Disclaimer: Hermione and the wizarding world belong to J.K. Rowling. I'm just playing with them :-).
As the bell rang, Hermione glanced up at the clock and sighed. She was in the middle of a particularly interesting problem that they had been given during lunchtime maths club. They weren't very far into the new year yet, but so far year 5 math was just as mind numbingly boring as year 4 math had been. Honestly, she couldn't understand why her classmates found arithmetic so difficult. A few weeks ago, she had discovered that maths club was open to both year 5 and year 6 students and that the challenge problems they had for the year 6 students (who had been coming to the club for the previous year and were therefore well beyond the normal curriculum) were more on her level. Unfortunately, that bell meant that she had to leave the oasis of intelligence she had found and return to her classroom.
The period right after lunch was independent reading time. Or, rather, it was time where she and her classmates were expected to sit quietly and read the book they had been assigned. Hermione was all for independent reading in principle. She spent many hours at home curled up with book absorbing everything she could from it. In a book she could travel to new and exciting places, meet new people or learn something new about the world she lived in. Books were also a way to escape the mediocrity of the majority of the people she was expected to interact with on a daily basis and could even, on occasion, offer insights that helped her understand how other people interact. She wasn't even really opposed to the book that her teacher, Ms. Tanar, had assigned. Roald Dahl's new book, Matilda, was certainly below her level, but it was a cute story and she could relate to some of Matilda's frustrations as a student who was well beyond her peers (though, thankfully, her own parents were completely supportive). No, the problem was that, like Matilda, Hermione was a voracious reader and knew that she was going to finish the novel well before the end of reading time while most of her classmates were still less than halfway through - and this was despite the fact that she had made a point of only reading it during the assigned time.
Despite her annoyance, Hermione dutifully packed up her maths materials and made her way directly back to her class. Taking her seat in the back of the room - they had been assigned seats alphabetically and this was where she ended up - she pulled out her copy of Matilda and neatly tucked her bag back under her chair. Before long she had, as expected, finished the novel. She contemplated asking Ms. Tanar if she could start another book, but the maths problem from earlier was still bugging her, so she pretended to continue to read and turned her mind to maths. Once she was confident she had worked it out, there were only 10 minutes left of their reading time. 10 minutes were NOT enough time to start a new book. She knew that if she tried she was going to be exceedingly frustrated when she had to stop. Thus she continued to pretend to read and instead let her mind wander.
In many ways Hermione could relate to Matilda - though she grudgingly admitted that Matilda was slightly more advanced than she had been at the same age. With nothing else in particular to do, she found herself pondering the idea that Matilda's extra brain power could be transferred into telekinetic power. She would never have admitted it to anyone, it wasn't a properly intellectual thought, but Hermione found herself wishing that her own extra brain power could manifest the same way. As her brain wandered in this direction, she recalled the time about a year back that she had been trying to get a book down from the top shelf of the bookshelf in the living room. Standing on tiptoe she could just barely reach the shelf and touch the book, but was struggling to actually grab it. While focused on stretching to reach it, she remembered feeling a tingle shoot up her arm just before she finally managed to grab the book. She could have sworn that the book jumped out to her hand, but, of course, she knew there was no way that could have happened. She told herself that the tingle she felt in her arm was somehow her managing to stretch that little bit further to snag the book. As this was the only logical explanation, Hermione accepted it and promptly forgot about the event. Now, however, she found herself comparing that tingling feeling in her arm to the heat Matilda felt in her eyes when she was first learning to use her power...
Hermione glanced up at the classroom clock. 5 more minutes before the next lesson. As her eyes wandered around the room, she noticed an eraser on the floor next to the desk directly in front of hers. Feeling ridiculous and mentally chastising herself for not being logical, Hermione aimed her finger at the eraser from under her desk (so no one else would notice how silly she was being) and started focusing on wanting the eraser to move. To her utter astonishment, she started to feel a tingle in her arm after about 2 minutes of focusing. Though part of her brain responded that the sensation was a mental trick caused by focusing on her arm, she continued mentally willing the eraser to move. Just as her teacher got up and started to announce that it was time for them to put their books away for the day, one side of the eraser started to lift from the ground. Between the eraser actually lifting and her teacher's voice startling her and breaking her concentration, Hermione let out an involuntary "Eep!" and the eraser fell back to lay flat on the ground.
Everyone turned to stare at her as Ms. Tanar asked "Miss Granger, are you alright?". Hermione could feel her face turning bright red and her heart racing a mile a minute as she tried to reconcile what had just happened with what she knew to be true about the world. She cringed back into her seat as she responded, "Ye..Yes, ma'am. I... I was just lost in the story and when you spoke it startled me." Her teacher accepted this and, although some of the boys continued to look back and snicker at her, class moved on. Hermione could handle the snickering. While she didn't enjoy it, she was used to her classmates teasing her. The movement of the eraser, on the other hand, went against everything she thought she knew about science and motion. As a result Hermione found it extremely hard to focus for the rest of the day.
When she got home from school, Hermione greeted her mum with a hug and then promptly ran upstairs to her room. Mrs. Granger smiled indulgently after her daughter and shook her head with a slight laugh. As a dentist, she heard all sorts of stories from her patients and was well aware that most parents of year 5 students had to fight with them to get them to do their school work. She had to make an effort to get her daughter to do anything that didn't look like school work. It was typical for Hermione to get home and immediately head to her room to get her homework out of the way so that she felt justified in working ahead in maths, experimenting with her chemistry set or reading whichever book currently had her attention.
Today, Hermione did not start her homework. She set her book bag down by her desk and then curled up on her bed hugging her pillow lost in thought. It wasn't possible for her to have telekinetic powers like Matilda. It wasn't. Such things simply didn't exist. And yet... She looked over at her desk. It was as tidy and organized as ever, but there was her pencil, sitting in it's normal spot in the slight grove on the right edge. She bit her lip as she contemplated the pencil.
She had two choices: she could ignore the observation she had made today with the eraser or she could approach the question like a scientist and test it. The observation had been made as a result of something silly, but then not everything was initially discovered through carefully designed experiments. Penicillin had been discovered by accident when Alexander Fleming left open a Petri dish that was meant to be closed. She nodded to herself. Real science was about being observant and testing hypotheses when you weren't sure what was going on. The whole thing seemed absurd, but, on the very off chance that she really did have some sort of strange ability, it would be equally absurd to ignore it and pretend it didn't exist.
Her mind made up, Hermione nodded decisively and carefully placed her pillow back properly at the head of her bed. She went to her desk, retrieved the pencil and then laid it on the floor before sitting about a meter back from it. She closed her eyes to center herself and focus (a technique she had learned for shrugging off her classmates' rude comments, but found useful in a wide variety of situations). Once she had calmed herself down, her eyes snapped open and she pointed firmly at the pencil as she focused all of her will on making the pencil float. After a maybe half a minute she started glancing at her watch, wondering how long she should keep at it. It was one thing to mindlessly focus on moving an eraser when she was killing time between lessons at school, but quite another to make herself focus when she was in her room with her books and scientific equipment and no set schedule. She shook her head. If she was really going to test this, then she needed to make an actual plan in advance so that she could stay focused.
She sighed as leaned forward to pick up her pencil and then back to drag her book bag closer. She then shifted over to lean against her bed as she pulled out her homework planner to decide which of the trivial assignments she should do first. After about an hour, she had everything finished and her bag repacked and ready to go for tomorrow. Hermione then got up and walked over to her bookshelf. She started to reach for the lab notebook that she used to record her experiments with her chemistry set and the labs that she tried from the introductory physics textbook her dad had gotten her for Christmas the year before, but paused, shook her head and took a blank sheet from her folder of filler paper instead. Even if she had decided that the only scientifically sound option was to explore this possible... ability... she wasn't sure she wanted a record of her experiments in her serious lab notebook.
Hermione sat down at her desk with the blank page in front of her trying to decide where she should start. After about 10 minutes of her thoughts racing in an unorganized fashion, she shook her head in frustration with herself. The first step should have been obvious – see if she could find any resources that had anything to say about telekinesis. She didn't know of any, but this also wasn't exactly the kind of thing she normally made it a point to read about. Shortly after coming to this conclusion, she heard her mum calling her down for dinner.
Mr. Granger was working late at the office that evening, so dinner was just between Hermione and her mum. It was relatively common for only one of her parents to be home for dinner. Hermione's parents were both dentists with the same practice and, ever since she had started school, they had organized their schedules so that both worked in the mornings but one or the other of them were always home to meet her after school. At least once a week there was paperwork that had to be completed, or an emergency patient to meet, or something else that kept one of her parents late at the office.
As she tucked into the roast chicken with mashed potatoes and green beans, Hermione told her mum about the fascinating maths problem from math club. She also silently debated asking her mother about her half formed telekinesis idea. Mrs Granger, as a dentist, was a scientifically minded person and Hermione looked up to her as an ideal role model. Most of the time she was thrilled to have a mother who was so intelligent and rational, but right now it made her wary. If telekinesis was, as she fully expected, not real, Hermione did not want her mother to think badly of her for considering the notion that it might actually exist. Half way through dinner, Hermione finally thought of a way to ask that she hoped wouldn't make her sound completely crazy. She took a deep breath to calm herself and asked, "Mum?"
Focused on cutting her piece of chicken, Hermione's mum responded somewhat absently, "Yes, dear?"
"Is it possible to have telekinetic powers in the real world?"
At this her mum paused and laid her knife and fork down before looking quizzically at her daughter. The question seemed out of character for her normally completely pragmatic daughter. "May I ask what prompted that question?"
Hermione took another deep breath, "Well, it's just that we are reading Roald Dahl's new book Matilda – well, my class is still reading it, I've finished it of course – and the main character, that's Matilda, naturally, discovers that she can move small objects around by staring at them and wishing them into moving. I figure it is just a story but," she faltered slightly before continuing with the story she had decided on, "I heard some of my classmates discussing it like they thought it might actually be possible." She paused briefly. "I've never heard or read of such a thing, but I'm only almost 9 and there is still so much out there for me to learn and ... and I figured you could tell me for sure."
While Hermione was explaining herself, her mum's mind involuntarily brought up the time that she thought she had seen a toy block floating to a 2 year old Hermione. She and her husband had been working alternating shifts at the time so that someone was always home with Hermione and between managing work, household chores, and an intelligent child who nonetheless couldn't seem to sleep through the night, she was always exhausted. She had put the floating block up to a hallucination and declared it nap time for both her and her daughter shortly thereafter. Realizing that her daughter had finished and was now looking at her expectantly, Mrs. Granger cocked her head to the side in thought and carefully responded, "Well, there are magicians who can pull off tricks that appear to the audience as telekinesis. There have also been people who have claimed to have the ability – they show up in the tabloids from time to time." Mrs. Granger smiled at her daughter's eye roll at this. "However, the scientists that have tried to follow up with these claims have never manged to publish any significant evidence that there is any truth to them whatsoever."
Hermione nodded. "That makes sense then. I would not be at all surprised if some of my classmates actually believe the nonsense they see in the tabloids. That could explain a lot actually..." she trailed off as she and her mother laughed. As she finished dinner and helped with the washing up, Hermione thought about her mother's answer. She didn't flat out deny that telekinesis could exist, she just pointed out that it had never been proven to exist. This made Hermione feel better about her line of thought earlier. It was definitely something to investigate if she could figure out how to organize her investigation.