Olivia Rodgers knew she had done it the moment the words left her lips. She grimaced as sweat began to form on her brow. She hadn't meant to say it, let alone belt it out at an ear shattering volume.
The dungeon had gone eerily quiet, as if her classmates were all holding a collective breath, waiting for what was sure to be the lashing out of a century. This was not how she wanted everyone to know she had Tourette's.
The imposing form of Severus Snape, the potions master, came to a halt in front of her table, glaring at her with such disdain the tiny hairs on the back of her neck even quivered in fear. She sucked in a deep breath of air, as if it was about to be her last, and slowly inched her eyes up to meet his.
"What did you say?" he asked, drawing out each and every syllable. His glare made Olivia wish she was back in Catholic school. This greasy haired man made even the dreaded and loathsome Sister Thompson seem like the kind of woman you could grab a coffee with and confide your deepest secrets.
"I-I'm sorry." Olivia stuttered, trying to find her voice. Her neck was jerking hard to the right, and her wand arm curled up and down as if lifting invisible weights. "I can't control it, I've got, you know, that thing."
"And what thing would that be, exactly? An utter lack of respect? Or the uncontrollable urge to land yourself in detention on your first day?" Olivia's eyes nearly bulged at the word 'detention". She had the distinct impression detention at Hogwarts wouldn't be writing lines or cleaning the black board every day after class.
"No, Sir, I'm sorry, sir, It was a tic. You were talking about goats and-"
"Twenty-five points from Hufflepuff." He sneered, "for being a no good, attention seeking, little ankle biter."
Olivia felt a knot begin to form in her stomach. Somehow, this felt worse than detention. At least with detention, she wouldn't be dragging everyone else in her house down with her.
"Sir, I'm the one with Tourette's! Dumbledore said he already spoke with all my teachers!"
"Another ten points from Hufflepuff for being argumentative." She ground her teeth together. "You may have been able to get away with your little outburst in the states, but here in my classroom you will be expected to pull yourself together and keep that tongue of yours in check. NOW LOOK AT ME WHEN I'M TALKING TO YOU!" He picked up Olivia's textbook and slammed it down on their table, making the four Hufflepuff's jump.
It took all of Olivia's willpower to keep her head straight ahead, despite it wanting-no needing- to turn to the side. She bit her lip. She could feel the pressure begin to build inside her. Strange and terrible things always seemed to happen when she tried to suppress her tics, at least the ones she had any sort of grasp over.
Most of the time they came and went of their own volition, usually at the worst timing humanly possible. Her flight from the United States to London had not been a pleasant one. She had been an over-excited, unaccompanied 11-year-old who couldn't sit still to save her life. To make matters even worse, her subconscious had a tendency to scan her surroundings, find the most inappropriate thing to say, and make her belt it at the top of her lungs without much warning. It was something the No-maj doctors called, "coprolalia."
Olivia had spent her two-hour layover in New York yelling at every passing person she made eye contact with she had a bomb in her luggage after sitting across from a sign that read, "no explosives". So why had it been such a surprise to discover her trunk, with all her school supplies and clothes, had not shown up at her final destination with all the other #luggage circling the airport baggage claim carousel? What had surprised her even more was to find it safe and sound, parked in front of a large four-poster bed in the Hufflepuff dormitory. If she had known it would all work out in the end, she wouldn't have spent the entire train ride and welcoming feast worrying about having to send an owl home with word that United Airlines had lost everything she owned.
It was this coprolalia that usually landed her in such trouble at school, and it was the reason for her current predicament now. She had been doing her best to pay attention, but when she noticed the state of Professor Snape's hair, particularly how greasy and unkempt it looked, she had wondered if wizards in Britain used shampoo. Then she had heard Snape talk about bezoars, a stone which was found in the belly of a goat. It was all it took for her subconscious to merge the two things together, and without any warning, she had yelled, "Goat testicle secretions are not a shampoo, Professor!"
Olivia gripped the edge of the table, trying to will her tics into submission. Something bad was about to happen, she just knew it. When she refused to give the internal pressure an outlet, it had a tendency to create one of its own, frequently in the form of uncontrolled magic. It seeped out of her like water escaping cracks in a dam.
It happened in the blink of an eye. Olivia gawked at the professor, a sense of doom settling over her. She let her head fall into her hands as the class began to snicker. One second he, and his long greasy black hair, had been glaring down at her, and the next, his hair, including his eyebrows, had changed to a fluorescent shade of hot pink. He looked confused for a moment as he grabbed for a fistful of hair and brought it closer to his face. His features began to contort from a sneer to a murderous rage, and it was aimed directly at her.
It hadn't been the first time Olivia had accidentally altered someone's appearance. It had actually been the first time she had used magic as far as she knew. She hadn't even known magic existed, given her family was all no-maj.
Olivia had been eight, and had been having a particularly rough day as far as her tics were concerned. No amount of glares and threats from the nuns could stop the barking, grunting, and other assortment of rude sounds coming from her mouth. She had been trying to hold it in and sit still, but it refused to co-operate. If she stopped moving for even a second, she felt as if she might spontaneously combust. By her tenth, particularly loud and ear-piercing outburst, Sister Berkshire had had enough.
She had stormed over to Olivia's desk, bent down just a few inches from her face and yelled, "WILL YOU SHUT UP?" with such ferocity, droplets of spit had flown from her mouth and coated the girl. Of course, Olivia hadn't taken too kindly to the outburst. She had begun to cry, until she noticed Sister Berkshire's eyebrows. Olivia let out a gasp of surprise as she gaped open-mouthed in awe. The sister's black, bushy eyebrows had begun to grow! They were like two large caterpillars slowly reaching for each other.
When the other kids had begun to giggle, Sister Berkshire had turned on them, now sporting a huge and hideous unibrow across her forehead. The only problem was, they hadn't stopped there. They continued to grow and stretch across the Sister's face, until the giggles of delight began to turn into shrieks of terror. Sister Berkshire lifted her hands to her face and screamed. Her once smooth skin was now coated in hair.
Sister Thompson, the school hierarchy and head disciplinarian, rushed in to see what all the commotion was. The classroom had erupted in chaos, children were screaming and crying and calling Sister Berkshire a werewolf. She turned to find said Sister huddled in a corner, sobbing and clutching her rosary in one hand, and pointing an accusatory finger at Olivia with the other.
"She's a witch!" the Sister had cried. Never in a million years would Olivia have guessed she was right.
Sister Thompson had let the class out early that day, but not before turning back to glare at Olivia and issue a menacing threat. "I'll deal with you tomorrow, Miss Rodgers, once I get to the bottom of all this."
Olivia had been up all night panicking about what the following school day had to offer. They were going to beat her with a ruler until she couldn't sit comfortably for a week, she was sure of it. She had, like everyone else, zero explanation for what had happened that day, but she expected the nuns would punish her as if she had. Having a disability made her different from all the other kids, and as she had learned rather quickly, the world didn't take too kindly to being different.
When she had returned to school the following day, her stomach was in knots. She hadn't slept well, nor had she eaten dinner or breakfast. Her nerves were shot, and the thought of eating had only made her feel even sicker. Only when she got to school, she realized she had nothing to worry about. It was just as strange as the incident the previous day. No one, not even Sister Berkshire, seemed to remember a thing. Everyone went about their business as if nothing had happened at all. Olivia had been starting to think it had all been a dream, when she felt a hand grab her arm and pull her aside.
"Miss Rodgers," a male voice had whispered in her ear, "let's try and keep that temper in check from now on, shall we?" She felt her blood run cold when she locked eyes with the school janitor. She nodded, and he released her before walking away without saying another word.
Lots of other strange things had occurred over the years she had attended that school, until her eventual expulsion last term. There was an incident with a yard stick floating in the air and hitting Sister Thompson repeatedly when she had tried to smack Olivia with it just moments before for swearing. There was also the time when everyone's shoe laces had somehow tied themselves together underneath their desks so that when the bell rang, and they stood up, they all immediately came crashing back down onto the floor. Everyone, that is, except Olivia.
A pattern had begun to appear, whenever something strange and unexplained happened, everyone always seemed to forget the next day. That was until the day following a rather odd incident involving all the crucifixes in the school. The coprolalia had begun to take on a rather disrespectful tone to Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and the nuns had been appalled. She had spent more time in detention than all the other kids put together. Between the blasphemous tics, and animal noises, she was almost certain the nuns thought her to be possessed.
The nail in the coffin for her had been the crucifixes. They had, all it once, fallen off the walls in the middle of mass, in the church and the main school building when they had tried for the umpteenth time to lay hands on her and cast out the Tourette's as if it were a demon. She hated when they tried to do this. She felt awkward and uncomfortable. She despised being touched, and whenever it didn't work, they had always blamed her for not having enough faith.
Olivia had expected for everyone to forget like they always did, she was even starting to think she was crazy and had imagined everything, when Sister Thompson called her into her office. Her parents had even been in there waiting for her. Her mother was crying, her dad looked pissed.
When she had exited the office, absolutely furious, she had run almost head first into the janitor. He had never said anything to her after that one warning, but she had always suspected he wasn't as he seemed. The school was immaculately clean for having a janitor that never seemed to do any work. She had two theories. The first being that she was crazy, and the second, he was somehow responsible for everyone always forgetting.
"Why?" Olivia said, tears streaming down her face. "Why do they remember?"
"It's time you moved on to bigger and better things. You're almost eleven now, after all." He handed her a card out of his pocket. On it was a crest featuring four animals and the word, Ilvermorny. She stared at it, unsure of what it meant, but when she looked up to ask him, he was gone.
After the disaster that was potions, Olivia sat in a corner of the table by herself in the Great Hall. She still couldn't believe she had gotten detention and lost her house 50 points on her very first day. She'd never make any friends at this rate. She stared at the food laid out across the table, but she was too stressed to eat.
"It's Olivia, right?" She lifted her head to find two Hufflepuff girls her age standing across from her. One was blond, the other brunette, and both were giggling.
"Yes," Olivia said. Her face was grimacing and winking like mad. She gave them an apologetic look as they sat down.
"Oh my gosh, how in the world did you turn Professor Snape's hair pink?"
"I don't know." Olivia said. "It just sometimes happens when I try not to, uh-" she motioned at her twitching face.
"It was all I could do not to burst out laughing at the look on his face!" The brunette said. Olivia forced a smile. She wasn't good at small talk. "Did he say you were from the States?"
"Yeah, just flew into London yesterday."
"Then what are you doing at Hogwarts? Shouldn't you be at Ilvermorny, the American Wizarding School?"
Olivia's face fell at the mention of Ilvermorny. Her rejection over "safety concerns" was still a sore subject.
"Professor Dumbledore invited me to come to Hogwarts instead." Olivia said. Mostly true. She had found him leaning against the wall outside the American Ministry of Magic building after she had lost her appeals hearing. He had been waiting for her with Hogwarts letter in hand.
"Woah! A special invitation from Dumbledore? I've never heard of anyone being scouted before! Usually your name is in the books from birth!"
Olivia shrugged. The whole thing had been a wild roller coaster of emotions, starting from the day before her 11th birthday, when she had been expelled from catholic school.
"What do we have next, Hannah?" the brunette asked the blond girl sitting next to her.
Hannah pulled out her schedule and checked. "Looks like we have Transfiguration with Professor Mcgonagall next." Olivia moaned. Not another strict teacher! She remembered her from the sorting ceremony. She was the old lady that nearly had to hold the sorting hat in place for her when her neck tics kept trying to send it flying off her head. She hadn't exactly been gentle.
When lunch was over, the three of them gathered their things and set off together towards Transfiguration. When Olivia peeked her head in, she was surprised to see not the old woman, but a gray tabby sitting perfectly still on the desk in front of the room. Olivia took a seat in the first row, she hated to see people turning around to gape at her when she began to make noise, and stared at the cat. How adorable, she thought. It even looked like the cat was wearing glasses. She had to fight the urge to get up and pet it. She had seen quite a few cats on the castle grounds, but none of them seemed to like her very much. She wondered if this was Professor's McGonagall's cat.
"Hi, pretty kitty!" Olivia coo'd at it. The cat stared back at her, looking annoyed. Olivia began to tic and move about. She had expected the cat to run away at the sudden movements, like most animals did around her, but it stayed where it was, continuing to silently judge her. She had been so transfixed by the cat, she hadn't noticed the room had completely filled with students. Olivia continued to talk to the cat. "Hi, pretty girl! What's your name?"
It was then that the cat began to change, grow and morph into a woman. Everyone sat in stunned silence, mouths hanging open in wonder and amazement.
"My name is Professor Mcgonagall, how do you do, Miss Rodgers?"
Olivia was speechless. The cat was Professor Mcgonagall! The cat! Professor…a cat Oh no! No! No! Please no! She could feel the premonitory urge shoot through her, and before Olivia could stop herself, she was on her feet and, and, barking! Not little yapping, but full guttural barking from deep within her chest. When she had finally stopped, the room had gone silent like it had in Professor Snape's dungeon. Olivia's face burned scarlet with embarrassment.
"I-I'm so sorry!" she began to say, but fell silent in horror when Professor Mcgonagall pointed her wand at her.
"Aguamenti," Olivia heard before a blast of cold water shot her in the face, forcing her down into her chair. She sat in stunned silence, now dripping wet. The corners of Professor McGonagall's lips turned into a barely perceptible smile. "Bad dog." she said, before turning her attention to the rest of the class as if nothing had happened at all.