Chapter One
The Unsinkable Poppy Potter
"Your daughter is a remarkable young woman Mrs Dursley," the teacher gushed, her face earnest with the passion of a recently graduated teacher.
"She isn't my daughter, she is my sister's daughter," Mrs Dursley replied, her knuckles white as she gripped the strap of her handbag, her face set in a tight pinch.
The teacher nodded slightly, seemingly unsure of how to respond to that comment. "As I was saying, she is remarkable, she is very smart – and yet her social skills are inadequate for her age."
"Inadequate?" Mrs Dursley asked sharply, her lips turning white.
"Indeed, it limits her with both peers and adults –"
"This is not a deficit in social skills; she is a wicked and disobedient child! Vernon wants to send her to a military school to give her some proper routine and discipline. Honestly this school is far too lax on misbehaviour. It puts well behaved and innocent children like my Dudley at risk!" Mrs Dursley snapped, the strap of her handbag pulled taught between her hands.
The teacher rushed to soothe Mrs Dursley, but couldn't quite keep the shock from her voice, "Now Mrs Dursley I understand your frustrations; she is irreverent at the best of times, but I don't believe it's maliciously intended but rather a lack of understanding and empathy of other's needs and feelings. This is good news-"
"Good news?" Mrs Dursley breathed, the naturally hoarse quality of her voice becoming more pronounced. Mrs Dursley's sense of horror moved her from her seat, the strap of her bag held in front of her as if to fend off the positively culpable opinions of the teacher. "I'll not hear any more of this nonsense!" Mrs Dursley spat as she turned on her heel and stalked from the meeting room.
The teacher lunged forward – unable to comprehend how the conversation had deteriorated so quickly – in an attempt to salvage the meeting and set the miscommunication straight. "What I meant is that it's something that can be worked on and improved!"
Mrs Dursley whipped around as she reached the door, looking at the teacher as if she was something unpleasant. "Your wonderful establishment has not improved her in the least, in fact, she becomes more horrible by the day!" and with that parting comment Mrs Dursley left down the hallway with a sharp clack of heels, eternally gladdened that they had decided to send Dudley to a private primary school and not the poor excuse of education this establishment provided.
When Mrs Dursley made it home from the parent teacher interviews which were incomprehensibly more infuriating and frustrating than she could have ever foreseen, she took her anger out on the focus of the night's spectacle.
Poppy Potter, her sister's daughter.
"Get to your room!" she snapped at the small slip of a girl who was standing on a foot stool finishing up with the dishes.
Poppy looked over her shoulder and then back to the five remaining dishes that still needed to be dried. She obeyed when the Dursley matriarch said, "now!" in a short sharp whisper that promised the strap or a mouthful of curry powder if she continued to tarry.
As Poppy moved on quick feet towards the cupboard under the stairs, she got a smack on the bottom on the way past. It had been a while since she'd seen Petunia so incensed; usually it was Vernon who dolled out the more punitive corporal punishments.
Petunia was the inventor of the more imaginative forms of punishment, which were usually more psychological in nature; the flavour of the month, per say, was the mouthful of curry or soap. Depending on Petunia's mood, Poppy would be sent to sit in the hutch in the garage for hours with her taste buds burning from the curry powder – feeling like she would scratch her eyes out for a glass of water – or with the sickly yet tacky taste of lavender soap making her feel like she would choke.
Despite the burst of fear, Poppy made sure to shut the door to under the cupboard gently. Petunia didn't like the slamming of doors and Poppy preferred to show her displeasure in less obvious ways.
Poppy was lulled to sleep by the heated discussion between Vernon and Petunia about the sheer inadequacies of her primary school, their relief that their precious Duddleykins attended a superior private school and the indomitable frustrations and inconvenience caused by the burden that was Poppy Potter.
Poppy was awoken by the sharp kick of a foot to the door of the cupboard under the stairs, and so started her morning.
Without delay Poppy grasped her taped together old-man glasses that had been brought for her from a thrift shop when the teachers had continually written letters home. They were most likely not the correct prescription from the way that they strained her eyes, but they improved her ability to see well enough.
Poppy gathered her unruly and untameable aurburn hair into a tie and changed into Duddlekin's second hand clothes, which were so big that she had to harness herself into them with two belts.
Poppy didn''t enjoy the weekends; at least on school days she was required to wear a second hand uniform that fit her much better and which she didn't have to constantly hitch up.
She also got a reprieve from the Dursley's.
Poppy wasn't sure how she came to be with the Dursley's – they made it clear enough that a spawn of Satan such as herself was from neither of their loins – but believed that it had something to do with her 'freakish' parents who were constantly mentioned by Vernon and Petunia for their weird, unnatural traits and way of life before they died.
Poppy held the belief that anyone the Dursley's thought ill of were probably stand-up citizens – but she couldn't quite come to terms with the poor judgement her parents would have had to place her with the Dursley's, unless her parents thought the Dursley's were great.
Because of this Poppy grew up with a large dose of scepticism as to the kind of people her parents could have been.
Poppy commenced making breakfast for Vernon whilst he prepared for his day. When he entered the kitchen and started reading the paper she piled a large portion of eggs and bacon on his plate. Poppy shot a glance to Petunia to check if she had noticed how oily Vernon's breakfast was. Petunia was enforcing a diet regime on the house, which was meant to target the large elephants in the room, but had resulted in further whittling down Poppy's own already slim portions also.
Petunia had given her the idea when she started parroting about the doctors concerns about Vernon's and Dudley's weight being a significant risk to their health. She had succinctly heard that if Vernon continued eating the way he was he would be sent to an early grave, followed by their very own Duddlekins. Poppy took it upon herself to help enact this outcome. She had heard from a cooking show once that there were a lot of things called 'hidden calories' in oil and that they at times caused the downfall of even the best laid diet plans.
Vernon was having his morning grumble to Petunia about the state of affairs of the world, usually raised by certain news clippings in the paper. This morning's was one of his favourites – how hard working tax payers such as himself had to constantly keep the 'no-good layabouts' in a level of opulence that he found positively disgraceful.
"Poppy once you have cleaned the breakfast dishes I don't want to see you until the garden looks perfect, do you understand?" Petunia asked.
Poppy said that she understood and finished up the dishes as quickly as possible, as she never liked hearing Vernon's pugnacious tone of voice for long periods of time.
Poppy started with the weeding and had almost completed the front garden when Dudley strolled outside with two of his friends. "Looks like you missed a spot," Dudley kicked the bin she had put the weeds in, scattering them over the lawn.
Poppy couldn't help the words that practically escaped from her mouth, "Looks like you're as dumb as your report cards said."
Dudley missed what people commonly described as a 'beat', where she could almost see the acorn in his head furiously processing her words to find the insult that would surely be there. Bingo, the processing ended, the light went on and he lunged, his friends following his lead. Poppy was already up and running down the street with practiced speed.
She kept her feet moving to a pounding rhythm. Dudley was slowly but surely getting beefier with every extra extra serving of Poppy's oily cooking, but he wasn't yet so big that him and his friends didn't put up a good chase. Poppy looked forward to the day when he ate himself into immobilisation and made a mental note to use even more oil, butter and cream when cooking, against Petunia's orders, to help him reach that stage quicker.
For how much she disliked Dudley the bloodhound, he at times played an important role in the ecosystem of the household. He would attempt to insult her and she would insult him back, which resulted in him attempting to beat her; the result on her part was always an attempt to avoid or escape.
She found that she didn't so much mind running from Dudley and his entourage of ill mannered friends. In fact, it was sometimes the highlight of her day if she was toiling on mind meltingly tedious chores. Escaping Dudley sometimes felt like she was escaping the prison fortress of the Dursley household itself, if only for a little while.
So it was a predictably common Saturday afternoon sight for the neighbours, the slight red headed girl with the comically too large clothes running as if she were truly attempting to out race mortal peril, at times having to awkwardly retrieve her dragging pants by the belt and hoist them up all the while attempting to not miss a step, with three less graceful figures lumbering in a line behind her.
Until Poppy made a fatal error as she was sprinting across a pedestrian crossing. She had briefly checked the road but as she had the right of way she didn't look too closely.
The boys laboured to a screeching halt as a car came zooming out of what seemed like no-where and hit Poppy head on. Poppy rolled off the bonnet and to the side, her head hitting the pavement with a dull thunk, the world around her disappearing.
The car slowed, the driver looking on in abject horror before he pealed away in a squeal of tyres. The boys stood frozen for an immeasurable length of time, shock in their countenances.
They were the only witnesses to the event, as the crossing where she had been hit lead to Poppy's school, which held a number of empty blocks around it. She usually tried to lose them there as Dudley hated running through the long grass and usually gave up sooner rather than later.
Poppy lay unmoving, blood starting to pool on the pavement from what looked like a gaping head wound.
Poppy awoke to the strange view of Dudley and his two friends standing over her, blocking out the sun. She hadn't fully understood why the three were so shaken and when she had got home and Dudley had told his parents what had happened she had been penned in the cupboard under the stairs and told it was to teach her a lesson to not use her freakish abilities in front of Dudley. From her eaves dropping they thought she had used her freakishness to heal her head wound.
Life perpetuated and the Dursley household returned to its adulated normality. Poppy continued on with the less prosperous and altogether esteemed commerce of fencing Dudley's belongings. It was not very lucrative, what with the slow and precise pace she had to work at to ensure Dudley didn't cotton on, and perhaps the even tougher task of finding appropriate buyers in a primary school setting. She didn't know how many times she had told Susie that she wouldn't take cookies as payment for the recent release of Super Mario Bros – as it was a particularly high risk steal, having only been in Dudley's possession circa eight months.
For some reason the teachers in the school system frowned upon her selling 'her' belongings and said that if it continued they would have to notify her parents, as it created interesting predicaments that the teachers didn't want to deal with. Namely Susie regretting her choice of forgoing the money for her canteen order for a figurine of GI Joe. When Poppy refused to renege on the purchase, Susie had ran crying to the teachers because she needed to feed her chubby face with pie. Poppy had been told that she had to return the money to Susie and once Susie brought her pie and the teachers had dispersed – crocodile tears still leaking from her eyes – Poppy had shoved Susie's face in her pie and told her that if she were to ever tattle again she would get a taste of toilet water next.
For Poppy it had been a very valuable lesson; just as Mrs Figg had many different types and colours of cats all with horribly picky eating habits, there were many different types of people, all motivated by different things. Looking back on her actions – and not in the way the teachers had expected her to – she realised that she had believed Susie to have a small measure of intelligence and thus a fear of retribution. Poppy came to understand that someone like Susie would not be motivated by bullying or threats, not when she had unfailing belief in the power of teachers. To beat a nemesis like Susie, Poppy had to tackle the problem in a different way.
Despite these life lessons and the intention to find an alternative way to motivate the conundrum called Susie, it had become progressively harder to fence objects when she had to be increasingly sly about it and only proposition students who wouldn't blab to the teachers. The pool of opportunity slimmed and Poppy found herself thinking of other commerce ventures.
As Poppy grew she came to understand something very important about herself. Her teachers often spoke of talents and attempted to nurture talents in the altogether talentless pool of children that surrounded her every day. Sure Gregory could run fast in the relay, but what was the point of swiftness if he didn't use the talent for anything other than impressing teachers in school – the laughable parody of the real world, supposedly set up to assist children to learn the life skills to succeed in the much less supportive reality.
Poppy found an unexpected talent – unusual in that it did not seem to fit in with the usual talents that the teachers talked about at school; in fact, when Poppy had tried to tell the class during show and tell about her talents, the teacher had gotten cross and said that show and tell was for events that had actually occurred and that she could keep her flair for story telling for their end of year creative piece.
Poppy had come to school prepared with a piece of crumpled butcher paper with a diagram of the events that had transpired when she had turned one of Mrs Figgs cats into a cat statue, similar indeed to a garden gnome, until Vernon had accidentally smashed it with an unskilled automobile reverse on his way to work one day.
"You see I didn't set out to create a garden ornament, but it's what unexpectedly happened one day when I was set the tedious task of weeding. My neighbour Mrs Figg, who is also my babysitter when the Dursley's go out for events too special for me, has a large collection of cats.
I was trying to get the weeding done within the specified time frame so I didn't get in trouble for starting dinner too late when one of Mrs Figg's cats – a black one I can't remember the name of – kept getting in the way of my weeding, acting in a way that Mrs Figg describes as wanting affection.
When Mrs Figg babysits me I usually try to indulge her assertions that the cats require human affection, despite what I've learnt off National Geographic that felines prefer affection exclusively from their own pride, as she takes their emotional welfare very seriously, but Mrs Fig wasn't present at the time.
I remembered thinking to myself, if only the cat would just freeze and act like a garden gnome. And it did, even with an impressive glossy finish. I moved it to the front garden bed so that I could continue my weeding, which was admittedly a mistake; it seemed that this was too close to Vernon's reverse arch and the cat ornament shattered. Otherwise I would have brought it in for the show part of show and tell," Poppy said, holding out the diagram with flourish to the class. The class sat in silence, many of the students with odd expressions on their faces, many of which looked similar to Dudley's grimaces when constipated from eating too much cheese. Poppy added, "Are there any questions?" That's when the teacher stepped in.
The cat gnome incident was not an isolated event; as expected, Poppy turned the use of her limited recreation time into further developing her talents for the unusual. After the teacher and classes' reaction to her choice of show and tell, Poppy decided to not share her unusual talents with others.
Let me know what you think! Is it good enough to continue? :D
