The anxieties claw at her on nights like this. When the autumn wind gusts against Gryffindor Tower like a night wraith at the door, when the clouds veil the gibbous moon and darkness undulates across the first-year girls' dormitory, Hermione Granger revisits every worry. A host of nebulae swirl in her mind every night with the droning of Lavender and Parvati's snores. She's a nightmare, honestly. Friendless. Loner. No one can stand her. Ron Weasley's words. Hogwarts's words, true words. If she slacks off in her studies, she will have nothing – be nothing. For the first two months as a student here at this ancient castle, this wondrous school she never knew existed until mere months ago, she has felt anything but magical. At night the beasts come alive, and she wakes up from nightmares with heavy eyelids and roosting fears.
Not tonight. Not tonight, when the moon creeps out from behind the clouds on Halloween. Below her candles burn and decorations peel off of the Gryffindor common room's walls. The golden lion that rears from above the central fireplace glistens in the firelight. Somewhere magic still swirls, all through this castle and at last in her heart.
Girls' bathroom. Troll. Boys. Wingardium Leviosa.
For two months she's worried everyone here hates her, Ron Weasley most of all. For one night, she's overjoyed to be wrong.
She turns over amidst her covers, drawing the sheets around her head to ward off the cold and Lavender's sleep-garbled mumbles. Here within the warmth of her cocoon of blankets, something changes.
Hermione thinks of a primary school far away to the south, of grammar and maths and the Lethe of rote exam learning and memorization, gears of the Prussian machine of modern education. She thinks of her mastery of subjects since pushed aside, of facts useful for the next test, hard work and study just to see the vacuous faces of a host of fellow primary school peers who never paid her a moment's notice. A Muggle education that she so prided on her smarts. She realizes, holding back a knot in her throat, that she has never figured out what friends are. Two months of Hogwarts and she knew no better. Two months and she expected all of life to pass this way, from world to world, scene to scene, Muggle, magical, life a book she could memorize and recite and analyze yet never feel for the stories and characters written on the pages.
Well, someone has let a troll out in the girls' bathroom this Halloween night, 1991, and someone has shown Hermione a glimpse beyond the door she has never seen opened.
Her parents tried. Bless them. Play dates. A hug and a hand on her shoulder when she cried at age seven, little fingers picking at mud flung into her hair. Bed time stories and more books than they'd ever thought a young girl could devour. Yet a parent's compassion goes but so far, because for every child to learn to love and care and share, there must be a willing child to welcome her. To open a hand and offer a smile. To save them from trolls, if need be. To show them the light beyond the black wall of growing up and promise that a good world awaits.
Hermione snuggles in her nest of blankets. She has dreamed a dream for years now, and tonight, for the first time, she feels it could come true. Tonight she does not feel that familiar pressure deep in the unseen hollows of her chest.
Sleep comes in the thoughtlessness of a warm and welcome bed. When Hermione awakes Lavender and Parvati snooze on, and the first pink lances of the sunrise needle through crimson curtains. She cannot go back to sleep, not today. Not this morning. Not in the first light of a dream that she's woken up into.
She wraps her pink robe around her bony shoulders and leaps to the floor like a dancer. This morning she does not rip open her textbooks and scan for scrawled notations. She does not hurry to revise for Charms. She does not even worry about what Professor McGonagall might say in Transfiguration, or what the five points she lost for Gryffindor in the aftermath of the troll encounter may mean. A hot air balloon takes flight somewhere in Hermione's middle, and she lets it fly her out of the dormitory and down the steps to the common room.
With one step to go she pauses. The common room unfolds before her, a still life juxtaposed between the past she has run from and the future – present? – she rushes into. There the fireplace, before which she has sat on countless nights and studied, remembered, the Softening Charm, the Knockback Jinx, a potion to cure boils. There is the scarlet couch upon which she curled up and cried when she thought no one was looking early in October, only to jump as Percy Weasley noticed and tried to cheer her up in the awkward way that only he can.
Then it is there, the sunrise. The spears of gold and red lancing the arching windows and bathing the common room in the artistry of autumn, a painter's touch of Gryffindor across the illuminated sky. The light beyond the black wall. The afterglow of the moment she has realized that someone cares enough to come pull her out of the fire, to make sure she is alright in the darkest of moments – even if that someone is grumpy Ron Weasley and Harry Potter, the famous and reckless boy she can't quite figure out yet, and even if that moment involves a troll smashing sinks in a bathroom. There's nothing wrong with grumpy or reckless, or trolls even. They're just as beautiful as the know-it-all girl who gets in the way, who can be nothing but a nightmare. For the first time she can remember, the hand of friendship, real friendship, offers to take her and embrace her. The door is open.
When she was eight years old, her father had held her tight one night as snowflakes floated down outside amidst the apricot glow of the streetlights. She had run from a pair of girls who had invited her to someone or another's birthday party, afraid it was just another joke, just another way to make fun of the girl with the bushy hair and the toothy smile. "Hermione," her father had said, his voice a hushed melody in the silent night, "you don't have to be upset. It's alright to be afraid. But it's also alright to let go once and a while and join in someone else's fun. You don't have to know everything all the time. Sometimes you can just let go, trust someone who says they want to be your friend, and see what happens. Sometimes it turns out to be magical."
She is alone, and now, now, she has to step forward and make the dream more than just a fleeting vision. Step forward. Now or never. Is she ready?
She leaps over the threshold. Not a step but a jump, an awkward, silly thing, all of eleven years old and bursting with possibilities. She lands with both feet firm on the carpet, sunlight smiling through the window. A cloudless sky. The giant squid lounges by the lakeshore. Hagrid saunters out of his hut onto the grounds.
She takes another step, and another, into the brave new world of dreams that beckons her forth into such wonders.