Jenny sits with her legs swinging off of the side of the tree stump we found in the woods. I watch the sun dance in-between locks of her long brown hair that curls over her shoulders ever so gently.

"Are you staring at me, Harry?" she asks without turning her head.

"Possibly," I say. She laughs and I stare at the lines in the stump.

"There's a story I read online about stumps. Have you read it?" she asks after a while.

"No, the Dursley's won't let me use the computer," I say.

She frowns at me. It's good for me to have Jenny. She's my best friend, a good Muggle, and she's smart. I suppose I was first drawn to her because she reminds me of Hermione. She hates the way the Dursley's treat me and thinks they're a poor example of humanity and she hates Dudley, unlike so many around town who either love him or fear him too much to notice anything he doesn't show them.

"Well, it's the giving tree story. A tree loves a boy so much that it gives all of itself to him even though the boy doesn't ever reach happiness and the tree becomes a stump. It almost destroys him when he finds that the tree can't make him happy anymore and then the tree feels the same way," Jenny says.

"So love is about giving until you destroy yourself?" I ask.

"No! The story is really about the boy," she says as though I'm thick for not noticing, "he didn't love himself enough to ever love anyone else so he kept trying to get more and more things to be happy but it never worked."

"Soo…" I say, confused. I don't quite understand what she's getting at.

"So the boy needs to love himself or he and the tree will destroy themselves trying to make it work. One tree can only do so much," Jenny says quietly.

She hops off of the stump and walks away.

It takes a long time before I realize she was talking about me.