one.

"Eloise!"

The eleven-year-old girl sighs and reaches for her bookmark. "Coming," she calls as she slides off her bed and starts for her bedroom door. She doesn't like being called by her full name anymore, though her mother seems determined not to endorse the new nickname she's given to herself - El - which isn't even that bad, in her opinion. Her grandparents are French and think that she should add an extra L and an E on the end, and always stiffly refuse to call her by the short version of her name unless she lies and tells them that she spells it the proper way.

Her parents are sitting on the edges of their seats in the kitchen and casting concerned glances at a folded piece of paper, placed exactly in the center of the table. "Eloise," says her mother, gesturing to the seat across from her, and El sits down, twisting a piece of dirty-blonde hair around one finger. "You've gotten a... letter." She looks dubious as she carefully unfolds the paper and scans the handwritten message there with tired eyes. She has this air about her that tells Eloise that she's read the letter several times already, but she hurries on after a moment, frowning slightly. "It's from a - a school."

Straightening up and squaring her shoulders, El automatically says, "I didn't do it," without the slightest clue what she might have done. It's the summer holidays, after all. The last thing she can remember doing is getting onto the roof of her school on the second-to-last day, but she'd made it back to ground level before any of her teachers had seen her, and it's two weeks into summer vacation; it's highly unlikely that they've found out now.

Her father shoots her a tiny smile and shakes his head. "No, honey, it's nothing bad." He carefully tugs the letter out of her mother's grasp and pushes it across the table to her, both of them eying her as if they don't quite know how she'll react. Eloise reaches for the letter, her fingers shaking slightly in either anticipation or anxiety, she isn't quite sure which.

"'Miss Eloise R. Underwood,'" she reads out loud. "'We are pleased to inform you that you have a place at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.'" She pauses here, glancing up at her parents with a frown already creasing her forehead. "What is this?" But neither of them answer her, only gesture for her to continue reading. "'Please find an enclosed list of all necessary books and equipment. Term begins on 1 September. We await your owl by no later than 31 July. Sincerely, Filius Flitwick, Deputy Headmaster.'" She folds the letter slowly along each pre-made crease and then tosses it back onto the kitchen table and crosses her arms over her chest. "If this your idea of getting back at me for not studying for that test last month -"

"It's not." Her father glances at his wife before continuing. "I, uh, it's real. Your grandmother - my mum - it's from her side. But her father was the last one with the..." He trails off and shrugs. "But it must be back," he continues, as if he hasn't skipped a part. "El, honey, you're a witch."

She stands up without realizing that she's moved. "No, I'm not," she shoots back, narrowing her blue eyes at her parents, who are both looking at her apprehensively, like they think she's going to pull a rabbit out of a hat. "You guys are insane. I'm not. This is a joke."

But her father only shrugs. "Maybe not. We'll see when your grandmother comes tomorrow to take you to Diagon Alley."

"What's Diagon Alley? she asks before she can stop herself. "Never mind. I don't want to know. I'm going upstairs." Turning on her heel, she goes back to her bedroom, leaving the letter lying on the table.

She finally returns downstairs a full thirteen hours later, very early in the morning. She's always been an early riser, climbing out of bed sometimes hours before her parents do, and when she sees the piece of paper still folded neatly on the table, she just shakes her head and crosses over to the toaster.

The letter is stupid, a joke, and she's not falling for it. She may be only eleven, but she's not dumb. She knows that magic doesn't exist, even if she wants it to.

But the letter is extremely tempting, sitting there innocently as she pulls out a chair and sits down to eat her toast. Gingerly, she picks it up by the very corner of the pages and scans the message there once more. Then she turns to the next page and reads it, too, her lips silently forming each word as if she's hearing it for the first time. First year students will require: Three sets of plain work robes (black), one plain pointed hat (black) for day wear, one pair of protective gloves (dragon hide or similar), one winter cloak (black with silver fastenings). Please note that all pupils' clothes should carry name tags. She takes another bite of her toast, filling her mouth with food to prevent herself from laughing. All students should have a copy of each of the following: The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 1 (by Miranda Goshawk), A History of Magic (by Bathilda Bagshot), Magical Theory (by Adalbert Waffling), A Beginners' Guide to Transfiguration (by Emeric Switch), One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi (by Phyllida Spore), Magical Drafts and Potions (by Arsenius Jigger), Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (by Newt Scamander), The Dark Forces: A Guide to Self-Protection (by Quentin Trimble).

Upstairs, she hears footsteps, a toilet flushing. Eloise hurriedly scans the last few lines of the supply list, hardly registering most of the words. Other Equipment: 1 wand, 1 cauldron (pewter, standard size 2), 1 set of glass/crystal phials, 1 telescope, 1 set of brass scales. Students may also bring an owl, cat or toad. Then, in all capital letters, the letter reads, Parents are reminded that first-years are not allowed their own broomsticks.

Broomsticks. As if this couldn't get any more ridiculous.

The footsteps are nearing the top of the stairs now; she's become an expert over the past few years at knowing where her parents are based on their footsteps, who's coming down the stairs by the weight of each step. It's her father this time, probably still half-asleep, and El hurriedly replaces the letter where she found it and resumes eating her toast.

"Morning, sunshine," he says as he makes for the coffee maker, which is always where he finds himself first thing in the morning. He glances at the clock, yawning, and adds, "Grandma's coming to pick you up at ten. I think she's excited about this enough for the both of you, would you believe that?" When El doesn't answer, he only shrugs and smiles to himself. "I think she always wanted to be a witch, herself, but her dad didn't have much magic in his blood, you know. It's surprising that it's popping up again."

"Stop."

He turns to face her, leaning back against the counter and examining his daughter interestedly. "Stop what?"

Eloise stands up to put her plate in the sink. "Stop pretending this is real. It's not."

But he just shrugs, the same way he did the previous day, and says, "Grandma's coming in three hours, so be ready." Then, humming quietly to himself, he turns back to the coffee maker and doesn't say another word.

Three hours later, Eloise is sliding into the passenger seat of her grandmother's car and being handed a freshly-baked chocolate-chip muffin. Her grandma is always baking, always giving Eloise things to eat, and she bites into the muffin gratefully even though she's already eaten breakfast. It's still warm from the oven, the chocolate chips partially melted.

They drive in silence for fourteen and a half minutes before Eloise, suddenly feeling as if she's suffocating, says abruptly, "You can stop pretending we're going to that alley place now."

The car swerves slightly before her grandmother straightens the steering wheel and glances furtively in her granddaughter's direction. El plays with the muffin wrapper, staring down at her lap while she waits for the older woman to laugh. Oh, El, we can't trick you, she'll say, and turn the car around and go back home. Instead, she says vaguely, "You've been given an incredible opportunity, sweetheart."

Eloise doesn't answer; she just puts the window down half an inch so that she can get some fresh air.

"We're looking for a place called the Leaky Cauldron," says her grandmother, staring blankly at the row of stores on Charing Cross Road. Eloise nudges her and points to the sign, which is entirely too obvious for even a grandmother to realistically miss. When her grandmother doesn't move, she links elbows with the woman and half-leads, half-drags her through the door. It doesn't look all that magical, but her grandma seems to know where she's going now and tugs her out into a tiny courtyard, empty except for a couple of garbage bins and a neatly-stacked pile of firewood. Eloise looks around skeptically as her grandmother starts examining the brick wall of the courtyard and counting under her breath. The woman reaches out with her right hand and taps one of the bricks once, twice, three times.

Nothing happens.

Eloise is about to turn away and head back into the Leaky Cauldron (what kind of a name is that, anyway?) when there's a sudden grinding noise. The bricks begin to move all at once, shifting and scraping across each other as they slide out of the way. It takes maybe ten seconds, but the wall is suddenly a large archway to a long, wide street bustling with people. Shops with brightly-coloured awnings line both sides.

"Welcome to Diagon Alley!" El's grandmother begins to pick through the crowd, glancing over her shoulder twice to ensure that the girl is following her. "My father used to bring me here when I was a little girl," she tells Eloise as they walk, ignoring all of the stores around them. She's moving surprisingly fast for a seventy-two-year-old woman, and El doesn't have much time to look around, though her heart seems to be beating unnaturally fast and she's starting to believe the strange letter that her grandmother is now holding tightly in one hand. "But I turned eleven and didn't get my letter, and we stopped coming."

She smiles sadly, glancing sideways at her granddaughter, while they climb the steps to a white marble building. It's a bank, Eloise realizes as they join the tail end of a line up to the counters. Everything is white marble inside, and there are several small, wrinkled creatures standing on high stools behind their desks.

"Your great-grandfather left all of his wizard money here," her grandma explains as they shuffle a little closer to the counter. "He said he was saving it for me, but I didn't need it. And he refused to exchange it for Muggle money, just in case."

"Muggle money?"

Her grandmother smiles down at her, eyes sparkling. "Non-magical money. I'm a Muggle. Your parents are Muggles. It's fun to say, isn't it?"

After a slightly-terrifying cart ride to a vault where the floor is lined with shining silver and gold coins, Eloise and her grandmother emerge back into the sunlight clutching a heavy bag of money. She almost doesn't want to spend any of it, though she can't decide if that's because she likes the way it looks or because she's afraid that the shopkeepers will laugh and tell her it's not real.

Her grandma starts purposefully towards the nearest store; over the door, a sign with peeling gold letters reads, Ollivander's: Makers of Fine Wands since 382 BC. A single window displays a dusty purple cushion with a single stick of wood, maybe ten inches long and decidedly unexciting, lying diagonally across it. A bell tinkles merrily over the door when her grandmother pushes it open, and they approach a nondescript sort of wooden desk in the very center of the room, Eloise looking around curiously. Bookshelves line every wall from the floor to the ceiling, though there's not a book in sight; instead, the shelves are stacked with narrow boxes, too long and thin to hold shoes. She glances back at the window and its miniscule display. It's the perfect size for any one of these boxes, and she imagines walking out of the store holding one of them, the image beginning to seem a little more exciting with every moment that she thinks about it.

A door in the back corner of the store opens and a woman with dark hair and emerald-green eyes smiles brightly at the two of them over a pile of still more boxes in her arms. "I'll be with you in just a moment," she says cheerfully, trying to hold up a finger and nearly dropping a few boxes. Carefully setting them down on the corner of the desk, she holds out a hand to Eloise, who shakes her hand and tries to pretend that people have wanted to greet her this way before. "My name is Cassandra Ollivander," the woman introduces herself. "I'm assuming that you're in need of a wand?"

El opens her mouth to answer, but finds herself at a loss for words and just closes it and nods instead.

Cassandra Ollivander pulls open a drawer and withdraws a tape measure, with which she measures various body parts, mumbling the numbers under her breath, not writing a single one down. Then, holding up a finger, this time without dropping anything, she easily climbs up a ladder as if she's been doing it for her entire life and returns with six of the narrow boxes. "Twelve and three-quarters of an inch," she informs Eloise as she flips open the first of them and pulls out a strip of wood. "Cherry wood and phoenix feather. Wand arm?"

Her grandma taps her left elbow and Eloise holds out her hand for the wand, curling her fingers around the cool wood. Nothing happens.

Opening the second box, the dark-haired woman hands her another wand. "Ten and seventh-eighths inches, mahogany and unicorn hair." One of the boxes topples off the desk and Cassandra Ollivander snatches this wand, too, away from Eloise, who doesn't move. "Nine and a half inches, abirch and dragon heartstring." Again, nothing happens. "Eleven and a half inches," says the wandmaker, holding out a fourth wand, "sycamore and unicorn hair."

This time, when Eloise curls her fingers around the wand, a few green sparks shoot from the opposite end, shining brightly for a moment before fading, and a light wind seems to stir around her.

She glances around, uncertain whether or not this is a good thing, but Cassandra Ollivander is nodding enthusiastically. "This is the one," she announces, a smile stretching her cheeks. "This is your wand!"

Eloise stumbles through her front door four hours later, arms full of bags - new schoolbooks, robes that she doesn't quite like, quills, ink, parchment, Potions ingredients, and a variety of apparently-magical sweets that she hasn't tried yet. Her father makes several trips from the house to her grandmother's car for Eloise's new telescope, scales, cauldron, and a large trunk that's apparently necessary, as no one in the wizarding world seems to use suitcases.

There's an entire wizarding world, she's learned. Magic, all over the world, the kind that Eloise learned didn't exist before she even hit double digits. She believes in it now, and her grandmother, trailing up the stairs and into her bedroom after her, carrying her new brass scales, seems pleased. Eloise's mother, who watched most of the parade upstairs with wide eyes before following, sets a large cage holding a white owl with dark grey flecks across her wings on top of El's dresser.

She spends the rest of the summer reading her new textbooks, which have about five times as many pages as her old ones and seem a lot more interesting, and slowly packing the trunk that her father has set at the foot of her bed. She tells her friends that she's going to boarding school in the fall and puts more effort than she thinks she's ever put into anything into making absolutely certain that none of them see her bedroom for the next month and a half. According to her grandma, the wizarding world is an important secret, and she can't risk any of her friends seeing her books or her wand or her owl, which she's named Storm.

The morning of September 1, Eloise wakes up earlier than usual, before the sun even peeks above the trees outlining her backyard.

She's too excited to eat; all summer, her anticipation has been building up on itself, and if she really thinks about it, it's hard to believe that there was ever a time when she didn't believe that any of this was real. She takes everything out of her trunk and fits it back in, just to make sure that she's got everything - her new school supplies, her regular clothes, her Muggle books, and anything else that she could think of that she might possibly need (but probably won't).

King's Cross Station is bustling with activity, with so many people around that El doesn't even get that many strange looks for Storm's cage. Her grandmother leads them towards platforms nine and ten. There's no sign for Platform 9 3/4, which is where she says that they're going, but the older woman reassures Eloise and her parents that she knows exactly where she's going. "I may be old, but I remember some things," she insists, but El thinks she might just be following the family of five ten feet ahead of them - a man with inky black hair and glasses, a redheaded woman, and three children, two boys and a girl. Each boy pushes a luggage trolley with a trunk like Eloise's, and an owl is somehow managing to sleep in a cage on top of one.

El keeps an eye on the family ahead of them as they stop in front of the wall between platform nine and ten. It's a boring wall, just bricks, but the wall in the courtyard behind the Leaky Cauldron was boring and made of bricks, too - and when the older of the two boys steps forward and runs straight through the wall, followed by the rest of his family, Eloise pushes her luggage trolley after them without even hesitating.

A train painted a deep scarlet fills the platform on the other side of the wall with steam. On the side of the train, Eloise can make out the words, The Hogwarts Express, and looks curiously around the secret Platform 9 3/4 with great interest. Her parents and grandmother appear behind her, and El can overhear the family that she followed through the brick wall greeting another group of people close at hand.

"So that's little Scorpius," says a redheaded man who belongs to the new family, eying someone that Eloise can't see. He looks fondly down at a girl with ginger hair next to him. "Make sure you beat him in every test, Rosie. Thank God you inherited your mother's brain."

The woman next to him rolls her eyes. "Ron, for heaven's sake, don't try to turn them against each other before they've even started school."

"You're right. Sorry," he apologizes hurriedly, but he looks slyly down at his daughter and adds, "But don't get too friendly with him, Rosie. Granddad Weasley would never forgive you if you married a pure-blood."

Eloise turns away from them to say goodbye to her own family, hugging the three of them tightly all at once, her arms not quite long enough to reach her grandmother, but she's there and that's what counts. "I'll write to you," she promises, glancing fleetingly in the direction of Storm's cage, still balanced on top of her trunk. Her grandmother has explained to her how wizard post works, owls carrying letters for wizards and witches across the world, and she pictures Storm dropping envelopes onto her parents' doorstep. For a moment, she wonders if she'll be able to write to her friends, but she can't send them an owl; maybe there will be a way to send letters in the regular post system. "I love you."

"Love you, El," says her mother, using her preferred nickname for what she thinks might be the first time in her life.

El hugs her a little tighter and kisses her on the cheek; then, maneuvering her trunk and Storm's cage onto the train one at a time, she blows a kiss in her family's direction. She finds herself in a packed corridor next to the redheaded girl - Rosie? - and starts to mumble an apology and pick her way through the crowd, but gives up quickly enough. When the train begins to move, she might be able to have a little breathing room. For now, she turns to look at her parents and her grandmother one more time and finds that everyone - both in the train and on the secret platform - has hushed slightly, staring at the man with the dark hair and glasses who Eloise followed through the brick wall.

"Why are they all staring?" asks one of his children impatiently from the other side of the redheaded girl. He asks it like he already knows the answer, but wants to hear something else instead.

From the platform, the other father grins easily. "Don't let it worry you," he says. "It's me. I'm extremely famous."

The four parents on the platform and the children around Eloise laugh. El doesn't understand the joke, but the train is beginning to move now and she busies herself with waving to her own family once more as they disappear from view.

AUTHOR'S NOTE / So I've been considering rewriting 'Mudblood' for a while, in a way. I tried to reread it last month and it was almost painful because I feel like my writing has improved so much since then. And then I got a new review on it, even though the last time I updated it was in, I think, 2010, and it was from strawberrypotter123, who was one of my most loyal reviewers through that whole story, saying how nice it would have been if I'd continued it. And that was pretty much the kick I needed to finally do it. Elle is no more, unfortunately, and this story will be a little different, but the general gist of it is going to be extremely similar. I'm rewriting each chapter, kind of, as I do this, rewriting things to make the full story better, have it make a little more sense, because I feel like a lot of 'Mudblood' was extremely unrealistic, honestly. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoy this, and maybe some of the old 'Mudblood' readers might come out of the shadows and read this one, too?