"It's about the most insulting thing he could think of," gasped Ron, coming
back up. "Mudblood's a really foul name for someone who was Muggle born-
you know, no magic parents."
Her large brown eyes fill with tears. She turns quickly away from her friends so they cannot see her crying, towards the fire. Her friends continue talking, not even noticing the effect these small words have had on her. She stares into the fire, the red flickering light from the flames reflected in her eyes. She cannot let them know....
"An' they haven't invented a spell our Hermione can't do," said Hagrid proudly.
She hears her name mentioned. She feels her cheeks flush a familiar shade of magenta. All of the early memories flood back to her in an instant. She feels a sudden stab at her heart as she remembers those painful memories, those experiences that make her how she is today....
"Dirty blood, see. Common blood. It's mad."
Dirty blood..... 'Well that's a new one,' she thinks, her eyes again brimming with tears. Her gaze remains on the fire, although the images are becoming more and more blurred. She had dared to hope, dared to dream, that when she came to Hogwarts, things would be different. She would finally be able to settle in.
She fingers the cut on her wrist. It still shows through clearly, although the damage was done over two years ago. Her head fills with taunts and jeers, all devastatingly familiar to her. Each has been played over and over again in her brain so often that she will never be able to forget them. Some are just childish comments that many people would merely whisk away, while others chill her blood and make the cut on her wrist sting with pain at the mere memory of them. Tears begin to fall silently down her still-flushed cheeks. She cannot turn around, cannot show her friends the truth. "My friends," she whispers, so quietly that the others cannot hear. "My friends...." The words unsurprisingly sound and feel strange on her tongue. Before arriving at Hogwarts, she had probably never uttered those words in her life.
The tears continue to fall silently. Thoughts and memories are chasing themselves around her brain. The blurred image of the flames is fading by the minute. She allows herself to slip into her own thoughts and her view gradually changes.
She is now standing at the front of a classroom, a mere four years old, watching the other children with apprehension. They all appear to be glaring at her, each with a fixated stare aimed directly at her small frame. She feels an arm go around her shoulders and instinctively stiffens. "Go on..erm..." Hermione! she thinks desperately. Please, PLEASE say Hermione! But the combination of her shyness and terror prevents her from speaking aloud. "Her...her..." Yes, yes! "Her-mo-nanny?" Childish giggles fill the room. She feels as though each laugh is ripping her apart, tearing her from limb to limb. "Hermione," she mumbles. "Her-mi-onny?" She says nothing. There is no need to. Her classmates are now in hysterics, each one's laughing face leering up at her. She cannot take it anymore. She lets out a whimper and runs from the classroom, her face stained with fast- falling tears.
Whirling images then spring up in front of her, like a distorted kaleidoscope. Images of children laughing, children pointing, children shouting flash before her eyes. One image stands out particularly clearly. She is six years old and standing at the top of a large flight of stone steps leading down to the school hall. Towering above her, both smiling nastily down into her terrified eyes are two other girls, of about eight or nine. She can hear their voices, pressed up close to her and shouting so that her skin tingles and her ear feels as though it will burst. "You never talk to anyone, you never have any friends, you're always in your own little world, aren't you?" Fear prevents her from saying a word. She simply stands there shaking, her brown eyes watering and her small fingers trembling as though they are made of rubber. "AREN'T YOU?!" She nods her head violently in order to stop them shouting, so violently that she nearly falls down the stairs. She clings desperately to the handrail, her legs dangling precariously over the step edge. The two girls smirk, and move forwards at exactly the same time. She can feel the pressure of their hands on her back, can feel herself slipping.... She flies helplessly through the air. At first it seems as though everything is going to be fine, she is going to survive. She can feel a strange floating sensation as she soars for a few milliseconds, unsuspended, several feet above the stairs. Then gravity begins to act. She screams with terror as she plummets, heading down and down, knowing she is going to hit the floor... She feels concrete smacking against her head. She goes head-over-heels several times, the excruciating agony filling every inch of her body. She finally lands in a crumpled heap at the bottom. She glances at her small pink hands, now stained a deep red. She tentatively licks it, the end of her tongue scraping across her hand. It tastes strangely sweet. Blood, she thinks, gazing again at her hand. My blood... Suddenly everything goes black, and she can see and feel no more.
Again her thoughts begin to jumble, spinning in a mad loop in front of her eyes. She can see herself in a hospital bed; see herself, with a sling across her left arm and scars all over her face and hands, sitting in a large, modern office, looking up at the headmistress, her parents sitting on either side of her. She dares to glance at her mother's face. Her mother's eyes are filled with tears and her hand is shaking slightly as she listens to what the headmistress is saying. She turns to her father, and instantly looks away. His eyes are full of disgust and bitterness. He is not upset or angry at what has happened. She knows that he thinks it was her fault, that she had aggravated the bullies. I didn't! she pleads silently, trying to communicate with him telepathically. Please Daddy, I didn't! But he does not respond. He simply continues to stare at the headmistress and ignores her completely. She knows with a lurch of fear that no good can come of this.... "Why didn't you tell us, Hermione?" asks her mother. She is now openly crying, her face a strange blotchy red, her eyes gazing longingly at her daughter. This sight of her mother in such a state frightens her. She shrinks back in her chair and says nothing. "Hermione! Answer when you are being spoken to!" bellows her father. The sudden noise startles her and she begins to shake with fear. "I...I....I don't know," she whispers, so quietly it is almost inaudible. She does know why. This is possibly the longest time she and her parents have ever spent together. She cannot ever remember being able to talk to them before. There simply wasn't time. She would be picked up from school by one of her child minders, taken back to her house and there Miranda, or Sally, or Bobby or Tamsin (it depended on the day) would cook her a meal, run her a bath and get her into bed. In the morning it was up to her to get organized. She would make her own breakfast, pack her own packed-lunch for school, brush her teeth, comb her hair and then wait for her childminder to turn up in their car and drive her, in silence, to school. Her parents were simply never there. She only knew them as her parents because she had once accidentally called Sally "Mummy" during a car journey to school. "I'm not your mum!" she had snapped, making her cower in her car seat. "You've got your own mum and dad who love you very much. They just don't see you much because they've got work. Now don't talk, I'm trying to hear the radio!"
She had known that Sally was lying, even though she was only five years old. Her own parents didn't 'love her very much.' How could they, when they were never there? She had used to wait up for them at night, rather like children wait up for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. She would lie in her bed, the covers pulled tightly up to her chin, listening intently to that 'click' of the front door to signify their homecoming. She would hear them talking in tired voices, hear them climbing up the stairs, towards her bedroom door... But they never came in. She would wait and wait, hoping and wishing that they just stick their heads round the door, but they never came in to kiss her goodnight or to check on her. Eventually, after staying up for hours, she would collapse into a tear-stained sleep, hugging her pillow tightly and sobbing quietly into it. She knew that she would have to suffer in silence like this, because she would never be able to get close enough to her parents to be able to rely on them for comfort.
Her memories flick forwards to several weeks later. She is standing in her bedroom, trying on her new school uniform. She can hear her own voice, shakily speaking the same phrases over and over again. She hates talking in front of people. Yet she knows that this is the very reason that she never seems to make any friends. She must gain confidence somehow. She must be able to laugh and shout and fool around like the other children. She does not know yet that she is not like other children. She has a special quality that will set her apart from the other children whom she is so desperate to be like and to be liked by. She turns back to the mirror, her throat dry with nerves even though there is no-one there to criticise or praise her, and begins to speak again.
Her thoughts become jumbled and distorted again, with one image flickering to the next. She can see herself, now in the new school uniform, standing alone in the middle of the playground, two hundred pairs of children's eyes in all shapes and sizes staring at her. Suddenly her memories flick forward several hours. She is now standing in a classroom, surrounded by people. She is talking very fast, gabbling her words out and making exaggerated hand gestures. She is telling them about her life, or rather, that is what she is saying about her life. But both she and they know that most of it is not true. As she clings desperately to the story, adding more and more excitement and drama, the children begin to gradually drift away. By the time she has finished, there is only one small boy left, no older than five or six, gazing up at her. "You're a liar," he says, then runs off into the crowd of other children as though afraid that she may chase after him. But she doesn't. She simply walks outside and sits alone on the playground wall, her back turned away from the shouting and laughing gaggle of children, silent tears running down her cheeks as she realises that once again she has been rejected by those whom she longs to be wanted by.
Her final memory is when she is eleven years old. She is now in the top year of her school and ought to be respected and admired by the lower years as the rest of her year are. Instead she is openly pointed at and whispered about. The students do not speak to her or go near her, because they have heard that when she is upset she can do strange things, such as knocking over cups full of water without touching them and managing to make objects hover several centimeters from the ground. No-one can actually prove that these things are being done by her, but seeing as she gets the blame for almost anything anyway, it is hardly surprising that the children choose her to blame these super-natural occurrences on. As she sits on her own at a double desk in a mobile classroom, she hears a voice over the intercom. "Would Hermione Granger please come down to the school office. Hermione Granger to the school office please." She stands up and walks out of the classroom, ignoring her teacher's comment of, "Well hang on a minute Hermione; we're in the middle of a spelling test! I'm sure it's not that important..." As she enters the office, she sees a tall man with half-moon spectacles, a long white beard and a scarlet cloak that comes down to the floor. The moment he sees Hermione, his face lights up into a charming smile. "Did you receive a letter this morning, Hermione?" he asks, his eyes twinkling behind his glasses. "Yes," she whispers. "But I...I thought it was a joke..." "No joke," he whispers back. "This is real. We want you, Hermione. Hogwarts wants you." He holds out his arms as she runs to him and buries her face in his robes, tears spilling out from her eyes. He hugs her tightly, knowing how important this is to her, and whispers in her ear, "I've been watching you ever since you were a baby. You've always had something special, a something that we want, and no-one can take that away from you."
She hears something about a cabbage patch. Her mind flicks back to the cabin, the fire, her friends sitting around her. She turns and sees her friends getting up and heading towards the cabin door. She stands up, wipes the tears hurriedly from her eyes and joins her friends. They have not noticed anything. She looks at each of them, a lump forming in her throat. She knows that if Malfoy tries to call her that again, her friends will defend her. She does not want them to know about her secret past. She knows that she will never be hugely popular. She will still always have people mocking and jeering at her, no matter what she does. She thinks that she is just that kind of person. But now she at least has friends. She looks up at Harry, Ron and Hagrid, who she is certain will stand by her and judge her on her own unique and individual qualities, instead of constantly expecting her to fit in with other people's ideas and expectations. All she ever wanted was to be wanted. After over a decade of isolation and loneliness, she can at last have the love and friendship that before she could only dream about.
Her large brown eyes fill with tears. She turns quickly away from her friends so they cannot see her crying, towards the fire. Her friends continue talking, not even noticing the effect these small words have had on her. She stares into the fire, the red flickering light from the flames reflected in her eyes. She cannot let them know....
"An' they haven't invented a spell our Hermione can't do," said Hagrid proudly.
She hears her name mentioned. She feels her cheeks flush a familiar shade of magenta. All of the early memories flood back to her in an instant. She feels a sudden stab at her heart as she remembers those painful memories, those experiences that make her how she is today....
"Dirty blood, see. Common blood. It's mad."
Dirty blood..... 'Well that's a new one,' she thinks, her eyes again brimming with tears. Her gaze remains on the fire, although the images are becoming more and more blurred. She had dared to hope, dared to dream, that when she came to Hogwarts, things would be different. She would finally be able to settle in.
She fingers the cut on her wrist. It still shows through clearly, although the damage was done over two years ago. Her head fills with taunts and jeers, all devastatingly familiar to her. Each has been played over and over again in her brain so often that she will never be able to forget them. Some are just childish comments that many people would merely whisk away, while others chill her blood and make the cut on her wrist sting with pain at the mere memory of them. Tears begin to fall silently down her still-flushed cheeks. She cannot turn around, cannot show her friends the truth. "My friends," she whispers, so quietly that the others cannot hear. "My friends...." The words unsurprisingly sound and feel strange on her tongue. Before arriving at Hogwarts, she had probably never uttered those words in her life.
The tears continue to fall silently. Thoughts and memories are chasing themselves around her brain. The blurred image of the flames is fading by the minute. She allows herself to slip into her own thoughts and her view gradually changes.
She is now standing at the front of a classroom, a mere four years old, watching the other children with apprehension. They all appear to be glaring at her, each with a fixated stare aimed directly at her small frame. She feels an arm go around her shoulders and instinctively stiffens. "Go on..erm..." Hermione! she thinks desperately. Please, PLEASE say Hermione! But the combination of her shyness and terror prevents her from speaking aloud. "Her...her..." Yes, yes! "Her-mo-nanny?" Childish giggles fill the room. She feels as though each laugh is ripping her apart, tearing her from limb to limb. "Hermione," she mumbles. "Her-mi-onny?" She says nothing. There is no need to. Her classmates are now in hysterics, each one's laughing face leering up at her. She cannot take it anymore. She lets out a whimper and runs from the classroom, her face stained with fast- falling tears.
Whirling images then spring up in front of her, like a distorted kaleidoscope. Images of children laughing, children pointing, children shouting flash before her eyes. One image stands out particularly clearly. She is six years old and standing at the top of a large flight of stone steps leading down to the school hall. Towering above her, both smiling nastily down into her terrified eyes are two other girls, of about eight or nine. She can hear their voices, pressed up close to her and shouting so that her skin tingles and her ear feels as though it will burst. "You never talk to anyone, you never have any friends, you're always in your own little world, aren't you?" Fear prevents her from saying a word. She simply stands there shaking, her brown eyes watering and her small fingers trembling as though they are made of rubber. "AREN'T YOU?!" She nods her head violently in order to stop them shouting, so violently that she nearly falls down the stairs. She clings desperately to the handrail, her legs dangling precariously over the step edge. The two girls smirk, and move forwards at exactly the same time. She can feel the pressure of their hands on her back, can feel herself slipping.... She flies helplessly through the air. At first it seems as though everything is going to be fine, she is going to survive. She can feel a strange floating sensation as she soars for a few milliseconds, unsuspended, several feet above the stairs. Then gravity begins to act. She screams with terror as she plummets, heading down and down, knowing she is going to hit the floor... She feels concrete smacking against her head. She goes head-over-heels several times, the excruciating agony filling every inch of her body. She finally lands in a crumpled heap at the bottom. She glances at her small pink hands, now stained a deep red. She tentatively licks it, the end of her tongue scraping across her hand. It tastes strangely sweet. Blood, she thinks, gazing again at her hand. My blood... Suddenly everything goes black, and she can see and feel no more.
Again her thoughts begin to jumble, spinning in a mad loop in front of her eyes. She can see herself in a hospital bed; see herself, with a sling across her left arm and scars all over her face and hands, sitting in a large, modern office, looking up at the headmistress, her parents sitting on either side of her. She dares to glance at her mother's face. Her mother's eyes are filled with tears and her hand is shaking slightly as she listens to what the headmistress is saying. She turns to her father, and instantly looks away. His eyes are full of disgust and bitterness. He is not upset or angry at what has happened. She knows that he thinks it was her fault, that she had aggravated the bullies. I didn't! she pleads silently, trying to communicate with him telepathically. Please Daddy, I didn't! But he does not respond. He simply continues to stare at the headmistress and ignores her completely. She knows with a lurch of fear that no good can come of this.... "Why didn't you tell us, Hermione?" asks her mother. She is now openly crying, her face a strange blotchy red, her eyes gazing longingly at her daughter. This sight of her mother in such a state frightens her. She shrinks back in her chair and says nothing. "Hermione! Answer when you are being spoken to!" bellows her father. The sudden noise startles her and she begins to shake with fear. "I...I....I don't know," she whispers, so quietly it is almost inaudible. She does know why. This is possibly the longest time she and her parents have ever spent together. She cannot ever remember being able to talk to them before. There simply wasn't time. She would be picked up from school by one of her child minders, taken back to her house and there Miranda, or Sally, or Bobby or Tamsin (it depended on the day) would cook her a meal, run her a bath and get her into bed. In the morning it was up to her to get organized. She would make her own breakfast, pack her own packed-lunch for school, brush her teeth, comb her hair and then wait for her childminder to turn up in their car and drive her, in silence, to school. Her parents were simply never there. She only knew them as her parents because she had once accidentally called Sally "Mummy" during a car journey to school. "I'm not your mum!" she had snapped, making her cower in her car seat. "You've got your own mum and dad who love you very much. They just don't see you much because they've got work. Now don't talk, I'm trying to hear the radio!"
She had known that Sally was lying, even though she was only five years old. Her own parents didn't 'love her very much.' How could they, when they were never there? She had used to wait up for them at night, rather like children wait up for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. She would lie in her bed, the covers pulled tightly up to her chin, listening intently to that 'click' of the front door to signify their homecoming. She would hear them talking in tired voices, hear them climbing up the stairs, towards her bedroom door... But they never came in. She would wait and wait, hoping and wishing that they just stick their heads round the door, but they never came in to kiss her goodnight or to check on her. Eventually, after staying up for hours, she would collapse into a tear-stained sleep, hugging her pillow tightly and sobbing quietly into it. She knew that she would have to suffer in silence like this, because she would never be able to get close enough to her parents to be able to rely on them for comfort.
Her memories flick forwards to several weeks later. She is standing in her bedroom, trying on her new school uniform. She can hear her own voice, shakily speaking the same phrases over and over again. She hates talking in front of people. Yet she knows that this is the very reason that she never seems to make any friends. She must gain confidence somehow. She must be able to laugh and shout and fool around like the other children. She does not know yet that she is not like other children. She has a special quality that will set her apart from the other children whom she is so desperate to be like and to be liked by. She turns back to the mirror, her throat dry with nerves even though there is no-one there to criticise or praise her, and begins to speak again.
Her thoughts become jumbled and distorted again, with one image flickering to the next. She can see herself, now in the new school uniform, standing alone in the middle of the playground, two hundred pairs of children's eyes in all shapes and sizes staring at her. Suddenly her memories flick forward several hours. She is now standing in a classroom, surrounded by people. She is talking very fast, gabbling her words out and making exaggerated hand gestures. She is telling them about her life, or rather, that is what she is saying about her life. But both she and they know that most of it is not true. As she clings desperately to the story, adding more and more excitement and drama, the children begin to gradually drift away. By the time she has finished, there is only one small boy left, no older than five or six, gazing up at her. "You're a liar," he says, then runs off into the crowd of other children as though afraid that she may chase after him. But she doesn't. She simply walks outside and sits alone on the playground wall, her back turned away from the shouting and laughing gaggle of children, silent tears running down her cheeks as she realises that once again she has been rejected by those whom she longs to be wanted by.
Her final memory is when she is eleven years old. She is now in the top year of her school and ought to be respected and admired by the lower years as the rest of her year are. Instead she is openly pointed at and whispered about. The students do not speak to her or go near her, because they have heard that when she is upset she can do strange things, such as knocking over cups full of water without touching them and managing to make objects hover several centimeters from the ground. No-one can actually prove that these things are being done by her, but seeing as she gets the blame for almost anything anyway, it is hardly surprising that the children choose her to blame these super-natural occurrences on. As she sits on her own at a double desk in a mobile classroom, she hears a voice over the intercom. "Would Hermione Granger please come down to the school office. Hermione Granger to the school office please." She stands up and walks out of the classroom, ignoring her teacher's comment of, "Well hang on a minute Hermione; we're in the middle of a spelling test! I'm sure it's not that important..." As she enters the office, she sees a tall man with half-moon spectacles, a long white beard and a scarlet cloak that comes down to the floor. The moment he sees Hermione, his face lights up into a charming smile. "Did you receive a letter this morning, Hermione?" he asks, his eyes twinkling behind his glasses. "Yes," she whispers. "But I...I thought it was a joke..." "No joke," he whispers back. "This is real. We want you, Hermione. Hogwarts wants you." He holds out his arms as she runs to him and buries her face in his robes, tears spilling out from her eyes. He hugs her tightly, knowing how important this is to her, and whispers in her ear, "I've been watching you ever since you were a baby. You've always had something special, a something that we want, and no-one can take that away from you."
She hears something about a cabbage patch. Her mind flicks back to the cabin, the fire, her friends sitting around her. She turns and sees her friends getting up and heading towards the cabin door. She stands up, wipes the tears hurriedly from her eyes and joins her friends. They have not noticed anything. She looks at each of them, a lump forming in her throat. She knows that if Malfoy tries to call her that again, her friends will defend her. She does not want them to know about her secret past. She knows that she will never be hugely popular. She will still always have people mocking and jeering at her, no matter what she does. She thinks that she is just that kind of person. But now she at least has friends. She looks up at Harry, Ron and Hagrid, who she is certain will stand by her and judge her on her own unique and individual qualities, instead of constantly expecting her to fit in with other people's ideas and expectations. All she ever wanted was to be wanted. After over a decade of isolation and loneliness, she can at last have the love and friendship that before she could only dream about.