Chapter Two
Over the next four years, Hermione's life didn't suffer from any major changes. She went to the same school, where she continued to excel, despite the fact that she remained surrounded by the same bullying students year after year. And if Stephen Jones' arm seemed to mysteriously break in the same place, time and time again (often, coincidentally, after Hermione had been on the end of one too many chinese burns), or Camilla George's pens got into the unfortunate habit of running out of ink just before exams; it certainly had nothing to do with her. After all, when either of these things happened she was never anywhere near the poor victims.
At home, she became increasingly distanced from her parents, something that seemed to both worry them and alleviate them of the stress she was sure they would have felt if she had divulged that, 'oh by the way, when I'm reading in my room at night, I can just make the book hover in front of me and turn the pages with my mind, so that my arms don't get tired' or 'you know how none of my teachers ever want to meet you? I'm worried they'll tell you I'm being bullied, so whenever they mention wanting to see you, they somehow forget why they wanted to see me in the first place by the end of the conversation'.
Hermione found she didn't mind the distance. While she admitted to herself (and only then begrudgingly) that she did want to find someone who understood, who liked her for who she was, instead of making fun of her for it, she'd also accepted that with each passing year it became more and more unlikely.
But there had to be others, didn't there? It wasn't possible that out of all the people in the world (and they'd studied the world's population in class, there were a lot of them), it just wasn't possible that she was the only one with magic. After all, she'd started searching for folklore about it, and almost every single culture she'd come across had some mention of magical beings, whether they be animal, human or somewhere in between (like sphinxes from Egypt, or mermaids and sirens that appeared a lot in European lore).
So Hermione convinced herself, somewhat doubtfully, that she was not alone where it came to magic, as all the proof she had found seemed to prove she was not, despite the obvious fact that she herself had never actually met anyone else with magic, and, of course, that it was generally accepted magic just didn't exist.
Either way, the eleven year old girl knew that she should do her best to learn how to control her powers, not only to protect herself and those around her, not even just for the power (although that in itself was incredibly tempting), but also on the off-chance that she ever did encounter someone else like her, a witch, she wouldn't embarrass herself terribly in front of what could be her ticket into learning more about magic. Were there books? Did anyone actually have wands? Why would they if they, like her, could do magic without them? Though she knew she couldn't just make anything happen either, there were certainly very clear limits to her power, and every so often she rediscovered that, as she nearly collapsed in exhaustion from practising the things she could do. She had found that modifying her teachers minds to make them forget about seeing her parents was the hardest. Was that because, unlike with objects, people had their own consciousness they could use to fight against her magic?
Hermione had questions, a lot of them, and she seemed to come up with more and more every time she thought about her magic, which, admittedly, was fairly often. Even then, as she walked home from school, her mind continued to rage a storm of all the things she wanted to discover but feared she would never be able to.
The house was dark, and obviously empty as Hermione approached it, but that wasn't unusual: neither of her parents were usually back from the dental practice for at least a few hours or so after Hermione finished school. For a long time they had always made sure at least one of them was at the house, but as their daughter had grown and proven to be more mature than most children her age, they knew they could trust her at home alone.
Upon entering, Hermione went straight up to her bedroom, taking care to close the door behind her despite the empty house, and changed out of her school uniform and into a comfortable pair of jeans and a jumper. From where she stood near her chest of drawers, she concentrated very hard on her school bag, triumph flooding through her as she watched her books neatly arrange themselves on her desk. She decided to put her magic to the back of her mind (though if she were honest with herself, she could never push it out entirely), and settled down to do her homework.
Some hours later, Hermione had long since finished her homework, and was nearing the end of her book. As she finished The Book Thief by Mark Zusak, she was unsurprised to find tears flooding down her face, she always had become incredibly emotionally invested in the characters she found in her stories, she often found them to be a lot more reliable than those she met in reality. What she was surprised about, however, was the lack of light coming through the window, and whilst, it being January, the sun did go down rather early, she knew that her parents should have gotten home by then.
She went downstairs to the kitchen, and looked at the time on the oven: 20:12. They were late, very late. In fact, Hermione knew that the dental practise never stayed open past six o'clock, and, with traffic, it only ever took her parents half an hour to drive home, meaning they should have been home, at latest, an hour and forty-two minutes ago.
Hermione was a pragmatic person, especially for an eleven year old, but when neither of her parents, nor the phone at the dental practise picked up, she began to worry. It was ridiculous, though, she told herself, to worry when they were obviously fine. After all, they weren't that late even, were they? So she set about making some supper for them to have when they got home, some pasta, she decided, would be lovely.
After the pasta was cooked, and she had eaten her share of it, Hermione sat at the kitchen table, looking at the clock so often that by the end of it she had put down her book (a french epistolary novel named, Une Bouteille Dans La Mer De Gaza), not even bothering to keep up the pretense of reading it. She sat there for forty-six minutes until something happened, until someone rang the front-door bell.
There was a policeman outside the door, his face was grim, and next to him was a stuffy looking woman in a suit. Hermione was not an idiot, in fact she prided herself on being quite smart, and so she made up the logical conclusion of all the facts: her parents were several hour late, they had been unreachable over the phone, there was a grim looking policeman on her front doorstep: her parents were dead.