Chapter 1

Hermione Granger sat at the front of her class listening intently to her maths teacher trying to explain a particularly difficult division question. It was the last day of term and the last day Hermione had left at her small primary school of her home town in Suffolk.

Suddenly the piece of paper the teacher was holding flew up into the air and hovered smoothly above his head.

"Woops! I must have left the window open." As Mr White shut the classroom window Hermione struggled to make the paper stop floating; she shook her head violently side to side. It was the second time that day that something peculiar had happened to her and she had no idea how or why it happened but what she did know, and what those around her failed to realise, was that it was her who was causing it.

It had started a couple of years ago when Hermione, feeling frustrated at not being able to quite master the technique of proper punctuation, had made her pencil burst into flames. The classroom had been in uproar as the whole school was evacuated onto the playground for 'health and safety' reasons. At the time she had been unable to understand why it had happened but she realised it must have been her as only moments before she had imagined that exact outcome.

At home that night she had experimented a bit more and found that if she concentrated properly she could make just about anything she wanted happen to her stationary.

Since then she had controlled her 'weird' powers but today she was having real difficulty in doing so as she was so distracted by the events of the morning.

They had been running late for the school run as Hermione's mother had overslept, when Caroline Granger had woken her daughter she was carrying with her a small yellowing letter with a red seal on the back. The return address had read: 'Hogwarts School'

Hermione had been desperate to open it and find out what the strange letter meant and who it was from. She had just begun to break the seal when her father had popped his head around her bedroom door.

"Come on! We need to go otherwise we'll all be late." Both Caroline and David Granger worked as dentists in the same practise and their patients often arrived early and therefore it was important that they were on time.

"Can I just open my letter?" Hermione asked, her fingers poised on the seal, desperate to open it but not wishing to disobey her parents.

"Not now my love, save it for after school and we can all open it together. I think this is your first letter that's not from a family member, very exciting!" Caroline patted her daughter on the shoulder as she got up from the end of the bed, "I think your blouse is hanging up in the kitchen so you will need to be extra quick ironing it this morning."

They had arrived at school a few minutes late and so Hermione had been distracted by the busy hustle of setting up the classroom for the first lesson and it wasn't until morning break that she remembered the letter. That was when her first strange thing of the day had happened, when her glass of milk she had been holding suddenly turned into an ice cream cone.

Hermione had never been popular at school as she had always preferred the company of books over other children and as a result she often spent her break times alone, as she did today. So no one noticed her little 'incident' as her parents had named her strange abilities – she had shown them straight away what she could do as she was a firm believer in parents being able to solve every problem, although unfortunately not this one.

She continued to think about the letter all day and by the time it came to the school's final assembly of the academic year and the goodbye lunch that had been put on for her and her fellow classmates of year six, she was in a world of her own and so the tearful goodbyes of her year group went unnoticed to her as she pondered over the yellowing bit of parchment waiting for her at home.