Summerroot School
The story begins on May 2, 1998 – the Battle of Hogwarts, at the end of the Second Wizarding War.
You’ve heard this story before. Tom Riddle, known the public as Lord Voldemort, had amassed a following of dark wizards and witches known as the Death Eaters. Their objective was to take over the wizarding world in the name of pure-blooded wizard supremacy. They attacked Hogwarts with the goal of killing Harry Potter, the only person with the power to defeat Voldemort. The battle was bloody and tragic, but ended in defeat for Voldemort’s forces. Harry Potter killed Voldemort, and the Death Eaters were destroyed. But this was only the opening chapter of a much larger, much darker tale.
Shortly after the Battle of Hogwarts, the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy was broken. This law had kept the wizarding world secret from muggle society for centuries. No one knew how the statute had been broken, but suddenly, the entire muggle world was aware of the existence of magic. Wizards had lived separately from muggles since time immemorial, and muggles had long regarded wizards as nothing but superstition and legend. Now, they were forced to coexist on a scale never before seen. Ancient prejudices were reawakened, and political conflict rapidly escalated. It was only through the efforts of a rational few that outright war between wizards and muggles was avoided.
But this was not the only significant event to befall the wizarding world at this time. Not long after the statute was broken, the number of wizard births around the world suddenly exploded. The population of newborn infants with magical potential rose by the thousands. Moreover, as the years passed, these children proved vastly more gifted in magic than older generations. Magical feats once considered exclusive to adults were being performed by primary schoolers. It was a miraculous generation, and many considered it to be a rebirth of magic in an era dominated by muggle science and technology. This generation of wizards and witches was thus fittingly named “the Rebirth Generation.”
I was born into this generation. My parents were James Doe and Mia Lotte, a wizard and witch couple born in the late 1960s. They were raised in separate communities: my orphaned mother grew up in a secluded Swedish wizard commune in Minnesota, and my father was raised by a muggle family in California who later disowned him. They met in the late 1990s while working muggle cover jobs in San Francisco. I was born in the early spring of 1999, one of the very first children of the Rebirth Generation.
These were difficult times for the wizarding world. The government of Great Britain had tentatively worked out an amicable relationship with their country’s Ministry of Magic, but the situation in the United States was much more complex. The U.S. government refused to acknowledge the Magical Congress as a legitimate organization. Public fears ran wild, terms like “occult” and “satanic” becoming popular among the irrational masses to label the wizarding community. Violence against wizards and witches (or those suspected of being so) increased sharply. Each presidential administration attempted to address the issue differently. The Clinton administration made some progress in advancing the rights of wizards and witches, but the Bush administration caved to public fears and pushed against wizard-muggle coexistence. It became unsafe for wizards and witches to live in major cities, for fear of being ousted and becoming the victims of hate crimes. Because of this, my parents ultimately decided to leave California when I was still a toddler, seeking a community where it would be safer for wizards to live among their muggle neighbors.
They moved to Salem, the town where it all began.
I am not referring to Salem, Massachusetts. The Salem I am referring to is in Montana, and was named after its East Coast counterpart. The history of wizards and witches in the Salem Valley dates back centuries, to the Native American wizarding tribes who considered the region a spiritual site. The landscape there was always deeply in tune with the magical world, which attracted many European wizards during the nineteenth century. They built the town together along the banks of the Lewis River, and it soon developed into one of the largest cities in the state. The involvement of wizards in Salem’s history was kept secret, but they still played a significant role in all aspects of the city’s culture. When the Statute of Secrecy was broken in 1998, Salem became one of the only places in the United States to openly welcome wizards and witches to live alongside muggles in peace. It was a safe haven for wizarding families who faced persecution and violence in other parts of the country.
It’s difficult to describe the Salem I knew all those years ago. I wish I had appreciated it more when I was a child, but I couldn’t have known how special that little town was, how different it was from the rest of the world. Wizards did not have to live in hiding there. There were conventions every summer along the riverbank, where practitioners of magic shared parfaits and pancakes with muggle street performers. Artists, authors, and advocates from all walks of life mingled in peace. From pure-blood to muggle-born, magical to non-magical, Salem was a place of welcome and understanding. The multicultural mixture of wizards from all corners of the globe colored the city’s society, from the Bitterroot Salish paintings on building walls, to the large Asian market on Marble Road. This miraculous place was where I grew up, a rare portrait of what peace between wizards and muggles really looked like.
If only we knew how fleeting a portrait it would be.
* * *
My magical upbringing was unconventional. The immense wizard population boom of the Rebirth Generation had made it unfeasible for every wizarding family to send their children to institutions like Ilvermorny and Hogwarts. This had led to the establishment of smaller magical academies across the country. One such academy was built a few years before my family’s arrival in Salem, and became the setting for my earliest childhood memories: Summerroot School.
Summerroot School was a very small building located on the northern outskirts of Salem, in a forested neighborhood also called Summerroot. It was built by wizards and witches in the Salem community who recognized the need for a special school to teach children of the Rebirth Generation – the so-called “Reborn” – how to hone their intense magical skills. This was easier said than done. There was no precedent for educating children with such unfathomable magical power. The formalities of wand gestures and verbal spells only served to hone the raw power that these children possessed. Most magical schools relied on the hierarchy of power between teacher and student, but the Rebirth Generation had inverted this hierarchy. The children were more powerful than most of their teachers. If they didn’t want to listen or behave, there was very little the teachers could do to stop them.
Thankfully, Summerroot School was the farthest thing from an ordinary school. The people who built it were believers in a way of life that was embraced by many Salem wizards, one of harmony and empathy rather than structure and discipline. I suppose if it were a muggle institution, it might have been labeled as an “alternative private school.” The teachers spoke on the level of their students, with caring and kindness, and promoted conversation and cooperation over punishment. The results were not perfect, but the children learned to control their emotions, which in turn helped them control their magic.
I was probably the most troublesome student at Summerroot School. I have very faint memories of my earlier years there, but I’ve been told I was quite disobedient and wild, always wanting to do something other than what the teachers told me to. I was also extremely gifted in magic, which made me even more difficult to handle. I hated the drudgery of learning particular spells and incantations ad nauseum. Wingardium Leviosa and Lumos and Flipendo and Colloportus... no kindergartener would enjoy having to memorize so many different strange words. I much preferred zipping around the school causing havoc wherever I could, lost in my own imaginary adventures. I wasn’t a prankster, but I also wasn’t above playing tricks on people who bothered me. And no one bothered me more than Emma West.
It’s strange, looking back now, that my memories of Emma may be my earliest memories of all. I still remember her face, her bright blue eyes and wavy blonde hair, her two thin arms sticking out from a sleeveless white shirt and resting angrily on her hips. The context of this memory was that I had taken something that belonged to her: a little stuffed doe, with no antlers, and white spots on its rear. The theft was an act of revenge against Emma, though I’m sot sure what for. My child brain remembered Emma as an annoying girly-girl teacher’s pet, who always tattled on me for the slightest misbehavior. This made me want to retaliate against her, so I’d taken her toy and hidden it somewhere on the playground. Emma told the teacher, whom she led over to me on the schoolyard, and confronted me about the stolen item.
“He took my Deery!” Emma whined, pointing an accusing finger at me.
My heart raced nervously as our elderly teacher, Mrs. Carol, looked at me. “Is that true, Alan?”
I did the same thing I usually did when I got in trouble, avoiding eye contact and kicking my feet against the grass. “Nuh-uh.”
“Are you lying?”
Mrs. Carol’s voice didn’t have a hint of harshness. She was a calm and warm presence, and never got angry at the kids no matter how troublesome we (or more specifically I) could be. I never had a grandmother, so Mrs. Carol was almost like one to me. She made it so difficult to lie.
I gave in to her knowing gaze and frowned guiltily at the ground. “Yes.”
“I told you!” Emma chanted in her obnoxious high-pitched voice. “I told you, I told you! He took it, Mrs. Carol! He took Deery!”
“That’s a stupid name anyway!” I retorted, as if this held any weight against her.
“You’re mean!”
“You’re dumb!”
“Now, now...” Mrs. Carol put a gentle hand on my shoulder, and another one on Emma’s. “Calling names will just make us all sad, right? Let’s take deep breaths and calm down.”
“Okay, Mrs. Carol,” said Emma obediently. She immediately inhaled deeply through her nose. I scowled at her, despising every inch of her, but when Mrs. Carol looked at me I reluctantly inhaled too. Emma and I exhaled slowly at the same time, our soft breaths synchronizing. I almost held mine back, just because I hated the thought of doing something at the same time as her.
“Now,” said Mrs. Carol. “Where did you hide her toy, Alan?”
I reluctantly turned around and held out my hand toward a nearby pine tree. High up and hidden behind the branches, barely visible through the springtime sunlight, was the faint outline of Emma’s stuffed animal. With a jolt, the tree shook aside and the deer levitated rapidly towards me. I couldn’t control the angle of its approach, so it tumbled to the ground nearby and came to a rest in the tall grass.
“Deery!” Emma exclaimed. She sprinted over to the toy and embraced it in her arms like a lost family member. I put my hands in my pockets and pouted, doing everything I could not to look at her.
“What a stupid name...” I muttered under my breath.
Mrs. Carol spoke quietly to me. “You know, Alan, there are nicer ways to get the attention of someone you like.”
“I don’t like her!” I screeched. I ran off in the other direction, disgusted that Mrs. Carol would even suggest I liked such a miserably prissy person as Emma.
These sorts of quarrels happened constantly. They carried on into first grade, and then into second. Emma and I got at each other’s throats every chance we got, and no amount of teacherly intervention ever defused the rivalry between us. At first I had been praised by the teachers because of my exceptional magical talent, but as our class lessons became more advanced, my poor attentiveness began to have consequences. I was still very powerful, but all the other kids were learning spells too complex for me to execute on my own, and when I tried to catch up, I was always several steps behind. Emma was my opposite: less naturally gifted in magic, but diligent and attentive in class. When we began our unit on transfiguration in the second grade, I struggled to master the Avifors spell that Emma had understood almost immediately. The frustration drove me wild, and I secretly cried many times about it, tearfully asking my parents how come Emma could do everything so well but I couldn’t.
The curriculum at Summerroot School was unique, focusing heavily on harmony with nature and performing spells that benefited or derived themselves from the natural environment. Our wands were hand-made from the wood that grew near Salem, and magical materials gifted to the school by locals. We spent many days hiking in the nearby forests and mountains with an old Native American wizard whom we simply called “Sam.” Sam was not a teacher at Summerroot, and lived in isolation near the town of St. Isadora north of the city, but visited occasionally to take the children on nature trips. We hiked on many different trails, from glistening creeks in the summer to wide snowy fields in the winter. Sometimes we would learn about nature magic from Sam, but sometimes we would just play and have fun together.
“The land in this valley is sacred,” I remember Sam telling us one day. We were walking along the Eustice Carrey Trail a few miles northwest of Summerroot, observing the flowers blooming in the meadows to either side of us. “It is our responsibility as users of magic to keep the land safe from harm, and to listen to the voices of the natural world.”
Sam knelt down next to a wild daffodil and stroked its leaves. “All life is precious, even the smallest things. Magic is an exchange of life energies. We use it for peace, not for violence.”
“But what about Aurors?” asked an overly-eager Silas Darrow, one of my classmates. His father was an Auror who worked for magical law enforcement abroad, a fact which Silas loved to brag about.
“Aurors keep the magical world safe from those who would abuse magic to their own ends. The Dark Arts are the magics which does not respect the natural world, magic which is used to harm others...”
“Like the Death Eaters?” asked the dimwitted Liam Manfred.
Emma nudged his arm and put a finger on her lips. “Shhh! Don’t interrupt Sam!”
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t be such a butt-kisser, Emma.”
“Yeah, Emma,” Liam chimed in, eager to jump on the bandwagon. He grinned expectantly at me as if hoping I’d praise him, which just made me more irritated.
Emma glared at us with such intensity that she could have killed us with her gaze alone. She almost opened her mouth to speak, but Sam, who had overheard our dispute, broke up the fight with a laugh. “Now, children. Nothing good will ever come of fighting one another. Let us make peace.”
I wish we had listened to him. I don’t mean me and Emma. I mean everyone. Salem. The world. If we had all just listened to Sam’s wisdom, perhaps things would have never turned out the way they did. Sam died only a few months later, and the words he had passed on to us would soon be forgotten by all but a few. There are so many memories I have of Summerroot School, but so many more that I wish I hadn’t lost. The years of my youth blur together in my mind, a past I can never again reach.
* * *
I spent most of my time on the playground with Silas and Liam. We weren’t best friends, but we were all each other had, and we generally got along well. Our weekends were spent exploring the vast wilderness behind Salem together, without adult supervision. We weren’t afraid of anything: our magic protected us, and we had been trained to live in harmony with nature, to see those woods as our home. We mapped out the shallow canyons and low hills with crayons on the back of printer paper, marking landmarks and secret places. Our explorations seemed to be infinite, though I suppose everything is bigger in the mind of a child. We probably didn’t explore as far as we thought. But back then, it was like a whole universe was hidden right outside our doors, a universe that was just for us.
Silas and Liam were good kids, even if they were both a little bit odd. Silas idolized his Auror father, and constantly rambled about him whenever he got the chance, much to my annoyance. I didn’t like going on playdates to his house, since he lived in the middle of the city with no backyard to play in, and we usually ended up hanging out in his room while he showed off his collectible Pokémon cards. Liam, meanwhile, was a seven-year-old with the brain of a three-year-old. He always hovered in my shadow like an annoying sidekick, doing whatever I did and saying whatever I said. I’m sure the kid idolized me, but I generally saw him as a bit of a nuisance. I wasn’t outright mean to him, but there were times when I just wished he would leave me alone, because his comments tended to make me cringe.
It goes without saying that Emma didn’t play with us. In fact, she didn’t play with anyone. I didn’t know at the time that Emma was an orphan, a muggle-born witch whose parents had abandoned her as soon as they discovered her magical power. Emma was adopted by a generally tolerant muggle family, but she had always been alienated by her adoptive muggle siblings, who attended a nearby muggle school. Her parents didn’t understand her, and didn’t make an effort to either; she always came second. Emma was completely alone in the world, and her only happy place was Summerroot School. Yet even there, she was picked on and ostracized, particularly by the pure-blooded kids. I hardly noticed this, or perhaps I deliberately ignored it. My parents pitied Emma and had repeatedly tried to foster a friendship between me and her, but the forced playdates only made us dislike each other more.
As the years went by, Summerroot School began to change. A new wave of parents had arrived in Salem, traveling from greater distances and holding different views about magical education. These views clashed with the existing curriculum, and the balance of power at Summerroot shifted. I didn’t know about any of this, and only learned about it later from my mother, who was closely involved in the school’s administration. Many of the new parents who had arrived were pure-bloods, having moved from their ancestral manors and estates on the East Coast, and carried with them old-fashioned prejudices against the muggle world. Two of these parents were particularly aggressive in wanting special treatment for their kid, Jonah Melville, who joined my class in the middle of second grade. Jonah was the portrait of a rich bully, and took advantage of Summerroot School’s lenient rules to disobey authority and torment his fellow classmates. This made Emma, a lone muggle-born orphan girl, his natural target.
I never liked Emma, but I positively loathed Jonah. Everything he did got on my nerves. He wasn’t the good-natured mischief-maker that I was: he delighted in making everyone around him miserable. He even used magic to hurt other kids, which we had all been taught was absolutely forbidden. Even in our worst disputes, Emma and I would never have used magic against one another. But Jonah did this almost constantly. He levitated little kids off of the swings. He set fire to people’s backpacks. He destroyed arts and crafts with knockback jinxes. But above all else, he thrived on verbal bullying. He teased and berated anyone he could, finding ways to get under everyone’s skin, and never stopped no matter how many times he was lectured by the teachers. His sadistic sense of humor was predicated on the joy of seeing other kids cry. That was another reason why he targeted Emma: no matter how much he harassed her, she refused to shed a single tear. That just made his bullying even worse, since there was nothing Jonah wanted more than to finally break her, to see her poor little face melt.
One day in the late winter, Emma was playing alone in the sandbox with her stuffed deer. I was playing with Silas and Liam nearby, the three of us inventing an elaborate game about a time-traveling dragon. Jonah approached Emma from the direction of the school building. The back of her bright pink coat was turned to him. She happily talked to herself under her breath, holding her toy’s back as it danced along the hills and valleys of sand.
“Expelliarmus!”
The doe soared out of Emma’s hand. She gasped in surprise. The toy arched in the cold air and landed in Jonah’s outstretched palm. He grinned.
“Give her back!” Emma yelled, standing up and sticking her fists out at her hips.
Jonah just laughed. “You seriously still play with stuffed animals? What a dumb little girl.”
Emma ran forward and tried to grab the doll from Jonah’s hand, but he was nearly a head taller than her, and easily held it out of reach. Emma’s little fingers strained to reach her beloved toy, but she couldn’t.
“You want it, huh?” Jonah laughed again. “Dumb little girl wants her dumb little deer?”
“Give... her... back!” Emma jumped repeatedly in vain attempts to grab the toy, but Jonah effortlessly kept it from her. He took a step back to avoid a swerve of her wrist. By this time, the other kids on the playground were watching, including me and my friends. Emma and Jonah were making quite a commotion, but there were no teachers around to stop them.
“You really want it?” Jonah teased.
“Yes! Give her back!”
“Okay then. Here you go!”
Jonah held up his hands, and the deer levitated above him, high into the cold winter air. Then, with a gesture like he was opening a set of double doors, Jonah threw his arms to either side of him. The doll instantly tore in half, stuffing and fabric shattering all over the ground in a single explosive moment.
“Deery!” Emma screamed. The high-pitched noise of her voice echoed across the playground.
Everyone in the vicinity stared quietly at the tragic scene, but no one stepped in to stop it. Jonah laughed triumphantly, catching the decapitated head of the deer and waving it mockingly at Emma. Emma, rather than wilting and crying as Jonah probably hoped, immediately lunged at him to get the deer’s head back. Jonah was surprised, and instinctively stepped back to get out of her way, only to trip over his own feet and fall into a puddle of melted snow-water. A splash of grayish-brown liquid exploded around his body and got all over his clothes, drenching him to his underpants.
Emma stared at the fallen Jonah. A few of the kids watching snickered at the sight. Silas and I covered our mouths and repressed laughter. Jonah was enraged. He stood up quickly, his face burning from humiliation as the water spilled off of his clothing. His eyes locked on Emma with violent malice. Before anyone knew what was happening, Jonah pulled his wand out of his pocket and pointed it directly at her. A burst of red energy knocked her back toward the field behind the sandbox. Emma cried in pain as she tumbled to a halt, dirt and snow all over her pink clothes.
The onlookers collectively gasped. Jonah had once again committed the unforgivable act. He’d raised his wand against another student. But that wasn’t the end of it. Jonah’s pride would not allow him to leave this unpunished. He pulled his boots out of the puddle and ran over to Emma. Without hesitation, he aimed a kick right at her stomach, hitting her as hard as he could. Emma screamed again. I remember my skin going cold, my heart pounding as I watched. This was no longer Jonah’s usual bullying. Something had awoken inside of him, a raging anger like a rampant bull, and all he wanted was to make Emma hurt.
“I-I’ll go get the teachers...!” Silas stammered. He began running the other direction towards the school. But I couldn’t move. I stood there staring at Jonah and Emma, my limbs completely motionless.
“Stupid... dumb... mudblood!” Jonah screeched as he kicked Emma over and over. “You...”
Jonah’s next kick didn’t connect. There was a sudden sound like a gun going off, and Jonah was blasted off his feet. He rolled backwards into a heap on the small path leading toward the school. When he raised his head in shock, there was blood dripping from his mouth.
I was standing in front of Emma. I don’t even remember when I moved. I remembered watching her get hurt, and the next thing I knew, I was there with my wand held out and Jonah was on the ground. My body was burning with a passionate feeling I couldn’t explain. To call it justice or kindness would be misguided. I hated Emma. But I hated seeing her get hurt by Jonah even more. I was sick and tired of him. But really, there was no rationale behind what I did. It was instinct, something that I did in the spur of the moment. My wand moved before I did.
My attack had been much more powerful than Jonah’s, and he’d lost all desire to fight. He wiped the blood from his mouth and began to cry, then sprinted toward the school building where the teachers were just emerging with Silas to investigate the scene. The other kids were speechless, staring at me from every direction. I slowly processed the reality of what had just transpired, but I was still too numb to everything to think about it. My heart was racing, and adrenaline coursed through my veins.
I walked back toward the sandbox. I was acting on autopilot. I found my hands on the remains of Emma’s doll. Without reciting a spell, I curled my wand in the air, and the bits of stuffing everywhere began to gravitate toward one another as if pulled by an invisible magnetism. The doll sewed itself back together. I held it in my hands, brushing the dirt off of its little ears, then turned around and walked back to Emma. She was sitting up now, her hands on the ground and her pale face stained by dirt.
I held out the deer. Emma stared at me. I looked away.
“Take your dumb deer. I fixed it.”
Emma slowly took the deer from my hands. Her blue eyes scanned its every feature for damage. There was none. She looked back at me again. Neither of us said another word.
* * *
Jonah and I were both severely reprimanded for the incident on the playground. The local parents were mortified that magical violence had taken place between the students, and the teachers likely struggled to reassure them that Summerroot was still safe. Jonah and I were subjected to long lectures about our misdeeds, and were forced to apologize to each other and Emma, though none of us really meant our words. Jonah’s parents were upset that I hadn’t been punished more severely for hurting their child. They ultimately ended up pulling Jonah out of Summerroot, apparently having decided that such a muggle-pandering school was unbefitting of their pure-blooded boy. My parents were also very upset with me; my dad grounded me for a week, and my mom gave me a very long talk about how violence is never okay. Yet for some reason, they took me out to get ice cream that very evening, and even let me buy seconds.
That was the last year I attended Summerroot School. I didn’t leave because of what happened with Jonah, but rather because the school was having a hard time managing all of the new students it was receiving. The population of the Rebirth Generation continued to grow, and the school wanted to focus on teaching early-childhood magic (which was now the equivalent of magic once taught at puberty) rather than training older students. Many kids left the school that summer, including myself. Silas, Liam, and Emma remained, though they would later move on too, since the magic they now needed to learn was too advanced for the educators at Summerroot to handle. They all continued to live in the neighborhood, though I saw them sparsely, since I lived in the countryside out west of Salem.
I was sad to be leaving Summerroot. Despite the incidents with Emma and Jonah, it was home to my happiest childhood memories. I still dream of those serene hikes through the wilderness with Sam and Mrs. Carol and all of my classmates – the silly and beautiful things we talked about, the scent of springtime in the air, the feeling of being surrounded by nature. Even to this day, I value the teachings of the people at Summerroot, and the peaceful beliefs that shaped the culture of Salem back then. That was a different time, a different world. I look back on those childhood friendships now with painful nostalgia. There are times when I wish I could go back for just one day, return to my youthful innocence, when the world seemed so big and not so frightening.
But there can be no going back. Not ever again.
My parents promised me that I would still have chances to see my friends. Nevertheless, I eventually fell out of contact with Silas and Liam, and spent the next few years isolated at home learning magic from my parents. I wasn’t unhappy; I still had the great big wilderness to explore, and I was always excited to learn new spells and hone my immense magical power. Mom always praised me, saying that I was the most talented wizard she had ever seen, and that I might one day be even better than Harry Potter.
Then came the day I enrolled at John Proctor Middle School.