Terry's last month at the Barduses was uneventful. It was just full of more dirt and pain, as per usual.

The encounter with first the drunken giant, and then second, the undead, still had an effect on Terry's grandparents. They wandered around the house, shaken, but attempting to do the things they used to do. Except now, Diddle put his puzzles together and framed them, and Nonny had taken to ordering take-out, and rearranging the food into nice designs on the family's rose patterned plates. Grudley had been so disturbed by being turned into a booze bottle, that he was beginning to lose weight and his coarse pig hair. Naturally, they blamed all of these changes on Terry.

"It's your fault Grudley's emotionally scarred," Nonny whined to Terry one evening, as she arranged stir-fry in a semi-circle on a plate. "It's also your fault that Diddle isn't creating as much fire fuel as he used to. We're going to freeze, Terry, not that it matters to you, you sorry excuse for a cripple."

Terry had been slightly taken aback by this. Being a cripple was the only thing he had ever been good at. Feeling down, he headed outside to his hole, and that's where he spent most of his time, except for meals.

One night at the dinner table, Terry asked his grandparents, "Can I get a ride to King's Cross Station tomorrow?"

"No," Diddle answered, chewing on some rice. "I'm sure you can walk. You have that one good leg. Besides, it's only twenty miles away…give or take twenty."

"Diddle," Nonny began. "Do we really want Terry out in public for such a long time? Why don't we just call a taxi?"

"Good idea, Nonny. We'll take money out of Terry's savings account to cover the fee. That should be the last of it," Diddle said, glaring at Terry as if it was painful even to have him at the table.

"I've never ridden in a taxi cab before," Terry said excitedly, spraying Grudley with rice chunks. Grudley, in turn, lapped up Terry's saliva soaked rice bits.

"Stop feeding Grudley from your own mouth!" Nonny snapped at her grandson. "We don't want to disease him or anything."

Terry wiped his mouth with a napkin.

"And stop using our good napkins! The grass is good enough for you. It's cleaner than you are, what with all the rain we've been having," Nonny added. "But I suppose you'd know, eh, Terry? Your little hole has turned into a swimming pool of sorts, hasn't it?"

"The neighbors called it a cesspool," Terry told her.

"Quiet, boy," Diddle said. "Don't talk back to your grandmother."

"I wasn't!" Terry protested.

"I saw that twitch in your leg. It means you're being disobedient, doesn't it, boy?" Diddle pressed.

"No!" Terry argued. "It means it hurts!"

"That's it!" Diddle exclaimed. "Take your pain outside to your hole, where we don't have to see it."

And so Terry spent a miserable evening in the pouring rain.

However, in the morning, the sun was shining with new promise for Terry, or at least that's what Terry liked to believe. The Barduses called a cab for him, and when the driver showed up, they kicked him good-bye, and threw his luggage at him.

"And stay out!" they threatened his retreating form. Terry heard the slam of the door as his luggage was manhandled into the trunk of the cab. A large, surly looking Irish man took hold of the wheel, and they were off, spinning wildly into heavy traffic.

When they got to King's Cross Station, the man quickly threw Terry's luggage onto the ground, tried to mug him, and sped off without his pay. Crippled kids made him nervous.

Terry's little mouth hung agape as he looked up at the large public transportation building. He had never seen anything so beautiful in his life. It was while he was standing there, staring at the building in awe, that a family of three took pity on Terry, and approached him.

"Are you lost, son?" the large man asked. Terry could tell that he was very wealthy, and his bushy, well manicured moustache twitched as he smiled at Terry.

"Not yet!" Terry told him. "But I haven't tried to find platform nine and three quarters yet."

"Oh!" the slender woman exclaimed, fingering her pearls, and moving aside to reveal a small girl Terry's age with spectacles and short, well cut black hair. "Lisa's headed for Hogwart's, too!"

"Hi there, Lisa!" Terry said, being polite. Who knows where he acquired that habit? "I'm Terry. Terry Boot."

Terry could tell that the family was friendly. The father was a little portly, but very jolly and good natured, and the mother was tall, thin, and very pretty. Terry could tell that she had a kind heart by the way she looked down at him and smiled without grimacing first. Their daughter was smiling shyly at Terry, and not even looking at his lack of leg.

"Do you know how to get to the platform?" Lisa asked him. "I've been here before, but I haven't seen a platform nine and three quarters."

"Well!" said Lisa's father cheerfully. "This will be an adventure then."

"It must be somewhere between platforms nine and ten," Lisa's mother added, as they walked into the crowded building. They were somewhere around platform eight when they got their first clue.

"Mandy, you had better not have forgotten your wand. I told you to make sure you packed it before we left the house," came a shrill, panicked voice from behind them. It belonged to a large woman, who was screaming at a younger, thinner version of herself.

"Nevermind!" the girl said. "It's right here!"

Terry and Lisa's family followed them to a barrier between platforms nine and ten, and that's when it appeared like mother and daughter just disappeared into the brickwork.

The family and Terry stopped, confused. Surprisingly, it was Terry who reassured them and put them all back on the right foot.

"If there's one thing I've learned about the magical world," he told them. "It's that it doesn't make any sense, and it's even less discreet."

So Terry went first, dragging his luggage, and bravely walked into the barrier and through it. Sure enough, it was a gateway of sorts. He found himself standing in a large, open structure. A big engine was puffing steam, as Lisa and her family joined Terry on the platform.

"Good show, son!" Lisa's father said, patting Terry's shoulder. "Well done!"

Terry was about to hyperventilate under all of this well wishing.

"Thank you, sir," he squeaked, tears of happiness threatening to spill out of his eyes.

As Lisa and her family said their good-byes, Terry hopped, scuffled, and shuffled his way into a cabin on the Hogwarts Express. He was very excited about attending school. Maybe he would be able to take a woodworking class, and fashion himself a new leg out of wood. It might make him look daring if he wore a jaunty peg leg.

Just then, Terry was trampled. "Whoa there, son! I didn't see you down there," a baggage boy laughed. "Do you have your ticket?"

"No," Terry said sadly. "Professor Kettleburn gave me this, though."

Terry handed the boy the ticket to the gentleman's club.

"Hey! Thanks kid!" the boy exclaimed. "Get on the train, and don't tell anyone about this," he added with a wink.

As Terry left, he managed to trip and entangle himself in about ten people's luggage.

"Looks like another one for Ravenclaw!" the luggage boy called over to his buddy, kissing his ticket, and counting his lucky stars. "That Professor Kettleburn always did have good taste," he mumbled to himself.

Terry managed to find an empty cabin, and settled himself on the cushioned seats. He was feeling a little lonely, but nothing that he wasn't already used to. He got himself ready for a good few hours of staring blankly out the window, when the door suddenly swung open.

"Do you mind if I sit with you? Everywhere else is full," a red haired boy lied to Terry. His eyes widened in shock when he realized just what person he was speaking to. "You're, why you're," he stuttered out.

"Terry!" Terry said, standing up shakily to reach for the red haired boy's hand.

"Crippled!" the boy said in utter surprise. "I've never met anyone like you, but I've had a sheltered childhood."

"A polar bear took it!" Terry said, again proud that his leg was snatched by a two ton mammal of frightening size.

"Wicked," the boy breathed. Suddenly, from down the corridor came a shout of "Harry Potter's sitting alone! Whoever gets there first is his new best friend!"

The red haired nitwit bolted out of the room faster than a cheetah on speed.

Terry hoped that even when the kid was the patsy of "The Boy Who Lived", he would remember the moment that he had shared with poor, one-legged Terry Boot.

The engine started, and the train took off from the station. Terry watched all the families waving to their children that they were sending off for a year at Hogwarts. He liked to pretend he had family out there in the crowd, but his fantasy was ruined when someone threw a rotten egg at his window. It was probably an accident. After all, they couldn't see he was crippled from the platform.

"Hey there!" said a familiar, cheerful voice from the doorway. It was the wandless girl from the platform. "Mind if I sit with you?"

"No," said Terry, looking at her in awe.  No one had ever voluntarily spent time with him before.

"My name's Mandy. Mandy Brocklehurst. Who are you?" she asked, sitting down in the seat across from Terry.

"Terry Boot," he replied, a little warily. "Don't you see I'm crippled? Doesn't that bother you?"

"You're crippled?" asked Mandy. "I didn't even notice!" she added, taking off her rose tinted glasses. She settled herself comfortably on the seat across from Terry, and smiled at him.

"I like you already," Terry said sincerely.

"I like you too, Terry," Mandy told him with a big smile. "You and your crazy phantom leg. Hey, would you like to share this lunch my mom packed for me?"

"Lunch?" Terry asked, amazed. "Someone voluntarily gave you food? Did the government make them?"

Mandy looked quizzically at Terry, and then smiled. "No, Terry, does the government make your family feed you?"

"Not anymore!" Terry told her. "They gave up trying after awhile."

Suddenly, the door swung open once again, and another familiar face popped into the compartment.

"Is there room in here for me?" asked Lisa from the doorway.

"Sure!" said Mandy. "Come on in!"

"Oh! Hi there, Terry. It's great to see you again! I see you got settled in right away on the train. It's been a madhouse for me," Lisa said, sitting down.

Then Lisa looked over at Mandy, and said, smiling, "Hi there! My name's Lisa. Lisa Turpin. I'm so excited about Hogwarts. Are you a first year, also?"

"I am!" said Mandy. "My name's Mandy. Did you notice that Terry was crippled?"

"Oh, hey! I didn't even notice your absent appendage," Lisa exclaimed smartly.

"Most people don't notice me at all!" Terry blurted out in true Terry fashion. "It doesn't matter if you don't notice that I'm crippled!"

"Okay!" said Lisa, sitting down next to Terry.

Terry looked at his new best friends, smiling over the scene proudly, as if he had just won a marathon- which he could never really do, you know, with that phantom leg. Lisa Turpin was a tall slender girl, with keen bright green eyes and startling shiny pitch hair cut bluntly at her jaw line. She already wore her Hogwarts robes, which looked baggy and foreign on her small build.

Terry could tell she had been Muggle raised, what with the whole experience on the platform and all. Looking at Lisa was like looking at himself, besides the sad sorry state of his everything, and of course the missing leg. In fact, Lisa herself looked rather wealthy, with a soft, kind smile placed on her pale, regal face, and tiny spectacles nearly dangling from the tip of her long pointy nose. She grinned over at Terry in what seemed a friendly glance, though could easily have been mistaken for pity mixed with knowing she was better than him.

Mandy Brocklehurst was nearly the exact opposite of Lisa. Her eyes were large and dark brown, and her hair was a light auburn, flying all over the place. She had a smattering of freckles across her nose, just like Terry, and a ready smile, which Terry warily thought that within the hour would be laughing at him. Unlike Lisa and Terry, Mandy had been raised by a Wizarding family, and had a few hand-me-downs. It was nothing to be ashamed of, like a missing appendage.

After an hour or so of talking to each other quietly, the old witch on the train rolled by with her trolley full of sweets. Terry became so hungry at the sight of the magical candies that he almost drooled onto his shoe.

"Do any of you want anything off the trolley?" the old witch asked, kindly.

"Do you have a leg?" Terry asked seriously.

"No, but how about a nice chocolate frog?" she offered.

"We'll take three of everything," Lisa told the old witch, whipping out her plastic. "Do you take Master Card?"

That's how Terry got his first, real taste of the Wizarding world. Literally.  There were so many candies to choose from, that Terry almost passed out from pure joy.

"Try the frogs, first," Mandy said, biting into her screaming frog. "They're my favorite."

What they don't tell you on the box of chocolate frogs is that they scream in agony going all the way down, but Terry didn't mind. After all, it was all magic, wasn't it?

"Terry, what wizarding card did you get?" asked Mandy, leaning over to look at the small piece of cardboard in his chocolate frog wrapper.

Terry picked up the card inside the chocolate frog package, and turned it over excitedly. It was blank.

"Odd, there isn't anything on your card," Mandy said, shrugging her shoulders good naturedly. "Here, you can have one of my cards," she said, fluffing her wad of hair and snorting, handing Terry her Dumbledore card.

"Dumbledore?" Terry asked, looking at the card. "Wow, thanks! Now I get it!" Terry said, clutching the card for dear life, as though he thought it might disappear at any moment. The Dumbledore on the card looked up at Terry and gasped, blushing apologetically.

"If I were real I'd apologize for letting that polar bear gnaw off your leg," the card Dumbledore said, stroking his beard. "Too bad I'm not." And then he cast a spell and the card went up in flames.

"Can they do that?" asked Terry, but the other girls were too busy looking in the other direction, for a large boy had just burst into the room, sobbing.

"HAS ANYONE IN HERE SEEN MY FROG?!?" he asked insanely, pulling out pieces of his hair. "Already I know that I am going to have the worst luck ever!" Then he looked at Terry's stump, and a huge smile lit up his face. "Never mind. You'll always be worse off than me, always."

Terry frowned, and clutched his stump.

"Thanks guys, you've really cheered me up!" the boy said manically, and left the room screaming, "HAS ANYONE SEEN A LEG…I MEAN, FROG?!?"

Just as the lard bag left, a thin, bucked tooth girl scampered into the room, a dictionary attached to her hand. "Hey, I am Hermione…" her eyes glanced down to Terry's lack o' leg. "Oh gawd. There is no magic to fix that!" She promptly passed out at the thought. Mandy dragged her unconscious body out into the hall, just to be trampled on by three boys, pushing their way into the cabin.

Lisa rolled her eyes. "Can't we get any privacy?"

The three boys entered anyway, and Terry recognized the middle one. It was his friend from the robe shop, Draco Malfoy.

"Is it true?" the pale boy spat out. "They're saying down the train that Harry Potter's in this compartment… and wait… you're that stubby kid from the robe shop."

"That's me!" Terry said excitedly.

"Hey!" broke in Lisa, who looked quite a bit better off than Draco, as she polished her platinum glasses. "Don't call Terry stubby! I'm sure it is bad for his self esteem, and will have long term effects."

Mandy nodded, and glared at the boys.

At any other time Draco Malfoy would have taken this, and Lisa's obvious wealth, as a grand offense. If there was one thing Draco hated more than Muggles, it was Muggles with more money than he had. He should have been enraged.

"This isn't even worth it," Draco said, scratching his arm, yawning. "I'll see you people around." And they left.

"Well, he sure was rude," Lisa said, glaring at the boy's retreating form. Mandy nodded her head in agreement.

"That was the son of Lucius Malfoy," Mandy explained, wrinkling up her nose. "My father works with him at the Ministry of Magic. Daddy's the receptionist at the "Misuse of Muggle Artifacts," station. Lucius is always skulking about in there. I mean, I'm annoyed by Muggles as much as the next wizard, but Lucius Malfoy despises them. He's like obsessed with them. Daddy says he must be quite the masochist."

Terry hadn't been listening much to the conversation but his little ears perked up when he heard the word "masochist". For some odd reason that Terry guessed could only be integral to the plot, it struck a feeling of profound terror into his heart, and his stub burned violently.

"Ouch!" Terry yelped, clutching at his stub and rubbing it soothingly.

"What's wrong?" Lisa asked with a concerned look on her face.

"It's my stump," he said, frowning. "Sometimes it just burns."

Mandy patted him on the shoulder and smiled sympathetically. "Here, Terry," she said, handing him a small colorful box. "Have one of Berti Bott's Every Flavor Beans!"

Terry opened the box and poured a few beans into his hand. "I like beans," he commented before popping a greenish looking candy into his mouth. For a few moments his face held the same blissful ignorance it always had. But, as Terry's taste buds warmed up, a look of complete horror and fear filled his eyes. He spit the bean out onto the floor and coughed dramatically.

"That tasted like the time I went insane from the hunger and licked Grudley, my grandparent's pig," he said, little tears welling up in his eyes.

"Oh," Mandy said, hiding a small smile. "That must have been one of the vomit flavored ones."

"Why would anyone make vomit flavored beans?" Lisa asked, looking down at the candies in Terry's hand.

"This is the magical world," Mandy said in an exasperated tone, as if that explained all.

"Oh," Lisa said dumbly. "I can't imagine that Berti fellow would sell a lot of beans."

"But he does," Mandy said smartly. "Berti Bott's Every Flavor Beans are everyone's favorite wizarding candy!"

Terry, inspecting the beans in his hand, picked up a bright red one and carefully placed it in his mouth. He had the same reaction as before, the bean falling to the floor in a puddle of Terry juices.

"Oh, no," Lisa said. "Another vomit flavored one?"

"No, that one was cherry," Terry said, gagging.

"You need to watch out for those shifty fruit flavored ones," Mandy added.

The rest of the trip went smoothly, as Terry talked both girls into a deep sleep. They asked him about his family, and he had gotten three words into it, "I live with…" and they had fallen into unconsciousness.

After a few hours of quiet pondering, the train pulled into Hogsmeade, and unloaded all of its passengers. Waiting for them was Hagrid, who was calling out stupidly, "Firs' years this way! Follow me!"

And all of the "firs" years did, including Terry, and as we all know, Terry loves to be included.