A/N: Please excuse the random slashes in the middle of some of my words. I did not put them there and have tried everything to get them off. (I'm probably not supposed to be doing this, but…) for a really good website where you can see this story posted with all of the formatting it's supposed to have (and a HP website that really doesn't suck in the least) go to www.sugarquill.com. Thanks! Enjoy! Review!!!
Harry's Neighbor-PrologueThe Patterson house was one of many just like it. It sat in a long row of normal houses, all of which had the grass and hedges cut to the same length. Everything about it was neat, clean, and most importantly, normal, right down to the white picket fence. Tem sat alone in his room, at the top of the stairs of Number 5, Privet Drive, the most normal, and most boring street on Earth.
Tem had just turned eleven years old last April, and everybody said that he had a great imagination. He really did, just not in the way everybody thought he did. Most of the stuff he said was true. He just happened to see strange things, and strange things just had a way of happening to him, like the time three years ago, when he had sworn that a car had flown up to his neighbor's window, picked up that boy that lived in the Dursleys' house, and flown away. When he had told his parents this, they'd just laughed, rubbed his head, and jokingly said that he'd be a great writer someday.
This wasn't a lie. Tem was a great writer, and he wrote every chance he got; these were mainly journals about his everyday life. He filled books with pages and pages of stories about things like the time he was mad about not being picked for the football team, and the ball had sprouted wings and flown away. Another time, he had been really upset that his fat next door neighbor, Dudley, had run over his toys while riding his bike and then, all of the sudden, the racing bike seemed to swerve into the street of its own accord, right in front of an on-coming truck. The truck had barely missed him, and he ended up hitting old Mrs. Figg instead. Things like this happened every now and then, and he always wrote everything down. People who read his stories always commented on his creativity, and this made Tem angry. They were calling him a liar. Tem never lied to people; he only wrote what he saw.
On this particularly dreary day in July, Tem was already bored out of his mind. School had just let out for summer holiday and there was nothing to do. He idly wondered what the kid next door was doing. Not Dudley, the one who beat him up every now and then, but the other one. Tem had never met him, and Mr. and Mrs. Dursley seemed quite content to keep it that way. They tried to pretend that the other kid didn't exist, but it was hard to miss the owls flying in and out of the kid's room at night, especially during the summer. Tem really wanted to meet this kid. Anybody with owls as pets had to be more interesting than the stupid kids at his school. He walked up to his window and looked into the one adjacent to his…that was the kid's room.
As he squinted into the glass, he could just make out a figure: tallish, thin without being skinny, messy hair, and glasses. Tem figured that the kid was a few years older than himself. He was fourteen, maybe fifteen at the most. Tem watched in astonishment as the boy opened the door of a cage and fed something to a beautiful snowy white owl that Tem had seen flying in and out of that window before. This was the first time he had seen it in a cage, however. Tem had to wonder how it was treated. Wild animals didn't usually domesticate well. The boy stroked the owl, talking to it, and then put it back, closing the cage. He walked across the room and bent down out of view. When the he stood back up, he held a broom. It was a nice looking broom as far as Tem was concerned. Who would want to sweep with it, though?
Suddenly, Tem's heart leapt into his throat as he realized that the boy was not only not sweeping with it, but he was flying on it! Tem's fingers itched towards his dressing stand where his journal and pen lay, but his eyes stayed glued to the window.
The loud jangle of the doorbell jolted Tem from his trance-like state, and when he went back to the window, the boy's shades had been drawn closed. He sighed and ventured downstairs to see who had come to visit.
His mother, looking up upon his arrival, smiled sweetly. "Tem, honey, that was the postman. You seem to have gotten a letter."