Chapter two: Harry Thought

Harry thought I was beautiful.

"Thank you," I smiled at him.

I had been very good about my gift as Meredith wanted. I couldn't control it, turn it off, but I had learned to ignore the things I heard when we were in public- which wasn't often as Meredith insisted on homeschooling me. But at the age of nine, I insisted myself that I was old enough to walk the few blocks to the park without her. She always followed me anyway, thinking I wouldn't know. But when I met Harry, we were the only two there; he on the swings, and I on the monkey bars next to them. I only responded to him, to his thought, because it the first time anyone other than Meredith had called me beautiful.

Harry blushed and blinked his verdant green eyes at me. He had dark, messy hair and glasses that were too big for his face.

I thought he was sort of beautiful too.

"Did you just-"

I looked away, realizing what I'd done. "I'm sorry. Meredith says I'm not supposed to."

I had started to leave, go home to the cottage Meredith and I shared, when he jumped down from his swing and asked me not to.

"It's okay," he said, face open and honest. "I'm not mad. How did you do that?"

"I don't know," I shrugged, "I just can."

He nodded in a very understanding way. "I do stuff I can't explain too."

Years later, I still remember giving him an odd look- my mind whirring with the possibilities. I'd never met another witch or wizard. Meredith said she stopped talking to her family long before she started working at the orphanage.

"Like what?" I asked.

Harry shrunk back and images flooded his mind like a film. Blue hair on a teacher, landing on a roof, and a large, beefy man shouting at him. Words like 'freak' and 'burden'.

"Is-is that your family?" I asked, horrified.

He didn't ask again how I knew what he was thinking, but nodded.

"They're lying, you know," I said, giving him a curious look. "There's nothing wrong with you. You're special. Like me."

There came a screeching like yell, "Boy!"

Harry jumped in alarm, his head snapping to the direction it came from. "I have to go. That's my aunt. She'll be cross if I don't come right away."

"But you'll come back, won't you," I asked, worried that I'd made a friend only to never see him.

He had already begun to go, but he turned back and considered me for a moment. Then he nodded, a little smile on his face. "I'll come back."

After that day, we became inseparable. If we weren't meeting at the park he was coming over to our house, nearly everyday after school like clockwork. Meredith liked him immediately, telling him that he was far too skinny and proceeding to lay plate upon plate in front of him. More often than not she was able to convince him to stay for dinner and he would show me what he'd learned at school. After, I would tell him more about Hogwarts and the World he and I would be entering.

"And it's real?" He would ask at least once a week, each time with the memory of his uncle saying there was no such thing as magic.

"It's real for us," I told him every time. "Not them. They can't get get you there."

Harry came over sometimes with bruises.

The first time it happened was shortly after we turned ten, his birthday being the day before mine, and it was on his cheek. Meredith noticed immediately, but said nothing. She'd told me before, about how some Muggles react when faced with things they didn't understand or want to accept. She said sometimes the Wizarding World wasn't any better.

"They don't like me coming over here," he told me quietly when I asked about it one day. "They think I'm bothering Meredith or I'm telling stories."

"I thought they were fine with it, since you weren't there."

Harry shrugged, looking down at his nearly finished homework. "They're afraid if they don't let me that she'll get suspicious or something."

I frowned. "That doesn't leave you much of an option, does it?"

He shrugged again.

Sometimes, Harry and I could go hours without saying a word. We'd lay in the grass at the park, just looking at the clouds and communicating silently. I'd learned how to push pictures into peoples heads, and while I couldn't do anything more than that to make my gift work both ways, it worked for me and Harry.

Meredith would say we might as well had been one in the same person the way we went on. We spoke for each other, though it was more me speaking for Harry than the other way around. She would watch us when we talked without words, trying to figure out what was going on in our heads. She would come back from running errands to a silent house and say,

"They've run off and joined the circus! I'm doomed to eat these sweets alone."

Harry didn't mind my gift. I think it was a comfort for him, me being able to speak for him. At home and school, he always had to be especially careful of what he said. But as soon as he was through our front gate he breathed a sigh of relief knowing that if he didn't want to say a word, he didn't have to.

Harry's first bit of accidental magic since our meeting was on his cousin's birthday. They went to the zoo that morning with Dudley and his awful friend, and I didn't see Harry again for two weeks. When he came back he looked incredibly thin, having shed all of Meredith's hard work, and very tired with dark circles under his eyes. So I told Meredith the story for him, while he helped himself to Meredith's treacle tart- his favorite.

A week later, the letters came.

A/N: So, I noticed there is no love for this story. Maybe this will help. New chapter soon.

Mia.