Anne put a gold star on the next line in her daily notes section of her Hermione Granger notebook. Then she wrote a few lines about how Hermione had made her lunch box come to her. She scanned the page and then flipped backwards counting the stars. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty, something was definitely happening with her daughter. It was beginning to be completely unnerving, Hermione was capable of such great things but anytime Anne or Harold mentioned anything she became self-conscious and was extremely careful about anything that she was doing.
Anne flipped to another divider labeled "Dreams." Just as she had thought, every single night for the past three weeks Anne dreamt about a baby Hermione sitting in a highchair surrounded by butterflies and then she would just wake up. She began to pour every detail that she could remember onto the paper.
The soft pressure of a hand on the crown of her head brought her out of her stupor just as she was trying with every ounce of might she had to remember what colour the flowers on the linoleum were. She looked up and childishly smiled at her husband.
"Anne darling, I thought I would remind you that today is your day off and you had planned to go to the library to look into Hermione's telepathy more."
Where was her mind going? Not only had she forgotten that she had planned to go to the library but she had altogether forgot that she would normally be getting ready to go to work by now. Her mind really was becoming more and more absent lately. Maybe she was spending too much time trying to figure out what was going on with her only child. But she couldn't help it. She and Harold had decided when they first started to notice unusual things about her that they would not ever notify anyone in the way of scientists or psychologists. Hermione was not only a brilliant child, who had unusual talents and abilities, but she was their daughter and there was no way that they would turn her into a lab rat.
Anne had been keeping a notebook on her daughter since she was only seventeen months old. At first it was very little things, things that if they had happened in any other context would not have been very different from any child. But on their daughters second Valentines Day Hermione forced her parents to realize that she was extremely different from any other seventeen month old. Not only was she already walking, talking, and potty trained, but she began to attract butterflies everywhere that she went. They just started showing up. She was in the kitchen sitting in her highchair eating and she had started talking to herself. Not in the infant gibbering that most toddlers have, but she was having a conversation with herself about how pretty a day it was and then for no reason at all she exclaimed that she did not like "sweet tatos" and she just pushed them off of her tray. Within ten minutes the kitchen was full of every color butterfly imaginable and some like those who looked as if they had been tie-dyed, that were not.
Anne snapped out of her stupor and realized as she had been reading that very entry in her journal that that had been the day that she had been dreaming about for weeks. She quickly flipped to the first section in her notebook, which was now becoming too big for the six-inch binder that it was in, she would have to break down and split all of this stuff into two binders soon. The fist divider was labeled "Possible Answers." She scanned down the very short list: Religion, "Miracle Child," Bad Genes, Need to Survive, Telekinesis. None of these things had every really been practical answers for Anne. Every one of them could be ruled out with very little if any research. She allowed her husband to think that it was simply that Hermione had some form of adolescent telekinesis but Anne knew that even if that were part of it, it wasn't all.
As for being able to move things because of a need to survive, this had been mostly seen in cases where someone had a helicopter sitting on their chest or reaching for a weapon to defend oneself was only an inch or two away. Never before had anyone seen that laziness would be considered as something that would fit into that set of situations. She added DIET to the list and beside it in parentheses she added sweet potatoes. She couldn't believe that she was actually considering that something as simple as the food she was eating could be the very answer that she had been looking for all this time, but she refused to eliminate any idea without at least a second look at it. She closed the notebook and quickly got dressed. She looked at her watch and could not believe that she had let an entire hour pass by just looking at a notebook.
Anne was very well known at both the local public library and the medical library at the university. Though not many people thought about her long enough to realize that if she were really simply doing research for her dissertation, as she had said she was, she should have been finished three times over by now. Anne sat herself down at her favorite table in the corner of the Mezzanine level of the library. No one ever came up here and that was how she liked it. The librarians had learned long ago that there was no use in putting the books up that she was using, because she would just have them right back out again the next day. Anne was at the library whenever she had more than twenty minutes of consecutive free time. All of her lunch breaks and days off had been spent there. Also, lately, well the past few years, Hermione had been begging to go to the library every day after school. Hermione now knew the stacks better than some of the adults that had been coming to the library for years.
Anne shook herself out of her daze. She really must stop letting her mind drift off like it had been. She walked over to her personal shelf in the library. Ms. Reeves, the librarian had decided that this would be a lot easier on both of them. She pulled out the old worn copy of the Journal of Modern Medicine. And as she was about to sit down again she heard someone clear her throat quite loudly behind her. She turned to see Barbara Lovejoy.
Barbara was the president of the local chapter of the PWA, Professional Women's Association. Anne was not sure how professional she was but she was the only female doctor in the local heart and lung hospital, so that was probably how she had landed the presidency. But whether or not she was the president of the association Anne did not like her. Barbara was a woman that was painfully trendy, and she made it a policy to let others know when they were not. Anne was not looking forward to hearing what Barbara had to say about her being in a public library wearing old worn jeans and a t-shirt. But for once in the entirety of the ten or so years that Anne had known her, this was not what she wanted to tell her.
"Anne, hi how are you?"
"Hi Barbara, I'm good, how are you, and what brings you to the library this time of day?" Anne was quite sure she had never seen Barbara in the library at all, much less this time of day.
"Well my dear, I was actually looking for you, I wanted to inform you that attendance is required at the PTA meeting tomorrow night, and that there will be a PWA meeting to follow."
"Well of course I will be at the meeting, I do have a child that attends that school, in case you had forgotten. And, as for the PWA meeting, unless we are discussing the annual retreat I doubt I will be able to stay for more than ten minutes or so."
"Very well, we will try to keep it as short and painless as possible. See you there."
In truth Anne had despised the PWA ever since she had mentioned that she was concerned about some things that Hermione had been doing around the time that she was three or four. The lovely president told her that no child is special they are all merely unique, and that she had no doubt what-so-ever that Hermione would grow out of whatever was bothering her mother. The only thing that had made her decide to stay in the association at all was the fact that they had weekly play dates for all of the children. This had been for the longest time the only time that Anne had been able to convince Hermione that it would do her good to play with children her own age, and Anne had no intentions of demonstrating to her young daughter what it was to be a quitter.
Anne refused to believe that Hermione was just going through a phase, there was no way that her telekinesis and ability to make things just appear out of thin air was her imagination. But one thing was for sure; she was not going to get anything accomplished today if she could not at least make her mind quit wandering. Anne pulled out her notebook and turned to the "Possible Answers" section. She could not believe that she was actually about to look up sweet potatoes to see if they had any known history of creating abnormalities in children.