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TIA

Why was it never sunny in Scotland?

Tia's bike rattled over bumps in the gravel path winding through the thick forest on the outskirts of the little village of Killin. Loose rocks, pulled free by the week's ungodly torrents of rain, threatened to send her skidding into the heather on either side of the track, but she was careful. She already had enough mud stains on her nice jeans already. Her hoodie kept most of the rain from her face as she peddled madly – but carefully – through the damp forest back to town.

Her backpack was laden with the berries she'd been sent out to pick ("It's a lovely day, Tia, why don't you go out and do something useful with your time instead of sit around here with your nose in your computer?" her mother had moaned earlier) and, the closer she got to her little village of bleach-white bungalows with old-timey thatch-style rooves, the more she felt herself to be in some kind of time warp. At home in her bedroom, snuggled up in bed and surrounded by her widescreen TV and laptop and tablet, she could be anywhere. A high-tech city apartment, for instance, where if she peeled back the net curtains she would see so many floors below her a hive of bustling like-minded people with phones pressed to their ears and lights flashing from signs to guide their way.

Instead what she got was a town of scruffy men with scratchy white beards and even scratchier cardigans, old ladies with their hair in curlers while they popped down to the co-op to pick up their day's shopping and paper, and young mums who might as well be old mums wheeling their babies in prams that had been pushed down that very street by their great-great-great grandmother and no doubt would be there again several generations from now.

Tia sighed at the injustice of it all. She was eleven years old, darn it! Soon she'd be twelve – which as everybody knew was technically the start of being teenager – and how was she supposed to have the 'real teenage experience' if she was stuck in this old place? Dirty old sheep farmers didn't make cute dates and old ladies were really only good for telling her to brush her teeth and pat her on the head like a puppy; the height of fashion for them meant boring cotton blouses with flowers stitched onto the pointy collars.

True, she had school… but it was so small, and nothing like the big noisy places with stairwells and shiny linoleum floors like you see on TV. It was old and cramped, like every other building in Killin. Sometimes she swore the whole town had been built for Hobbits. The walls smelled like mildew and the ancient floorboards creaked under her feet when she walked on them in her heavy black school shoes. There was zero ability to ninja from place to place and blend in with the non-existent crowds if she wanted to avoid the constant unwanted attention of Terry Mominger, as she often needed to.

Darn that Terry Mominger, she thought furiously, can't he find anyone else to have a crush on? Maybe someone as awkward and weird as he is?

Without warning, a flash of brown shot past her head in whoosh of feathers and noisy squawks. Tia screamed, tugged reflexively at her handlebars— and suddenly found her front wheel skidding out from under her.

"Crap!" she shouted as the bike tilted, and in a flash of sloppy mud and skinned elbows, she was staring at the bike from the gravelly ground. She blinked hard and sat up slowly, waiting for the stunned feeling to pass. Her hood had fallen from her face and rain was now pelting the top of her head, sticking strands of dark brown hair that had fallen out of her pony tail to her face. She brushed them away with muddy fingers, staring fiercely down the track after the mysterious flash of brown feathers.

What the hell…?

After a moment, glad that her mother couldn't read her thoughts like she could the diary she'd kept when she was six, she gingerly eased herself to her feet. Her ankle twinged as she hesitantly put her weight onto it. She took a step towards her bike—

"Ow!" she howled, and sank back to the ground. Her ankle was on fire. Fingers shaking, she pushed the hem of the right leg of her jeans up to her calf, only to see a dark blotch on her pale skin that seemed to be expanding by the second. Or maybe that was just her imagination acting up at the slowly-dawning realisation that she was alone in the forests of Killin, sitting in a puddle with her bike several feet away and totally unusable right now.

Her grandfather's joking words of that morning cut through the rain and heavy rustle of leaves to catch up to her: "You and your city dreams, Tia! Have patience, kidlet. When you're older and more independent, then you can go live in Edinburgh— or maybe even London, eh?" And he'd laughed and grinned at her, like it was a big joke. Like he didn't think she could do it. At the time she'd lifted her chin haughtily and snatched up her helmet and backpack. She was going to bring back so many berries, gosh darn it, and she wasn't even going to ask her older brother Will to go with her. She was going to prove how independent she could be…

Staring at the still-spinning front wheel of her sodden bike now, though, and clutching her swollen limb, she wondered if maybe she didn't have what it takes after all.

I mustn't cry, she thought viciously, swallowing the lump in her throat. I mustn't cry…

"Tia?"

There was somebody coming up the track towards her. Tia scrambled to blink back her tears and hold her head high as the somebody rounded the corner, pushing aside the fronds of the tall ferns she'd crashed through to see her better. Tia only needed to take note of the soaked-through black t-shirt with 'Magicka Lvl: 9000+!' scrawled across its front to guess as to who had stumbled upon her previously hidden humiliation.

"Go away, Terry," she growled, refusing to even look at the rest of him. Footsteps squelched towards her through the sodden dirt, and suddenly a pair of scruffy trainers were directly in front of her. The hems of a pair of basketball shorts were dripping water. Why, oh why, were there never enough sunny days in Scotland?

"What happened? Are you alright?" Terry asked. Tia obstinately tugged her hood over her head and crossed her arms, wincing at the way her ankle flared.

"Go away," she repeated. "I'm fine."

Instead, a hand offered itself hesitantly to her. She inspected it carefully out of the corner of her eye (it was no good having him think she was actually considering taking it just yet— didn't want him thinking she liked him or anything) but she didn't see any remnants of crisp crumbs or Sticky Globs of Unknown Origin. Slowly, she took it.

"I'm going to need help walking," she mumbled, and without missing a beat his arm was around her waist, her arm flinging around his shoulders.

"Alright, we'll just go slow, okay?" Terry said, and together they traipsed their way out of the undergrowth. Tia felt uncomfortable with him so close. After all, she spent so much time avoiding him at school. They reached the spot where her bike had fallen. Gently, Tia leaned against a tree while Terry righted it.

"Maybe if you sit on it and I wheel you back to the village?" he suggested, peering at her with his really quite bright blue eyes. His floppy yellow hair kept sticking to his forehead, but he didn't brush it away.

"You didn't bring one of your own?"

Terry shook his head. "We're only a couple of minutes out from the Bridge."

The Bridge was the final exit from the cramped little village to the freedom of the woods. It was an old, old thing of heavy black stone, and it crossed a wide river that burbled downhill over rocks and startlingly green weeds. From the bridge it was only a ten minute ride home, provided she cut through the village centre.

"Oh. I didn't realise I was so close."

Terry just shrugged and smiled shyly, blinking rain out of his eyes. Tia had to work to make herself scowl at him as she eased herself onto the seat, Terry's non-existent weight keeping her and her bike from toppling over again.

They started walking. It was tricky at first, what with her navigating and him basically keeping them upright, but eventually they got the hang of dodging loose patches and puddles. They were – though Tia hated to admit it – kind of a good team.

"Why are you out here anyway?" Tia asked suspiciously when the trees started to thin and the crisp white edges of buildings began to show through the foliage beyond. "Are you stalking me?"

Terry looked mortified at the very thought. Tia thought he was maybe faking. Probably. Definitely.

"No! I… well, maybe I did see you ride out this way this morning," he admitted, and Tia flashed him a glare. His cheeks went red and he hastened to explain. "So, yeah, I was looking for you, but not stalking, not really. I mean… you've been out here so long – all day, really – and I thought maybe you hadn't seen them… or maybe you had and you were stuck or lost or I dunno… you know?"

If Tia hadn't been lost before, she certainly was now. A number of witty and biting retorts ran through her mind, but in the end her tongue only managed a simple:

"What?"

Terry looked at her pleadingly, like she was failing to understand him on purpose.

"The owls, Tia. All day they've been flying over the village, and you won't believe how many phone calls my mum's taken from her quilting club friends about it…"

The last trees were dropping away now on either side of them and as Tia glanced over the village, she too spotted some of the birds in question swooping low over the dark, angular rooftops. One of them even landed on the chimney of old Mr Jones' butcher shop and preened itself before taking off again. It was enough time to glimpse something on the bird's leg, something white and tightly rolled and…

"They're all carrying letters," Terry whispered. His blue eyes were wide, but not with fear or trepidation. No, that was excitement on his open face. "Isn't it cool? All this time I thought I was missing out living out here in the middle of nowhere with stupidly slow bandwidth and nothing but sheep to have epic sword battles with, but now— well, just look! There go some more, from the other direction!"

Weirdly enough, it wasn't the new owls that drew Tia's attention, but what Terry had just said. From the sounds of it, he, too, wasn't satisfied with their humdrum country lifestyle. And all this time Tia had thought she was the only one…

No, bad Tia! Stop it! You are not allowed to like Terry Mominger, even as a friend!

She could only picture the face of her macho older brother with his rugged beard and cool black-rimmed glasses if she brought home Terry Mominger as a friend. Maybe they'd all play chess together. She snort-giggled at the very thought.

Thankfully, Terry didn't talk all the rest of the way back to Tia's house except to exclaim every time another owl swooped overhead. It wasn't until they'd made it all the way to her front door, and Tia was struggling to get off the bike without injuring her ankle any further, when Terry asked again:

"So how did you end up in the mud, anyway?"

Tia sighed. She wasn't quite ready to admit that she'd been spooked by an owl – probably one of the very ones zooming across town right now, in fact – but at the same time she definitely didn't want to say that she'd just fallen off her bike by accident.

"A rabbit jumped out in front of me," she said quickly, not looking at his face as he helped her up the steps. "I didn't want to run it over so I got out of its way and I slipped."

"Oh. Okay."

Tia didn't know what to say to fill the awkward silence that followed, so she raised a hand to grab the big rusty doorknocker. Her fingertips had only just brushed its flaky metal when the door was wrenched open from the inside, nearly toppling Tia and Terry back off the steps in surprise.

"Tia Stevenson!"

Tia's mum was in the doorway, and she was looking mad. Instinctively Tia attempted to flatten her rain-soaked hair, brush some of the soggy dirt from her clothes.

"You've got mud on your forehead," Terry whispered most unhelpfully. Tia resisted the urge to push him off the steps, if only because she knew she'd have to go down with him.

Tia's mum blinked down at Terry, like she hadn't even seen him there.

"Oh my. Who are you?"

Terry went even whiter than usual under her fierce black-eyed stare.

"M-my name is Terry, ma'am. Terry Mo—"

"Terry. Nice to meet you. You—" she was pointing at Tia – "you have been gone far longer than you promised me this morning. You missed lunch again. Inside, please. Now."

Tia and Terry started gabbling at the same time.

"But Mum, I—"

"Her foot, Mrs Stevenson, she really can't be—"

"IN. NOW."

And with all the force of a thousand bulls, she pushed her way between the two and half-lifted, half-pulled Tia inside, careful to keep her weight off the leg she was leaving to hover in the air.

Tia, for her part, was immensely confused. It was that thing about missing lunch that did it; yes, mum usually went off her nut whenever Tia turned up covered in muck and filth, but never before had she reacted quite this badly. And never, at least as long as Tia had been alive, had her mum ever really concerned herself with the importance of lunch.

"Breakfast is the most important meal of the day," she'd say regularly over a frying pan of bacon and eggs, "followed only by a big healthy supper."

Tia couldn't remember the last time her mother had made her lunch.

"Bye," she said miserably to Terry before her mother snapped the door shut in his face.

Her mother frog-marched her down the tight corridor stuffed with end tables and potted plants and umbrella stands and into the tiny living room. She dropped her onto the plump sofa in the middle of the room, apparently mindless of the way it left streaks of mud on the nice floral print. Tia blinked up at her, concerned; had her mother maybe been abducted by aliens? Or was this a clone, sent to infiltrate their middle-of-nowhere Scottish village?

After a preliminary examination of Tia's wound, her mother propped her leg on the glass coffee table cluttered with magazines and sweet wrappers before getting to her feet.

"Wait right here," she said— rather unnecessarily, Tia thought. "I'll go get something for you."

Tia waited. Now that she was in a dry house, watching the rain pummel relentlessly at the windows instead of at her face, some of the sting faded from her ankle. Her panic, too, faded, and soon she was resting up against the cushions, her backpack discarded at her feet while she flicked idly through one of the fashion magazines on the coffee table, waiting for her mother to get back.

Some five minutes must have passed before she returned with a bowl of steaming water, an armful of bandages and antiseptics, and, tucked under her arm: was that a… an envelope?

Her mother nudged aside the rubbish on the table to make room for the supplies she'd brought. Then, when her hands were free, she pulled from under her arm the envelope. It was yellow and thick, and she held it tentatively between her work-calloused fingers, like she was afraid it was covered in something gross, like blood. Or cat fur. Tia's mum hated cats.

"Tia…" she began. Then she stopped. Tia found herself holding her breath. Her mother wasn't the sort of person to trip over her own words.

Finally, she tried again. "I suppose you've been watching all the owls flying around the place this afternoon."

"Not really," Tia said quickly. She sucked in a breath at a sudden flare of pain in her ankle and decided to elaborate. "I mean… well, I kind of knew about them, but not properly… Mum, what is all this?"

Instead of answering, her mother laid the envelope aside in favour of squirting some of the antiseptic cream on Tia's wound. Tia tried not to squirm under her mother's less-than-gentle touch.

"All while growing up, you were never different from the other children," her mother was saying now. Tia may not have squirmed on the outside, but inside she was suddenly defensive.

"I was so! None of them can see any farther than this village, can they? I want to live in New York, or Paris, or Sydney, or… or… somewhere! Anywhere that I can be a fancy lawyer or a doctor or... or… " she ran out of steam here but felt confident she'd made her point. But her mum just shook her head.

"Love, it's not that. You weren't different in… in other ways. Ways most of the mothers around here need never worry about for their children."

Tia was still suspicious, but she tried to keep an open mind. As her mum dipped the bandages in the hot water and wrapped them around her ankle, she asked: "Then how was I not different, Mum? I don't get it. Does this have something to do with those owls?"

Tia's mum wouldn't meet her eyes. Tia had to settle for staring at her long black hair, pulled back in a frizzy bun on the back of her head. Her long fingers tugged the last length of bandage into place and pinned it expertly. Then she sat back and sighed at the carpet.

"You were always going to be different. No matter how far away we moved, how isolated we became… How normal a life I provided…"

"Moved? Huh? We've always been here. Haven't we? Mum, tell me what's going on."

Tia's mum didn't move for a second. Tia could feel her frustration and her panic building. Her mum – her stoic, force-to-be-reckoned-with mother – looked on the verge of tears.

Finally, just when Tia could stand it no longer, her mother picked up the envelope again and handed it to Tia.

"This arrived a couple of days ago. I thought maybe, if I just didn't give it to you…" She shook her head just as an owl swooped right past the window. "Read it. If you have any questions, just ask. I'll tell you what little I know. Just remember, love— this isn't a dream."

And she laughed low and bitterly, right from the darkest, most disappointed part of her. Suddenly Tia wasn't at all certain she wanted to know what was in this fat envelope. It felt so old, even though it looked so new. Breaking the crusty red seal on the back, she slid two letters out from inside. The sharp tang of ink permeated the air as she unfolded the first one, marvelling a little at the paper's thickness, its funny texture.

Dear Miss Stevenson,

We are pleased to inform you that you have a place at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment.

Term begins on 1st September. We await your owl by no later than 31st July.

Yours sincerely,

M. McGonagall, Headmistress

Tia couldn't wrap her head around it. The next letter was no help either, filled with gibberish like pet toads and cauldrons and robes.

She looked to her mother, only to get a grim smile in return.

"I s'pose this means it's official. I'm terribly sorry to be the one to tell you this, but… you're a witch, Tia."

A/N: Oh my gosh. Another story I started because I was bored and wanted to practice my writing. Yay! Maybe I won't delete this one three chapters in...

Anyway. Tia, happy birthday! Don't expect a nice present or anything this year, alright? _ Hahah... oh, the funnies. Enjoy. :) Everyone else: Don't. Ooooor rate and review, I dunno, up to you. Ta ta. xxx