Disclaimer: I do not own, nor am I affiliated with Harry Potter in anyway.

Note: I was given a suggestion that Hermione figure out about the heavy abuse and neglect on the part of the Dursleys. It's actually a quite clever idea, and Hermione actually is the first to figure it out, but not until much later. Whitney is actually much better at hiding this fact than Harry was. Ron and his brothers, after all, found Harry with bars on his window and a doggy flap on his door, his magic locked away in a trunk. This is probably not going to be the case when I get around to writing the second fic in the series.

I love your comments and suggestions so much, so as always, please review.

/-wujy

Chapter Eight – Just a Name

The next morning, Whitney was up before the sun, or indeed any of the other girls. She stretched and yawned, considering going back to sleep for a while, but knew it was no use. When she was awake, she was awake. She sighed and dragged herself to the shower, which was deliciously warm. She took her time, enjoying that she could take a shower without fear of Dudley running the sink, drenching her in icy water. She smiled to herself as she put her face in the hot water.

Feeling quite refreshed, Whitney quickly got dressed in her school robes and went down into the common room, which was a cozy room decorated in reds and golds. Neville was sitting in one of the chairs by the fire, so Whitney went to go join him.

"Morning," she said, smiling.

"Hullo," Neville said groggily. He looked like he'd had a terrible night.

"Didn't you sleep?" she asked him.

"I've been up looking for Trevor," he told her.

Whitney opened her mouth to say something reassuring but, just as she was about to, something nearby made a loud croaking sound. Whitney looked confused for a moment, but Neville burst out laughing. After a moment, she joined him, snorting a little, but she stood up and picked up the toad from behind her chair, handing it to Neville.

"What are you two laughing about?"

The two of them looked around to see Hermione peering at them curiously.

"Nevermind," Neville said, holding Trevor tightly so he couldn't escape again.

"Good morning, Hermione," Whitney said happily.

"You're awfully cheery," Hermione said back, looking almost suspicious.

Whitney thought about that for a moment before saying, "I suppose I'm just happy to be here." She sighed and thought about the Dursleys for a moment, before casting them from her thoughts and saying, "There are worse places to be."

She gave Hermione a smile that had a bit of sadness mixed into it, and walked toward the portrait hole. She paused almost immediately as soon as she reached it and turned back to the other two with a look of realization. "Er… I don't suppose either of you remember how to get back to the Great Hall, do you?" she asked them.

"I can get us there," Hermione said, sounding more confident than she looked.

"You can all follow me," said a voice from the opposite side of the room where Percy was descending from the boys' dormitory, Ron in tow. "You'll learn to navigate the school as easily as a Prefect in a couple of weeks," he said pompously. "Good to see you all up with the dawn," he added. Neville simply looked miserable, so Whitney took his hand.

At the breakfast table, which began filling up after Whitney, Hermione, Ron, and Neville had seated themselves, all of the students were given their syllabi for classes. Whitney immediately committed hers to memory. Finding them, she knew, would be nearly impossible at first, but she hoped to make it easier on herself by at least knowing when she needed to be in which rooms.

Whitney's owl broke the silence when she swooped down at the four of them, landing deftly on the table. Whitney smiled and scratched the place on top of her head lightly. "I really need to give you a name," she said absently, feeding the owl a bit of sausage from her plate. The owl lifted up one foot, to which a letter had been attached and Whitney removed it, looking confused. "Where'd you get this, girl?" she asked.

"Owls are useful that way," Ron said, piping up. "Bringing you mail, I mean. Percy got one for being Prefect and I got his old rat."

Whitney smiled at the sad, little creature that Ron produced from his robes. "Been through the mill, haven't you, sweetie?" she asked the rat, looking sympathetic as she opened her letter. It was from Hagrid.

"Hagrid wants me to come down and have tea with him on Friday," she read out loud.

"I've heard of him," Ron said, chewing on a piece of slightly burnt toast. "He brought us over on the boats, didn't he? My brothers say he's a bit mad."

Whitney snorted and said, "Everyone here's a bit mad. He seems nice enough, though. I think I'll go."

"You want company?" Neville asked. Ron and Hermione looked around, interested in going, too.

"Sure," Whitney said, smiling. "We'll go Friday afternoon."

...

As it turned out, Whitney's assumption that finding their way around the castle would be difficult was entirely correct; it was also an understatement. The entire week was spent trying to remember the layout of the corridors. Besides that, Whitney discovered she also had to focus on avoiding the Slytherins. Finding where all of her classes were was difficult enough without having to duck past random people in the halls trying to trip her or steal her book bag.

The Slytherins, she learned quickly, had some sort of rivalry going on with Gryffindor and seemed to find extreme pleasure in tormenting Whitney in particular. She wondered if this was Draco's doing or just something Slytherins normally did.

"He must still be sore that you snubbed him day one," Neville said, shrugging at dinner Thursday evening. "Thanks, by the way," he added, his cheeks turning pink.

Whitney shook her head and looked slightly shameful. "Except I didn't snub him," she said. "I just stood there like a babbling idiot. She sighed. "I should've… said something. I should have called him a prat and told him to take a long walk off a short cliff."

"You were braver than me," Neville protested, looking away.

She kicked him lightly under the table and said, "Shut up."

When he looked up, she was smiling at him, so he grinned back.

Neville, Whitney had decided, was all right, but there were the rest of her classmates to worry about. Whitney had never felt so surrounded in her life. Everywhere she went, she was followed by stares and whispers. She was used to similar treatment from public school where Dudley spread nasty rumors about her, but this was an entirely different feeling. She wasn't being teased or made fun of. Had that been the case, she would have at least known how to deal with it. Instead, she felt ostracized and sure that someone was watching her at all times.

Besides Ron, Hermione, and Neville, only Fred and George treated her like a normal person. Or, well… the twins they treated her the way they treated everyone else, anyway—like a walking, talking science experiment.

Where her teachers were concerned, only Professor McGonagall treated her as though there was nothing special about her, which she appreciated deeply. Professor McGonagall was just as stern and strict with Whitney as she was with everyone else. Transfiguration class became somewhat of an oasis of normalcy for her, which was a strange concept since the entire class revolved around changing objects into other things.

Professor Snape, the black-haired teacher who she'd seen on her first day talking to Professor Quirrell, also did not treat her as though she were special, though he certainly did treat her differently. After a few cracks about her popularity, Whitney was already feeling secluded and attacked, almost as though she were staring down Uncle Vernon.

Then he started asking her questions she had no way of answering.

"Potter!" he called to get her attention. She really didn't like being called by her last name at all. "What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?"

Whitney's mouth dropped open as she tried to search for an intelligent answer, even though she knew there wasn't one in her head. She hadn't been allowed to look at her school books before leaving for King's Cross. She had no idea what the answer was. Hermione, next to her, raised her hand quickly.

"I… I don't know, sir," Whitney answered slowly.

"Then tell me, where would you look to find a bezoar?"

Snape's face seemed to be Transfigured into Vernon's before her eyes. The familiar sensation of her body locking up returned. "I don't… I don't know," she said quietly, her vocal chords strained to capacity.

Snape looked angry and continued to ignore Hermione, who clearly knew the answer. Whitney resented Hermione for her eagerness to answer questions that were clearly designed specifically to embarrass her.

"What is the difference, Potter, between monkshood and wolfsbane?"

Whitney felt cornered. She opened her mouth to speak, but no words game out. She heard a few of the Slytherins snicker, and Hermione slowly—and thankfully—put her hand down, focusing on Whitney.

Whitney's eyes welled up and she fought not to cry as she desperately willed herself to know the answer.

What's the difference? What's the difference? Come on… What is it?

Looking fearful, Whitney met Professor Snape's gaze, tears sparkling at the corners of her eyes. Barely breathing, she shook her head, unable to respond with words.

Suddenly, Snape withdrew and Whitney saw an odd look on his face. He was looking at her the way Aunt Petunia looked at her sometimes when she was close to crying.

The Potions Master physically stepped back from her desk and began to explain the answers to all of the questions, still ignoring Hermione who'd put her hand back up when it had become clear that he was finished interrogating her classmate. Eventually, though, she lowered her hand and went to taking notes instead.

Whitney sniffed, wiping her eyes on the back of one sleeve and trying to be inconspicuous about it. Numbly, she began copying notes, as well, but they were scribbly and blotchy and she was sure she'd have to copy Hermione's later. She felt something soft hit the back of her head and whirled around to see a wad of paper on the floor. She simple looked at it for a moment before turning, downtrodden, to her notes. Rubbish. It's no different than Privet Drive.

The rest of the lesson went poorly to say the least. Whitney was so distracted by how unfairly Snape had treated her that she barely noticed when Neville managed to melt the cauldron he was using, sending a wave of whatever accidental concoction he had created across the floor. Whitney stood there long enough for the potion to seep into her shoes while everyone else in the room was climbing on top of their chairs to avoid it. She gasped when pain like sizzling iron swept over her. She tripped over her own feet where boils had began to spring up and fell over, landing on her back in more of the solution. She wasn't as covered as Neville, who had been in the blast radius, but both of them had to be carried to the Hospital Wing after Snape had cleaned the potion from the floor.

Whitney and Neville spent the better part of a full day in the Hospital Wing being fixed up by Madame Pomfrey. Their only visitor was Hermione.

When she came into the room, she paused and handed Whitney something, saying, "Oh, this was next to you on the ground in Potions. I thought you might want it back."

Whitney looked down at the crumpled paper ball that had hit her in the back of the head in class. It was less crumpled than before, and clearly Hermione had opened it. Whitney pulled at the edges until the paper was relatively smooth and found two words written on it: "Don't cry."

Whitney read it three times before tossing it into the bin, looking confused. It was a note? Who…

She didn't have much time to think about it, though, as Hermione had brought them the Charms homework from the class that they'd missed and even helped them catch up on it, for which Whitney was grateful.

"So, see?" Hermione said, looking rather smug when she had finished, "it's really not all that difficult at all. You simply employ the proper wand movement in order to maximize the chance of a successful cast."

Neville said, "It's easy for her to say. Her fingers aren't the size of sausages and oozing green slime," he said, lifting up his hand where the boils had sprouted between his fingers.

Whitney, who had been fighting back tears for hours, tried to smile, but it was too painful. She sniffed, looking sad, and Neville immediately looked apologetic. "Sorry," he said. "I'm rubbish. I didn't mean to hurt anyone."

Whitney nodded, still looking sulky, but said, "It's okay. I'm rubbish, too. I don't know what I'm even doing here."

Neville looked at her with what might have been confusion had his face not been covered in golf ball-sized boils. "But… you're Whitney Potter," he said, as though that were an important distinction.

Whitney spread some more of the ointment Madame Pomfrey had given her onto her arms and shrugged. "That didn't mean anything until three weeks ago," she said in a quiet voice.

"What do you mean?"

Whitney shrugged. "I wasn't anyone special until three weeks ago. Three weeks ago, there wasn't any such thing as magic or Lord Voldemort. Whitney Potter was just a name and I was just a girl who didn't have any friends. A scrawny, four-eyed, freckled, loser with a massive scar smack in the middle of my face! And tell me how I'm supposed to change that all in a month's time!"

Neville wasn't sure how to respond to that.

Whitney took in a deep breath and sighed heavily. "Sorry… I didn't mean to shout."

"'S all right," Neville said. He hesitated for a moment before saying, "You said his name."

"What?"

"Lord… You-Know-Who. You said his name."

Whitney shook her head. "Sorry. I know I'm not supposed to."

"No," Neville said. "It was… kind of cool."

Whitney, who wasn't expecting that reaction after the amount of coaxing it had taken Hagrid just to whisper the name to her, looked up at Neville with surprise. After a moment, she smiled a little. "Shut up."

Neville grinned.