The Vanishing Glass
“Up! Get up! Now!”
My brother’s eyes popped open as he abruptly sat up, slamming into me inside our cramped closet.
“Ow! Harry!” I hissed as my hands slipped—my hair fell back down in curtains around my face.
“Sorry Jessie!” my brother whispered, rubbing his eyes as he tried to see in what I knew to be the blurry dark.
I grumbled half-heartedly under my breath before returning to the task at hand: my hair. I gathered up my long black curls and pulled them up my head again to wrap into a messy bun at the nape of my neck.
I’d been up for a half hour, so I was already dressed. An oversized jumper along with a very baggy pair of dirt-brown trousers, both of which were hand-me-downs from my cousin Dudley back when he was seven.
I quickly slipped on my beat up trainers and cracked the door open. The hallway was clear of the intolerable, so I stepped out. Brushing my bangs away from my glasses, I entered the kitchen. Aunt Petunia, the one who had rudely awakened my brother, had the frying pan on the stove.
When she saw me, she snapped, “Make sure the bacon doesn’t burn.” Then, as she pushed past me—though without touching me—she hissed, “Where is that boy?”
I sighed as I pushed up the sleeves of the giant jumper, exposing the entirety of my pasty, sun-deprived forearms. I quietly began to cook.
Though I could hear the voices of my aunt and my brother drifting in from the hallway, I pretended I didn’t. It was too early and I could already tell that today was not going to be pleasant.
Aunt Petunia rejoined me a few seconds later, putting the kettle on and giving me nasty glances every few minutes. I ignored them like always.
Soon, the door opened and my brother, rather ungracefully, joined us in the kitchen. I looked up at him and gestured with my head towards the pan in front of me. He nodded, taking the bacon from my hands as I went to get the eggs.
We never really spoke to each other in front of our family. It seemed to make them nervous, for whatever reason. They didn’t like us talking, especially if we were asking questions. Our aunt and uncle really didn’t like questions.
Right then, our uncle strode through the door. “Comb your hair!” he barked at my brother. “And move your bangs!” he shouted at me.
With a small sneer—hidden away from his sight, of course—I did as he asked, moving my short bangs out of my face and tucking them behind my ears.
Uncle Vernon always told us the same thing over and over. He told Harry at least once a day that he needed a haircut, that he needed to comb it, or something of the sort. My brother’s hair was quite unlike my own. It grew at all sorts of angles, looking like a small hurricane had flown across his head before a bird decided to nest in it.
My own hair was long and curled in ringlets, and my bangs were the perfect shield. But they never liked it when they couldn’t see my face. They said I might be ‘plotting’, whatever the hell that meant.
I took over on the stove, piling the bacon onto a plate and bringing it over to the table. Uncle Vernon looked up from his morning paper as I set the plate down on what little table was left—it was my cousin’s birthday, and boy, did he have gifts—and my uncle grunted his slight approval.
When I returned to the kitchen, Harry had gotten started on the eggs I had taken out of the fridge and Aunt Petunia was nowhere to be seen. Probably went up to get my obtuse cousin, the birthday boy. Ugh.
“Here comes the Birthday Boy!” the high, shrill voice of our aunt came from the hallway. I watched Aunt Petunia and Dudley enter the dining room from the hallway as I poured two cups of hot tea into mugs.
Harry picked up the two cups of tea and sighed. I took over on the stove again, finishing up the eggs before serving them onto a plate. My brother waited for me before leading the way to the table and the rest of our family.
My brother and I were nearly identical. The same shade of jet black hair, naturally dark yet sunless skin, and bright green eyes. We even had practically identical scars, though Harry’s was on the right side of his forehead and mine was on the left. Peculiar jagged white lines in the shape of lightning that reached from our hairline all the way to our eyebrows. We even had the same round wire rimmed glasses, which concluded the look, though they were winged in my case. Both were broken and had to be held together by tape, courtesy of Dudley.
“Thirty-six,” I heard then, breaking me from my silent reverie. I looked up to see Dudley, his fat face contorted in what seemed to be grief. “That’s two less than last year.”
I ignored the rest of the conversation, probably one involving spoiling our cousin even further, as I turned to reenter the kitchen. At some point, our aunt and uncle will have spoiled him so much that he’ll expect his weight in gold as a present.
That’d be a lot of gold.
Back in the kitchen, I turned, expecting my brother to have followed me. When I saw that he wasn’t there, I poked my head back out into the dining room to see my brother wolfing down his small serving of breakfast as our cousin’s face turned bright red out of anger.
“And we’ll buy you another two presents while we’re out today,” I heard my aunt say to my furious cousin. “How’s that, popkin? Two more presents. Is that all right?”
I watched as Dudley tried to process the numbers. “So I’ll have thirty… thirty…”
“Thirty-nine, sweetums,” my aunt supplied.
“Oh.” Dudley sat down and pulled the nearest present towards him. “All right then.”
My brother sighed with relief. He was probably panicked about Dudley flipping the table again. I chuckled to myself before snapping my mouth shut because I was chuckling with my uncle. I shudder went through me as I retreated back into the kitchen.
The thing about Harry was that he was a bit more timid than I was, especially around our family. We were always treated harshly—which was a gross understatement—so we had to rely on each other for anything and everything.
We both had scars, physical and mental. They came from the punishments that were given to us whenever either of us made a mistake… or when our aunt or uncle wanted to have a little fun. But they didn’t strengthen Harry like they did for me.
“Bad news, Vernon,” I heard Aunt Petunia say all of a sudden. “Mrs Figg’s broken her leg. She can’t take them.”
Dudley gasped softly, and it was as if I could actually see his jaw dropping. I leaned just far enough out of the kitchen again to watch what was happening in disbelief. I saw Harry perk up just as a scowl turned down my lips.
Dudley and a friend of his got to go to parks and restaurants and movies every year on his birthday. And every year, Mrs. Figg babysat both me and my brother, pestering us with photographs of all of her cats in her cabbage-smelling home.
“Now what?” Aunt Petunia said, glaring at the two of us as if it were our fault.
I wanted to roll my eyes, but I kept my gaze stable. It would only grant me another scar, and that was not something I wanted right now.
“We could phone Marge,” Uncle Vernon offered.
“Don’t be silly, Vernon, she hates the two.”
They continued on in this manner, ignoring the two of us as they tried to figure out a solution. I retreated back to the kitchen, gesturing for Harry to come along with me. He followed quietly, and we stopped by the counter.
“I suppose we could take them to the zoo with us... And leave them in the car...”
“That car’s new, they’re not sitting in it alone...”
My head shot up, whipping around to look at the door where the voices drifted in. I glanced back to meet my brother’s gaze, his eyes wide as saucers and his mouth slightly open in shock.
Were they going to take us on the trip?
Our surprise was quickly interrupted by our wailing cousin, crying out his fake tears.
“Dinky Duddydums, don’t cry, Mummy won’t let them spoil your special day!” our aunt called.
I could practically see Dudley’s scrunched up face, red from the effort of fake crying, with Aunt Petunia’s twig arms around the pig that she called her son.
“I... don’t... want... them... t-t-to come!” Dudley yelled as he choked out overdramatic sobs. He knew that if he even began to frown, his parents would spoil him rotten with whatever he wished. “They always sp-spoil everything!”
I poked my head around the corner for the third time that morning. Sure enough, Dudley was being cradled by his mother as he ‘cried’ his fat crocodile tears.
My brother came beside me to look over my shoulder, which was when Dudley spotted us from between our Aunt’s stick arms and gave us a wicked grin. I raised a single eyebrow, rolled my eyes, and pushed us both back into the kitchen.
“As if we’d want to go,” I grumbled softly to my brother.
“Yeah...” my brother replied, trailing off. He still had his head in the doorway, even though I had pushed us both backwards, watching the events in the dining room unfold.
Then, the doorbell rang.
“Oh, good Lord, they’re here!” our aunt exclaimed frantically.
Moments later, one of Dudley’s best friends, Piers Polkiss, walked into the dining room with his mother.
Piers was a scrawny boy who looked like a rat, the opposite of Dudley. He was the one who held Dudley’s victims arms behind their backs as our cousin beat them.
Dudley’s sobs ceased at once.
Thirty minutes later, Dudley, Piers, Harry, and I were stuck in the back of the Dursleys’ car on the way to the zoo. I was glaring out the window, cursing my bad luck. Next to me, however, Harry seemed to be praising his luck.
Our aunt and uncle hadn’t found a way to leave us behind, so there we were, on the way to the zoo. However Uncle Vernon had taken the two of us aside before we left and threatened us.
“I’m warning the two of you,” he had started. His purple face was contorted with rage as he spit out his harsh words like we even cared. “I’m warning the two of you now. Any funny business, anything at all, and the two of you’ll be in that cupboard from now until Christmas.”
“We’re not going to do anything,” Harry said. “Honestly!” we said together.
Harry said it in a reassuring way, like he was trying to convince our uncle of our innocence. I hissed it under my breath, like I was cursing Vernon, like I was disbelieving or not even caring about his threats. Both of which were true.
Uncle Vernon narrowed his piggy eyes and ruffled his moustache. Of course he didn’t believe us. We were the Freak Twins who created strange disasters of everything we touched.
I remember that Aunt Petunia had once chopped off the entirety of Harry’s hair in an attempt to tame the unruly locks way back when we were eight years old. He had gone to the barber shop earlier that day, but she claimed it looked just like it had before he had gone. When she was through with him, he was practically bald with only his bangs left “to hide that horrible scar.”
Dudley had guffawed his lungs out, teasing poor Harry. He was really restless that night, and I heard him whimpering. I knew that he was worried about what school the next day would be like, and I worried with him. We were already teased about our broken glasses and unfitting clothes.
However, when we got up the next morning, his hair was just like it was before our Aunt attacked it with a pair of shears. We were both locked in the cupboard for this, even though we tried to explain how we’d done nothing and it had grown back itself.
I’m pretty sure Aunt Petunia thought it was my doing. That was how I got the thin scar that curled all the way from my left shoulder blade to my right hip bone. It was one of my larger ones, but if it would protect my brother, I would take it.
Another time, Aunt Petunia had tried to force me into wearing a hideous brown sweater with orange puff balls. I’d told her that hell would freeze over first, but she continued to shove the infernal thing over my head.
But, each time she tried to push the thing onto me, it shrunk until it would barely have fit a hand puppet.
Luckily, she decided that it must have shrunken in the wash and neither me nor my brother were punished.
On the other hand, we had gotten a terrible beating when Harry and I were found on the roof of the school kitchens. We were being chased by Dudley’s gang when suddenly, we were sitting on the chimney.
The Dursleys had received a very angry letter from our Headmistress about our climbing of the school property. We tried to explain how we only tried to jump behind the big garbage bins outside the kitchen doors when the wind must have picked us up and deposited us onto the roof.
Uncle Vernon beat us both to hell and back for the trouble we caused, and even went the extra mile when we tried to explain.
“QUIT YOUR EXCUSES!” he had shouted as he beat our exposed backs.
Hopefully, nothing was going to go wrong today.
I was brought out of my memories slowly and began to tune into Uncle Vernon’s complaints. He always complained about many things: people at his work, Harry and I, the council, Harry and I, the bank, Harry and I... and that’s just the beginning of his favourite subjects. This morning, it was motorcycles.
“...roaring along like maniacs, the young hoodlums,” he said as a motorcycle passed us.
“I had a dream about a motorcycle,” my brother blurted out. I knew exactly what dream he was talking about. It was something I had dreamed of before, too. A motorcycle that was... flying...
I turned to him in horror, knowing exactly what he was going to say next.
“It was flying,” he said wistfully.
Uncle Vernon nearly smashed the car into the one in front of us. He turned all the way around in his seat to shove his enraged face closer to my brother.
I slammed my hands onto my ears, but even that blockage just barely muffled our uncle's explosion.
“MOTORCYCLES DON’T FLY!” he screeched.
Our cousin and his ratty friend snickered at this. I glared at them, but they weren’t looking at me. They had their gaze locked on Uncle Vernon and Harry, hoping for punishment.
“I know they don’t,” Harry said, calmly. “It was only a dream.”
When Uncle Vernon turned back around, I saw Harry let out his breath in a huff of a sigh. I saw the regret written across his face; he probably wished he had kept his mouth shut.
If the Dursleys hated something, it was any talk of anything doing something it shouldn’t, whether it was a dream or a cartoon. They hated it even more than if either of us asked questions! They seemed to have got it in their head that the two of us might try something or get dangerous ideas.
As if we could even do anything.
It was a very sunny Saturday at the zoo, which was crowded with families. Dudley and Piers got large chocolate ice creams at the entrance, paid for by the Dursleys. Because the smiling lady in the van asked my brother and me if we wanted something, we were each bought a cheap lemon ice pop.
Usually, I avoided anything given to me by the Dursleys unless it was a necessity, but this ice pop was rather nice.
And, somehow, the morning was going pretty well. I hadn’t been pummelled by my cousin, and neither had Harry. A few insults and glares were thrown our way, but it was better than usual, now that we were in public.
I hung back, behind the group of insufferable morons, and spent my day with my brother, looking at animals and enjoying the sun, which we rarely experienced.
At lunch, we ate in the restaurant at the zoo. We were even allowed to finish off Dudley’s first knickerbocker glory because it hadn’t had enough ice cream. Of course, if there was even a small detail that was wrong, Dudley would have a tantrum. And of course, if Dudley had a tantrum, Uncle Vernon would spoil him, so he bought a second knickerbocker glory for his little birthday boy.
I rolled my eyes but didn’t complain. I’d been allowed to share the discarded ice cream with my brother, after all, and that was way more than I had expected at the beginning of the day.
I should have known it was all too good to last.
After a somewhat glorious lunch, we went to the reptile house. It was cool and dark, with lit windows all along the walls, lizards and snakes crawling over wood and stone behind the glass.
Dudley and Piers wanted to find huge, poisonous cobras and thick, man-crushing pythons. Soon, they found the largest snake in the place, large enough that it could’ve wrapped its body twice around Uncle Vernon’s car and crushed it into tin foil. At the moment, though, it didn’t seem in the mood, as it was fast asleep.
Dudley pressed his nose against the glass, staring at the glistening brown coils.
“Make it move,” he ordered his father. Uncle Vernon rapped on the glass with his knuckles, but the snake was imobile. “Do it again,” Dudley stated, and Uncle Vernon complied.
The snake stayed fast asleep.
“This is boring,” Dudley whined as he shuffled away, on to the next tank.
Harry and I took the spots that had previously been filled by Dudley and Uncle Vernon.
I suppose I wouldn’t have been surprised in any way if the snake that was in front of us had died of boredom. It had no company except for the stupid people drumming their sticky fingers on the glass. It must be worse than having to live in a cupboard: at least I had my brother and we were both allowed out… usually...
Suddenly, the snake’s beady eyes blinked open. It slowly lifted its head to position itself at eye level for us. And it… winked.
Shocked, I looked to my brother, who was looking back at me, equally shocked. We both turned our heads to scan our surroundings to see if anyone was watching. They weren’t. We made eye contact again before turning to the snake. Simultaneously, we winked back.
The snake motioned its head towards Uncle Vernon and Dudley, then raised its eyes to the ceiling in an eye roll. It gave us a look that said “I get that all the time.”
“I know,” I heard Harry murmur.
I wasn’t sure if the snake could hear, but I said, “It must be really annoying.”
The snake nodded strongly in agreement.
“Where do you come from, anyway?” I asked.
The snake used its tail to jab at a small sign next to the glass. I leaned towards it to see, and Harry did the same next to me.
Boa Constrictor, Brazil.
“Was it nice there?” my brother asked, not bothering to read the rest of the sign.
I nudged his ribs with my elbow and pointed to the sign again. The snake jabbed its tail at the sign as well as I did this.
I saw my brother redirect his gaze to the sign again and read the second part: This specimen was bred in the zoo.
“Oh, I see,” Harry said in realisation. I rolled my eyes and gave a slight chuckle, but Harry ignored me and continued. “So you’ve never been to Brazil?”
The snake shook its head slowly, in defeat, before we heard a deafening shout from behind us that made all three of us jump.
“DUDLEY! MR DURSLEY! COME AND LOOK AT THIS SNAKE! YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT IT’S DOING!”
Dudley came waddling toward us as fast as his piggy legs could take him. “Out of the way, you,” he sneered, shoving Harry backwards, who fell into me and brought us both hard onto the concrete floor.
The next few events flew by in a blur—one second, Piers and Dudley were leaning right up close to the glass to stare dumbfoundedly at the snake. The next, they leapt back with shouts of surprise and horror.
I pushed my brother off of me, and moved both of us into a sitting position. Just in time, as well, to see that the glass front of the boa constrictor’s tank had vanished. The huge snake was unravelling itself speedily and slithered out onto the floor.
People all throughout the reptile house screamed and started sprinting towards the exits. The snake slid past us, and I swore I heard a low hiss tell us, “Brazil, here I come... Thanksss, amigosss.”
The keeper of the reptile house was in shock, continually asking, “But the glass? Where did the glass go?”
The zoo director himself made Aunt Petunia a cup of strong, sweet tea while he apologised over and over again. Piers and Dudley had no words, as shocked as they were, and kept on blubbering like babies.
I was pretty sure that the snake hadn’t done much except for playfully snap at Piers’ and Dudley’s heels as it passed, but by the time they reached the car, they were going on about how it almost bit off their legs and tried to squeeze them to death.
I rolled my eyes, trying my hardest to ignore them, when Piers said something very troublesome for me and my brother.
“Harry and Jessie were talking to it, weren’t you?”
Uncle Vernon went dangerously quiet.
I kept my mouth shut, but the entire ride home I was silently cursing my luck and mentally preparing myself for death. Well, I didn’t get to do much, but at least my misery will be over soon.
Uncle Vernon waited until Piers was safely out of the house and well on his way home before approaching us. He was so angry that words failed him as his face blew up like a balloon.
We suffered a long half hour of beatings, shouted insults, and other punishments before we were allowed to stagger to our feet.
“Go—cupboard—stay—no meals,” he choked out before he collapsed into a chair. I watched Aunt Petunia run and get him a large brandy before dragging myself and Harry towards our cramped prison.
Hours later, I lay gingerly next to Harry, both of us wishing we had a watch or a clock or some way to keep track of time. We couldn’t be sure if the Dursleys were asleep yet. Unless they were, we couldn’t risk stealing some food. It wouldn’t be completely unbearable if tonight would be another night that we wouldn’t get to eat. It happened pretty often. But still.
We had lived with the Dursleys for almost ten miserable years. I didn’t remember a time when we weren’t living with them. Our parents had died in a car crash, leaving us with the twin scars on our twin foreheads. They were in the shape of lightning bolts, going from our hairlines to the edge of our brows.
Strangely, neither of us could remember being in a car with our parents when they died. Sometimes, when we strained our memory we could remember flashes of green and sharp, burning pain on our foreheads. We both came to the conclusion that this was the crash, though we had no clue where all the green light came from.
Neither of us knew our parents, or even remembered them, and we were forbidden to ask any questions. The Dursleys hated questions.
We used to sit and talk, dreaming and hoping that some other family member might come and take us away. But no. The Dursleys were our only family.
Sometimes, though, a few strangers would seem to know us. Some very weird strangers.
There was one that wore a violet top hat and would bow continually, and an old woman who was all in green and had waved very merrily at us on the bus, and the bald man in the purple coat who had shaken both our hands before disappearing without another word. And none of them ever stayed around, vanishing when we tried to get a closer look at them.
But at school, we had no one because everyone was terrified of Dudley’s gang, and Dudley’s gang very openly hated us.
Ah, what a life we lived…