A/N: Harry Potter et al belong to JK Rowling, with my thanks for letting me play with her toys.
Thanks tons to SmolderingJade and muggledad for your reviews of Chapter 2.
Chapter 3 The Practical Girl
Turning to her new friend, Jean marveled at how she had allowed herself to open up without holding back. It was as if the counselor she'd spoken to earlier had predicted the future: "You cannot hold it all in, you'll have to open the door soon or you'll burst."
Gathering her wits, she considered the situation briefly. It seemed now, on this bench in the gathering gloom, that the unexpected comfort of a kind matron had been the key she needed. Letting out a breath she'd held too long, she plunged into the dark open doorway in her mind.
"I only saw my parents on the holidays. I was just so... busy at school." Jean paused, face scrunching in self-reproach, closing her eyes, she continued.
"The Christmas after I turned ten I learned that my mum was sick." Jean shuddered a bit. A harsh gust of cold wind swirled around the pair as the memory of the first time she saw her sick mum brought fresh tears to her eyes.
"She had contracted an infection which made her weak from pain. She could no longer work, she could barely walk. The infection spread until she was wracked with debilitating spasms and had to be sedated much of the time. The doctors could not agree on a cause, let alone a cure. Specialists were called in and they couldn't cure Mum either."
Jean felt Sarah's hand grasp hers. She knew the tears were flowing freely down her cheeks and she simply continued, the memories and pain both sharp and dull in equal measure.
.o0o.
Jean got a leave from her coursework. She spent many days with her mother, first at the hospital and then at home helping the nurse that now worked days helping take care of her needs. Once home, Jean found that there was little anyone could do for her mother. Trying to keep her comfortable and tending to her personal needs was the extent of their ability to help.
Though she was overwhelmed by it all, Jean was a great help to her mum. Her practical self clamped down with her usual self-control. She rigidly shoved aside her emotional reactions and began to analyze how she could be helpful. After overcoming their mutual embarrassment of taking care of your own mum's diapers, she began to treat it like any other lesson. Jean learned everything she needed to do to care for her mum with her usual dedication; meaning she read lots of books. Medical books, research papers, anything she could get anyone to send her or check out from the library on her forays for supplies.
She never let on about her fears when the most important woman in her life was crying and blaming herself; though Jean could not get her mum to explain what she felt she had done wrong.
At night she willed herself to be silent, re-doubling her battle against feelings of grief and plain old sadness. The dark, quiet hours were the worst because Jean could not distract herself with housework or reading; she knew she had to get her sleep or she would not be able to help. She especially did not want her parents to hear her crying from her overwhelming sense of helplessness. This was especially hard when she could hear her parents trying to argue quietly over his taking a second job.
The girl knew she was having a tough time when she kept finding all her old stuffed animals in her bed each morning. She carefully put them back in their box, and assumed she was sleep walking to take them out. She pointedly refused to think about how they were all on top of the covers. It brought back memories of child-hood nightmares and the questions her parents had about her 'strange habits'.
Jean began taking on the majority of the household chores, though she was spared cooking after the third time she started a kitchen fire while lost in a research paper or medical journal. She simply could not bring herself to see preparing the bland diet the doctors laid out as more important than looking for a cure. Thankfully mum's sister Jane had gotten involved, and when she wasn't there a half dozen frozen dinners fit the same dietary restrictions and were safer and far less stressful.
When the school leave was finished Jean went back to the Academy, but not full time. She was able to make arrangements to reduce her course-load and only attend on Tuesdays through Thursday. If she had made any friends they didn't seem to notice her absence. Those few classmates who came with condolences met a girl too awkward with dealing with emotions to respond properly.
Aunt Jane was a great help, but she was rarely there when Jean was. The little Bed & Breakfast that she ran in the country was also struggling financially and after the first few weeks her mum's younger sister was only there for the three days that Jean was in school.
Though the family cut every extra from their budget, still it was not enough. A year ago the successful couple had opened a new practice. Within months Jean's dad was working feverishly to pay for all the equipment and space the pair of them were supposed to be earning for. The medical bills were enormous and the cost of in-home care, medicine and doctor visits were beyond their income and insurance.
Each week seemed to find something else that the practical young girl took upon her shoulders. She buried herself in course work, laundry, monitoring her mum's health and even started organizing the bills.
One day Jean was sorting the 'dues' from the 'past dues' and was startled to find a late notice on the house – a second notice. The more she read the wider her eyes got. It seemed that even their home was in danger of bank repossession! She felt her tightly held self-control snap, panic welled up and then...
...
The Unspeakables in charge of her region had even come up with a nickname for her: "Hazardous Hermione". Of course they called her after the name that had been recorded when she was born. Names aside, her releases of accidental magic were less frequent, yet considerably more powerful than most muggleborns 'incidents' they encountered.
Jean's self-control was one of her points of pride, though her emotions could only be pent up for so long; her untrained magic eventually keyed on her emotions, and being restricted it tended to be all the more spectacular in it's release. The fact that Hogwarts' own deputy headmistress had asked for this girl to be specifically watched was unusual. It only took a few 'incidents' for the team to see the old woman's wisdom, Hermione was now monitored 24/7.
This 'incident' was more destructive than anything the team members had seen in an untrained witch, it had taken two teams and a time-turner to effectively erase the poor girl's outburst.
...
… When she woke up on the floor she had a fleeting memory of someone else in the room, she looked around but nobody was there. She never saw the disillusioned wizards, and took the sharp cracks from the street to be a car backfire. Her accidental use of magic was professionally obliviated, and the damage she had wrought was undetectable in their perfectly restored den.
.o0o.
Shaking herself a bit, Jean knew she'd gotten off track, she felt so close to remembering something, yet in the end she became convinced it was not important. She felt Sarah squeeze her hand and realized she must have been silent for a bit. Furrowing her brow she picked up where her memories had gotten her off track.
"One day I was sorting bills and found out my parents were behind on their house payments. I got so... I don't know, so upset that I guess I blacked out. When I came to my senses I thought through all the expenses we had. I realized we couldn't afford to pay for my school anymore. The Academy didn't offer scholarships, so that was the end of that."
Sarah could tell the young woman was very practiced with that last particular act of burying emotions. With nothing more to say, she felt compelled to offer her sincere, "I'm sorry."
Jean looked up at the sympathetic woman, nodded once, then returned to her tale. She was both determined and relieved to continue, now that she had started.
.o0o.
She had been the one to make the suggestion to her parents – well, she told her dad, as her mum was barely able to open her eyes these days. It was the logical choice given the situation and Jean was a practical girl. Her dad protested at first but she could clearly see the relief in his eyes… along with the unshed tears. When her mum was finally lucid enough to talk with she had already been out of school several weeks.
Her mum never seemed to forgive herself for 'taking away her baby's dreams'. She still carried on about it from time to time months later. Jean wondered if perhaps her mum was lucid in her apologies all those months ago - that she could see the future, see that they could not continue to pay for the schooling and the medical expenses. She knew she got her analytical thinking from her mum; Dad was a lot of things but an organized thinker he was not. It was one of the reasons their finances and such suffered without Mum to guide them.
Worst of all, even that sacrifice was not enough. The Grangers were forced to sell their practice and Jean's father went to work for a large clinic. Jean was to return to her old school, her dad stating that she would be 'more comfortable with kids she knew'.
Jean returned to her old primary school an entirely different girl. She tried to tell her dad how out of place she felt - the district had placed her back in her age-year. Jean pointed out that she'd finished Junior schoolwork her first year at the Academy. Her dad asked the teachers about ability-based placement, however the school year was well into second term so the paperwork would not go through until next year.
Her time home with her mum had given her the opportunity to reassess her situation. Having exhausted every resource she could find she came to the conclusion that her mother's doctors weren't incompetent, they just didn't have a cure for the disease that was killing her mum. Without academic pressure or medical research, Jean felt lost.
She was soon reminded that the differences between the two schools was startling. At the Academy her ability to speak intelligently with classmates was not an issue. The average IQ was in the 140's, the average student spoke three languages. Jean was working on fluency with German - her fourth.
With her return to primary school she found her peers' topics of conversation quite childish – and often vulgar. Their interests were juvenile in the extreme to someone used to debating the impact of period authors upon their peers and in-depth examinations of history and it's relationship to current events. Her turns at Debate didn't earn her any friends at the Academy, but it was a completely different world when the only retort your opponent gave was "shut up you bookworm"... or a hard shove. Or both.
While logically Jean knew that she wasn't well liked during her first few years there, now she could see she was just Different. She didn't feel as bad about it now, but she found that she still wanted to fit in.
She understood that her peers didn't like her for reasons beyond her looks and name. She knew deep down that she had built walls, using a bossy, know-it-all attitude to keep people from getting close. Jean watched her classmates getting along, teasing and having fun together and felt a loss deep inside.
Considering her situation practically, she knew she would not stay with these kids next year. Therefore she determined to try to get along and learn how to make friends. She made a list of steps to take towards this goal and set her plan in motion.
Jean considered the "smart kids" as a good place to begin making friends. Unfortunately these former class academic leaders were livid to find their battle for academic superiority crushed by the return of the girl who had disappeared two years previously.
Even though she had completed the majority of her school coursework over a year ago, she wasn't about to slack off on her grades. She would still have to take the tests, so she continued to actively take notes and participate in classes.
Standard classes would have bored her to tears except she was very careful to answer every question, or at least try. When she finally figured out that this was just causing her more trouble, the damage was done; she was glared at for answering and ridiculed when she didn't.
When she approached the study groups and 'smart kids' tables she received a rude awakening: Where she thought perhaps she could find camaraderie, the "smart kids" didn't understand her at all. They didn't share her love of learning and even belittled Jean for "knowing too much". Thus there were no friendly faces, even in the study clubs. She found their method of rebuke, ignoring her completely, to be even more upsetting than the irregular taunts that still haunted the hallways.
The only bright spot was in math class, the teacher was impressed instead of intimidated. He convinced Jean to sign up as a paid tutor and for once the girl had her own source of income. This was the last year of Primary and the results of the year end testing could place these kids in a good Secondary school. Or not. Since she had already completed the coursework she spent her 'study time' tutoring as many as eight kids a week, both during her normal classes and afterwards. These kids, at least, did not make fun of her for her intelligence.
Outside of the classroom, in mandatory exercise hour, some of her classmates seemed to turn on her worse than ever. After over two years of a mostly academic life, Jean was badly uncoordinated. Even though she was next oldest in her year she was a rather small girl and the frequent opportunities for her to get knocked to the ground were often taken. "You're not one of us, freak!", was the new taunt and was all too often flung in her face, or more likely at her back as she fell. She briefly considered that they had finally come up with something new.
Despite the abuse she never lost her temper. Jean found that childish taunts and even physical pain were nothing compared to what she had already endured. Her steady refusal to rise to their taunts made the game grow old for most of them. They didn't know her. They didn't understand her. They just knew she was different, and so did she.
It wasn't that she wanted to be different; for the first month Jean desperately strove to fit in with her class. Knowing that her hair was a lost cause and she was a long ways from growing into her teeth, she tried other ways to change her outward appearance.
An obvious need for change was her wardrobe. Her Academy clothing had consisted of a standardized school uniform and a bit of leisurewear for weekends. Armed with fashion magazines from the library, a careful observation of her peers and vigilantly watching for sales, Jean had changed her look to fit in nicely, at least for the most part. Because she was funding her own purchases from tutoring, she had a tight budget. She also had (self-imposed) limits – in a world where girls her age wore skirts – she wore trousers. Her legs were too pale after all, or at least that was her reasoning given to others. She had no reason to trust the boys to respect her modesty in a skirt was the truth behind the decision. There seemed to be no change good enough to end the occasional sneers and taunting though. She simply didn't fit in.
Some things that kept her an outsider were really just her practical solution to problems. To avoid troubling her dad for a ride, Jean arrived early to school having taken the bus. It was simple economics: a monthly bus pass was cheaper than the petrol used in just eleven days of rides. She was proud of her practical solution.
Arriving early allowed her to help the librarian with returns and gave her a quiet place to read till class started. Though it was standard to gossip in the hallways she stayed behind and prepared for the next class or helped the teacher when allowed.
When school was done she tutored for one hour then went home, did her chores and took care of her mum. At night she had just enough time to re-check her homework, (which she invariably had finished at school), then read for a few hours.
On weekends her classmates went to the malls, visited the arcades or went to parks together. Jean never did those things. She told herself that it didn't interest her. Besides those activities were expensive for a household budget as tight as theirs and Jean didn't consider them to be practical expenses for her tutoring income. Never mind that the park was free, she didn't go there because she was never invited.
No, Jean had tried everything she could think of. She was done trying to fit in. With two months left till summer holidays, she turned her mind away from fitting in with her peers, she returned to what felt safe.
Jean returned to learning with a fervor. The girl who tried to fit in was replaced by the fully-dedicated student, her self-control never allowing the feelings of loss or self-pity to linger. She wasn't going to stay in primary school forever after all, it came down to practicality, and Jean was nothing if not a practical girl. She knew her intellect made her Different, she decided to strive to see where that difference would take her.
.o0o.
A/N: Reviews are always welcome.
Recommended reading is Partners by muggledad, another great character driven story heavily featuring our miss Jean... erm, well you know who I mean.
M