Chapter 34: Petunia Begins

A/N: Sorry I've been so slow to post and reply to reviews, but my life has been a Gong Show of late. The forces of stupidity are aligned against me. Fortunately, I'm up to the challenge, but I've had no spare time to write (and a very iffy internet connection as well). Things should get better in a month or so (I hope). Meanwhile, here's a short look at Rita's interview with Petunia. I'll get back to this, and to our favorite phoenix and his friends, as soon as I can. Until then, thanks for your patience!

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Rita Skeeter brought out her notebook. Petunia Evans Dursley had been so easy to fool. All it took was a trench coat and a phony badge to make the muggle woman believe that Rita was a muggle police detective investigating the recent wizard problems. With a little bit of prodding the woman would tell all.

Petunia started by prattling on about her family's suffering during the war. They'd been forced to stay in some old hotel on the coast in Devon where the owner, who was more than a bit barmy, had been very rude to them, and now they were having financial difficulties. Vernon had lost his job and was still looking for a new one. They couldn't get Dudley back into Smeltings and had to put him in one of the awful local schools to finish his last year. The yard was overgrown with weeds, the neighbors had been avoiding them and giving them very strange looks, and Aunt Madge kept telling them that it was all their own fault for harboring a freak.

"It's all been so horrible," Petunia said, sniffling a bit, "completely and utterly horrible."

"I'm sure it has been," Rita said with fake sympathy, "but we must begin at the beginning to see how it all came about. Tell me about your sister, the …" she paused for effect, "… witch. What was she like as a child?"

"Lily?" Petunia snorted. "She was always everyone's favorite. They all thought she was so pretty and so clever, but she was really quite nasty, at least to me. They never acknowledged that, though. She had them all fooled. They all thought she was little Miss Perfect."

"When did you realize she was … not normal?"

"A freak, you mean?" Petunia said, and Rita had to stifle an intense urge to hex her. "It took a while. Strange things used to happen around Lily, and I thought that was normal. I thought that I was the abnormal one because those things didn't happen for me."

"What sort of things?" Rita asked gently. Her phony smile wasn't very convincing but Petunia was too busy feeling sorry for herself to notice.

"Little things would leap into her hand when she reached for them. Toys, flowers, forks and spoons, things like that. And sometimes things would fall down for no apparent reason, like a vase or the clock over the mantle. And of course I'd get the blame whenever that sort of thing happened.

She's just jealous, Rita thought. It's hardly surprising. She's just a poor, stupid muggle, after all.

"I don't think my sister understood it herself until she met that horrible boy," Petunia continued, making a face like there was a bad smell in the room. "He was the one who told her she was a witch and encouraged her to do witchy things."

Rita's heart leapt with excitement, but she managed to sound casual. "What boy was that?"

"The Snape boy."

"Snape?" Rita asked innocently.

"Yes, Snape. He was the son of one of the workers at the plant. Our dad worked at the plant, too, but he was a supervisor, of course. He said Tobias Snape, the Snape boy's father, was just plain lazy. It was no surprise what happened to him."

"What did happen to him?"

"He was killed in a riot at some stupid football match. It was in the papers. Dad said he was probably drunk."

"Hmmm," Rita said, writing in her notebook, "but what about his son? What about the Snape boy?"

To be continued …