Note: I do not own Harry Potter or anything book-related; J.K. Rowling does.
Spaz, Razzle, Troy, Scarface, and Sexton are mine.
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A face, framed by two pink-dyed strands of dead-straight hair peered out of the grungy windowpane high above the teeming London sidewalk. The rest of her hair was black, and cropped close to her head, long legs crooked as she knelt below the window on a dirty mattress, gazing at the rooftop across the road.
Her name was Spaz, and she was eleven years old. An odd moniker, to be sure, but it was her name. She would discover shortly that, in the wizarding world, odd names were quite commonplace. Taking a look at her current situation, it was quite understandable how she had gotten this dubbing.
Right now, she was living in a squat with five teenaged heroin addicts and a twenty-something, male punker.
You see, Spaz had been abandoned at the age of five in a park. There, she had been picked up by a rather addled teenage girl who'd lost her own child, and brought to a similar squat and accepted into the fold of the chronically homeless, when her saviour had overdosed two years later.
She had learned how to read and write, do basic mathematics from the better educated of her brethren, and she had learned everything from how to steal cars to the fine arts of panhandling from those less fortunate.
The six she lived with now were named Scarface, Sexton, Ringer, Troy and Razzledazzle. Scarface had been blinded by the blade of a vengeful lover, years before. Sexton had contracted HIV from a bad needle, they had not seen him for a week. Ringer liked to make jewelry out of the bones of small animals he killed and ate. Troy was the most beautiful of them, even though his angelic body wasted quickly from the drugs he consumed. Razzledazzle, the eldest, was named because, once, the others said they had seen him shoot a big, silver rabbit out of a stick.
But none of that mattered now, Spaz was preoccupied with the large brown owl that had alighted on the windowsill, and was staring at her with its big yellow eyes. Ever so slowly, it raised a single talon and tapped on the glass. The bloody thing wanted to come in. It had an envelope in the other claw, so, she deduced that it must be here for someone else in the building. Her fellow squatters often used carrier pigeons, but owls? That was new.
She struggled to get the window open, grunting with exertion, one sleeve of the oversized checkered blouse she wore sliding off her shoulder. The bird just watched her.
Finally, she wrested the window open, letting a breath of cold air into the small, dirty apartment as well as the predatory bird. She scooted back then, and picked up a year-old magazine she had already read a thousand times, allowing the bird room to make its delivery to someone else in the abandoned building.
It was, apparently, not interested in the others, however, for it dropped the heavy parchment envelope in the preteens lap, and promptly flew back out of the open window.
Spaz gaped at her present, standing and shutting the window once again as she regarded the emerald ink on the front of the envelope. SPAZ, it read, bearing no last name –she had none, to the best of her knowledge– and her address. Not even Spaz knew exactly where she lived!
The girl was too delighted to be getting mail to think too much of its origins, and held the envelope above her head as she tore out of the room, grinning and calling the name of the eldest squatter, and her dearest friend "Raz! Raz!" So that all the world would know that Spaz had gotten a very special letter.