Hi, my name is Verity Alexander. You might know me as the girl who worked at Weasley's Wizard Wheezes, but there is more to my story than that.
I grew up with my grandmother as a muggle in a town in the Netherlands. My childhood was pretty normal, I went to elementary school like all the other kids. I played outdoors with my friends. I loved barbies and lego and my little pony.
What wasn't normal of course was that I grew up without my parents. No one knew who my father was. My mother had died when I was very young. I was told she was killed in a gas explosion. Later I learned she was killed by Sirius Black. And even later that it had been Peter Pettigrew.
"A friend of mine is coming to dinner tonight." Grandmother announced one afternoon during the summer holiday when I was eleven. She had few friends, we mostly kept to ourselves.
"Miss van Dijk?" I asked her. Miss van Dijk was a lady who always brought her little fluffy white dog wherever she went. I didn't care for her much, but I was crazy about animals. "I hope it's not Miss Pardon." Who was a woman who pretended to be a fortuneteller, I say pretended because her predictions were always wrong.
"Verity!" Grandma exclaimed but she smiled while she did it, she wasn't too fond of the lady herself. "No, it's a man, a professor even, Professor Dumbledore. He's a very old friend of mine from England."
"A professor? Of what?"
"He teaches." She explained.
At half past five the bell rang. I was sitting at the dinner table, drawing a horse. Grandma let the guest in. "Aleida! It's so good to see you again!" I heard the man's voice say. I looked up as he walked in and the man looked so much out of the ordinary, I dropped my pencil in amazement. He looked like an old hippie, long hair and a long beard, but he wasn't wearing hippie clothes, no he was wearing a burgundy suit. He didn't look at all like a friend of my grandmother, who looked and dressed very conservative and correct.
"Hello Verity!" He said. He reached out his hand to me. I got up from my chair and shook it. "My name is Albus Dumbledore." He glanced at my picture. "You draw very well! Do you like animals?"
"A lot." I replied, "But I don't draw so well."
He smiled. "Ah! That's the spirit of the young artist!"
He sat down on the couch, I took the chair next to it. Grandma left to make tea.
"What do you teach?" I asked him.
"Well, I don't actually teach anymore myself, I'm the headmaster of a school in England. And I will be blunt, I hope to persuade you to come to my school next school year."
"In England? Is it a boarding school than?"
"You're very bright. It is one indeed." He smiled.
I wasn't so amused. Kind as he appeared to be, I didn't like the idea of leaving my grandmother, leaving the country even, to go off to school in England.
"It's a special school, for special children." He continued. "Gifted children."
I was smart, I knew that, but I certainly wasn't "gifted"!
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Haven't you ever noticed that you have special abilities? Your grandmother told me that you make your My Little Pony's walk and fly as if they are real animals instead of plastic figures."
I blushed. I didn't know that my grandmother knew this, I was trying to keep it a secret, I didn't want people to think I was crazy!
Professor Dumbledore didn't pay attention to my face being on fire, which allowed me to compose myself quickly.
"My school, Hogwarts, teaches children to control and expand their abilities, we call it magic."
At this moment my grandmother walked back in with tea.
"Can you do it too than? And how about you grandma?" I asked bewildered.
"What? Magic?" She asked.
My mouth dropped open as she made the tea cups fly from her tray and onto the table.
"Why didn't you ever tell me?" I asked.
This is when she explained to me that my mother had died by the hand of a bad wizard. From then on she thought it would be best for me to grow up away from the wizarding world and we moved out of London to her hometown.
"There are a lot of advantages to being a with, but there are a lot of disadvantages as well. Now that you're capable of making the choice, I want to leave it up to you whether you continue your life here with me or you go to England next month to go to Hogwarts." Grandma said.
I was silent for a moment. "Can I think about this for a while?" I finally stumbled.
"Of course you can." Said Professor Dumbledore. "Term starts in four weeks." He smiled at grandmother; "Now, Aleida, what's for dinner?"