Thirteen

Teddy is thirteen. It is nearly the end of the school year, the second year exams are over, and the sun is high overhead. He is outside, sitting in the shade underneath the big oak tree beside the lake, watching his friends. They are playing with magic; messing about with little charms and spells they have picked up from somewhere. A soft wind skims over the longer strands of grass.

"Where'd you learn that spell?" One of Teddy's friends' asks another. They have transfigured a thorny weed into a yellow daisy. It is a peculiar flower; the stem is a darker green than it should be and the petals have a few prickled edges. Teddy thinks the spell has not gone quite as well as it could have, but it worked nonetheless.

"Oh. My dad taught it me when I went home for Easter."

"See, that's a cool spell! My dad taught me a spell to clean the algae from the pond. I think he was hoping I'd be good at it so that I would do it for him."

Another friend joins the conversation. "When I went home for Easter my mum was so shocked by the state of my trunk that she taught me a spell to fold all my clothes into it neatly. I'm rubbish at it though. She'll probably make me practice it over summer so I'll have perfected it by September."

"My little sister starts Hogwarts in September."

"She'll be in the same year as my cousin then! They might even be in the same house."

"Is it true Flitwick's retiring? I wonder who'll be the head of Ravenclaw next year?"

"My uncle was asked to be the new charms teacher but he turned it down. He said he likes working in the Ministry's Obliviator Headquarters."

"My oldest brother's going to graduate and become an Auror for the Ministry this summer."

Their conversation is interrupted by the arrival of a girl, a couple of years older than them, who looks very much like one of Teddy's friends. She has the same colour hair, the same wide, round eyes and the same strong Irish accent. She has come to ask her younger brother how his exam had gone, and whether he had received the same letter from their parents that morning as she had.

Teddy has been quiet, and he finds that he has nothing to say. He has no brothers and sisters to start at Hogwarts, no Aunts or Uncles with interesting jobs, and no parents to learn new spells from. He has his Grandmother, but no good story has ever started with, 'my Grandmother taught me…'. She is kind, and very patient, but she can be strict. He has his Godfather, but he feels self-conscious when he talks about him; he is Harry Potter, the boy who lived, the Chosen one, and he already gets enough stick from the Slytherins about it. He has no one else.

He wishes he could join in with the conversation. He wishes his little brother would run up to him, worried, asking for help on an essay or some homework he has forgotten to complete. He wishes he could impress his friends by telling them all the interesting stories about his mother's job as an Auror. He knows a fun spell that turns a rat yellow, but he learnt it from his father's friend, and he wishes he had learnt it from his father. In fact, he wishes he had learnt anything from his father.

He does not blame his friends, of course. He knows it must be difficult to not talk about their families- and anyway, why should they have to avoid it? One of Teddy's friends does not have an owl, but the others still talk about them. It should be no different. But somehow, it is.

His friends continue on and they do not notice Teddy reaching into his bag and pulling out a tattered book. It is not a textbook- after all the revising he has been doing for the recent exams, he has had enough of them. It is a simple fiction book, written by a muggle author, about a peculiar, wintry kingdom hidden in a wardrobe, with talking lions and beavers and a cruel white queen. He has read it before, and he does not like it very much- he does not like how the wolves are vicious beasts and the witch is an evil bully, but he reads it all the same. For that brief moment, he is not stuck at school under the oak tree listening to his friends babble on about the many various members of their extended families, he is in a world of his own. There is something he finds strange about the book- he feels almost jealous of the main characters, and he knows very well that it is fact they are siblings.

Teddy is both an only child and an orphan. He can't help but feel that one would be bearable, if only he had the other.