For the first couple of chapters, I'll be relying heavily on the text from the book, with small changes. As the story goes on, there will be more and more changes from the book. So, that being said, anything you recognize probably isn't mine and probably belongs to JK Rowling.
"Up! Get up! Now!"
Harry woke with a start. His aunt rapped on the door again.
"Up now girl!" she screeched. Harry stifled a groan. He heard his aunt walking towards the kitchen and then the sound of the frying pan being put on the stove. He rolled onto his back, wishing he could go back to sleep.
His aunt was back outside his door.
"Are you up yet?" she demanded.
"Nearly," said Harry as he sat up, his head nearly brushing the ceiling.
"Well, get a move on, I want you to look after the bacon. And don't you dare let it burn, I want everything perfect on Duddy's birthday."
Harry groaned and dropped back down to lie on his bed.
"What did you say?" his aunt snapped through the door.
"Nothing, nothing…" Harry sighed. Dudley's birthday—how could he have forgotten? Dudley had only been crowing about it for the last few weeks.
Harry slowly sat back up, got out of bed, and started looking for a pair of socks. He found a pair under his bed and, after pulling a spider off one of them, put them on. Harry was used to spiders, because the cupboard under the stairs was full of them, and that was where he slept.
When he was dressed, he went down the hall into the kitchen. The table was almost hidden beneath all Dudley's presents. It looked as though gotten Dudley had gotten the new computer he wanted, not to mention the racing bike. Exactly why Dudley wanted a racing bike was a mystery to Harry, as Dudley was very fat and hated exercise—unless, of course, it involved punching somebody. Dudley's favorite punching bag was Harry, but he couldn't often catch him. Harry didn't look it, but he was very fast, and he was small enough to fit in places Dudley couldn't reach.
Perhaps it had something to do with living in a dark cupboard, but Harry had always been small and skinny for his age. He often looked even smaller and skinnier than he really was because much of what he had to wear were old clothes of Dudley's, and Dudley was about four times bigger than he was. Of course, his school-clothes were the only things he had that weren't Dudley's cast-offs. Harry's Aunt Petunia was much too proud to send her "niece" off to school in anything other than dresses; and though they came from the charity bin, they still were nicer and fit better than any of Dudley's old clothes.
Harry had a thin face, knobby knees, curly black hair, and bright green eyes. He wore round glasses held together with a lot of Scotch tape because of all the times Dudley had punched him on the nose. The only things Harry liked about his own appearance was his skin color—dark enough that no one actually though he was the Dursley's blood—and a very thin, branching scar on his forehead that was shaped like a bolt of lightning. He had had it as long as he could remember, and the first question he could ever remember asking his Aunt Petunia was how he had gotten it.
"In the car crash when your parents died," she had said. "And don't ask questions, girl."
Don't ask questions—that was the first rule for a quiet life with the Dursleys.
Uncle Vernon entered the kitchen as Harry was turning the bacon.
"Brush your hair!" he barked, by way of a morning greeting.
About once a week, Uncle Vernon looked over the top of his newspaper and shouted that Harry's hair looked like a bird's nest. He'd then send Harry off to the bathroom to brush his hair and braid it into some semblance of submission. Sometimes, when Harry was feeling particularly bold, he'd shoot back that his hair would look better if it were short. Invariably, that would get him sent to his cupboard for the day.
Girls don't do boy things—that was the second rule for a quiet life with the Dursleys.
Harry was frying eggs by the time Dudley arrived in the kitchen with his mother. Dudley looked a lot like Uncle Vernon. He had a large pink face, not much neck, small, watery blue eyes, and thick blond hair that lay smoothly on his thick, fat head. Aunt Petunia often said that Dudley looked like a baby angel—Harry often thought that Dudley looked like a pig in a wig.
Harry put the plates of egg and bacon on the table, which was difficult as there wasn't much room. Dudley, meanwhile, was counting his presents.
"Thirty-seven," he said, looking up at his mother and father. "That's less than last year." Dudley began to go red in the face.
Harry, who could see a huge Dudley tantrum coming on, began wolfing down his bacon as fast as possible, in case Dudley turned the table over—something that happened with alarming regularity when Dudley didn't get his way.
Aunt Petunia obviously scented danger, too, because she said quickly, "And we'll buy you another two presents while we're out today. How's that, popkin? Two more presents. Is that all right?"
Dudley thought for a moment. It looked like hard work. "So I'll have thirty… thirty…"
"Thirty-nine, sweetgums," Aunt Petunia cut in.
"Oh." Dudley sat down heavily and grabbed the nearest package. "All right then."
At that moment, the telephone rang and Aunt Petunia went to answer it while Harry and Uncle Vernon watched Dudley demolish the mountain of presents beside him. Dudley was ripping the paper off a gold wristwatch when Aunt Petunia came back from the telephone looking both angry and worried.
"Bad news, Vernon," she said. "Mrs. Figg's broken her leg. She can't take her." She jerked her head in Harry's direction.
Dudley's mouth fell open in horror, but Harry's heart gave a leap. Every year on Dudley's birthday, his parents took him and a friend out for the day, to adventure parks, hamburger restaurants, or the movies. Every year, Harry was left behind with Mrs. Figg, a senile old lady who lived two streets away. Harry hated it there. The whole house smelled of cabbage and Mrs. Figg made him look at photographs of all the cats she'd ever owned.
"Now what?" said Aunt Petunia, looking furiously at Harry as though he'd planned this. Harry knew he ought to feel sorry that Mrs. Figg had broken her leg, but it wasn't easy when he reminded himself it would be a whole year before he had to look at Tibbles, Snowy, Mr. Paws, and Tufty again.
"We could phone Marge," Uncle Vernon suggested.
"Don't be silly, Vernon, she hates the girl."
The Dursleys often spoke about Harry like this, as though he wasn't there—or rather, as though he was something very nasty that couldn't understand them, like a slug.
"What about what's-her-name, your friend—Yvonne?"
"On vacation in Majorca," snapped Aunt Petunia. She worried the glass pearls around her neck. "I suppose we could take her to the zoo," she said slowly, "…and leave her in the car…"
"That car's new! She's not sitting in it alone…"
Dudley began to sob loudly. He wasn't really crying, but he knew if he screwed up his face and wailed, his mother would give him anything he wanted.
"I…don't..want..her..t-t-to come!" Dudley yelled between huge, pretend sobs. "She always sp-spoils everything!"
Just then the doorbell rang, and a moment later, Dudley's best friend, Piers Polkiss, walked in with his mother. Dudley stopped pretending to cry at once.
Half an hour later, Harry, who couldn't believe his luck, was sitting in the back of the car with Piers and Dudley, on the way to the zoo for the first time in his life. His aunt and uncle hadn't been able to think of anything else to do with him, but before they'd left, Uncle Vernon had taken Harry aside.
"I'm warning you," he had said, putting his large purple face right up close to Harry's, "I'm warning you now, girl—any funny business, any at all—and you'll be in that cupboard from now until Christmas."
"I'm not going to do anything," said Harry, "honestly…"
But Uncle Vernon didn't believe him. No one ever did.
The problem was, strange things often happened around harry and it was just no good telling the Dursleys that he didn't make them happen.
Once, Aunt Petunia had been trying to force him into a revolting old sweater of Dudley's. The harder she tried to pull it over his head, the smaller it seemed to become, until finally it might have fitted a hand puppet, but certainly wouldn't fit Harry. Aunt Petunia had decided it must have shrunk in the wash and, to his great relief, Harry wasn't punished.
Another time, though, he'd gotten into terrible trouble for being found on the roof of the school kitchens. Dudley's gang had been chasing him as usual when, as much to Harry's surprise as anyone else's, there he was sitting on the chimney. The Dursleys had received a very angry letter from Harry's headmistress telling them Harry had been climbing school buildings. But all he'd tried to do (as he shouted at Uncle Vernon through the locked door of his cupboard) was jump behind the big trash cans outside the kitchen doors. Harry supposed that the wind must have caught him mid-jump.
But today, nothing was going to go wrong.
He should have known better than to expect things to go right, Harry thought to himself, hours later as he lay in his cupboard. Harry had thought that it was all going to be fine, until Piers calmed down enough on the ride back to say, "Harriet was talking to it, weren't you?"
Uncle Vernon had waited until Piers was safely out of the house before starting on Harry. He was so angry he could hardly speak. He managed to say, "Go— cupboard— stay— no meals, before he collapsed into a chair, and Aunt Petunia had to run and get him a large brandy.
No funny business—that was the third rule for a quiet life with the Dursleys.