When I was six my family and I left England to travel the world, due to my parents' job, spending at most half a year in one place. I had attended many Wizarding schools.
About four months ago I turned sixteen, which was also when all the trouble started again and it was made official that Voldemort had returned. We returned right away so that my parents could join the Order of the Phoenix, we would have done so earlier but at that stage, most people didn't believe the return and it would have cost my parents their jobs.
When we returned, even though the Wizarding community was in a state of terror, there was one thing that I feared more than Voldemort bursting into my house and killing us all, and that was starting at yet another new school. This time it would be Hogwarts.
I know it sounds foolish and I should have been used to it, but I clearly wasn't. However this time there would be one person at least in my year that I knew.
When we were five years old we lived next door to his family. His parents had forbidden him to have anyhing to do with me because of our families opposing political views but we often snuck out to play hide and seek in the forest behind his family's manor, or to play on our toy broomsticks, pretending to be the greatest Quidditch players in the world.
I guess at first it was because we both had no siblings and we were the only children in the area at that time, but we soon became inseparable, until we moved. I'd forgotten all about Draco Malfoy until those few months ago when we heard that his father was sent to Azkaban for being a Death Eater.
When I had been little my parents had explained to me that his father was "bad" and warned me to stay away from him at all costs although at the time I hadn't understood why.
Now, as I stepped onto platform 9 ¾ for the first time I kept half an eye out for the sweet-natured blond haired boy who had always said that he would become the driver of the Knight Bus when he grew up, never thinking that in the time that we had lost contact, he had become just like his father…