A/N Okay, I am really depressed and sad right now because my dog just died last night. She was really old, but it's still sad, you know? My parents had her since before I was born, so that makes it even sadder. So what I'm trying to say is that it might take a while for me to post the next chapter. I really hope this doesn't bother you!

That lil' ol' Blue Girl- Thanks for the review! I'm glad you find it interesting, and not unoriginal or boring. Also, thanks for adding my ficcy to your Favorite Stories List.

phoenixtear19- Thank you! When I got the idea for writing this, I decided that Lily and James would probably have to be close, in order to read it together. And I also wanted there to be a plot. I didn't want every chapter to be just them, sitting around, reading it. It's more fun when there is something else going on, and it would be too boring with just them reading it.

Chapter Three

The next day was a rainy day, to Lily's luck. They had all woken up around 10:00 went down to the kitchen, and each ate a different thing. Lily had decided on toast with strawberry jam, Remus picked homemade waffles with fresh peach syrup, and Sirius and James decided to be difficult and demanded pancakes with fresh strawberries!

After breakfast, they had all wandered around, doing their own things. Remus and Lily walked together to the library, Sirius ate more candy, and James put on a raincoat and went to visit his horse, Patriot.

They reunited together over a lunch of watercress sandwiches and hot tea.

"So, what do want to do next?" Remus asked, breaking the silence.

Lily darted her green eyes towards each of them. They all had blank expressions. She cleared her throat loudly, and they looked up towards her.

"Erm...what about the book?" Lily asked casually, as though it were of no importance to her. She gave a quick glance at them.

"Well, I suppose we could," said James.

"Yeah, there's nothing else to do." Sirius agreed.

Remus nodded his head.

Lily beamed. They would finally get to read it! She had a feeling this book was more than just a novel...

"Whoa, slow down, Lils!" exclaimed Sirius, watching Lily gobble down her sandwich. Lily blushed slightly, but continued to wolf down her lunch.

The rest of them sped up to catch up with Lily. After the finished, they headed out of the kitchen door, when the cook interrupted them.

"Children!" she cried in a heavy German accent. "Vould you like some cherry tarts?"

"No, thank you, Elga." refused Lily, running down the hall.

"Hey! I wanted some cherry tarts..." Sirius huffed behind her, clearly annoyed. Lily ignored him and pushed the door to James' room open. There was the book, lying on James' desk. Lily walked over to it and picked it up. The boys came in.

"Okay, I get to read aloud the first chapter. Every chapter, we will switch readers. Understood?" Lily informed them in a bossy tone. She had obviously spent a great deal of time thinking about it.

"I don't care for your tone of voice. Maybe I won't participate." said Sirius, in a lofty, joking tone.

Lily narrowed her eyes at him dangerously.

"Just kidding!" he replied meekly.

Lily opened the book to the first chapter, and commenced with the reading process.

Chapter One: The Boy Who Lived

"That sounds promising," James drawled sarcastically, pointing to the picture of a sleeping baby boy wrapped in a blanket with an unusual lightning bolt shaped scar on his forehead, under a sea of stars. Lily nudged his ribs.

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd except to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense.

"Continue!" shouted the three boys at Lily, as she paused, twirling her hair, something she always did when she was thinking hard.

"Hold on," she panted, as though she had been holding her breath.

"What is it?" asked Sirius curiously.

"My...my sister, Pet...Petunia. Her boyfriend's last name is Dursley. And they hate anything abnormal...like me."

Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills. He was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large mustache. Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbors.

After reading this paragraph, Lily held her tongue. Right that moment, Lily Evans knew that this book she was holding in her two hands was not a normal book. She knew then and there that finding this book was not a coincidence. It was fate. Somehow, someway, someone had wanted her to find it. She held the book a little tighter, and spoke louder and clearer.

The Dursleys had a small son called Dudley and in their opinion, there was no finer boy anywhere.

The Dursleys had everything they wanted, but they also had a secret, and their greatest fear was that somebody would discover it. They didn't think they could bear it if anyone found out about the Potters.

The silence in the room was so loud that Lily felt obligated to stop reading. She knew everyone was thinking the same thing as her. Lily realized that her palms were shaky and sweaty.

"Sh...Shall I continue?" Lily asked gently, tentatively.

The others nodded agreeably.

Mrs. Potter was Mrs. Dursley's sister, but they hadn't met for several years; in fact, Mrs. Dursley pretended she didn't have a sister, because her sister and her good-for-nothing husband were as unDursleyish as it was possible to be. The Dursleys shuddered to think what the neighbors would say if the Potters arrived in the street. The Dursleys knew that the Potters had a small son, too, but they had never seen him. This boy was another good reason for keeping the Potters away; they didn't want Dudley mixing with a child like that.

Dudley...the name echoed around in Lily's fiercely rushing mind. Petunia had mentioned to Lily once that she quite liked the name Dudley.

When Mr. and Mrs. Dursley woke up on the dull, gray Tuesday our story starts, there was nothing about the cloudy sky outside to suggest that strange and mysterious things would soon be happening all over the country. Mr. Dursley hummed as he picked out his most boring tie for work and Mrs. Dursley gossiped away happily as she wrestled a screaming Dudley into his high chair.

None of them noticed a large, tawny owl flutter past the window.

At half past eight, Mr. Dursley picked up his briefcase, pecked Mrs. Dursley on the cheek, and tried to kiss Dudley good-bye but missed, because Dudley was now having a tantrum and throwing his cereal at the walls. "Little tyke," chortled Mr. Dursley as he left the house. He got into his car, and backed out of number four's drive.

It was on the corner of the street that he noticed the first sign of something peculiar—a cat reading a map. For a second, Mr. Dursley didn't realize what he had seen—then he jerked his head around to look again. There was a tabby cat standing on the corner of Privet Drive, but there wasn't a map in sight. What could he have been thinking of? It must have been a trick of the light. Mr. Dursley blinked and stared at the cat. It stared back. As Mr. Dursley drove around the corner and up the road, he watched the cat in his mirror. It was now reading the sign that said Privet Drive—no, looking at the sign; cats couldn't read maps or signs. Mr. Dursley gave himself a little shake and put the cat out of his mind. As he drove toward town he though of nothing except a large order of drills he was hoping to get that day.

"Hey...does that cat remind anyone else of Professor McGee?" Sirius asked, using Professor McGonagall's nickname. Remus slapped Sirius in the head.

"Ouch! What was that for?" he asked incredously.

"For asking stupid questions."

"Well, hitting me in the head did no good, did it? Now I've lost more brain cells, and you'll still have to put up with me." stated Sirius smugly, earning him another hit on the head, this time by Lily.

"This is weird." said James.

"I know...but I have a feeling about these books." replied Lily, her voice full of thought.

"These books? As in plural?" asked Sirius.

"Oh! I didn't mention it? There are six other books in box I found, presumably all Harry Potter."

"Lily!" James hissed angrily.

"What?"

"Why didn't you bring all of them here?"

"Well, I don't want to sound conceited, James, but if I don't think I can finish this book this summer, I highly doubt you will."

"Not that!"

"Then what?"

"Lily," started Remus. "I think James meant that maybe someone in your family might have found the books and gotten rid of them."

"Shit!" cried Lily.

James sighed, frustrated. He ran a hand through his already messy jet-black hair.

"I'll send a letter to Mum and Daddy tonight when they later, when they've returned home." Lily said, trying to calm them down. "Let's just continue reading."

But on the edge of town, drills were driven out of his mind by something else. As he sat in the usual morning traffic jam, he couldn't help noticing that there seemed to be a lot of strangely dressed people about. People in cloaks. Mr. Dursley couldn't bear people who dressed in funny clothes—the getups you saw on young people!

Lily snorted.

He supposed this was some stupid new fashion. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and his eyes fell on a huddle of these weirdos standing quite close by. They were whispering excitedly together. Mr. Dursley was enraged to see that a couple of them weren't young at all; why, that man had to be older than he was, and he was wearing an emerald-green cloak! The nerve of him! But then it struck Mr. Dursley that this was probably some silly stunt—these people were obviously collecting for something...yes, that would be it. The traffic moved on and a few minutes later, Mr. Dursley arrived in the Grunnings parking lot.

Mr. Dursley always sat with his back to the window of his office on the ninth floor. If he hadn't, he might have found it harder to concentrate on drills that morning. He didn't see the owls swooping past in broad daylight, though people down the street did; they pointed and gazed open-mouthed as owl after owl sped overhead. Most of them had never seen an owl even at nighttime.

"Who has honestly never seen an owl in their life?" asked Sirius, quite dumbly.

Lily rolled her emerald eyes.

"You know, Sirius, owls are wizarding pets. Muggles don't use owls as a mailing system. In fact, it states in Hogwarts, A History that the wizarding world has tried many unsuccessful times to prevent Muggles seeing owls at all, in case they were carrying a letter or a parcel. Not the Muggle carrying it, the ow—"

"Okay, I get it, Lils. You don't need to give me a whole speech!" interrupted Sirius.

"Well, you asked."

"Well, you answered."

Lily narrowed her eyes in utter confusion. "Yeah, Sirius, that's what you do when stupid bloke's like you ask questions."

"I'm not the stupid one!" Sirius argued heatedly.

"Sure..." said Lily sarcastically.

"What about 'Only on Tuesdays'? What the hell was that? Not even I could understand that, and I'm the stupid one!" Sirius yelled.

"Exactly."

"Huh? Wait...I meant—"

"Too late, mate. You've proved yourself."

"But—"

Mr. Dursley, however, had a perfectly normal, owl-free morning. He yelled at five different people. He made several important phone calls and shouted a bit more. He was in a very good mood until lunchtime, when he thought he'd stretch his legs and walk across the road to buy himself a bun from the bakery.

"Well, he needs the exercise." said Remus.

He'd forgotten all about the people in cloaks until he passed a group of them next to the baker's. He eyed them angrily as he passed. He didn't know why, but they made him uneasy. This bunch were whispering excitedly, too, and he couldn't see a single collecting tin. It was on his way back past them, clutching a large doughnut in a bag—

"Hey, I thought he was going to get a bun, not a doughnut!" exclaimed Sirius loudly, as though he was offended by Mr. Dursley's choice of baked goods.

Lily rolled her eyes and let out a frustrated sigh. It was hard for her to read without getting irritated, when this lot was interrupting her every five sentences.

--, that he caught a few words of what they were saying.

"The Potters, that's right, that's what I heard—"

"—yes, their son, Harry—"

Mr. Dursley stopped dead. Fear flooded him. He looked back at the whisperers as if he wanted to say something to them, but thought better of it. He dashed back across the road, hurried up to his office, snapped at his secretary not to disturb him, seized his telephone, and had almost finished dialing his home number when he changed his mind. He put the receiver back down and stroked his mustache, thinking...no, he was being stupid. Potter wasn't an unusual name.

"Humph!" said James indignantly.

He was sure there were lots of people called Potter who had a son called Harry. Come to think of it, he wasn't even sure his nephew was called Harry. He'd never seen the boy. It might have been Harvey. Or Harold. There was no point in worrying Mrs. Dursley; she always got so upset at any mention of her sister. He didn't blame her—if he'd had a sister like that...but all the same, those people in cloaks...

There was a knock on the door that startled everybody.

"Children. It is time to come downstairs." informed the butler.

A/N I thought I would leave a sort of cliffhanger. For tension, you know. Gosh, I am so sad. Maybe if you left me some reviews, it might lighten my mood, just a little.

-Jules