On the thirty-first of July, 1991, Harry James Potter and Charlotte Vega Cromwell met for the first time in their memories in a hut on a rock in the sea in the middle of a storm.
"It was my eleventh birthday," Harry remembers. "Charlotte was still ten. Rubeus Hagrid had been trying to get my Hogwarts letter to me for a while, on Dumbledore's orders, and my aunt and uncle had actually gone so far as running away from it and buying a gun to keep me out of Hogwarts."
That plan did not work, of course. Rubeus Hagrid, accompanied by Charlotte Cromwell, knocked down the door of the shabby hut with ease and confronted the Dursleys.
"They looked rather frightened," Charlotte mused. "Of course, in hindsight I might have been frightened as well, a large strange man knocking a door clean off its hinges, but for me it was just Hagrid and I found it all rather more amusing than anything. He gave Harry a cake and told him he was a wizard. That was probably the most amusing part."
The following morning, Hagrid took the two young children to Diagon Alley to buy their school things, and Hagrid explained to Harry who he was and why Charlotte knew about him. Then, as if none of it had happened, they all went their separate ways until the first of September, Charlotte back to the manor and her aunt's "care", Harry back to Privet Drive and being virtually ignored by his "family".
"Literally, nothing changed for me," Charlotte recalls with a laugh. "I told our house-elf, Drizza, all about Harry Potter, very excited-like, and she told me some stories about the things my mother would do with James Potter when they were young, the trouble they got into. She found all the letters my grandfather had received about my mother's detentions and such, and Drizza said that James Potter had gotten detention for nearly all of the same things, except in the later years. She didn't show me all at the time, because nobody told me who my father was, and telling a ten-year-old about how their mother got detention for getting caught out of hours with boys, snogging or shagging in some remote part of the castle, was probably not a good idea. Especially to tell such things to a child with an imagination such as mine."
"The only thing that changed for me was that the Dursleys were literally too terrified to confront me," Harry laughs. "Dudley had earned himself a pig's tail as a result of the whole event. I – um – well, there was a bit of in-the-moment accidental magic, you could say, and he ended up with a pig's tail. That shut the lot of them up rather good for quite a while, as you could imagine. The only reason they agreed to drive me into London to catch the train was that Dudley needed his tail removed and they just took me on the way."
That September first was particularly fateful in my own life. Harry Potter and Charlotte Cromwell met again in King's Cross, desperately trying to figure out how to get onto the platform mentioned on their tickets: nine and three-quarters. Charlotte's aunt had neglected to mention it to her, and Harry's relatives, obviously, didn't know. Not long before eleven, the Weasley family came thundering through the station in all their gingered glory, and by a stroke of luck Harry and Charlotte realized that these were a family of wizards, someone who could help them get onto the platform.
My mother, Molly Prewett Weasley, would never have left a pair of eleven-year-olds wandering around King's Cross. As soon as she realized that they didn't know what to do, she explained how to enter the platform and effectively sealed the close bond between the Weasley clan and the fated duo.
"There were so many Weasleys," Charlotte said with a laugh, "it was hard not to interact with them after that. The twins helped us get our trunks onto the train and Ron ended up sitting in our compartment. For me, both interactions were the start of instantly close friendships, but for Harry Ron's friendship was the most prominent."
"Fred had insisted that the boy in the station was Harry Potter," Ronald Bilius Weasley remembered, "and Mum said something about how the girl must be the Cromwell girl. Every wizarding child knew about Harry Potter, but other than the fact that the Cromwells were an incredibly old and wealthy family, Charlotte was completely unknown to my generation. Peter Cromwell was dead by the time I was old enough to ride a broom and he'd been out of politics for ages. The name didn't mean anything to me, but it meant a lot to Mum."
The beginning of Hogwarts is always a fateful occasion. Many people meet their best friends on that first ride, and this was the case for our war heroes. At eleven, they could not have imagined the significance of it all, but not only did Harry Potter, Charlotte Cromwell, and Ronald Weasley share one compartment, but they also managed to meet Neville Longbottom, Hermione Granger, and even Draco Malfoy in the course of the ride. Draco, obviously, is not in the friend category, but he has played a significant role in the lives of all the heroes.
To me, the day seemed particularly significant. I had met, however briefly, the famous Harry Potter, and at ten years old, I thought he was just about the best thing in the world. That wasn't so strange. I know many girls who confess to having grown up with crushes on Harry Potter, who had been raised on his story and thought of him much as Muggles think of Prince Charming. Having met him, though, made my crush real, solid, tangible.
As could be imagined, I talked about Harry Potter all year, driving my parents absolutely bonkers. As fun and exciting as I thought it would be, having the house effectively to myself with my brothers all gone, I wanted to be at Hogwarts instead. After all, Charlie was in Romania and Bill was in Egypt. My father worked quite a lot and my mother was often busy with cooking, cleaning, washing, etc. So I preoccupied myself with daydreaming about Harry Potter, drawing our future wedding, and reading and rereading the letters Ron and the twins sent home about Harry and his dark-haired friend, Charlotte.
It wasn't until the following summer that my fate was well and truly sealed, however. The twins managed to get mum to allow Charlotte Cromwell to come over and stay for the summer. She would have done with Harry, too, I expect, but he had told Ron that his aunt and uncle would never allow it.
Charlotte was a pretty girl, with dark hair, green eyes, and more confidence than is typically healthy for a twelve-year-old girl. We would have become fast friends, and we certainly were friendly, but we were both at a bit of an awkward social age and she was already friends with Ron and the twins, who kept her very busy playing Quidditch, chess, Exploding Snap, and writing letters to the famous Harry Potter, and a girl called Hermione.
She stayed in my room though, and after hours, when she didn't sneak up to sleep in Ron's room, she would tell me stories about the famous Harry Potter. I liked her stories best, because she didn't tease me and she didn't brush me off as nobody, but she would oblige whatever I asked, even if I asked her to tell the same story six times. I liked the story of the four of them fighting off a troll.
Much to everyone's concern, we didn't hear from Harry Potter all summer, and Hermione said she hadn't heard from him either. Charlotte told me it wasn't at all like Harry, but whenever they talked to the adults about it, they said perhaps he was busy.
Charlotte didn't believe that.
She, Ron, and the twins, hatched a plan that I didn't find out about until after the fact, and I was certainly a little shocked to come down to breakfast one morning with none other than the famous Harry Potter sitting at the table, eating off a fork like any other person would have done. My voice was gone. All of the clever things I had dreamed of saying to him, all of the ways I would prove to him that we were perfect for each other, they all left my head the moment I saw him sitting there in my kitchen, and me still in my dressing gown. I froze, and found myself unable to speak to him properly for quite some time after, meaning years later.
As it turned out, Charlotte, Ron, and the twins had stolen a car that my father had enchanted to fly and taken it to Little Whinging to liberate Harry from his aunt and uncle, who had literally locked him up in his room, put bars on his window, and were feeding him from a little flap on his bedroom door.
And that first summer with Harry Potter, that month before I began Hogwarts, was the beginning of my own first adventures involving Lord Voldemort.
We were at Flourish and Blotts, and those who are old enough may remember this particular event. The once-illustrious author, Gilderoy Lockhart, was having a book signing on the very day we were getting our school things. The place was absolutely packed, and Lockhart used Harry and Charlotte as an opportunity to garner more publicity, having his picture taken with them and giving them free books for school, announcing he was going to be our professor.
Moments later, I had my first encounter with one Draco Malfoy, then twelve, and clearly incredibly jealous of the publicity Harry and Charlotte had accidently stumbled into. He was rather vicious to them, and I found my voice long enough to snap at him, but it didn't last long when attention turned in my direction.
The most important part of that day, however, happened with Draco's father, Lucius Malfoy, and my father, Arthur Weasley, met up with us, and the argument went to the older generation. None of us realized it at the time, but Lucius Malfoy took advantage of the tiff to slip a small, unused, seemingly worthless diary into one of my school books. That diary was actually a horcrux, holding a piece of the soul of Lord Voldemort.
At the time, however, the biggest, most newsworthy event was the fistfight my father and Mr. Weasley got into in the middle of Flourish and Blotts, actually knocking over a shelf and having to be broken up by Rubeus Hagrid, who was nearby on a mission to find flesh-eating slug repellent.
It didn't take long for me to begin writing in the diary, which I found wrote back to me and the diary was someone named Tom Riddle. The name, of course, was unfamiliar to me. He was very sweet, very understanding, and throughout the coming weeks, even months, I began to pour my heart out to him, as Charlotte had her own friends and my one confidant was no longer mine. Tom listened to my hopes, my fears, and was always very understanding. He took particular interest in the boy named Harry Potter, who had defeated Lord Voldemort, and the girl named Charlotte Cromwell, who my mother had told me was from one of the oldest wizarding families, and that she was one of the most rich and powerful witches of her age. I didn't know at the time, however, that she was actually the brightest witch to ever live and literally the richest witch alive, but she herself didn't even know the whole of it at that time.
I began to lose control of my own actions, and on the fifth of September, hardly a week into school, there was a night that I had no recollection of my whereabouts, my actions. It was terrifying, but as nothing bad seemed to have happened, I simply wrote it off as a product of stress. In fact, I had been possessed, but that didn't come to light until much later. The only person in the whole school who had noticed something off that night except for me was Harry Potter, who had heard a strange voice while he and Charlotte served detention with Professor Lockhart, but they didn't tell me about that. If they had, maybe I would have mentioned the fact that I had had a strange night as well, but after all, we were in different social groups. I couldn't even talk to Harry without blushing furiously.
Then, on Halloween, the bit of soul in the diary possessed me once again, and a cat was attacked, petrified, and a message was written on the wall: "The Chamber of Secrets has been opened. Enemies of the Heir, beware."
Of course, there was panic in the school. The cat had been petrified, although by what, no one knew. I, for one, had no recollection of what I had been doing that evening, and there was blood on my clothes. I had no idea how it had gotten there, but I was more than a little worried as I naively told of my concerns to Tom in my diary that night. I made no connection between my strange, book-bound companion and my strange lapses in memory.
About a week later, Gryffindor and Slytherin played their Quidditch match, but something went unusually wrong. A Bludger attacked Harry, but refused to go after anyone else. Somehow he managed to catch the Snitch and Gryffindor won, but not before Charlotte suffered a head injury and Harry's arm was shattered. To make matters worse, Lockhart, in an effort to mend Harry's arm, managed to remove all of the bones from the arm instead, which was a rather disgusting sight. The pair of them spent the night in the hospital wing.
The next morning, there was news that another attack had occurred. A Muggle-born in my year, Colin Creevey, had been petrified on his way to sneak down and see Harry and Charlotte in the hospital wing. He was a bit… obsessed with them. He followed them everywhere with his camera, which drove them crazy, but he meant well. It certainly shook them up when he was petrified.
I, for one, felt far less than rested that next morning, but couldn't recall having gotten up in the night.
A month later, there was an attempt by Professor Lockhart to start up a dueling club. Many were in attendance; although it probably would have been sparser had we known in advance that he would be the one teaching it. The upside was that we got to watch Professor Snape make a fool out of him in front of everyone. The downside was that when Charlotte and Draco were made to demonstrate blocking (which neither of them attempted to do), Professor Snape, knowing as almost everyone knew, that Charlotte was deathly afraid of snakes, told Draco an incantation for conjuring a snake.
She had stood, rooted to the spot with fear, in front of the entire crowd, as the snake eyed her, then went toward a Hufflepuff by the name of Justin Finch-Fletchley. Harry Potter spoke Parsletongue and called the snake off, but of course, only two people in the hall were aware that this was what he was actually saying, Harry because he was saying it and Charlotte because she was able to see into his mind as he said it.
It didn't take long from that point on for people to begin whispering that Harry Potter, or Charlotte Cromwell, or the pair of them, were the Heir(s) of Slytherin and responsible for all of the attacks. Previously the two most celebrated, popular people in the school, they had become pariahs overnight, particularly Harry. The rumors that began to fly around were so absurd, so ridiculous, that they would be laughed at now, but at the time, from the point of view of children, they made absolute perfect sense. Fear made a lot of things appear more logical than they actually were.
When the very next day, the very same boy Harry had kept the snake from attacking was petrified, along with the Gryffindor House ghost, Nearly-Headless Nick, the rumors were absolutely justified in the minds of the Hogwarts student body. Harry and Charlotte were guilty, no matter the truth or facts, and that was that.
As for myself, I was finding rooster feathers in my clothing, more blood on my hands, and more and more of my time was unaccounted for in my memory. I was terrified, confused, and completely in over my head, but at the same time I was too frightened and ashamed to mention my fears or concerns to anyone. After all, what if I was right? They would kick me out of Hogwarts for sure, maybe even lock me up in St. Mungo's, or worse, Azkaban. I was becoming thinner, peaky, and jumpy. Mostly, my brothers hardly noticed, as they had their own lives and friends and concerns, but Percy did insist that I get a Pepper-Up at one point, and that was really the extent of it. Truth be told, they probably saw me as just their weak little kid sister, too incapable to handle the stresses of Hogwarts. They should have known I was out of sorts, should have seen I wasn't myself, but I had been out of sorts since the day Harry showed up at our kitchen, so they probably wrote it off as a part of my ridiculous childhood crush. Whatever the reasons, it was all about to get worse.