Chapter 5
„You can do this... Come on! Don't be such a wuss!" Hermione whispered to herself as she paced up and down on her own front porch. She'd been doing so for the last 30 minutes and for the life of her, she couldn't get herself to just go in. Her heart was beating like a jungle drum and she felt like she'd had a couple of red bulls.
"Ok… Ok… It's not a big deal at all. Who knows? Maybe they won't even notice…"
Just then someone opened the front door of her house from the inside.
"Oh my god! Oh my god! Hermione? What happened?! What did they do to you?!"
'Right… Not in this lifetime…´, she thought to herself.
"Mum, please… Will you stop yelling?"
"Stop yelling? Have you looked at yourself?! You said you'd go get your hair cut, not get run over by a lawn mower!"
"Mum…"
"Don't worry sweetheart… We'll go right back there and I'll tell that incompetent hair stylist a thing or two."
"Mum…"
"Oh, they'll deeply regret the day they signed up for hair dressing school, I…"
"Mum!" Hermione finally yelled in attempt to snap her mother out of her frenzy. Mrs. Granger just looked at her with a startled expression.
"Can we maybe talk about this inside?...", she almost whispered with a pleading look now.
Sensing there was more to this then some freak hair accident Mrs. Granger suddenly calmed down and hugged Hermione.
"Of course…" she said with a soft voice. "Let's go in." Then, with an arm around her she guided her daughter into the house and left her in the living room.
"I'll just make us some tea, ok?"
Hermione just nodded and threw herself on the couch. `Now that went well…´, she thought to herself.
"Now, would you care to explain why your hairdresser thought making you look like a man is a suitable style for such a pretty young lady?", Mrs. Granger shouted from behind the kitchen counter.
"Maybe 'cuz that's what I am?..." Hermione mumbled and let out a frustrated sigh.
"What's that dear?", she heard her mother.
"Nothing! You know what? I'm not really in the mood for tea. I don't really feel well. I think I'm gonna go lie down for a little while, ok?" And with that she stormed up the stairs, right into her room, slammed the door and cast a silencing spell on it.
Her mother would probably be up any second now to bang at her door and demand an explanation. An explanation she apparently STILL wasn't ready to give.
She grabbed her phone, tossed herself on the bed and hit speed dial.
"Hello?", she heard the familiar voice.
"It's me… Seriously, why didn't you just get a phone with caller ID like any other normal person?!", she asked rolling her eyes which Harry of course couldn't see.
"You know I like me some vintage", Harry laughed. "So… How'd it go?"
"What do you think?! Awful!"
"You don't like the hair?", asked Harry with a confused voice.
"Not the hair! My mother's reaction to it and my clumsy attempt to explain it to her. Well, to be honest, I didn't even really try… I froze again and now I'm hiding in my room…."
"Seriously?... Come on… You said you'd talk to them two weeks ago!"
"I know!... I can't help it. As hard as it was to come out to you, this is a million times harder."
"Don't you think you might be making this unnecessarily hard? You're going to have to talk to them eventually unless you plan on starting the potions when we get to Hogwarts and give 'em a nice surprise for Christmas. What is it that your mum said about your hair that ticked you off so much anyway?"
"Nothing really… Just something about it not being suitable for a pretty lady… Almost made me vomit. I guess I'm just a little over sensitive.", Hermione replied grumpily.
"More like a little overly tense. You'd feel better if you'd finally get this over with."
Harry was right and she knew it. And as a Gryffindor she knew what she had to do.
"Ok mate I'll talk to them tonight. Besides… It' not like I can't just show up for dinner now like nothing happened… Wish me luck?"
"Godric Gryffindor would be proud of you. Now go get them! Oh and Herm? Next time you call me when Buffy is on the telly I'll hex the crap out of you!"
With a click Harry was gone and she was left alone with her thoughts once again. She couldn't hide in here for ever. She knew that, but her relationship with her parents had been strained when she dumped them in Australia and she just wasn't sure how much more they'd be willing to accept. She couldn't bear the thought of loosing them now that everything was supposed to get back to normal.
Hermione got up, grabbed her wand off her night stand and lifted the silencing charm. Immediately the loud voices paired with the sound off fists banging against wood filled her room.
"Hermione, we know you're in there. Open the bloody door.", her fathers voice carried through the wood.
"Sweaty, please open the door. We just want to talk to you!", that was her mothers voice.
Hermione took several deep breaths and walked towards the door of her room.
"Well, here goes nothing…" she mumbled to herself as she unlocked and opened the door.
Immediately her mum flung herself at Hermione's neck and wrapped her in a bear hug.
"Hermione baby, are you ok? What on earth is going on?! You're starting to scare us! Something bad is going on again and you're not telling us, right? That evil person you were protecting us from… Is he back again?", her mother asked apparently close to a panic attack.
"Mum, it's ok. Everything's fine. No evil guy is coming after us, I promise."
"You are NOT fooling us again, young lady! We have a right to…"
"Will you stop calling me that dammit?!", Hermione interrupted her dad as she freed herself from her mother's hug and started crying.
"Hermione… What is it? If it's not the war, then what's going on? You've been so withdrawn from us the last couple of weeks. I thought we wanted to try to be a family again. Did we do anything to upset you? Are you depressed? Are your nightmares getting worse? We can't help you if you don't tell us what's going on. " Mrs. Granger pleaded.
"It's not the war… I just… There's something I need to tell you and it's hard for me. I've been meaning to tell you guys for weeks but I always chickened out. Merlin, why does it have to be this hard?", Hermione said while walking back into her room and sitting down on the edge of her bed.
Her parents slowly followed throwing each other worried glances. Hermione buried her face in her hands.
"Hermione, you know you can tell us anything.", her father said in a soothing voice now.
"Hold that thought… Just, please know that I'm not trying to hurt you guys, or make you uncomfortable, or get your attention ok? I didn't ask for any of this to happen."
"Just say it baby… It can't be that bad.", her mother encouraged her.
"I'm trans.", Hermione said, then held her breath waiting for a response. When none came she looked up at her parents who just stared back in confusion.
"Did you hear what I just said?"
Her parents looked at each other then back at Hermione.
"Yes, but… What does that mean? Is that something magical?"
Hermione just groaned.
"I should've just written you a letter… This is torture!", Hermione said while throwing herself back on the bed.
"I'm a guy! Or at least I'm supposed to be a guy and somehow the universe managed to fuck it up and now I'm stuck in this hideous female body. I'm transgender!", she yelled in exasperation.
Still no response. Then she felt her bed dip on either side of the bed and a hand on one of her knees.
"Hermione… I don't understand… I mean… Where's this suddenly coming from? You never mentioned being unhappy about your body before. Are you sure? Maybe you're just a little confused. That's perfectly normal. You've been through so much… Maybe…"
"I'm not confused mum… Actually I'm confused as hell! Being trans is confusing. What I mean is I'm sure. I've always sort of known, but I'm 100% positive now because I went to St. Mungo's a couple of weeks ago to get some advice on this and it turns out they have this sort of test to figure out if your "internal gender" matches your body. The test is 100% accurate."
"And that test said you're really a boy? Is that why you cut your hair, just because a stupid test said so?", the confusion was evident in every word Mrs. Granger said.
"You don't get it." Hermione said as she sat back up. "I've always felt like a boy. Ever since I was a little kid I never understood why I couldn't be like all the other boys. Maybe that's why I never really made any friends in school. Then I got older and somewhere along the line I just realized that I was never going to be like the other boys and I tried not to think about it anymore. And Then when I went to Hogwarts and met Harry and Ron it was easy for me to forget about it. They treated me like one of them. Then the war started and there were more important things to worry about than my sexual identity. But now that there's no more threat and I'm an adult all these feelings are coming back to choke me. I just want to feel normal, you know?"
The silence in the room was deafening. For a while Hermione just sat there, listening to the pounding of her own heart in her ears. She knew it. She knew everything was going to go to hell. After everything they'd been through her parents no longer loved or wanted her. Maybe she could stay at Harry's for a while before they went back to school.
Hermione got up from her bed, went over to her closet and with a whisk of her wand clothes started flying out and into her old school trunk.
"Hermione, what are you doing?", her mother asked with that same annoying tone of confusion that Hermione was starting to hate.
"I got the message mum, I'm leaving. Don't worry about the rest of my stuff. I'll come pick…"
"What are you talking about?!" Anger… Well at least it seemed her mother was no longer confused. "You're not going anywhere! You're our child and we love you. Nothing's ever going to change that, but you have to give us some time to wrap our heads around this! We're just hearing about this now, since you never bothered to say a damn thing to us! You let us believe this whole time that you were a perfectly happy little girl, so don't be so surprised that we hadn't considered the fact that our healthy little baby girl is in fact a very unhappy man that never trusted us with his feelings."
Hermione stared at her mother wide eyed.
"What?!", Mrs. Granger snapped irritated.
"You said: HIS feelings", Hermione kept staring at her mother.
"Your mother is right kiddo", the warm voice of her father brought her back. "I don't bloody care if you're my daughter or my son. All we ever wanted was for you to be happy and you can't blame us for being a little upset over finding out that you've been miserable this whole time and you didn't trust us enough to tell us about it. This is like finding out you erased our memory and left us behind in Australia to go fight in a war all over again.", he sighed. "We just feel left out."
Tears welled up in Hermione's eyes again.
"I'm sorry", she choked. "I just love you so much… You're the best parents anyone's ever had and the thought of loosing you to the war or because I'm trans is more than I can stand. I never wanted to…"
Suddenly she was pulled into a hug by her father.
"Shh kiddo… It's ok. We just… We need a little time to think about this, that's all. And we're all too upset right now to have a rational conversation about this tonight. Why don't we just call it a day get some rest and talk about it in the morning, alright?
Hermione nodded against her father's chest. When she let go of him she was met with two very tired smiles.
"We love you baby", Mrs. Granger said softly.
"I love you too, mum" Hermione smiled a sad smile at them as they walked out of her room and closed the door behind them.
Hermione barely managed to cast the silencing spell before the first sobs broke out. On one hand: her parents didn't hate her or kick her out. On the other hand:… They were hurt she hadn't trusted them with this secret and that in turn hurt her.
She felt absolutely drained when she crawled under her blankets. Her stomach was rumbling. They hadn't had dinner, but she was simply too exhausted to fix this particular problem right now. Food would have to wait until morning. Then suddenly she smiled.
`She said: his feelings´ was the last thought that went through her head before she fell asleep.