The sky was dark and the trees skeletons as a long haired boy (or was it a girl?) sat at the side of the road, next to a streetlight, outside, what was, at a guess, their primary school. The androgynous figure was dressed in a grey, beat up old t-shirt and a pair of washed out blue jeans, with ancient looking red braces holding them up, clothes completely unsuited to the freezing night weather. The child's black head was bent over a tattered school exercise book, nodding along to a tune blaring out of his headphones, and he was scribbling away with a passion which did not suggest school work. Occasionally the child would stop, and murmur over the words, his pen working furiously as he edited. Apart from his faint whispering, and the hum of the street lights, the road was deafeningly silent, the eerie quietness of a school after the children and energy has gone, to make way for the evening, then night.
The boy was called Harry, and this was, indeed, his school. His family, a frankly vile bunch, had neglected to pick him up after school, as his cousin Dudley was staying over at a friends house tonight, and so his Uncle Vernon had told him, in no uncertain terms, that he was to get himself home. "Why should we waste precious fuel on you, poof? You can walk your freaky self home, or better yet, don't come back at all!" His Uncle Vernon was a dick, in Harry's opinion. However, being left at school did leave Harry with the chance to listen to his tapes on his Walkman, which he had stole off Dudley, after the oaf had chucked it at a wall and proclaimed it broken. 'Honestly', thought Harry, with a roll of his eyes. 'It only needed the battery putting back in.' The Walkman had certainly been Harry's greatest find- it meant he could listen to music whenever the Dursley's weren't around, and he could find refuge in his favourite singers, which he usually only heard when they were played on the radio station his uncle listened to, which was very infrequently, as Harry tended to listen to Bowie, who's music was switched off unerringly every time it came on. Uncle Vernon called him a poof, and his Aunt always pulled a face as he said that. Bowie was Harry's idol, but when Harry protested against him being turned off, Uncle Vernon gave him a clout around the head and sneered, telling Harry he was a fag. Harry didn't really get what was wrong with that- in fact, he tried to emulate Bowie as much as he could. He would borrow the girls nail polish (they were happy to experiment on any boy), grow out his hair and give cryptic answers to questions which didn't always make sense, but nearly always contained a song lyric or two. Yes, Harry Potter was mostly ok with being left alone, even is it was on his 11th birthday.