THE HOGWARTS' LETTER
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She woke up with a gasp, the scattered pieces of a dream still playing on rewind in her mind.
It was about a letter this time and a hut on an island in the middle of the ocean. There was a giant man called Hagrid - Keeper of Keys and Grounds of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry - explaining to someone that wasn't her about the Wizarding World. She knew him. He was the one who had taken her to the Dursleys on a flying motorcycle the night her parents had been killed - and not died in a car crash like the Dursleys had told her - when she was little more than one year old.
This was just yet another dream among the myriad of dreams she had since she could remember. They were always about a boy named Harry Potter.
Helli and Harry had various things in common besides their surname. They were both Lily and James Potter's children, they had both spent their childhood with Petunia and Vernon Dursleys, they both had a strange scar on their forehead and they were both able to talk to snakes. Their personalities were rather similar too, though Helli was less impulsive and less easy to anger.
But that was where the similarities ended. First of all, Helli was obviously a girl. She had red-tinted burgundy hair where it looked slightly purple in the sunlight where Harry had black hair. She had turquoise green eyes while Harry had emerald green eyes. Harry wore glasses and she did not.
And, while not exactly caring or loving, the Dursleys behaved better towards her than they did towards Harry. Maybe because she was a girl, maybe because she didn't look much like her parents. However, it was she who was a source of money for them. And she had dreams to thank for that.
Until the age of six, she had been bullied by her cousin, forced to sleep in a cupboard under the stairs, to wear Dudley hand-me-downs, and practically starved - exactly like what had happened to Harry - but unlike Harry, everything had stopped when she had been noticed by a professional artist and introduced to the art world.
It had been pure luck that she had met the studio manager that day and yet not. She had had a vision that day of Dudley chasing Harry through the local park, playing 'Harry-hunting' like it was his usual when Harry had ended up in a blind alley and beaten up because of it.
Thanks to the dream, Helli had known to avoid her cousin - and the park - at all costs that day. She had spent the day at the local library, using the leftover paper and pencils to draw detailed mythical images, a place she knew her cousin avoided like the plague - and that was when it had happened.
She knew that if she had not decided to do something different from what Harry had done, she would have continued to have the same life Harry had, with the Dursleys treating her as they always had done.
The Dursleys had not been enthusiastic at first about their freak of a niece being noticed in such a positive way but when they had realized that they could make money by this, they had immediately seized the opportunity and practically forced her to develop her skill, without caring if she wanted to or not.
And - to tell the truth - she didn't want to. Sure, drawing was fun, but what she hated was being the center of attention, when all she wanted was to disappear into the background, maybe with a book in hand. But she hadn't had much of a choice. It was that or continued being treated worse than a servant.
So she had started going to the gallery openings and then she had created her best piece to date and suddenly everybody in England knew her name.
From then on, it had been a fight to create bigger, better, and grander images to make the Dursleys more and more money. Since nobody could know the way she had once been treated by them for she - and consequently the Dursleys - was on the spotlight daily, she had been given everything she would need to always appear pretty and perfect, giving everybody the illusion that she was living with a loving family and that she had a perfect life.
Since then, no more cupboard under the stairs, no more rags, no more starving, no more beatings from Dudley, nothing. On the contrary, she'd been given a room, designer clothes, and she was always supposed to appear like a perfect, porcelain doll because 'you can never know when you're going to appear in the magazines'.
Of course, her 'career' didn't exempt her from having to do chores. She was expected to cook and clean the house, mow the lawn, wash Vernon's car, and all the other things that the Dursleys could think about giving her to do. She didn't mind so much though since she had nothing better to do anyway most of the time.
She had been withdrawn from school and assigned a private tutor and since she didn't have any friends to hang out with - not that the Dursleys would ever allow her to have friends in the first place - when she wasn't busy with "developing her talent"- and it wasn't as often as one may think - she had days on end when she had nothing to do besides stay at home and go to the library. And since after having read a book just once, she could remember everything about it thanks to what she liked to call her 'super-memory', she didn't spend more than two hours every day.
It was thanks to her super-memory that she remembered with perfect clarity in the first year of her life. One year spent with a family who loved her until they had been killed by some green spell cast by a man called Voldemort.
Of course, the Dursleys didn't know about this particular talent of hers and she had no intention of telling them. The Dursleys hated everything that wasn't what they considered absolutely normal and she was as far from normal as one person could be.
This was just one of the many examples that proved that she was not like normal people at all. Besides this, her ability to talk to snakes, the dreams, and the strange things that tended to happen around her, she knew that she was not normal. And maybe what the dreams were showing her was the truth. She was a witch. It seemed impossible but it kind of made sense, strangely. It explained everything besides the dreams themselves.
She took a look at the clock on her nightstand and realized that it was already eight o'clock. She needed to start making breakfast. At least now - as opposed to before she had started her 'career' - she was allowed to eat at the kitchen table with her supposed family.
She went down to the kitchen and got to work: scrambled eggs, sausages, bacon, toast, and coffee. In about half an hour the components of the Dursley family joined her in the kitchen and the four of them sat around the table to have breakfast. Sage was allowed only a tiny piece of bacon, one buttered toast, a spoonful of scrambled eggs, and a cup of coffee.
A few minutes later they heard the click of the mail slot and flop of letters on the doormat.
"Get the mail, Dudley," said Uncle Vernon from behind his paper.
"Make Helli get it." Dudley protested immediately, his petulant tone grating on Helli's nerves.
"Get the mail, Helli." Vernon immediately said, not one to deny his son anything. Helli knew that it was completely useless to argue back so she simply nodded and got up from the table towards the entrance.
Three things lay on the doormat: a postcard from Uncle Vernon's sister Marge, who was vacationing on the Isle of Wight, a brown envelope that looked like a bill, and - a letter for Helli.
She picked it up and stared at it, her heart beating hard and fast inside her chest.
She knew this letter, she had dreamt about it just last night. The same thick envelope made of yellowish parchment with the address written in emerald-green ink and no stamp.
Turning the envelope over, her hand trembling, Helli saw a purple wax seal bearing a coat of arms; a lion, an eagle, a badger, and a snake surrounding a large letter H. The Hogwarts crest. There was no mistake now, it was real. All of it.
She read the address on the letter, slightly different from the one Harry had received.
Ms. H. A. Potter
The Teal Bedroom
4 Privet Drive
Little Whinging
Surrey
"Hurry up, girl!" She heard Uncle Vernon shouting at her.
"Yes, Uncle Vernon!" She answered back automatically. She had a choice to make. Bring the letter in the kitchen and pretend like she didn't know anything about Hogwarts so she could just wait for Hagrid to show up or hide the letter now and answer it? What to do, what to do...
Once again she was at a crossroads but, unlike normal people, she knew exactly what was waiting for her if she returned to the kitchen with the letter in hand. She wondered for a few seconds what was better. Choose the known road or take another route and see what would happen? After a seconds hesitation, she hid the letter inside the pocket of her dress. Now, she just needed to decide what she was going to do about answering the school. Where was she supposed to find an owl?
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