Hi, my name is Harriet and I'm starting this fanfiction to practice my writing skills since I don't have time in my schedule to add creative writing (feedback would be great!). I took a Harry Potter class where I wrote this story about pre-Hogwarts Hermione, and I thought I'd share it to get some critique so I may grow as a writer. It may not be what you expect (I was kind of in a rush writing it), but I hope you're open to what I have to share. I'm going to try to fix errors before I post the chapters so the reading experience isn't too terrible – thanks and enjoy!
Outside number 8 Heathgate, the usually plain London sky bled a painting of bright, exotic colors as the sun returned to its resting place below the horizon, like watercolor trickled over a vast wet canvas. Two flame red Wellington boots stomped out into the autumn air, their tiny footfalls landing with the tick tock rhythm of running time, crackling on leaves tinged with crimson, yellow, orange, and brown. Above the small girl standing in them, the sun finally gone, a cover of dark murky gray began leaking into the bright sky, stirring in with a hint of wispy clouds. The trees around her shed off their beautiful bright feathers. Leaves plopped down to coat the ground like a cloak of red, blanketing the dirt and shielding it from the bitter cold. The girl strode down the concrete path leading away from a thick mahogany front door, and stopped to plop down on her usual spot atop the sturdy iron bench in front of her home.
Though spooky decorations littered the lawns on her street, sitting outside on her own didn't scare her—she'd never been scared of Halloween. After all, none of it was real. She brought out an unfinished book and began reading, her tiny hands tracing over words on its delicate pages, each blocky letter combining with the next to form a harmonic symphony in her mind. Completely absorbed in her new favorite story, she didn't even notice the group of her schoolmates creeping up on her. And, when they each attempted to frighten her by uttering their spookiest, most ghastly screeches, launching a barrage of water balloons in the direction of her thick brown hair, nothing she had ever encountered or even heard about in her life would have prepared her for what happened next.
The girl jumped off the bench as if it had burned her and screamed so loudly the whole world must have heard her cry for help. A gust of wind came, pegging her assailants with dried leaves and pine needles fraught with dust and dirt from the ground beneath their feet, as a crackling noise brought branches crashing down from the oak tree above their heads. Her five terrified attackers hastily fled the chaotic scene wide-eyed with fear. They shouted for their parents, running as if chased down by a hungry man-eating cheetah.
Curiously, after the whole incident, the girl remained perfectly unharmed; she stood, shivering in her wet clothes, in the same exact spot she'd been on when she heard the first spooky screech—the ghost of her terror still etched across her face—but her hair remained dust and pine needle-free. And, when she finally collected her book from the bench and went back inside for dinner, the only evidence that showed she'd even witnessed the dust storm remained in the grime beneath her bright red boots and the hushed whispers of five astonished schoolboys.
Hermione Granger woke with a start. The mangled bedding strewn around her legs and on the floor told her she'd tossed and turned all night. She tried to shake off shivers and erase memories of the expressions of revulsion echoed across the faces of her five schoolmates as they ran away from her. However, as much as she tried to forget about this particular incident, it always came creeping back to her in thoughts and dreams. Of course, other strange incidents had occurred around Hermione as well.
She remembered her talk with Professor Morrison, the director of her previous school, after bits of broken glass from a shattered mirror miraculously landed all over Mackenzie Mather's brand new hair cut. She'd called Hermione a "mop head" when the two encountered each other in the girl's lavatory that day, and—before either of the girls could react—a shower of crystal doused her hair. Hermione had tried to explain, to no avail, that she had no idea how a perfectly intact mirror could suddenly shatter on all its own. Of course, such a thing couldn't possibly happen. Things like that only happened in books, in which, realistically, the occurrence should have a simple explanation behind it—a childish prank, for instance, or a faulty screw in the wall.
Then, there was that time just last year when Hermione's parents invited, or rather forced, her to accompany them to an opening party for the new reptile exhibit in the London Zoo. All she planned to do that day entailed staying home and finishing the book she recently started—a story about an eccentric young girl and her experiences moving into a new town—but, as her parents didn't exactly give her a choice in the matter, she reluctantly went with her them to the event. It was boring.
As Hermione sat lethargically on a bench, having lost her parents in the throng of adults, she wished she'd snuck the book out with her. Even the snakes and lizards honored at the party slept on their rocks or hid away from view. Though she didn't blame them for their show of lassitude, she'd wanted something—anything—to do. Just as she thought this, she noticed the golden cover of a thin book out of the corner of her eye, a book that looked alarmingly like the one she'd placed on her desk before leaving the house that evening. And, after opening it to find her name scrawled behind the front cover, she gaped at it. She'd have lied if she said it didn't automatically occur to her that the book came to her precisely because she craved it so badly. Though she could've passed the incident on as a fluke back then, these strange accidents and coincidences had happened so often since Halloween five years ago, that she could no longer pretend they never occurred.
Ever since that fateful Halloween, when she first encountered her strangeness, she would often find herself waking in the early hours from haunting memories fraught with fear and confusion. She'd never asked for odd things to happen around her—they just always seemed to follow her wherever she went, especially whenever she felt particularly threatened or anxious. Though they seemed to occur with good intentions, they didn't help much with her social life. In class, Hermione's schoolmates ostracized her, labeling her as "that Strange Granger;" nobody invited her to their homes for sleepovers or to their extravagant birthday parties, though she was often forced to hear about the celebrations in class the following day. Instead of attending festivities, she buried herself in books, finding that she much preferred the fascinating characters she met briefly in paper and ink to the people she spent half her day with at school.
The summer holidays dragged on, and she and her parents recently returned back to their home in London after a month vacationing in the Polynesian Islands. Though she'd spent hours soaking in sunlight, she remained as pale as the flecks of sand she often found stuck between her toes in the hotel room. In the lazy drawn out hours of summertime back in her simple room, Hermione had begun preparing for Cornapelle High, the school she'd attend next year. Textbooks stacked on her desk in alphabetical order, and, as she'd had a lot of time to read and had an extremely good memory, she had already finished studying two of the six subjects she'd start to learn about in the fall.
Deciding at last to launch out of bed, Hermione rubbed the sleep out of her eyes before sinking her feet on the plush white carpet, her pajamas falling back down over her skinny ankles. She walked to her bathroom and turned on the light, looking wearily into the gold-rimmed mirror above the sink. Her brown bushy hair looked especially unruly in the mornings, but she didn't bother attempting to drag a comb through it, as she figured she'd look even worse with bits of plastic bristles stuck in her tangles. Evidently deciding to ignore her hair, she turned on the tap and splashed her face with cool water before grabbing her toothbrush and squeezing toothpaste on top. Gritting her pearly whites at the mirror, she brushed her smile, not without noticing for the millionth time her huge front teeth. She couldn't ignore them, as they looked so large, and as her parents, dentists, never failed to bring up dental hygiene in everyday conversation. She hoped she'd ged braces on soon—as if she needed something else to help her stand out from the other kids at school. With a shrug, she exited the bathroom, grabbed a textbook from her desk, and made her way downstairs to breakfast.
Thanks for reading this far. I'll be posting the next bit soon. Please leave a review if you could, even if its really short!