Proof of Something More
The incident of the Brazilian boa constrictor, while still making Dudley and Piers think twice about bothering him, earned Harry the longest confinement he’d ever had. By the time he was let out of the cupboard to do anything other than cook and clean and go to school, the end of June had bled halfway into a long July, and the summer holidays had started. Based on the mess that Harry was ordered to clean, Dudley had already torn through a third of the presents he had received the month prior and wreaked havoc on both the neighborhood and his second bedroom.
Harry immediately began escaping Dudley’s prowling gang with more and more visits to the library, ignoring the smile of the librarian, Ms. Groller, as he settled in his usual table in the far corner of the room, books stacked around him about animals (especially snakes), a math book (he was certain he got something wrong on his final and he was set on finding the correct answer), and a few fiction books (he was rewarding himself for getting through his punishment by reading Alice in Wonderland).
About a week of daily visits working through the animal section of the nonfiction shelves, a shadow fell timidly over his table, causing Harry to shrink back and look up quickly. He let out a breath of relief when he saw it was just Ms. Groller, who was looking away politely as he righted himself.
“Sorry, Mr. Potter, I just wanted to stop by and check in with you before I left for my holiday tomorrow. I noticed that you’ve been fixated on a certain topic lately, and I don’t know if you’ve been thinking about a career in animals, but my niece is studying zoology at university, and I had some pamphlets about it at home, I thought you might be interested.”
She placed a handful of colorful papers at the other side of the table, and smiled gently at Harry, who was flickering his gaze between them and her. “They're all yours, we don’t have any use for them anymore. You can take them home, or leave them in your drawer at my desk. The other librarians know that you keep some things in there, they won’t mind you using it while I’m gone. There’s a lot of information about the classes she’s taking, which won’t matter to you since you’re so young, but something to keep in mind.”
She took a step away as Harry reached for the papers, eyes widening as he looked down at pictures of a variety of animals and class lists.
He looked up at her, giving her the largest smile she’d ever seen on his face. “Thank you, ma’am. I went to a zoo for the first time, and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. This is exactly what I’d been hoping to find something about.”
She grinned back. “I’m so glad. You be good while I’m gone, and I’ll be back in just two weeks, and if you have any questions about it, you let me know and I’ll be sure to ask my niece, how does that sound?”
His nod was as fierce as his smile. “Thanks, Ms. Groller. Enjoy your holiday.”
She walked away from the ecstatic boy with a bouncing step, glad to have made even the smallest difference in his quiet presence in her library.
Harry snuck one of the pamphlets into Number Four under his shirt, tucking it under the mattress on the floor of his cupboard to look at when he couldn’t see sight of a life beyond the Dursleys. This year, this was the year things would be different. Dudley and Piers, the leaders of their little gang, had both been accepted into Smeltings, a private secondary school that Vernon had attended and still had connections to. Harry, for the first time in his life, was going to a different school, Stonewall High, the local public school. It would be the first time he didn’t have to pretend to get grades worse than Dudley. It wasn’t as if Petunia would ever ask to see his report card. It might even be the first time he was able to have friends, since Dudley wouldn’t be there, and the rest of his gang would hopefully cut back on Harry Hunting and the like.
Needless to say, Harry was actually looking forward for the summer holidays to be over.
Dudley seemed to sense his enthusiasm, and had started telling him horror stories of public school. “They stuff kid’s heads down the toilets on their first day there. Wanna go upstairs and practice?” he sneered from the back garden door, watching Harry put away shears.
Harry took a breath, and glanced towards the side of the house, where he could easily gain some distance on his cousin. He turned to Dudley with a smirk. “Thanks for the offer, Duddydums, but I’ll pass on the lesson. The poor toilet’s never had anything as horrible as your head in it, it might be sick.” He took the time to pat Dudley’s shoulder as the whale’s brows furrowed, working it through. By the time he heard a “Hey!”, a cackling Harry had already gotten half a block down the street.
One day in mid-July, while Vernon was at work, Petunia and Dudley headed into London for school shopping, leaving Harry with Mrs. Figg and her cats. The woman, still on her crutches from tripping over one of her cats, seemed unusually eager to chat with Harry about the upcoming school year, before depositing him in front of the television with a bit of stale chocolate cake.
That evening, while Harry was cleaning up dinner, Dudley tried on his new uniform and preened through the house, straw hat tilted at an odd angle. A peculiar mixture of orange and maroon, the Smeltings uniforms included a knobbly stick, which Vernon proudly explained was for good training in the art of hitting each other when teachers weren’t looking. Harry didn’t know where Petunia found said stick, but he could already feel at least four bruises from it as he swept the kitchen.
Vernon and Petunia watched with adoring eyes. Vernon was grumbling about how it was the proudest moment of his life, and Petunia promptly started sobbing about how fast her Ickle Dudleykins had grown into this handsome and smart man.
Harry quickly grabbed the bag from the rubbish bin and took it outside, barely managing to close the door behind him before laughter spilled from him. He swore his ribs might have cracked if he had to hold it in any longer, the sight of his pig cousin stuffed into an ugly uniform, parading around like this school was something to be proud of.
The next morning, Harry was awoken not by the rapping of Petunia’s fist on his cupboard door, but rather a horrendous smell from the kitchen. Against his better judgement, he pulled his shirt over his nose and walked in to find Petunia standing over a boiling pot, stabbing its contents with a wooden spoon.
“What’s this?” he asked, peering into the tub to look at what looked like dirty rags swimming in gray water.
Her lips tightened, as they always did when he dared to ask a question.
“Your new school uniform for Stonewall.”
Harry reared back. “Is the school in the Channel, and that’s why it has to be so wet?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Petunia sneered. “Be grateful I’m taking the time to dye some of Dudley’s old things for you. They’ll look just like everyone else’s when I’m done.”
Harry sat at the table, swallowing a joke about hoping their school mascot was an elephant, because he would look like he was walking around with one’s skin.
Not even a few moments later, Dudley and Vernon waddled in, both holding their noses at the smell. Vernon began scanning the newspaper, as usual, and Dudley stood in the corner wielding his Smeltings stick, which he had begun to carry everywhere.
It wasn’t long until the sound of the metal flap of the front door sounded, followed by the soft thunk of paper hitting the carpet of the hallway.
Without even looking up, Vernon grunted from behind his paper. “Get the mail, Dudley.”
“Make Harry get it.”
“Get the mail, boy.”
Harry rolled his eyes. “Make Dudley get it.”
“Poke him with your Smelting stick, Dudley.”
Harry dodged the stick thanks to years of practice dodging Dudley’s weapons, and went to get the mail. Bored, he barely paid attention as he scanned the three letters that had been delivered.
He barely registered all three slipping through his fingers, back down to the carpet.
Staring back up at him, in shimmering emerald-green ink, was his own name.
No one had ever, ever, written to him. There was no one. No family outside Number Four, no friends, the library didn’t have his address. Yet there it was, his name on a thick and heavy, yellowish envelope.
“Boy! What’s taking so long? Checking for letter bombs?” Vernon chuckled at his joke, not aware of Harry’s shaking hands reaching for the mail.
Holding it barely made it seem more real. It was thick, both the envelope and the paper within. He traced his fingers over the text, reading his name, the address, even listing his cupboard. He flipped it over, and furrowed his brow at the purple wax seal bearing a coat of arms. It wasn’t until Vernon yelled again, accompanied by the squeak of a chair moving, that Harry spurred back into action. He shoved the letter in the band of his pants, and quickly rejoined the Dursleys in the kitchen. He handed the postcard from Vernon’s sister, and what looked like a bill to his uncle, and circled back around to his chair.
Still shaking from the chance that someone was writing to him, Harry didn’t notice Dudley’s evil smirk, nor the stick reaching subtly out from the table.
The next thing he knew, he was face down, clutching a now-bleeding nose, and Dudley was laughing from his seat.
Petunia tsked, and simply told him to clean the blood off of the floor before it stained her tile. Vernon was chortling heartedly, before something stopped him dead cold. Through the tears streaming from his eyes, Harry noticed Vernon standing over him, face slowly turning red, then green, then a ghostly pale white.
“P-P-Petunia?” His voice shook as his hand pointed towards the thick envelope that had fallen from the loose hand-me-downs Harry had shoved it down.
Harry lunged for the letter, but his aunt’s heeled foot kicked it away, and before he could scramble to his feet, she had picked it up, face white as she opened it.
She gasped, and nodded fearfully at her husband.
Dudley had finally stopped laughing, and realized that something important was happening. “What is it? I want to read it. Give it here!”
Harry straightened his clothing as he stood tall, not an impressive height, but indignant none the less. “I want to read. As it is mine,” he snarled.
Vernon stood, reaching across his wife to grab the letter and stuff it back in the envelope. “Out. Both of you.”
Dudley gave a cry of protest, and Harry simply held his chin higher.
“But I want to read it!”
“I. Want. My. Letter.”
Harry could feel a slow rush of energy start moving through him, but before he could act, or any of his freakishness happen, the letter slammed on the table. Vernon, moving more quickly than Harry had ever seen him move, crossed the kitchen and grabbed both boys by their collars. “I said GET OUT!” The door was closed before either of them could even turn back, and a short scuffle later, Harry was pressed to the floor, Dudley at the keyhole, both straining their ears to listen to the muffled argument now going on between the adults.
“We said we’d put a stop to all this nonsense, Petunia! I won’t have one of those in this house!” Vernon’s voice was wildly emotional, even more so than the number of times he had been furious with Harry’s freakishness.
Harry was fixating on his phrasing. One of those. Were there others like him?
Petunia’s voice wavered, but she tried to reason with her husband. “If he goes, Vernon, he won’t be in the house. He’ll be there. Maybe one of them can just take him, or he could just stay at that school year-round.”
“And if they won’t? He’ll be back here, bringing that foolishness with him. Look at the address, Petunia, they’re watching the house. How else would they know where he sleeps?”
“But what should we do, Vernon? Write back? Tell them we don’t—”
A loud noise made both of the boys jump, scrambling to get away from the door before it opened. As Dudley pushed Harry into his cupboard, they could just hear, “We’ll just ignore it, Pet, and go from there.”
Harry stayed in his cupboard for the rest of the day, furious at the loss of his letter and scrubbing at the dried blood from his nose. His hopes were dashed, however, when his uncle returned from work and squeezed himself into the doorway, something that had rarely happened before.
“Where’s my letter? Who’s writing to me? And how did you know who it was?” Harry, blinded by the chance of something, disregarded his usual rule of no questions.
“No one. It was nothing. It was addressed to you by mistake.” His words were short and fierce. “I’ve burned it, now we can forget about the whole thing.”
“Yes, of course, a mistake!” Harry rolled his eyes. “A mistake that was addressed to my cupboard!”
“SILENCE!” The man’s voice echoed through the miniscule room, spiders falling from the ceiling and quickly scurrying back into the shadows. Harry wished he could follow them, back against the wall as his uncle stood above him, taking deep breaths. Vernon forced an awkward smile, and Harry gulped.
“Er, yes. Harry. About this cupboard. Your aunt and I think you’re getting a bit big for it, going into secondary school and whatnot. We’ve been discussing moving you into Dudley’s second bedroom, wouldn’t you like that?”
“Why?” Harry narrowed his eyes at his uncle’s expression, which looked quite pained and not at all subtle.
“Don’t ask questions, boy!” The smile was now gone, and Vernon had to take another deep breath. “Take your things upstairs. Now.”
It took one trip for Harry to move the few clothes and books he had to the room where Dudley kept all of his things that wouldn’t fit in his bedroom. The floor was scattered with broken toys, including the majority of things that he had received for his birthday just the month before. Shelves filled with a broken computer, an empty cage that once held a parrot, and books that were the only things in the room left whole. Even the bed was broken, one leg snapped from when Dudley was sure he could learn to do something called parkour.
As soon as Harry closed the door behind him, Dudley could be heard complaining about the loss of his extra room. Harry sighed, and began cleaning the graveyard of toys. By the time his aunt called him for dinner, he had most of the room clear, separating everything into a heap of trash in one corner, and a pile of some things he thought he might be able to get some entertainment out of either fixing or demolishing further. A wooden chair had managed to escape Dudley’s wrath, and Harry had placed it under one corner of the bed so it would be stable enough for him to use. His few outfits were folded up on the shelves next to the books that he would be reading through on his next punishment. He was sprawled over the stale-smelling covers, despairing over the new situation. Yesterday, he would have given anything to be in an actual room, but now, he would rather have the letter in the cupboard than have the entire Dursley house for himself without it.
Harry didn’t sleep that night, too hypervigilant about the differences in sounds and atmosphere in a new room to be restful. He made breakfast mechanically, which was fine, as even the Dursleys were oddly quiet as they settled around the table. Dudley was still furious about the loss of his room, and was seemingly tired from the huge tantrum he had the night before. Vernon and Petunia simply shared loaded glances over the newspaper and tea.
When the mail came, Harry jerked into awareness and jolted for the door. With a speed he had never seen before, Vernon grabbed Harry by the collar and yanked him back, missing his chair and landing him on the floor with a cough from the grab.
“Dudley, get the mail,” Vernon heaved, slamming his hand on the table when Dudley whined. “Now!” Dudley banged his stick on everything he could in the hall, Petunia cringing at the sound of broken glass a few seconds later. The stick clattered to the floor when he shouted, “There’s another one! This one’s addressed to the smallest bedroom!”
Vernon gave a strangled cry and pushed Harry back to the floor as he ran to the front door, wrestling Dudley for the letter. Harry tried to work his way around the two, trying to reach for the envelope, but Dudley had apparently picked up his Smelting stick again and the bulk of it smacked the side of Harry’s head, glasses sent flying. Harry looked up from the floor at Vernon breathing heavily over him, letter clutched in his huge fist and Dudley stomping his foot behind him. Petunia just stood at the entrance to the hallway, one hand clutching the cheap pearls she wore daily, the other covering her mouth.
“Cupboard, now, boy,” Vernon wheezed.
Harry just raised an eyebrow and looked back at the letter.
“Your room, I mean. Just—go. Dudley, go.”
Dudley stormed out of the front of the house, and Harry gave Vernon a glare before stomping up the stairs. As he reached the landing, he stayed in the hallway but closed the door to the room loudly, before creeping back to where he could listen to any conversation downstairs.
“Vernon, they must be watching the house. What are we going to do?”
"We just have to be smarter, Pet. Don’t worry. We’ll figure this out.” Footsteps headed back towards the kitchen, and Harry crept backwards towards his room. He looked around at the graveyard of Dudley’s old things, and his eyes landed on something on a top shelf. He grinned to himself.
Be smarter indeed.
The repaired alarm clock rang at six the next morning. Harry, who was merely dozing for the past few hours, quickly shut it off and crept across his room. If he couldn’t beat the Dursleys to the mail slot, he would just have to beat them to the mailman.
Listening for any and all noises, he snuck downstairs, not even daring to turn on lights. He was three steps from the bottom when he froze, eyes adjusting to the dark just in time to see a breathing mass lying on the doormat. Harry groaned silently, pinching his leg in frustration. There, somehow fitting in a sleeping bag, was Vernon snoring in front of the door.
Harry settled quietly on the steps, thinking through alternatives to the plan. He couldn’t do what he originally thought of, which was to meet the postman at the corner of the street before anyone realized he had left the house. He could sneak out through the back garden, but this time of day the neighbors let their dogs out, and they were sure to bark if they caught sight of him climbing over the wall to the front. That would surely wake Vernon.
The only other thing to do would be to wait, hidden in the shadows, and hope that the mail falling through wouldn’t wake Vernon, in time for Harry to grab the letter and disappear back upstairs.
Hope. Something Harry hadn’t been good at in years.
But… there was something Harry was good at…
Harry shifted his weight to be more comfortable, closing his eyes and breathing deeply. It took almost ten minutes for him to feel that energy that he had felt at the zoo, to pull it from his chest and out of his hands.
He felt his freakishness almost freeze on his fingertips as he blew softly towards his uncle. He wished one word with his entire being as he sensed the heaviness in the air float away from him.
Sleep.
Harry swore his uncle began snoring louder.
He waited with barely any movement, only the biting of his nails betraying his position in the darkness. About half an hour later, the mail slot clinked open and three envelopes with vivid green ink fell onto his still sleeping uncle’s chest.
He grinned, and quickly tiptoed to take a single letter before disappearing back to his room.
Two letters were still downstairs when Vernon woke up, with no reason to believe there were any more. Vernon yelled for his wife, who rushed down the stairs, followed quickly by Harry, who made every effort to try and reach for one of the letters, just to get pushed away harshly by Dudley as he headed towards breakfast.
“I want my letter.” Harry stood up, nursing a sore hip. Vernon simply chuckled as he tore the two letters into pieces, picked up the scraps, and threw them all in the fireplace in the kitchen, watching them turn to smoke. Harry made an act of being furious, storming back to his room and slamming the door closed as hard as he dared. He then stopped, ensuring that no one followed him before leaping across the room to the windowsill, where he had tucked the letter out of sight.
He settled on the rickety bed, carefully unfolding the thick parchment.
The words shimmering on the page made no sense. But he couldn’t help but reread it time and time again until Petunia’s shrill yell jolted him out of his daze and down into the kitchen.
Wizards and witches? Grand sorcerer, chief warlock…. Harry had read enough fantasy books to know the kind of world these titles came from.
Magic.
Could his freakishness be something more?
His mind flew as he wandered downstairs to start his chores.
Vernon didn’t go to work that day. Instead, he dug through the dusty tools in the shed in the back garden and nailed the mail slot closed.
“Dear, you don’t think that will actually work, do you?” Petunia tittered.
“These people are deranged, Pet, but we have to try and put them off of this madness,” Vernon muttered through a mouthful of nails, which got in the way of the piece of fruitcake Petunia had brought him.
Harry just rolled his eyes and did his chores as fast as possible, retreating to look at the letter yet again, fingers running over his name and the date September 1st.
He had no idea what this letter meant for him, but it was something.
And he wasn’t the kind to turn away an opportunity.
The following days didn’t get any better. Every time they thought there was no way for letters to be delivered, there would be a stack waiting somewhere. Crammed through the cracks of the doors, inside of the eggs delivered one morning, tucked inside of Vernon’s shoes. It wasn’t until Sunday morning that Vernon snapped.
Harry had just finished serving an afternoon tea, complete with delicious biscuits he didn’t get to eat, when Vernon chuckled to himself.
“Glorius day, Sunday. Don’t you think, Pet? A nice day at home with the family, no interruptions.”
Harry immediately picked up on his inference and rolled his eyes. “And no post.”
The chair shuddered under Vernon as he chuckled. “Right you are, Harry. Right you are.”
Harry turned away so he could cringe at his uncle actually using his name, and started scrubbing the stovetop.
Vernon sighed happily and poured brandy into his teacup. The bottle slipped from his fingers and cracked across Petunia’s Sunday tablecloth when something flew from the chimney and thumped him in his bushy mustache. The noise caused Harry to turn just in time to see another white mass smack his cousin in the back of the head, and he had to choke back a laugh.
His laughter turned to shock when thirty or forty stark white envelopes with a familiar green ink flew out of the chimney in droves.
Vernon was vibrating in anger when he stood, the table getting pushed away by his midriff as he stood. “Out. Now. OUT.” He herded his wife towards the hallway, hand reaching out to pulling Harry along by his collar. Dudley waddled behind, hands full of biscuits.
The door closed firmly behind them, barely blocking the sounds of streaming paper. “Five minutes. Pack and get back here. We’re not staying here.”
Harry ran upstairs, shoving a few changes of clothes and a few books, including the one holding his letter, into a threadbare bookbag. He looked longingly at the window, at his chance of freedom, but the yelling of Vernon downstairs didn’t bode well for his chances.
He gazed out the car window as they drove and drove, ignoring Petunia’s worried chittering, and Dudley’s complaints about missing various shows on the telly. The landscape changed from suburban neighborhoods to rolling farmlands, with no signs of stopping. Occasionally Vernon would take a sharp turn and drive another direction, eyes flickering to the rearview mirror at any movement. Harry just kept a firm grip on his bag, not risking drawing anyone’s attention to it but not wanting to let go.
Vernon’s psychotic muttering and paranoid driving didn’t stop until nightfall. Petunia didn’t dare complain, but Dudley was in a full-blown tantrum, having not eaten, watched telly, or blown up an alien on his computer since that morning. Everyone let out a sigh of relief when they pulled into a rundown hotel on the edge of a large city near the coast.
Harry barely slept, between the new environment and Dudley snoring loudly on the other twin bed in the room. He instead watched the lights of the city, cars driving through towering buildings.
After a few hours of restless dozing, Vernon pounded on the door.
Breakfast was watery coffee and tinned fruit that Vernon had picked up the single time they had stopped for a restroom break the day before. Harry was still sipping at his lukewarm coffee when the hotel manager walked up to them, a paper in hand.
“Scuse me, but is one of you a Mr. H Potter? Only, we got bout a hundred of these at the front desk, our postman was proper confused.”
Harry had the control to wait until Vernon stomped away angrily to start laughing.
Soon enough, they were back in the car, Vernon with a dangerous look in his eyes and bags full of food from a convenience store next to the hotel.
“Wouldn’t it bet better if we just went home, dear?” Petunia tittered.
Vernon didn’t answer, but just sped off with a squeal of the tires. The entire day was spent driving to various abandoned areas, Vernon getting out, looking around, shaking his head, and driving off again.
While Harry at least enjoyed the change of scenery, he was eager to leave the confines of the car and his whining cousin.
“I don’t care if Daddy’s gone mad,” he yelled at his mother when Vernon left them locked in the car somewhere along the coast. “It’s Monday and I’m missing The Great Humberto, and I want to stay somewhere with a television.”
Petunia did her best to calm her son, but Harry’s eyes grew wide as he kept his gaze out the window. If it was Monday (the days of the week were the only thing Harry would trust Dudley to know if only for his programs), that meant that his eleventh birthday was tomorrow. Not that his birthday was ever a day worth celebrating at Number Four, usually just the usual day with a few more sneers and whatever ‘present’ Vernon pulled out of the bin, but Harry held out hope. Maybe eleven would be the year things changed. He tightened his grip on his bag. Maybe this year everything would change.
A few minutes later Vernon appeared out of the rain, a long thin package under his arm and a feral grin as he gestured for them to get out. “Found the perfect place, come on.”
No one was happy about leaving the car and walking through the cold rain. But they dutifully followed Vernon down a ramp towards a small rickety dock, and shadowed in the distance on a small island, Harry could see the most miserable, ramshackle house he’d ever witnessed in his life. An older man with a cigar hanging out of his mouth, somehow still lit even with the rain and the wind, was waiting with a large rowboat and two oars.
“This storm is supposed to keep up all night, and this gentleman has agreed to lend us his boat,” Vernon cackled. “I’ve got our rations, so let’s head over.”
The water splashed and sprayed as Harry took the oars and began rowing the Dursleys across. The clouds had already made it dark, but as the sun set, it got even worse, and the chill didn’t abate with the salty water clashing around them. It felt like hours before the boat finally rammed onto the rocks of the shore on the little island, and Vernon quickly led them up the steep, slick hill and into the house.
After a meal of bananas and chips, the Dursleys all went to bed, Vernon and Petunia in the master bedroom up the stairs, and Dudley on a moth-eaten sofa with as many blankets as his mother could find. Harry found himself staring through one of the thin windows, watching the storm clouds gather as he tried to stay warm next to the embers of a fire Vernon couldn’t keep going, on the floor under the thinnest blanket they found.
He sat there, watching the occasional lightning strike, listening to the rain hit the roof, eyes flickering occasionally to the digital watch on his cousin’s wrist.
11:58. He was freezing, his too-thin frame rattling more than a cup full of pencils.
11:59. He was starving, his stomach lurching with worry and the too-small bag of chips.
12:00. He was eleven… and still the same. He still felt the weight of this family, the monotony of a life he couldn’t seem to escape. Eleven, all in all, didn’t feel much different than ten.
He still took a deep breath, eyes on the horizon out one window, and whispered, “Happy Birthday, Harry.”
BOOM.