Author's Note: This project has several elements.

It is part fiction-based close reading. What I mean is that this will be a full canon rewrite, but I will also take all elements of the text that I see as specifically Harry-biased and expand upon them into a fuller, more explicitly written character. Think of this as textual Harry on steroids.

But it is also a fem Harry story. I will be looking only and strictly at what would realistically change with a gender-switch. (Hint: Without some other catalyst, the Dursleys don't change as much as you'd think. So read at first for the close-reading and character expansion.)

Now, this will be a full canon rewrite, so if you find those boring… I don't know why you'd read this long enough to write a review?

So those are the three main elements - close reading character expansion, fem Harry with only logical changes, canon rewrite. If that sounds interesting to you, strap on your seat belts, here we go.

Final note - I included the haircut bit because according to Jo it was based off of a scene that actually happened to her as a little girl. You'll see what I mean.

Lizzie Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Chapter One: The Vanishing Glass

Nearly ten years had passed since the Dursleys had taken in their orphaned niece, but Number Four, Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey had hardly changed at all. The sun rose on the same tidy front gardens and lit up the brass number four on the Dursleys' front door; it crept into their living room, which was almost exactly the same as it had been ten years ago. Only the photographs on the mantelpiece really showed how much time had passed. Ten years ago, there had been lots of pictures of what looked like a large pink beach ball wearing different colored bonnets - but Dudley Dursley was no longer a baby, and now the photographs showed a large blond boy riding his first bicycle, on a carousel at the fair, playing a computer game with his father, being hugged and kissed by his mother. The father, big and beefy with hardly any neck and a very large mustache in a suit and tie, was Vernon Dursley, director of a local Surrey drill-making firm called Grunnings. The mother, thin and blonde with nearly twice the usual amount of neck and beady eyes, was Petunia Dursley, a housewife. They were in some photographs, but the focus was obviously on their son Dudley, who was now over ten years old. The room held no sign at all that another child of the same age lived in the house, too.

Yet Elizabeth Potter was still there, asleep at the moment, but not for long. Her Aunt Petunia was awake and it was her shrill voice that made the first noise of the day.

"Up! Get up! Now!"

Lizzie woke with a start. Her aunt rapped on the door again.

"Up!" she screeched. Lizzie heard her walking toward the kitchen and then the sound of the frying pan being put on the stove. She rolled onto her back and tried to remember the dream she had been having. It had been a good one. There had been a flying motorcycle in it. She had a funny feeling she'd had the same dream before.

Sometimes it felt like Lizzie never got to sleep for long enough. There was always a tone of longing when she thought back over her dreams, which could be quite vivid and complex; there, in her dreams, she was safe.

Her aunt was back outside the door.

"Are you up yet?" she demanded.

"Nearly," said Lizzie.

"Well, get a move on. I want you to look after the flowers for the morning and then cook breakfast. Something of your own choosing, something nice and not too weird. And don't you dare let it burn, not today, I want everything perfect on Duddy's birthday."

Lizzie groaned.

"What did you say?" her aunt snapped through the door.

"Nothing, nothing…" Lizzie muttered, somewhat grumbling and irritable.

Dudley's birthday - how could she have forgotten?

Lizzie was a bit absent-minded in everyday life, hence the birthday forgetting and the burning breakfast comment. She was a good cook, though, when she paid attention. Many hobbies were denied her - the Dursleys distrusted and forbade art and imagination, while sports for them would be not feminine enough for a girl. So if she wanted interests, especially at school where the Dursleys usually didn't bother her, she had to get creative.

Hobbies that were accepted by the Dursleys included cooking, baking, and flower gardening - ornamental, useful, and practical household skills that could also be turned into creative hobbies. Countless books of cooking and baking lined Lizzie's shelves, while her space was also decorated with sprigs of wildflowers. She loved wildflowers and her own little individual plot in the front garden was a whimsical shrine to that love. In cooking and baking she favored fantastical designs and unusual taste combinations; a blue cake flavored with both spices and chocolate, for example, or cottage pie with pineapple, cucumbers, and tomatoes, its pineapple crust done up in fanciful meringue-like waves. In baking, she had a particular love and weakness for chocolate, and really outside baking as well. She also preferred big, warm, hearty, filling traditional comfort meals.

She was also allowed books and music as long as she wasn't actually writing or playing. After her ornamental hobbies and her need for good-looking clothes to keep up appearances (a boy's poor clothes might have been dismissed as his being rough with them, but a girl couldn't say the same and the Dursleys feared gossip almost as much as they loved hearing about other people's), the Dursleys had gotten used to buying simple, cheap things for her. So also in her space were long rows of books and musical albums, complete with a record player in the corner. Both the record player and the wildflowers added personalized touches to the space, as did the scattered bars of chocolate. Polaroid photographs of some of her favorite finished culinary creations also decorated the walls, mingled with Polaroids of Lizzie with school friends.

In books, Lizzie loved biographies, psychology, science, sci fi, mysteries, and psychological fiction. Interested by sports in spite of all social training, she had a few sports tomes in there as well. In music, Lizzie loved old-fashioned jazz and the much-more-modern punk rock.

Lizzie got slowly out of bed, throwing back her old quilt, and started looking for socks. She found a pair under her bed - typical of Lizzie with her constant, absent-minded scattered messes - and, after pulling a spider off one of them, put them on. She was rather matter of fact about the whole action. Lizzie was used to spiders, because the cupboard under the stairs was full of them, and that was where she slept.

She didn't dwell on this much. She knew it wasn't good, but this was just how life was.

She got dressed. The most expensive clothes the Dursleys would buy Lizzie were from thrift stores and secondhand shops. Deciding to go with this, she'd gone vintage in her fashion choices many years ago. By now, she had something from every era: old-fashioned gowns (which she had an obsession with; there were magazine cutouts of her favorite ballgowns taped above her bed) went alongside square-shouldered 1940's women's jackets and 1960's slinky mod dresses and caps. She had a pair of soft blue bell-bottom pants and a long, flowery shirt from the late 60's and early 70's in her dresser drawers as well.

When she was dressed she went out the front door into the front garden in the dewy early morning. She knelt among the plants and dug her hands deep into the soil, tending to the flower beds she and her Aunt Petunia cared for so the whole street could see them, walled in by their hedges and their low garden wall. She and her aunt didn't get on, but they had a few things, making food together and gardening as a team being chief among them.

When she was finished with the gardens, she went back inside the neat, square suburban house and down the hall into the kitchen. The table was almost hidden beneath all Dudley's birthday presents. It looked as though Dudley had gotten the new computer he wanted, not to mention the second television and the racing bike. Lizzie tried not to feel bitter and acerbic, but it was very hard; last year for her own birthday, she'd been given an ugly old blouse of Aunt Petunia's and a coat hanger to put it on. Dudley broke a whole television and he got a new one. Exactly why Dudley wanted a racing bike was a mystery to Lizzie anyway, as Dudley was very fat and hated exercise - unless of course it involved punching somebody. He demonstrated this liberally with other boys at school, most of whom were not quite as good at running based on phys ed as Lizzie was and so had no chance of escape from being made punching bags.

Was this Dudley comment fat shaming? Yes. But Lizzie did not fat shame equally. She only fat shamed people she thought were perfectly horrible anyway. And she'd never claimed to be perfect.

Lizzie was fast, too, very fast, though she was not strong and her form was not naturally athletic looking. She didn't mind; she liked the way she looked. She was small and slim, pixie-like and very short and lightweight. She had a slimmer heart-shaped face, dimpled knees, long thick shiny jet-black hair that went straight past her shoulders and down her back, and almond-shaped bright green eyes. She wore square black-framed glasses with soft curves in the classic geek-chic look, but less heavy and more wearable. The only thing Lizzie was self-conscious of in her own appearance was a very thin scar on her forehead that was shaped like a bolt of lightning. She had had it as long as she could remember, and the first question she could ever remember asking her Aunt Petunia was how she had gotten it.

"In the car crash when your parents died," she had said. "And don't ask questions."

Don't ask questions - that was the first rule for a quiet life with the Dursleys. Lizzie had plenty of questions when it came to the Dursleys, but she had learned to cut herself off from saying them out loud. In fact, she rarely spoke out loud in her own home at all. Her goal was to survive - get along - not to fight back.

The scar was worth noting, though, because how she looked mattered more deeply to Lizzie than how she was treated. Treatment she could get used to, but she wanted self respect. It was a strange quirk, possibly stemming from her time being raised by the Dursleys. She usually tried to hide the scar behind her fringe.

Uncle Vernon entered the kitchen as Lizzie was in the midst of making breakfast - a kind of baked blueberry French toast with chocolate orange Chia pudding and some lavender blackberry scones she'd baked one afternoon a couple of days ago. He couldn't find anything wrong with her, so he gave her no morning greeting, heaving himself down at the table to his morning paper and his coffee instead.

Uncle Vernon never seemed to know quite what to do with Lizzie. There was nothing wrong with her, necessarily, and he couldn't resent her or be aggressive the way he could have with a boy. The end result was that except when she was being punished, they had very little contact. Usually she interacted more with her Aunt Petunia, who alternated between anger and something akin to begrudging fondness.

But he could have at least wished her a good morning. It was only polite, and politeness and manners mattered to Lizzie.

Lizzie was almost finished with breakfast by the time Dudley arrived in the kitchen with his mother. It had taken him long enough, Lizzie thought to herself in annoyance. 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. He was spoiled and violent and ugly and Lizzie deeply hated him. Aunt Petunia often said that Dudley looked like a baby angel - Lizzie often said that Dudley looked like a pig in a wig.

The most he did do for her was protect her from other bullies at school. The most she did for him in turn was tutor him so that he got grades good enough to pass through the years. It was a reciprocal and mutually resentful relationship filled with lots of mocking, under the belt antics, bickering, and name-calling.

Lizzie put the plates of breakfast on the table, which was difficult, she thought begrudgingly, as there wasn't much room. Dudley, meanwhile, was counting his presents. His face fell.

"Thirty-six," he said, looking up at his mother and father. "That's two less than last year."

"Darling, you haven't counted Auntie Marge's present, see, it's here, under this big one from Mummy and Daddy."

"All right, thirty-seven then," said Dudley, going red in the face. Lizzie, who could see a huge Dudley tantrum coming on, quickly pulled her plate into her lap in case Dudley turned the table over.

As she'd said. Survivor. She'd made this breakfast and come hell or high water she was finishing her damn meal. And she was not going to wolf it all down before the tantrum could happen like some crass boy.

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. Lizzie had learned over her tutoring sessions that Dudley always managed to make thinking look like hard work. "Seven plus two," she muttered.

Dudley brightened. "Oh! Thirty-nine."

Aunt Petunia was delighted. "That's right, sweetums!" she cried, flinging her arms around him and firmly ignoring Lizzie. Lizzie hated being ignored about as much as she was used to it.

Dudley sat down heavily and grabbed the nearest parcel. "Well. All right then."

Uncle Vernon chuckled.

"Little tyke wants his money's worth, just like his father. 'Atta boy, Dudley!" He ruffled Dudley's hair.

At that moment the telephone rang and Aunt Petunia went to answer it while Lizzie and Uncle Vernon watched Dudley unwrap the racing bike, a video camera, a remote controlled aeroplane, sixteen new computer games, and a VCR. Lizzie counted methodically, as always in a state of slight disbelief at the sheer amount of spending this must have taken. 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 Lizzie's direction.

Dudley's mouth fell open in horror, but Lizzie'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. Lizzie didn't even resent that she didn't get the same on her own birthday so much - but she did resent that she never got to see other places and go with her relatives, no matter how horrible they were. Every year on Dudley's birthday, Lizzie was instead left behind with Mrs Figg, a mad old lady who lived two streets away. Lizzie hated it there. The whole house smelled of cabbage and Mrs Figg made her look at photographs of all the cats she'd ever owned.

"Now what?" said Aunt Petunia, looking furiously at Lizzie as though she'd planned this, an impossibility Lizzie slightly resented. Lizzie knew she ought to feel sorry that Mrs Figg had broken her leg, but it wasn't easy when she reminded herself it would be a whole year before she 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."

It was true, so Lizzie didn't mind the comment. Lizzie didn't care about true, factual things. But she did hate that the Dursleys often spoke about her like this, as though she wasn't there - or rather, as though she was something very nasty that couldn't understand them, like a slug. As with her birthday outing beef, she hated the lack of experience or thought for her opinion, the lack of representation in her own home.

"What about what's-her-name, your friend - Yvonne?"

"On vacation in Majorca," snapped Aunt Petunia.

"You could just leave me here," Lizzie put in hopefully (she'd be able to watch what she wanted on television for a change, and have a nice day doing her usual hobbies for herself out in the quiet to the hum of television).

Aunt Petunia looked as though she'd just swallowed a lemon. In a morbid way, Lizzie found the reaction strangely funny.

"And come back and find the house in ruins?" Aunt Petunia snarled.

"I won't blow up the house," said Lizzie, but of course they weren't listening.

"I suppose we could take her to the zoo," said Aunt Petunia slowly, "... and leave her in the car…"

"That car's new, she's not sitting in it alone…"

"What if I went over to a friend's house for the day?" Lizzie asked desperately. "I could call a friend from school!"

Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon actually looked thoughtful, but at that moment Dudley began to cry loudly. In fact, he wasn't really crying - Lizzie had a keen eye for these things and it had been years since Dudley had really cried - but he knew that if he screwed up his face and wailed, his mother would give him anything he wanted.

"Dinky Duddydums, don't cry, Mummy won't let that nasty girl spoil your special day!" she cried, flinging her arms around him.

"I… want… her… t-t-to come!" Dudley yelled between huge, pretend sobs. "I d-don't want her to have to go to a f-friend's house!"

This proved too much for Aunt Petunia. Lizzie watched in a wry, satirical kind of amusement as she began sobbing. "Oh, my darling, sensitive little boy!" Aunt Petunia cried.

Yes. That was what Dudley Dursley was. Darling and sensitive.

He was doing this because he knew she'd be happy at a friend's house, and they both knew it. Dudley shot Lizzie a nasty grin through the gap in his mother's arms. Both spiteful and nauseating, Dudley loved nothing more than finding little ways of making Lizzie's day unhappier. It was one of his favorite hobbies.

Just then, the doorbell rang - "Oh, good Lord, they're here!" said Aunt Petunia frantically - and a moment later, Dudley's best friend, Piers Polkiss, walked in with his mother. Piers was a scrawny boy with a face like a rat. He was usually the one who held people's arms behind their backs while Dudley hit them. He was Dudley's best friend, and Lizzie's least favorite member of Dudley's little schoolyard gang. Self conscious and macho to the end, Dudley stopped pretending to cry at once.

Half an hour later, Lizzie, who couldn't believe her luck, was sitting in the back of the Dursleys' car with Piers and Dudley, on the way to the zoo for the first time in her life. The very thought was thrilling! Dudley and Lizzie had both assumed the Dursleys would find some other horrible fate for Lizzie, but her aunt and uncle honestly hadn't been able to think of anything else to do with her. In the end, they'd simply let her come along. She'd won somehow without expecting to, the ultimate prize - a new experience, a new place. She was delighted.

But before they'd left, Uncle Vernon had taken Lizzie aside.

"I'm warning you," he had said, putting his large purple face right up close to Lizzie's as her own had wrinkled in distaste, "I'm warning you now, girl - any funny business, anything at all - and you'll be in that cupboard from now until Christmas."

Lizzie was used to such threats, so she barely blinked. "I'm not going to do anything," she said, "honestly…"

But Uncle Vernon didn't believe her. No one ever did.

The problem was, strange things often happened around Lizzie and it was just no good telling the Dursleys she didn't make them happen.

Once, Aunt Petunia, tired of dealing with Lizzie's long hair, had taken a pair of kitchen scissors and cut her hair so short she was almost bald except for her fringe, which Aunt Petunia left "to hide that horrible scar." Dudley had laughed himself silly at Lizzie, who spent a sleepless night imagining being laughed at in school the next day. Next morning, however, she had gotten up to find her hair exactly as it had been before Aunt Petunia had sheared it off. She had been given a week in her cupboard for this, a typical punishment, even though she had tried to explain that she couldn't explain how it had grown back so quickly.

Another time, Aunt Petunia had been trying to force her into a particularly revolting pink, fluffy sweater (Lizzie did not believe in things pink, fluffy, and cute the same way some people did not believe unicorns existed). The harder she tried to pull it over Lizzie's head, and the more Lizzie struggled indignantly, the smaller it seemed to become, until finally it might have fitted a hand puppet but certainly wouldn't fit Lizzie. Aunt Petunia had decided it must have shrunk in the wash and, to her great relief, Lizzie wasn't punished.

On the other hand, she'd gotten into terrible trouble for the teacher incident. A teacher had once mocked her in front of her entire class for getting a problem wrong in answer to one of his questions. Suddenly, his hair had turned blue and slipped sideways off his head, as if a breeze that did not exist had suddenly flown through the classroom, revealing itself to actually be a toupee. The Dursleys received a very angry letter from Lizzie's headmistress, insisting in a tone of unmistakable confusion that Lizzie had somehow managed to turn her teacher's wig blue. But she hadn't done anything, something she had shouted at Uncle Vernon through the locked door of her cupboard. All these things were just happenstance. She'd actually gotten so emotional in arguing with him through the door that for a moment she was whole inches above the ground, as if having leaped up into the air and been about to slam herself into the doorway. She'd noticed it just as her feet hit ground again, and it had startled her into silence.

But today, nothing was going to go wrong. She felt a bright kind of sunny optimism in response to her stroke of good fortune. It was even worth being with Dudley and Piers to be spending the day somewhere that wasn't school, her cupboard, or Mrs Figg's cabbage-smelling living room. (And that was saying a lot.)

While he drove, Uncle Vernon complained to Aunt Petunia. He liked to complain about things: people at work, the council, the bank, and how much extra money Lizzie cost them to keep around were just a few of his favorite subjects. He talked about Lizzie excessively, actually, it was exceptionally irritating. This morning, it was motorcycles.

"... roaring along like maniacs, the young hoodlums," he said, as a motorcycle overtook them.

"I had a dream about a motorcycle," said Lizzie, blurting it out as she remembered suddenly. "It was flying."

Uncle Vernon nearly crashed into the car in front. He turned right around in his seat and yelled at Lizzie, who pictured his face in wry amusement like a gigantic beet with a mustache: "MOTORCYCLES DON'T FLY!"

Dudley and Piers sniggered.

"I know they don't," said Lizzie calmly. "It was only a dream."

But she wished she hadn't said anything. No funny image was worth getting yelled at. If there was one thing the Dursleys hated even more than her asking questions, it was her talking about anything acting in a way it shouldn't, no matter if it was in a dream or even a cartoon. It was why she wasn't allowed art and imagination. They seemed to think she might get dangerous ideas.

It was a very sunny Saturday and the zoo was crowded with families. The Dursleys bought Dudley and Piers large chocolate ice creams at the entrance and then, because the smiling lady in the van had been kind enough to ask Lizzie what she wanted before they could hurry her away (Lizzie could be as charitable to friendly people as she could be mocking to the unfriendly), they bought her a cheap lemon ice pop. It wasn't bad, either, Lizzie thought, licking it as they watched a gorilla scratching its head, who she thought with cruel, amused irony looked remarkably like Dudley except that it wasn't blond.

Lizzie had the best morning she'd had in a long time. In her own silent way she felt emotionally, genuinely grateful for that. She lasted longer in interest than Piers and Dudley, actually, who were starting to get bored with the animals by lunchtime. They ate in the zoo restaurant, and when Dudley had a tantrum because his Knickerbocker Glory didn't have enough ice cream on top, Uncle Vernon bought him another one and Lizzie was allowed to finish the first. Unless she made a dessert or a meal, she wasn't usually allowed to eat the sweets or have seconds of anything, so in her happy mind the delights just kept coming.

Lizzie felt, afterward, that she should have known it was all too good to last.

After lunch they went to the reptile house. It was cool and dark in there, with lit windows all along the walls. Behind the glass all sorts of lizards and snakes were crawling and slithering over bits of wood and stone. This was by far the most interesting part of the zoo Lizzie felt she had been in so far. Dudley and Piers, to her girlish exasperation, wanted to see huge, poisonous cobras and thick, man-crushing pythons. Dudley quickly found the largest snake in the place. Lizzie was impressed despite herself; she thought fervently that it could have wrapped its body twice around Uncle Vernon's car and crushed it into a trash can - but at the moment it didn't look in the mood, she noted whimsically with a quirky little smile. In fact, and she may have been the only one who picked up on this little detail, it was fast asleep.

Dudley stood with his nose pressed against the glass, staring at the glistening brown coils.

"Make it move," he whined at his father. Uncle Vernon tapped on the glass, but the snake didn't budge. Lizzie watched with a raised eyebrow, but nothing was happening.

"Do it again," Dudley ordered. Uncle Vernon rapped the glass smartly with his knuckles, but the snake just snoozed on. The whole interaction was increasingly taking on an air of the absurd.

"This is boring," Dudley moaned. He shuffled away.

Lizzie moved in front of the tank and looked intently at the snake. She wouldn't have been surprised if it had died of boredom itself - no company except stupid people drumming their fingers on the glass trying to disturb it all day long. The life seemed in her mind fully worthy of a melodramatic death; her uncle and cousin were idiots and so, she was sure, were plenty of other people. All this poor snake wanted was to be left alone, and that was exactly what no one would provide it. It was worse than having a cupboard as a bedroom, where the only visitor was Aunt Petunia hammering on the door to wake you up; at least she got to visit the rest of the house. That jack-hammering started her morning, but it was all this snake's life consisted of, and Lizzie felt the natural sympathy of someone with a mildly bad life who was looking at someone with a terrible one.

The snake suddenly opened its beady eyes. She felt the intense focus it was putting onto everything it looked at. Slowly, very slowly, the snake raised its head until its eyes were on a level with Lizzie's. Lizzie stood mesmerized.

It winked.

Lizzie stared in disbelief. Then she looked quickly around to see if anyone was watching. They weren't. Safe at least for now, she looked back at the snake and winked, too. She had no idea what was going on - but she wanted to see what would happen. If there was one thing Lizzie was good at, it was taking things in stride.

The snake jerked its head toward Uncle Vernon and Dudley, then raised its eyes to the ceiling. It gave Lizzie a look that seemed to her to say quite plainly:

"I get that all the time."

"I know," Lizzie murmured through the glass, though she wasn't sure the snake could hear her. That it wouldn't understand her by this point seemed a non-problem; she had already accepted that she could talk to this snake. "It must be really annoying."

The snake nodded vigorously. Lizzie mentally changed that to extremely annoying.

"Where do you come from, anyway?" Lizzie asked. It seemed the conversational thing to ask, as if she were talking to a foreign exchange student.

The snake jabbed its tail at a little sign next to the glass. Lizzie peered at it, squinting slightly to read the tiny words.

Boa Constrictor, Brazil.

Lizzie's first honest thought: "Oh, was it nice there?"

The boa constrictor jabbed its tail at the sign again and Lizzie read on: This specimen was bred in the zoo. "Oh, I see - so you've never been to Brazil?"

As the snake shook its head, a deafening shout behind Lizzie made both of them jump. Her ears were actually left ringing. "DUDLEY! MR DURSLEY! COME AND LOOK AT THIS SNAKE! YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT IT'S DOING!"

Dudley came waddling toward them as fast as he could.

"Out of the way, you," he said. Dudley didn't usually hit a girl, and what happened next was not a punch exactly, but this time he did shove Lizzie as his cousin or sibling figure out of the way of the glass tank. Caught by surprise, still in the midst of her snake conversation, Lizzie fell hard on the concrete floor. There was that brief moment of startled, humiliated pain that always followed slipping on ice. What came next happened so fast no one saw how it happened - one second, Piers and Dudley were leaning right up close to the glass, the next, they had leapt back with howls of horror. Lizzie was left confused and alarmed.

She sat up and gasped; the glass front of the boa constrictor's tank had vanished. The great snake was uncoiling itself rapidly, slithering out onto the floor. Lizzie froze, watching very carefully. People throughout the reptile house screamed and started running for the exits.

As the snake slid swiftly past her, Lizzie could have sworn a low, hissing voice said, "Brazil, here I come… Thanksss, amiga."

Despite her careful stillness and shock, it was actually a really cool moment. It was also the only truly happy ending that occurred that day. Against all the odds, Lizzie always kind of hoped that boa constrictor made it to Brazil.

The keeper of the reptile house was in shock. "But the glass," he kept saying, "where did the glass go?" By the time the snake left the reptile house, Lizzie was in a calm enough frame of mind again to find this genuinely funny. It was dry and completely absurd, just her brand of humor.

The zoo director himself made Aunt Petunia a cup of strong, sweet tea while he apologized over and over again. Lizzie quietly enjoyed her own tea, as strong and sweet was just her preference, but she didn't pay much attention to Aunt Petunia's mental state to be frank. Piers and Dudley it seemed could only gibber, something that left Lizzie vaguely contemptuous. As far as she had seen, the snake hadn't done anything except snap playfully at the boys' heels as it passed, so she decided everyone was making a great big deal over nothing. It had happened; so what? But by the time they were all back in Uncle Vernon's car, things really had gotten out of hand - Dudley was telling them how it had nearly bitten off his leg while Piers was swearing it had tried to squeeze him to death. Really. Worst of all for Lizzie was something entirely different from facing a massive snake - it was when Piers calmed down enough to say, "Lizzie was talking to it, weren't you, Lizzie?"

After that it was like everything inside Lizzie shut down from tense, silent, primal, dreading fear.

Uncle Vernon waited until Piers was safely out of the house - safe from the coming explosion - before starting on Lizzie. He was so angry he could hardly speak. Lizzie was left genuinely terrified, but the end result was rather comical in its anticlimax. Uncle Vernon 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.

This was Lizzie's final lasting impression of the night. Uncle Vernon hadn't specified the cupboard was going to be locked, so everything was okay this time really.

Lizzie lay in her dark cupboard much later, wishing she had a watch. The purchase would be expensive, but so deeply practical. As it was, she didn't know what time it was and she couldn't be sure the Dursleys were asleep yet. Until they were, she couldn't risk sneaking to the kitchen for some food.

All this was just another fact of life for her, just something to be put up with. Of course having a watch would be practical and of course it only made sense to sneak out for food after hours. What was the alternative, to curl up and die?

Lizzie had lived with the Dursleys almost ten years, ten miserable years - and yes, they had been miserable, all of them. She'd been with these people for as long as she could remember, ever since she'd been a one-year-old baby and her parents had died in that car crash. She couldn't remember being in the car when her parents had died. Sometimes, when she strained her memory during long hours in her cupboard - searching for something, anything, before this, wondering as she had always wondered about her parents - she came up with a strange vision: a blinding flash of green light and a burning pain on her forehead. This, she supposed with distinct curiosity, was the car crash, though she couldn't imagine where all the green light came from. She couldn't remember her parents at all. Her aunt and uncle never spoke about them, and of course she was forbidden to ask questions. There were no photographs of them in the house. She would know. Desperate for information, she had checked every single frame for an unfamiliar face.

When she had been younger, Lizzie had dreamed and dreamed of some unknown relation coming to take her away, had dreamed with the kind of longing and desperation she always dreamed with, but it had never happened and by now she had given that particular dream up; the Dursleys were her only family. Yet sometimes she thought (or maybe hoped, she thought in a moment of self-awareness) that strangers in the street seemed to know her. Perhaps she simply wanted a connection with someone else outside her little life, but these people really seemed to know her. A tiny man in a violet top hat had bowed to her once while out shopping with Aunt Petunia and Dudley. She remembered everything, the exact shade of the hat, all of it, to this day. After asking Lizzie furiously if she knew the man, Aunt Petunia had rushed them out of the shop without buying anything. A wild-looking old woman dressed all in green had waved merrily at her once on a bus, seeming quite cheerful about it all, including her own stunning wildness. A bald man in a very long purple coat had actually shaken Lizzie's hand in the street the other day, and then walked away without a word. No one had ever shaken Lizzie's hand before. The weirdest thing about all these people was the way they seemed to vanish the second Lizzie tried to get a closer look.

At school, Lizzie had her friends. She was that odd Potter girl, somehow singled out as fundamentally different from the rest in a way she didn't understand, but she had her friends. She took agriculture and culinary arts classes at the local schools, so she knew friends there. She was friends with all the librarians and library flies. The people in the 1920's club, eccentric and proud of it as they walked to school every day in their black flapper dresses and loved jazz, carried an especial fondness for her as a somewhat unacknowledged member of their own. She was friends with one skinny boy named Dave who shared her interest in sci fi, psychological thriller, and punk rock; she was closest friends with a rather shy girl in sweaters named Sophie. She was generally liked by members of her class because she was fast with good reflexes and good (if sensitive) observational skills, and therefore good to pick first in gym. She was also in most other ways unobjectionable, somewhat unnoticed, though her absences were strange; perhaps she was sick? Lizzie paid no attention to these rumors.

No one picked on her, she could at least say that. No matter how her cousin felt about her, she was the official sisterly property and unofficial tutor of Dudley Dursley and his gang. And nobody liked to disagree with Dudley's gang.