It had actually been a decent birthday, I thought spitefully as I plunged a dish into the water and attacked it with a sponge, splattering water and suds up my front. Harry glanced at me sideways, but I continued to scrub the plate with single-minded determination, glaring at it like it personally had caused world hunger.
It had been one of the better birthdays I'd ever had. A box of frogspawn soap and nose-biting teacups with some wizarding candy dumped in for flavor from Fred and George, a book on Medieval potions that I was itching to dive into from Snape, my usual mysterious bundle of white tulips, a gorgeous Broomstick Servicing Kit from Hermione that I was honestly shocked by until I realized Harry had gotten the same thing and she could hardly do anything less for me without being rude. Hagrid sent us both a copy of the Monster Book of Monsters. All in all, it was a birthday that actually made me feel cared about, which was a rarity.
Then we come into the kitchen, and what new to we get? Bloody Aunt bloody Marge was come to bloody number four, on our bloody birthday, and with our bloody luck, she'd be bringing one of her bloody dogs.
To quote Ron Weasley, bloody hell.
"The plates didn't invite her," Harry muttered as I smacked one of the breakfast dishes into the drying rack. "At least we got Uncle Vernon to agree to sign the Hogsmeade forms if we say we're from St. Whatsits and put on a good show."
"We are being blackmailed," I retorted. Harry sniggered as he squirted more soap into the water.
"I think we're doing the blackmailing, technically."
"I just got a new book on potions that I was really wanting to read, and now I can't, because some people get tetchy about our world…" I grumbled. We'd had to pack up anything even slightly magical in our room and either shove it in the closet or under a loose floorboard and ship our owls off to the Weasleys for the duration of the visit.
"She's here!" Aunt Petunia shrieked suddenly, like Uncle Vernon had just pulled up with the queen himself.
"Joy," I sighed, drying my hands on a towel before pitching it to Harry. Aunt Petunia stuck her head into the kitchen and narrowed her eyes at us.
"Fix your hair!" she snapped at us, before ducking back out. I licked my palm and tried to pat down the back of Harry's hair, but he shoved me off with a dirty look. I grinned as I yanked my hair back into a slightly respectable ponytail and we ventured out into the hallway.
"Get the door!" Aunt Petunia hissed at Harry. Looking like a man walking to his funeral, Harry pulled the door open.
On the threshold stood Aunt Marge. She was very like Uncle Vernon: large, beefy, and purple- faced, she even had a mustache, though not as bushy as his. In one hand she held an enormous suitcase, and tucked under the other was an old and evil-tempered bulldog.
"Where's my Dudders?" roared Aunt Marge. "Where's my neffy-poo?"
Dudley came waddling down the hall, his blond hair plastered flat to his fat head, a bow tie just visible under his many chins. Aunt Marge thrust the suitcase into Harry's stomach, knocking the wind out of him, seized Dudley in a tight one-armed hug, and planted a large kiss on his cheek.
I knew perfectly well that Dudley only put up with Aunt Marge's hugs because he was well paid for it, and sure enough, when they broke apart, Dudley had a crisp twenty-pound note clutched in his fat fist.
"Petunia!" shouted Aunt Marge, striding past Harry as though he was a hat stand. Aunt Marge and Aunt Petunia kissed, or rather, Aunt Marge bumped her large jaw against Aunt Petunia's bony cheekbone.
Uncle Vernon now came in, smiling jovially as he shut the door.
"Tea, Marge?" he asked. "And what will Ripper take?"
"Ripper can have some tea out of my saucer," said Aunt Marge as they all proceeded into the kitchen, leaving Harry alone in the hall with the suitcase. No way was I joining that chaos yet, so I helped Harry heave the heavy case up the stairs and into the guest room, dropping it down on the bed. Unfortunately, that was all the time we could reasonably take, so we trooped back downstairs towards the kitchen, me humming a funeral march as we went.
Aunt Marge had been supplied with tea and fruitcake, and Ripper was lapping noisily in the corner. Aunt Petunia winced slightly as specks of tea and drool flecked her clean floor. She hated animals.
"Who's looking after the other dogs, Marge?" Uncle Vernon asked.
"Oh, I've got Colonel Fubster managing them," boomed Aunt Marge. "He's retired now, good for him to have something to do. But I couldn't leave poor old Ripper. He pines if he's away from me."
Ripper began to growl again as Harry and I sat down. This directed Aunt Marge's attention to us for the first time.
"So!" she barked. "Still here, are you?"
"Yes," replied Harry, looking at me blankly. Where were we supposed to have gone? Just melted away?
"Don't you say 'yes' in that ungrateful tone," Aunt Marge growled. "It's damn good of Vernon and Petunia to keep you. Wouldn't have done it myself. You'd have gone straight to an orphanage if you'd been dumped on my doorstep."
With the Hogsmeade form floating in my mind, I forced my face into a painful smile and bit down every nasty and sarcastic comment that as bubbling on the tip of my tongue.
"Don't you smirk at me!" boomed Aunt Marge. "I can see neither of you haven't improved since I last saw you. I hoped school would knock some manners into you." She took a large gulp of tea, wiped her mustache, and said, "Where is it that you send them, again, Vernon?"
"St. Brutus's," said Uncle Vernon promptly. "It's a first-rate institution for hopeless cases."
"I see," said Aunt Marge. "Do they use the cane at St. Brutus's, boy?" she barked across the table.
Harry fumbled, "Er -"
Uncle Vernon nodded curtly behind Aunt Marge's back.
"Yes," I said quickly. "All the time."
"Excellent," said Aunt Marge. "I won't have this namby-pamby, wishy-washy nonsense about not hitting people who deserve it. A good thrashing is what's needed in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. Have you been beaten often?"
"Oh, yeah," chimed Harry, "loads of times."
Aunt Marge narrowed her eyes. "I still don't like your tone, boy," she darkly. "If you can speak of your beatings in that casual way, they clearly aren't hitting you hard enough. Petunia, I'd write if I were you. Make it clear that you approve the use of extreme force in their case."
Perhaps Uncle Vernon was worried that Harry might forget their bargain; in any case, he changed the subject abruptly.
"Heard the news this morning, Marge? What about that escaped prisoner, eh?"
"You mustn't blame yourself for the way the children turned out, Vernon," Aunt Marge said over lunch on the third day. "If there's something rotten on the inside, there's nothing anyone can do about it."
I had been smothering my not inconsiderable arsenal of sarcastic, disdainful, disparaging, and esteem-crushing comments and retorts since the moment Aunt Marge crossed the threshold. After three days of her engaging in one of her favorite vacation activities – insulting Harry and I – I was actually trembling with the effort of not letting fly on the odious woman. I could feel the emotions roiling in my stomach, wanting to come out somehow.
Aunt Marge reached for her glass of wine.
"It's one of the basic rules of breeding," she said. "You see it all the time with dogs. If there's something wrong with the bitch, there'll be something wrong with the pup -"
I froze. Oh that would not stand. I glared at Marge with all the hatred I had in me. At that moment, the wineglass Aunt Marge was holding exploded in her hand. Shards of glass flew in every direction and Aunt Marge sputtered and blinked, her great ruddy face dripping.
"Marge!" squealed Aunt Petunia. "Marge, are you all right?"
"Not to worry," grunted Aunt Marge, mopping her face with her napkin. "Must have squeezed it too hard. Did the same thing at Colonel Fubster's the other day. No need to fuss, Petunia, I have a very firm grip..."
But Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon were both looking at Harry and I suspiciously, so in a united front we decided to skip dessert to flee to the hall and get a handle on ourselves.
"D'you know if that was you or me?" Harry asked, back pressed against the wall and glaring hatefully at the door to the kitchen.
"If it wasn't me it would have been you, and vice versa," I replied, then added mildly. "I hope she dies in a fire."
"That's dark."
"Oh, like you don't feel the same."
"…"
"Exactly."
At last, after what felt like a century, the final evening of Marge's stay arrived. Aunt Petunia cooked a fancy dinner and Uncle Vernon uncorked several bottles of wine. They got all the way through the soup and the salmon without a single mention of our faults. During the lemon meringue pie, Uncle Vernon bored us with a long talk about Grunnings, his drill-making company. Then Aunt Petunia made coffee and Uncle Vernon brought out a bottle of brandy.
"Can I tempt you, Marge?"
Aunt Marge had already had quite a lot of wine. Her huge face was very red. "Just a small one, then," she chuckled. "A bit more than that... and a bit more... that's the ticket."
Dudley was eating his fourth slice of pie. Aunt Petunia was sipping coffee with her little finger sticking out. Harry and I were both waiting for the conversation to pick up enough that we could slip off to our rooms unnoticed, because by the way Uncle Vernon kept eyeing us warningly as we squirmed in our seats, we were not excused yet.
"Aah," said Aunt Marge, smacking her lips and putting the empty brandy glass back down. "Excellent nosh, Petunia. It's normally just a fry-up for me of an evening, with twelve dogs to look after..." She burped richly and patted her great tweed stomach. "Pardon me. But I do like to see a healthy-sized boy," she went on, winking at Dudley. "You'll be a proper-sized man, Dudders, like your father. Yes, I'll have a spot more brandy, Vernon..."
"Now, this one here-" She jerked her head at Harry, and I felt my stomach clench with rage. Oh, you mean the boy who's been starved most of his life?
"This one's got a mean, runty look about him. You get that with dogs. I had Colonel Fubster drown one last year. Ratty little thing it was- Weak. Underbred."
I sat there, reciting the ingredients for the Wiggenweld potion silently to myself. It was the only way I'd found to keep myself distracted: pick a finicky potion, recite the ingredients, and then go down the instructions.
"It all comes down to blood, as I was saying the other day."
I stiffened in my seat and felt the knot of rage coil tighter.
"Bad blood will out. Now, I'm saying nothing against your family, Petunia" she patted Aunt Petunia's bony hand with her shovel-like one "but your sister was a bad egg. They turn up in the best families. Then she ran off with a wastrel and here's the result right in front of us."
Aunt Marge's voice seemed to be boring into me like one of Uncle Vernon's drills.
"This Potter," said Aunt Marge loudly, seizing the brandy bottle and splashing more into her glass and over the tablecloth, "you never told me what he did?"
Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia were looking extremely tense. Dudley had even looked up from his pie to gape at his parents.
"He - didn't work," said Uncle Vernon, with half a glance at Harry and I. His cheek gave a funy twitch at the sight of my face. "Unemployed."
"As I expected!" said Aunt Marge, taking a huge swig of brandy and wiping her chin on her sleeve. "A no-account, good-for-nothing, lazy scrounger who-"
It was me that opened my mouth first, but Harry got the words out faster.
"He was not," he interrupted loudly. The table went very quiet. Harry was shaking all over. I had never felt so angry in my life.
"More brandy!" yelled Uncle Vernon, who had gone very white. He emptied the bottle into Aunt Marge's glass. "You two," he snarled at us. "Go to bed, go on-"
"No, Vernon," hiccuped Aunt Marge, holding up a hand, her tiny bloodshot eyes fixed on Harry's. "Go on, boy, go on. Proud of your parents, are you? They go and get themselves killed in a car crash - drunk, I expect-"
"They didn't die in a car crash!" I snarled, and somewhere along the line Harry and I had both stood up, me with such force that my chair clattered to the floor.
"They died in a car crash, you nasty little liar, and left you to be a burden on their decent, hardworking relatives!" screamed Aunt Marge, swelling with fury. The knot exploded. "You are an insolent, ungrateful little -"
But Aunt Marge suddenly stopped speaking. For a moment, it looked as though words had failed her. She seemed to be swelling with inexpressible anger. But the swelling didn't stop. Her great red face started to expand, her tiny eyes bulged, and her mouth stretched too tightly for speech. Next second, several buttons had just burst from her tweed jacket and pinged off the walls. She was inflating like a monstrous balloon, her stomach bursting free of her tweed waistband, each of her fingers blowing up like a salami.
"Marge!" yelled Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia together as Aunt Marge's whole body began to rise off her chair toward the ceiling. She was entirely round, now, like a vast life buoy with piggy eyes, and her hands and feet stuck out weirdly as she drifted up into the air, making apoplectic popping noises. Ripper came skidding into the room, barking madly.
"Nooooo!"
Uncle Vernon seized one of Marge's feet and tried to pull her down again, but was almost lifted from the floor himself. A second later, Ripper leapt forward and sank his teeth into Uncle Vernon's leg.
Harry and I turned in sync and sprinted from the room. The cupboard door burst magically open as he reached it and began to drag our trunks out while I sprinted upstairs. Harry heaved our trunks towards the front door as I hit the landing. I burst into our room and threw myself under the bed, wrenching up the loose floorboard, and grabbing the pillowcases full of our books and birthday presents. I wriggled out, seized the two empty owl cages, and, barely managing to carry it all, dashed back downstairs to the trunks, just as Uncle Vernon burst out of the dining room, his trouser leg in bloody tatters.
"Come back in here!" he bellowed. "Come back and put her right!"
Harry kicked his trunk open, pulled out his wand, and pointed it at Uncle Vernon, covering me as I did the same.
"She deserved it," Harry snarled, breathing very fast. "She deserved what she got. You keep away from us."
He fumbled behind him for the latch on the door.
"We're going," Harry said decisively. "We've had enough."
Vernon roared and lunged at Harry, but I stepped smoothly in front of my brother, my wand coming up and jamming into the fleshy rolls under his chin. He froze in fear as I stared up at him, a nasty smile on his face. I kept him on the ropes as Harry dumped our books and gifts into our trunks and heaved them out onto the front stoop.
"We could try and fix her, but I don't even know what we did, honestly. It would take experimenting… might not end so well for her…" My smile widened by a few molars.
"You know!" Uncle Vernon rasped, but I dug my wand in harder and he shut up.
"I don't, actually," I replied.
"Rena, come on!" Harry called from by the door. I grinned and dropped my wand.
"Oh, and by the way… you were right, our dad didn't work. But see, he didn't need to. He was heir to a massive potions fortune. Good night," I chirped, and slammed the door behind me.
