Lily wandered miserably down the road to the park, on her own. It was early morning, and Mum and Dad weren't up yet. She knew they weren't comfortable about letting her out on her own, in case there was anything dangerous out there. When she was littler, they had explained to her that if she instinctively did magic in an emergency, it wasn't her fault, but that once she was eleven, she'd be able to go away to Hogwarts to learn how to control her magic, and that from then on, she mustn't do magic outside school until she was seventeen.

Now, that didn't seem to be a problem.

It was two weeks past her eleventh birthday, and it was no longer any good trying to convince herself that the owl from Hogwarts might be delayed. After all, the owls from her brothers had arrived on time. James had sent a broomstick maintenance kit and a card promising to disown her if she wasn't Sorted into Griffindor. Albus had sent a bottle of the latest potion he had invented, and a card promising to show her all the hidden places in the castle that he had discovered when he was first Sorted into Slytherin.

And now, it seemed she wouldn't be going after all. It was all too clear.

Lily Potter was a Squib.

She had heard about Squibs, but never met one. Dad mentioned once that he'd had a Squib neighbour when he was young, an old lady who lived alone with her cats, and who had kept an eye on Dad to make sure he was safe, and defended him once when he had been in trouble with the law. More often, she had heard her parents reminiscing about the grumpy, stupid Squib caretaker who had patrolled the corridors of Hogwarts in their day, and who seemed to have no friends except his cat.

'Was he always cross?' Lily had asked.

Dad had laughed. 'A lot of the staff were cross with me quite often, but the teachers were usually cross with me for a good reason. I did loads of things that put my life or other people's in danger – like the time I found a spell scribbled in the margins of a book, tried it out without knowing what it did, and nearly killed a boy in my year. But Filch was just angry with life, because we could do magic and he couldn't.'

'Why couldn't he?'

'I think it's something called genetics. I don't know how it works – you'd better ask Auntie Hermione.'

Lily wondered whether she was doomed to grow up angry and hating all witches and wizards. She knew that Dad's mum's sister had been jealous of her for being a witch. When Dad's parents had died when he was a baby, Dad had gone to live with his aunt and uncle and cousin, and they'd hated him for being a wizard, too. Dad and Cousin Dudley hadn't even started to be – well, not best friends, but people who could put up with each other, the way Lily put up with her brothers – until they were about seventeen, Dad said.

Maybe she should run away and live with Dudley and his partner and their daughter, Eleanor. She'd been to visit their house, in Surrey. Dudley had let her and her brothers and Eleanor take turns on the exercise machines in his basement. James had sneered that he supposed you needed big muscles if you couldn't levitate things. Albus had been polite-ish (this had been a few years ago, before he'd started at Hogwarts and become really infuriating). But Lily had been fascinated by the way they worked, some just using mechanical devices to lift lumps of metal using different muscles, and some using something mysterious called electronics to measure your speed and how fast your heart was beating and how many calories you'd used up in exercising on it.

If she moved in, maybe she could go to school with Eleanor. But then, Dad had been saying Dudley thought Eleanor might be a witch. Well, maybe he and Dad could swap daughters, and she could live with Dudley and his partner Philip. After all, Eleanor was adopted, and she'd already moved between foster families a few times before she settled in with Dudley and Philip, so maybe she wouldn't mind moving again…

What was the use? Lily didn't know anything about how the Muggle world worked – Dad didn't talk about it much, probably because his memories of it weren't very happy ones. Besides, she didn't have any Muggle money, and she didn't know how to get to Dudley's house anyway. It wasn't as though she could stick out her wand and ask the Knight bus to take her there. She would never even have a wand. There was nothing to look forward to. There never would be, ever again.

Lily wondered whether this was what a Dementor attack felt like. She couldn't see any cloaked figures, but then, Muggles couldn't see them, so she wouldn't, would she? No –Dad said Squibs could see Dementors. Anyway, wouldn't they at least make the place look foggy or something? This was a beautiful, bright spring morning, a couple of weeks before the Easter holidays.

There was a boy already in the park, wearing Muggle trousers instead of robes. He was riding round and round the playground on a Muggle machine which Lily remembered was called a Bicycle. Eleanor had one, and she had tried to teach Lily to ride it, but Lily had been too frightened of falling. She didn't mind the exercise bike that Dudley had in the basement, as long as it was fixed to the floor. But Eleanor's bike just rolled along, balanced on two thin wheels one in front of the other, without even magic to stop it falling over. And this boy's bike was doing the same, except that he was making it rear up on its hind wheel, or balance on its front wheel and kick its hind wheel up behind it, or spin in the air. As Lily watched, the bike rushed up a slide and down the steps on the other side, span round again, and rode up the steps and down the slide.

'Show-off!' Lily called.

'Am I?'

'Yes. You're just like my brothers on their brooms.'

'Yeah. Everyone rides brooms round here, don't they? Not bikes.' The boy dismounted, and propped his bike against the side of the climbing-frame.

'Everyone except me,' said Lily.

'And me.'

'What's your name?'

'Oliver.'

'That's a cool name. I'm Lily, and my oldest brother's called James. But my other brother is called Albus Severus, because he's named after two past headmasters who died in the war against Voldemort, when my parents were at school.'

'Yeah? Well, the head of my mum's old school was called Ronald Wilson, and the deputy head was called Kenneth Brown, but she didn't think of calling me Ronald Kenneth.' He sneered, as if the names were obviously ludicrous.

'My uncle's called Ronald!' said Lily indignantly.

'Yeah, well, I didn't say there's anything wrong with that, it's just – it's not a very normal name, is it?' said Oliver. 'Not for people our age.'

'I love Muggle names,' said Lily. 'Howard and Walter and Cynthia and Pamela.'

Oliver snorted with laughter.

'What's wrong?' asked Lily indignantly. 'They're way cooler than just being called Andromeda or Regulus or something.'

'You're a witch, aren't you?' Oliver asked.

'No. I always thought I was, and – it turns out I'm not.'

'Well, that's not the end of the world, is it?' said Oliver. 'I'm not, either – I mean, I'm not a wizard.'

'You're a Squib, too?' Lily was surprised. All right, he dressed like a Muggle and he liked Muggle toys, but she was fairly sure you couldn't make a bike do tricks like that without magic.

'No, I'm just normal – what you people call a Muggle. So's my mum. And my dad's not magical either. I didn't even know there were real witches and wizards until my little brother started making his crayons come alive and wriggle around. And then – well, my dad told us he never knew where he'd come from. He'd just turned up at an orphanage with really bad amnesia when he was about eleven.'

'Do you think he was orphaned in the war against Voldemort, and Obliviated because his memories were too terrible to bear, and he was so traumatised by them that he could never do magic again?' asked Lily.

'No,' said Oliver. 'I think someone didn't want him because he couldn't do magic, and so they wiped his memory because they didn't want him to tell people his parents had abandoned him. It's like in the olden days when they used to put babies in lunatic asylums if they had cerebral palsy or Down's syndrome or anything! But we don't do that now – I mean, Muggles don't. Do wizards?'

'I don't know,' said Lily. 'I don't think my parents will, because my dad lived with people who were horrible to him for being a wizard, so he wouldn't want to do that to me. But I don't know what they'll do about school, if I can't go to Hogwarts.'

'You'll go to one of the schools round here, like me,' said Oliver, as if it was obvious. 'They have to let you in, if you live in this area. I go to Crispin – that's the one over in Street.'

'Which street?'

'No, the town of Street – haven't you ever been there?'

'I haven't been into Muggle towns much. So – what's it like, your school?'

'It's okay.'

'What subjects do you like?'

Oliver considered. 'Well, French is my best subject, and if I'm good enough, they might let me add Spanish the next year, and German the year after that. I love learning languages. And I like Philosophy, and Religious Studies, because it's interesting learning about how different people see the world. And there's Art – we're just doing drawing and painting this year, but we start studying Photography next year. In Music, we're learning the keyboard this year and then the guitar next year, so that we can play rock music. I don't like Design Technology because they keep moving us around every half-term, so that as soon as we get interested in cookery, we move on to making mechanical toys, then sewing, then technical drawing. But at least they let us go on studying Computer Science all through the year, and we're designing computer games at the moment. And there's Maths, and Science, and English, and Drama, and Geography, and History – basically, I don't think there are any subjects I don't like. Except football. The teacher keeps trying to get me to hit the ball with my head as well as my feet, and I want to keep my head for thinking with.'

'At least footballs aren't as hard as Bludgers,' Lily pointed out. 'And you don't have to fly.'

'There is that,' Oliver conceded.

'I wish I could go to Crispin,' said Lily. She'd always enjoyed painting and acting, and from what her brothers said, nobody did those as serious school subjects at Hogwarts. And learning other languages would be brilliant, and computers sounded incredibly exotic.

'You probably can,' said Oliver. 'At least – when I started at secondary school, my parents had to get application forms from the council at the beginning of my last year at primary school, and list the schools they wanted me to go to in order of how much they wanted me to go to them, so the council could decide who was going to which school – to what school, I mean, not to a witch school. But if your parents didn't do that – well, my parents are teachers, so maybe they could help your parents out. They need to phone – no, there's no landline phones in this village, and we can't get much reception for mobiles with all these hills between us and the nearest radio masts – well, maybe my mum could drive over the council with your mum or dad, and explain that your parents were planning to send you to a private school, but then you failed the entrance exam, so you need to go to a school round here.'

'Why do you live here?' Lily asked suddenly. 'Is it just because of your brother?'

'No – well, not exactly. Only, when we started finding out that magic was real and there were wizarding villages all over the place, my dad wanted to learn about his roots, and my mum thought it'd be good for us to find out about a different way of life. So she applied for jobs as a Muggle Studies teacher at different wizarding primary schools, and most of them just ignored any letter that didn't come by owl, but the one here invited her for an interview. They thought it'd be good for wizarding children to learn about the Muggle world, so that they don't grow up thinking we live in caves. So we moved here last summer, so that Mum could start teaching in the autumn, and my dad did a bit of supply teaching until he found a job at one of the Muggle schools nearby.'

'So you've been here all this time? I've never seen you out here before.'

'No.'

'Where are you?'

'Travelling!' snapped Oliver. 'There isn't a school bus to here, because everyone except me – and you, I suppose – goes to boarding school from the age of eleven, so I have to use public transport, so I have to leave the house by seven in the morning to get to the bus stop to catch the bus to be at school by half past eight, and then when school finishes at three, I have to catch two buses to be home by five. And when I'm not at school – well, for the first few months after we moved in, I was helping my parents set up solar panels so that we could have an electricity supply, and stuff like that. And then – well, I'd got used to not having friends at school because I couldn't bring them back here and if I went round to their houses I'd be even later getting home. And I'd got used to not having friends in the village because I didn't talk to anyone in case they thought I was weird because I was a Muggle. So I just come out early in the morning to ride my bike, and then I go in and play on my computer or play chess with my dad, or whatever.'

Muggles played chess? If they could cope with playing-pieces that talked back to them, Lily wondered why they weren't surprised by magic in general. Then again, Muggles had televisions and computers, so maybe their chessmen were animated by a different mechanism.

'I haven't seen you out without your family before,' said Oliver. 'Don't your parents like you being out on your own?'

'Well – I suppose they worry about me because I'm the youngest, and because I'm not a witch,' said Lily. 'They wouldn't mind if I ran around with a group of friends, but even before I realised I wasn't a witch, I've always been a bit of a loner. It's easier in the holidays, when James and Albus are around and I can go out with them.'

'Your parents must be going mad, wondering where you are now,' Oliver pointed out. 'D'you think they'd rather you were friends with a Muggle than on your own?'

'Probably.'

'Maybe we'd better go back to your place now,' Oliver suggested.

'Probably,' said Lily. 'But – well, can I have a go on your bike first?'

'Okay. You might need to lower the seat a bit first.'

So Lily rode a couple of wobbly circuits round the playground, and then, with increasingly less wobbliness, up the road to her house, with Oliver running alongside. The trick, she discovered, was to keep moving so that the bike was too busy to remember that it couldn't balance upright. It wasn't magic, technically. But unless you already knew that, it was hard to see the difference.

Author's note: the names of Dudley's partner and child are taken from the story Dudley's Memories by PaganAidd, which can be found at

www. fanfiction s/6142629/1/Dudley-s-Memories

I'd recommend the two sequels to these, Snape's Memories and Severus Dreams, and her other stories such as Digging For The Bones. I'm dubious about some of PaganAidd's assumptions: for example, that the Dursleys are routinely extremely violent to Harry, and that the only reason he isn't obviously covered in injuries is because wizards heal supernaturally fast, and that if it isn't mentioned in the books, this is because Harry is suppressing the memories. In fact, we are told in Deathly Hallows that Harry doesn't even know how to heal himself of a minor cut, and certainly doesn't have the power to recover from a beating that would kill a Muggle child. Also PaganAidd sometimes makes it sound as though wizards are so different from Muggles – almost as if they are a different species – that Muggle medicines wouldn't work on wizards. But if you can accept these premises, her stories are entertaining and moving, and her guess about what Dudley might be doing as an adult sounds quite believable.