Dear Darcelle Duponte,
Hi! I'm Dominique Gabrielle Weasley, your 'Cultural Magic Scheme' letter sending partner. As you can see I have a French name which is because my mother Fleur Weasley (formerly Delacour) is French and went to your school, Beauxbatons. Unfortunately I know hardly any French, just a choicy selection of swear words that my mum likes to use when she is annoyed at us, dad or just generally anything. Just tell me to simplify myself if my English is getting too hard to understand!
I'm not sure what I'm meant to be writing about because the point of the exchange is for me to tell you about my culture. I may as well start with telling you about myself. My friends call me Dom, and as for my appearance I've attached a picture for you of me last year when I was going through a bit of a rebellious phase. Don't worry; I don't usually have purple hair and that many piercings!
I'm in the Slytherin house and if you've heard anything about us then just clear those nasty little prejudices out of your head. We don't poison first years, kill baby unicorns or systematically hospitalise every member of the Gryffindor Quidditch team, so don't believe any of the rumours that you hear. Sorry about the rant, my cousin James is always winding me up about how protective I am of my house. If you haven't heard anything about my house you must think I'm as bonkers as a Quibbler subscriber (a British wizarding magazine filled with wacky conspiracy theories and imaginary animals). If you don't know Slytherin is meant to be a house for evil megalomaniacs who want to take over the world. But that was years ago and as we're fortunately running a bit short on power-crazed loonies Slytherin has started taking nice, normal people whose families used to be sorted into other houses like me and my cousins Al (Albus) and Lucy.
Lucy, Al and I are best friends along with Fraze (Fraser) Wood and Em (Ember) Nott. As you can tell we have a thing about shortening names! Fraser's parents were in Gryffindor, in fact his dad used to captain my Uncle Harry, but Fraser has now come over to the 'dark side'. He's funny, friendly and Scottish (he has the funniest accent and we're always winding him up about it).He's also incredibly tall so he's the one who always ends up rescuing Em's cat from all manner of strange places like last week when Jordan (the cat is called Jordan, Em used to have a massive crush on Lee Jordan, the international Quidditch commentator) managed to get to the top of the Womping Willow. Poor Fraze is still in the hospital wing and has a month of detentions to look forward to for what Headmistress McGonagall calls "intentionally idiotic and reckless behaviour".
Em's family has always been in our house so she's our only real 'hereditary' Slytherin. She is a bit mad sometimes as she gets very hyper on the seemingly harmless kiddie wizarding sweet Sugar Quills which are very easily smuggled into lessons because they look exactly like normal quills (except you can't get hyper by sucking on normal quills obviously). Currently her hair is dyed red, brown, blonde and black (we're only allowed 'natural' hair colours but Em has got round this by pointing out that even though her hair is streaky with four different colours they are all natural, even though the occurrence of all four in her hair isn't).
An actual quality of a Slytherin is being cunning and if we go by this then my cousin Fred should be in our house, I have never seen someone who can conceal a prank so well that nobody realises until the last moment that they are about to be humiliated. Another Slytherin trait is being ambitious and if we go by this then my cousin Molly should be in our house because I have never seen someone who so very much wants to be Head of the Department of Mysteries even if it is a mystery to her and the rest of us how she should go about achieving this.
So you see most of my family should be in Slytherin and we're not just the black sheep, in fact I'm pretty certain that everyone has a bit of Slytherin in them. You might have realised that by now I have mentioned five of my cousins which is a bit unnatural. The reason for that is that Hogwarts is pretty much populated by my family. If you stand up at a table in the great hall and holler "Oi, Weasley!" (which Alanna Fleming has tried once to get the attention of one of her Quidditch team, my cousin Hugo) then you receive the confused and irritated looks of many ,generally, red-haired freckly students wondering why you have interrupted their meal.
Most of my family is ginger and freckly although I'm not. One Christmas when I was eleven I felt so left out that I nicked some hair dye from Victoire (she likes to experiment with her hair colour) and dyed it ginger. It turned out a hideous tangerine colour and at the time everyone was very sympathetic because I was hysterical. But as soon as I looked like I might not break down into sobbing, gasping tears at the slightest mocking comment James and Fred (partners in crime, despite the slight age gap) lunged in and started winding me up about it. They both still call me Gingy, even though that's the one hair colour I won't be trying again EVER. Overall I have ten cousins (nine on the Weasley side and Aunt Gabby's little girl Nathalie) and one honorary cousin Teddy who's Uncle Harry's godson.
I'm in fifth year which means I'm taking my O.W.L's (ordinary wizarding levels) this year. The reason why we're doing this letter exchange is because one of the subjects I'm taking is Cultural Magic/Muggle Studies (they combined them to make the subject accessible to muggles because there wasn't enough interest in Muggle Studies and Headmistress McGonagall didn't want the subject 'dying out'). I'm meant to be learning from you all about Beauxbatons, French customs and foreign spells and charms. You're meant to be learning from me right? For your yearlong 'la magie des autres' project (at least I think that's what Prof. Richardson called it)?
Fat lot of use I'm probably being. All I've really told you about is a magazine for weirdo's, dying out prejudices and my eleven year old self's humiliation. I hope you don't think I'm completely barmy and you actually reply. Sorry about being useless, it's a habit of mine.
Yours in apology,
Dom 'Gingy' Weasley
A/N: Thank-you for reading and please review. If you are wondering what the picture Dom sent Darcelle is then here is the link to the picture I imagine it being on deviantart: .com/?qh=§ion=&q=dom+weasley#/d2wve1h. Next chapter is Darcelle's reply.