Squibbiness
Disclaimer: Not counting any mentions of Witch Weekly, the Weird Sisters, Hogwarts, Muggles, Squibs, the Ministry of Magic, Voldemort, Death Eaters, and/or the Chudley Cannons, this chapter is entirely mine. So are the characters. However, since it is set in the happy-go-lucky world of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter, I'm afraid I'll have to relinquish my rights to everything except the original characters and plot. Thank you, and eat fish.
Chapter Five: Kissed By Fame
My interview with Grulina Higgins-Furthingspell (for she was the one who interviewed all "Wonderful Witches of Our Time" selections) was one of the more excruciating experiences that I have had. Grulina was waiting for me in her office when I arrived, and I was ushered through the halls of the Witch Weekly nerve center with great haste. I passed an unfathomable number of cubicles, frosted glass doors, and photographs of wizards and witches with unbelievably white teeth. My guide – a rather frazzled looking elderly witch, who introduced herself to me as, "Cherry, dear – because of the hair" (quite red) – finally halted in front of a particularly large and imposing set of double frosted glass doors with the name Grulina emblazoned on them in large cursive letters.
"Here you are, then, miss," said Cherry the tour-guide. "Just knock on the door. Have a lovely interview!"
Before I could thank her for guiding me through the mess of hallways and offices, the old lady was gone. I knocked on the right-hand door gingerly, wondering if an interview with the editor of the wizarding world's most popular women's magazine was really the best thing for me to do.
I stared at the door nervously, and was about to knock again when a sleepy looking pair of eyes opened right below the u of Grulina. A mouth followed suit.
"Your name, dear?" asked the mouth as the eyes gazed at me balefully.
"Elinor Crawley," I replied brusquely, trying to mask my surprise. "I'm here for – "
"An interview with Madam Higgins-Furthingspell," said the mouth. The eyes blinked, their lids coming down heavily and sliding back up reluctantly. "That is correct. Please, enter."
"Thank you," I managed to say as the doors folded back, the glass shimmering.
I stepped through the doors, and somehow they unfolded themselves and shut behind me. Madam Higgins-Furthingspell's office, I thought, was quite the to-do. Bright green gauze curtains fluttered over an open window, trailing down on to the curry-coloured shag carpet that seemed to have flooded the floor. A huge purple desk sat beneath the window, small stars gleaming off its sides and edges. Two huge plants sat on the desk, waving their leaves at me ominously. And directly between them sat the editor of Witch Weekly.
At first glance, I would have said that Grulina Higgins-Furthingspell was a middle-aged lady, what with her wrinkles and straw-like gray hair; a middle-aged lady who was trying to stave off the inevitable and cling to her youthful beauty with a mass of thick, pore-clogging makeup. She looked like a lizard when she blinked – like the Cheshire eyes on her door, her eyelids were so heavy with makeup that she seemed to be having trouble holding her eyes open.
However, as I later discovered from several of the junior advertisers back at the Cannons HQ, Grulina was in her early twenties and had suffered a most unfortunate accident in her teens – while at one of the annual witch beauty pageants, she had had the misfortunate to make an enemy of quite a prominent beauty consultant – to make a long story short, she had left the beauty pageant doomed to spend the next ten years as a forty-five year old woman. There was nothing anyone could do about the curse, not even the Ministry of Magic, although I attribute the Ministry's lack of aid to the return of Voldemort and his Death Eaters, which had taken place around that time. Grulina had set herself to the task of making a life as a young woman in an old body, and her natural aptitude for success had somehow climaxed in the office of head editor at Witch Weekly. I don't know if this was partially behind her odd taste in office furnishings, but regardless, it was none of my concern.
"Sit down, do sit down," she said as soon as the plants on her desk had shifted their leaves enough for her to see me standing by the door. "You must be Elinor," she said pleasantly.
"Yes, I am," I answered, stepping forward awkwardly. I was about to stick out my hand for a handshake when I remembered that wizards and witches did things differently; no silly Muggle customs allowed. A wave of nervousness burst over me as I realized what a fool I would have made of myself. "Very pleased to meet you, ma'am."
"Please," said she, "Call me Madam Higgins-Furthingspell. And have a seat, dear," she said as she waved her wand at me. A large, obnoxiously fluffy armchair popped out of the air in front of me. I sat down and attempted to cross my legs as delicately as I could. I've always had trouble crossing my legs; it simply doesn't come naturally to me. Madam Higgins-Furthingspell watched my efforts with obvious amusement and, I suppose, took pity on me, for she soon engaged me in conversation.
"I'm quite excited about this new series on Wonderful Witches," she said to me.
"Yes, lovely isn't it?" I managed to reply as I succeeded in slipping one leg over the other. It bounced back, most unfortunately, and I settled for sitting with both feet on the floor. "How many articles have you published so far?"
"Oh, just two," she said, "One on the drummer for the Weird Sisters – a wonderful lady, of course; that band has done so much for the musical world."
Chopin! I thought. Bach! Beethoven! Bartok! Cream! Help me!
"And the other?" I inquired, while staring in fascination at the lurid green on Madam H-F's nails. It looked as if she had dipped her fingertips in potently radioactive slime. She went on to tell me about some Hogwarts professor or other, but I must confess – my attention was elsewhere. I'd begun to wonder how long it would take the editor of Witch Weekly – an astute witch if there ever was one, or so they said – to figure out that I was a complete and utter Squib. Not even a witch. And I wasn't that well known, so I still couldn't figure out why anyone would want to interview me.
"So," she said conversationally, "Let's talk about you."
"All right," I answered, staring down at my knees. They were rather knobbly, even through my dress pants.
"How long, exactly, have you worked for the Chudley Cannons?" she said, snapping her fingers. A notebook fell out of midair onto her desk, and she shook her arm over it – a quill slid out of her sleeve. Very prepared, she was.
"About two years now, ma'am." I relaxed. Talking about the team was the one thing that could get me to relax, anywhere, and anyhow. I suspect that if I had been clinging to the edge of a precipice on Mount Everest, the rescue team would only have to ask me to recite the team's annual stats and I would be no trouble for them at all to pull to safety (or to drop into the gorge beneath the precipice, of course; I tell you – I probably wouldn't even notice). "I knew when I was fourteen years old that all I'd ever wanted to be was a Quidditch person. I've got no skills whatsoever with a broom, though." There, I thought. That had sorted some issues out quite nicely.
"No talent on a broom?" asked Grulina, smiling in a nauseating way. "I'm sure that's not true. You must be quite good indeed to show such a love for a flying sport."
"No, really," I said, laughing awkwardly, "I'm terrible. I've nearly killed myself a hundred times."
"Oh?" said Grulina, leaning forward and tapping her nails on her desk. "Like what?"
I swallowed. "Oh, you know; hundreds of times. Falling off brooms, tripping over brooms, dropping several stories on brooms...So I stuck to being a promotional advertiser. Close contact with the sport, you know, but not close contact with a hospital!" My laugh sounded as if several frogs were being strangled in my throat.
"Tell me about these – near death experiences," she said, her voice chillingly cold.
"Oh, well, I – um, er –" I paused. My mother had always said that I had had an active imagination as a child, so here was the time to put it to the test. "There was this one time, back in school – I got ahold of a broom around my thirteenth birthday and went for a midnight flight. Of course I could barely stay on, even with what my father'd taught me, so I hit a tree first off. They patched me up good in the hospital, though."
"I see," she sounded disappointed. "That was all?"
"Well – " I hesitated. Something deep inside, rather like courage but more like idiocy, took hold of me and refused to let go. "I didn't let go of the broom after it hit the tree and it dragged me up through the leaves and out into the sky. I was so terrified; after all, being in your nightgown on a broom when there's no moon – did I mention there was no moon – is pretty frightening. I ran into a flock of Canada geese, which were somehow in the area, and they – suffice to say they were not pleased. Those things have really sharp beaks. But, as I said, the hospital was good. You can hardly tell where they sewed my ear back on. At last I managed to return home to my dorm, after avoiding a series of telephone poles and a group of late night bird wizards. Of course, I ran straight into the arms of the Matron."
She looked very, very pleased. "Excellent!" she said, and clapped her hands. "This will be perfect fodder for the masses. They're going to love you."
"So I can go now?" I inquired eagerly, all set to hop up out of the armchair and flee Grulina Higgins-Furthingspell's office.
"Oh no," she shook her head sternly, "Of course not. Sit back down. You mentioned school, I believe? What school did you attend? Hogwarts? You must have been brilliant at magic to have been so successful, Miss Crawley."
I am quite sure that my jaw nearly dropped. It's time for you to make a decision, I thought firmly. Now is the time – are you a Squib or aren't you a Squib? I admit to sliding out of that question. My rationale was something along the lines of – I've already told so many lies today, why not a few more?
"Not school exactly," I hastily invented, "Rather a private sort of school. One of my mother's friends taught her own children at home – she was a fully certified teaching witch – and invited me to come along. I stayed at her home during the year, since she lived some distance away, but I came home to my parents – Raymond was at Hogwarts – on the weekends."
"I thought you said there was a Matron?" she said, looking confused.
"Matron? Did I say Matron?" I frowned, puzzled. "You must have misunderstood me – I'm sorry, I called my mother's friend Matron. That was, in fact, her name. Matron Jonson."
"So you were quite a brilliant little witch, eh?" she asked cheerfully, bending her quill. "I was right, then. You even had to be homeschooled so as not to make the other children look bad."
"No, no, no," I interrupted quickly, "I was an awful student. My workmanship was shoddy. I could hardly do spells for the life of me. They kept me out of school so I wouldn't embarrass myself. My magic came and went in great waves – never steady. In fact – " I moved my chair a little closer, and bent towards her conspiratorially, "I never took my NEWTs," I whispered.
She gasped. "Oh, Merlin!" Then she plastered a look of pity on her face. "But you've done so well for yourself – is that even possible - ?"
"Yes," I said smugly, leaning back in my chair and for once in my life, managing to cross my legs gracefully. "I've always shown an aptitude for Muggle business techniques, and I just put those to work."
"Amazing," said Grulina, scribbling rapidly with her quill. Being a twenty-something woman trapped in middle age certainly had not interfered with her writing skills. She'd already amassed at least two pages on me. I felt more confident than I had in weeks – years, I suspect. I was ready to tell her everything; at least, to tell her everything that wasn't really true and related to me in a non-Squibbish aspect.
The interview lasted about another half hour, upon the commencement of which Grulina thanked me for coming to Witchly Publications, told me that she had enjoyed interviewing me, and assured me that I would see my interview in the very next issue of Witch Weekly. Then she had Cherry politely escort me out of her office and back down through myriad hallways and corridors of the building.
"How was it, miss?" asked Cherry kindly as we reached my exit point (I was taking the tube back to the C.C. Headquarters).
"It went very well, thank you," I told her. "Thanks for all of your help."
She smiled. "I look forward to reading your interview."
Her words rang ominously in my mind as I exited the centre. As soon as my shoes hit the sidewalk, I felt my knees buckle. They turned to jelly as I stood there, people rushing by me on either side, and I had to push my way to the wall and collapse against it. I leant there, hyperventilating, as I took in the last hour of my existence.
I had told her that I'd studied magic privately, because I was terrible at casting spells.
I had said that I'd been studying magic privately.
I had said that I'd been studying magic.
I had said that I could do magic.
I think, if it hadn't been for the rude man who had cycled past me on an expensive looking bike and nearly run over my toes, I would have fainted on the spot. As it was, the only intelligible thought in my mind was that the new issue of Witch Weekly came out in two weeks.