Lily's Beginning: Year One At Hogwarts
By: CNJ
PG-13
3: New Friends, New Experiences
Lily:
We had another hot weekend the third weekend in August. I headed outside to see if maybe I should have a dip in the lake. That's when I saw a girl, a black-haired one crouched under a log.
Her hair was long, straight and rather messy like mine. She was peering out and whispering to a dark brown cat next to her. I'd never seen her before, so I slowly walked up. She saw me than and called, "Hello..."
"Hello..." I sat on the log and watched her write some kind of writing into the ground, then whisper more to her cat. "Does the cat understand you?" The girl nodded, then crawled out from under the log.
I was surprised to see a parchment sticking out of her pocket and the envelope for it fell out and it had Hogwarts in its letter head. "I got something like that a month ago!" I gasped. So she was a witch too.
"So you're magical too?" she asked. "I'm Amelia Kovacs, by the way."
"I'm Lily Evans," I introduced myself. "Pleasure meeting you. I guess it'll be my first year at Hogwarts."
"Mine too," Amelia smiled and I smiled back. "I was eleven back in March. All area witches and wizard get this in their eleventh year. My mum and dad went to Hogwarts as well."
"So they're magical too?"
"Yes. We're going shopping for my supplies tomorrow."
"Me too...my mum and dad aren't magical, though...neither is my sister."
"Muggles." Amelia told me.
"What?"
"That's what non-magic folks are called. Some Hogwarts students; their whole families are magical; others came strictly from muggle families while others are a mix of muggle and magic." I nodded, grateful for this bit of information. Amelia told me that her own family was a mixture as well.
"What else can you tell me about Hogwarts?" I asked.
"It's a middle and secondary school rolled up in one. First years start off at usually eleven like us, then go all the way until their last year of secondary school at seventeen or eighteen, then graduate," Amelia told me as we walked up toward our houses. She brushed a lock of her thick black bangs out of her eyes and beckoned her cat, who followed. "This is Ebonshires, by the way. Ebby for short."
"Hi, Ebby..." I waved.
"As for supply shopping, we enter a place called Diagon Alley where they sell everything we need. It's in the middle of London and we enter through a back wall of a sort of bar called the Leaky Cauldron.
She told me a lot of other little helpful facts, such as on September first, students catch a train called the Hogwarts Express and the station was entered by tapping a wand on a back wall of a loo at the Kings' Crossing Station.
"Hey, maybe you could come over for a while and tell some of this to my mum and dad, so they know what to do," I suggested. She liked the idea, so she came over. Thank the stars, Petunia was out somewhere with Vernon, so I didn't have to worry about her.
"Why don't our families shop together?" Mum suggested over a snack. "Maybe your parents would like that?"
"I'm sure they will..." Amelia finished up a cookie. "Do you have a...?" She looked around. "...contacter?" She then looked over at our phone by the wall. "I guess I could come over or ring you." I gave her my phone number.
"Some magical people don't use telephones," she explained. "Most of us use contacters. It's a tiny device you touch to summon someone."
"I see." I knew there would be a lot to learn about magical machines and appliances since I had the feeling that they are quite different from ordinary...muggle ones. "See you soon." We waved as we parted.
"She seems like a nice girl," Mum commented as I came back in and helped her clear the snack dishes.
"Yes. It's so lucky I found her; she'll be able to give us a lot of pointers in the magical world."
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"...Two...one...here it is!" Amelia's mum pointed. "Leaky Cauldron!" My parents, Amelia, her younger sister, Tara, and parents, and I entered what appeared to be a bar or pub resembling that of the Charles Dickens era. It was dimly lit, smoky-looking, and people sat in bars, many of them in long robes and strange hats.
We proceeded to the back where Amelia's mum pulled out a wand and tapped it on certain bricks. I tried to count each section where she tapped it, but it was hard. I gasped as the walls parted; the bricks shifted to form an archway into another street, another world altogether.
We entered and it was an amazing street with a narrow winding cobblestone road and hundreds, maybe thousands of little shops. The place was crowded with mostly witches and wizards shopping, eating, socializing. Mum and Dad gaped around just as I did. Ohhh, Mum gasped.
"What a delightful quaint place..." Dad murmured. It was.
"The first stop we want to make is Gringotts' Bank," Amelia's dad told us. "You'll need your muggle money converted to galleons." I had a cash reserved with me, so we headed there. The bank was very strange. Instead of human clerks and tellers, it was these tiny things...
"Amelia...what are these things?" I whispered. They had huge heads and scowling little faces with pointed ears.
"Goblins," Amelia told me. "Not really friendly...but efficient." And they were. At the Kovacs' advice, I opened up an account with Gringotts and one of the Goblins took us to a big vault by this thing that appeared to be a cross between a sled and a cart. It zipped along these narrow tracks and I had to fight to keep my stomach calm. The whole place was rather dim and cavelike, almost eerie.
"Stand baack, pleeease," the goblin barked in a high bleat as it opened the vault. With shaky hands, I put a chunk of my newly converted galleons in it.
"It's...it's secure here?" I asked nervously.
"One of the safest places to keep your money reserves," the goblin bleated, then jumped back into the cart. We joined it and the cart zoomed us back to the entrance.
I let out my breath in relief to be back outdoors. Then we hit the stores. A lot of it was picking up books and our cauldrons and wands.
"Bewaaare of letting this wand fall into the wrong hands," the wand shop owner, Mr. Ollivander told me once I was matched with the right wand.
"Wh-what do you mean?" I asked shakily.
"Not aaall witches and wizards are gooood..." he intoned. "Some go bad and take wands to use for the wrong purposes. Should your wand get lost or stolen, contact me immediately and I'll deactivate it and send you a new wand. Take caaare and gooood luuuck at Hogwarts." He smiled then, his gold tooth shining in the dusty shop.
"Thank you, Mr. Ollivander." I peered at my new wand as I rejoined the others. Our robes came near the end and there was quite a line of Hogwarts hopefuls waiting to be fitted. Amelia and I managed to find a small spot near the door and talked awhile. I caught snatches of other conversations as well.
"...almost all the ones who went bad were in Slytherin..."
"...that Tom Riddle bloke
was in Slytherin...I hear he's calling himself Voldemort now and has gone
bad..."
"I heard...he's even trying to recruit followers to do his bidding..."
"...Mum was in Gryffindor, so I hope I get so lucky; she says the kids there were great..." From listening to their conversation, we heard that Hogwarts had four basic houses...Slytherin, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Gryffindor and that on the night new students arrived, they were divided into each house.
"How are students sorted?" Amelia asked a boy in front of us. The boy had light brown hair and gray eyes.
"Don't know." He shrugged and I guessed that he was a first year like us.
"I heard you have to recite a spell..." someone called.
"No, I heard you have to change a rat into a goblet!" someone else put in. Others chimed in with guesses, some of them funny, others daft. God, I hoped there wasn't one where you had to wand-battle a giant!
"Number forty-four...Remus Lupin!" the witch up front called and the boy in front of us went up.
"Good luck..." he called.
"You too..." we called after him. Finally our numbers were called and we left the store a half hour later with new robes.
"God, I think it'll be neat wearing these robes," Amelia told me as we headed down toward the small cafe where our parents were meeting us.
"Me too," I nodded. "They look so dignified."
"We're ready then," Amelia nodded.
"Hope so." We had all our supplies, at least the material ones, so we headed back toward the muggle world. Now if we could be sure we were mentally and emotionally ready, that would be a feat.
More later!