When the letter arrived, it was no real surprise to one Harry Potter. He already knew that there was something odd with him, and a few times he'd lingered when going through the attic had payed off when he managed to take his mother's things down to his laboratory. Most people, including whoever wrote and addressed the letter, would say that the tiny door tucked near invisibly beneath the stairs led to a simple broom cupboard; skinny, dusty, and altogether unfit for any child to stay in. Harry would disagree. The room beyond the tiny cupboard, accessed by lifting a back panel, was larger than all of Privet Drive. It was tiled in nice bright springtime colors, and it was altogether unsuited for the neighborhood where it was stashed. It was almost as out of place as Harry was.
For one thing, he was the least unkempt child in the neighborhood. Even one strand of his far too curly hair being out of place would send him into a rage. Any wrinkle that he spotted was immediately destroyed. The first sign of clutter would have him descending on it with an almost righteous furry, along with a sharp scolding for the instigator. But wait, these are things that made him fit in with the neighborhood's adults, not what made him stand out from the children.
The children that he was surrounded by needed to be acknowledged before you could say why Harry wasn't one of them. For one, this was a higher income suburb, complete with bigger cars and stretched wallets. The same couldn't be said for the retirement community a few blocks down when walking, but the children in this aria had rich parents just below being high-society. Statistically, Harry could expect the children on his block to have high quality or brand name clothes. The boys would have a bicycle and the girls might have one to, if their parents were so inclined. With such big expectations and a budget just beneath them, some of the parents would have expensive furniture but their children would merely have alright clothes. Others had boarding school clothes and a rigid discipline when home. Some of the children, like Dudley, had every dream they could ask for while the family home wasn't kept to the standard of others on the block. Harry didn't match any of those categories completely.
It wasn't anything large, but there was something to separate him from every niche of children there. Harry had high end brand-name formal wear and strong play clothes, but they were all hand-me-downs that had taken some work to salvage from Dudley. Harry was slightly faster than some of the other students, but he didn't have a bicycle. Unless Dudley lent that bicycle to Harry, then Harry couldn't ride with the sporty kids. The Dursleys were one of the families that invested in their son instead of their house, but Harry did a wonderful job keeping it up to date on repairs and accessories so they almost fit with the expensive yards. He did such a good job with it than some of the other cheaper yards hired Harry to keep them up to date to, but Harry never did quite as good of a job with the other houses as his own, mostly because of how much more time he spent with his own home. Harry did go to boarding school for several years, but he only got in on scholarships. He wasn't exactly one of the upper end members of the academic clique, even though he was smart as the rest of them. Dudley, the child who had the largest number of similarities in his home to Harry, was one of the spoiled ones, but Harry most assuredly was not. That might encompass the biggest difference between Harry and the other children who met on the block.
Harry didn't mind his reduced position, however. Keeping a house orderly was one of the biggest jobs that someone his age could keep, and he thrived under the expectation. Considering himself more of a butler than child of the Dursleys, Harry earned his keep by being discrete and thorough. The inside of the house was managed at night with a number of creations that he had made. When there was no one else awake, Harry set loose his broom to sweep the house for him. Harry didn't need to stay up all night and exhaust himself working, he just had to sweep up the small dust pile beside the staircase in the morning. The windows were harder, but it was nearly impossible to notice the small strips of sponge that would wipe them down at midnight, all at the same time so as not to arouse suspicion. The sink and kitchen were impossible to shortcut through as quickly, but breakfast was Harry's only challenge. Once he was up for the day, he could either make porridge or sandwiches or a combination of the two. Some fruit in a normal sized serving of oatmeal made it look huge and quiet triangles of sandwich made two for a person seem like seven. Leaving only a quiet meal for himself, Harry would struggle to make himself keep even that much down in a day. It left him looking smaller than the others of his age, but it was a small price to avoid the vomiting that always fallowed a larger meal.
As far as the letter went, Harry simply told his landlords that he'd received another scholarship at boarding school and wouldn't be available for most of this year. His aunt tittered about it, and Vernon sighed in disappointment. Still, just another boarding school wasn't anything knew. Petunia would have to take over breakfast and an awful amount of dust would end up clinging to the side of the cabinet, but she could manage. Dudley complained about loosing his favorite cook again, but Petunia silenced the talk. If she was louder about her slight, then it was just attributed to the baby that everyone was looking forward to. Still, a few affirmations that school would be over before the pregnancy and that he could help keep the chores on time when she was resting from the pregnancy was enough to calm down any argument. After all, Harry was the one who worried about his scholarships, not the Dursleys.