Good Grief! thought Harry Potter.
It would have been really ungrateful to let on how his heart fell when he realized his mysterious "A Friend" was a girl his age. Basically, he was doomed.
Even worse, the Dursleys were away for the weekend. They'd left him less than half of what Dudley ate at a sitting to last for two or more days, but fortunately, Harry was dining at his new friend's house.
Harry had slipped out, following a suggestion by Hermione. She'd brought a stuffed figure she got somewhere, and propped it up at the Dursleys' dining table. Then she had Harry turn out the lights except for a lamp they put behind the dummy. If you looked at the window it did look like someone was home.
Harry never borrowed trouble; leaving like that without permission was demanding compound interest. Still, if he had to be "rescued" by a little girl, he supposed he could have found worse.
The "Friend," whose name was Hermione Granger, was a small, slender, sporty girl with lightly tanned skin, perfect teeth and a head of curly, somewhat frizzy hair kept in a ponytail. Harry was going to spend the night on a cot in her room, and tomorrow she was going to wake him up for exercise, which she was apparently a fiend for. As tomboyish as all that made her seem, unfortunately at the moment, the situation they were in couldn't possibly be more girly: Harry was going to have tea with Hermione and her dolls.
Well, he decided, perhaps boys should do this one time just to see how the other half lives. With any luck, he could interrogate the strange girl about how and why she knew so much about him, and was seemingly so interested in him. All she'd volunteered was that she had investigated him "magically and not magically."
He followed the girl up the stairs carefully, since she carried a tray with lemon, cream and sugar. He'd offered to take up the pot of tea she'd brewed, but she surprised him by saying "Don't bother, please."
He would have assumed she was completely mental, had it not been for their neighbour, a young woman named Esther Williams. "Sneaking out with a girl, are you, little Harry? Precocious little thing, aren't you, then?" she'd exclaimed, giving him a wink. Then, she asked Harry, "Not that I want any trouble, dear, but do you know anything about all the ... well, the rabbits?"
He hoped he hadn't looked guilty. "Rabbits?" he asked.
"Hundreds of them, at least it looked like. It was on page four of the papers. And, well, I saw the bulk of them - they were all burrowing out of Number Four. Turned Privet Drive into a proper warren. People had to have men come and get rid of them."
Hermione had been watching his face and announced they had to rush or she'd be late getting home. Harry told the woman, who lived with her mother in Number 6, that he did all the chores for the Dursleys, and Petunia had not asked him to take care of any rabbit problems.
They hadn't lingered in Number Four one second longer than they needed for Hermione to ring the door, barge in, tell Harry she was his friend, have him gather a spare shirt, tee and shorts in a bin bag and leave it near the door, put the dummy in its chair, grab the bag, and lock up. If it had been anyone not as desperate as Harry, it would have been almost comical.
Hermione raised her wand and conjured a speeding bus out of thin air. Harry began to be very afraid of her, but she gave him no time to hesitate. "You won't like this a bit, but bear with it. We all do. If he asks your name, do you prefer Neville or Ronald?" Harry hadn't responded, so she'd picked Neville for him. After they'd settled in, as much as one could on the crazy bus, she turned to him. "Rabbits?"
"It wasn't me!" he said, defensively. "I was trying to make some come out of a hat, true. But nothing happened."
"Sounds like you have power, but no control. That's ... more data for me!" It was evident that she loved data.
"Is that him?" a woman, who had to be her mother, asked when they got to the door. Hermione smiled and agreed. When she smiled, she reminded Harry of girls you saw playing parts on television. The woman welcomed Harry inside.
"Well, at least he's real," said a man's voice from somewhere inside.
It was Hermione's mother that suggested that Harry and Hermione should have a tea party in her room
Harry had never had any friends, let alone any girl friends, nor had he ever been to anyone's house but Mrs Figg's. For all he knew, it was a reasonable suggestion. He thanked the Grangers for having him over, and they brushed it aside. Mrs Granger put the kettle on, and Hermione got down a pot and some leaves. The same pot she later left in the kitchen.
Hermione had the boy out of the storybook put his folded shirt on a hanger in her wardrobe. She'd had Harry bring up a pair of cushions to rest against on the floor by the little tea table. They were on one side of the table and all seven dolls were clustered around the table, turned to face them.
"Watch my cup," she told Harry, suddenly. As she drew herself to the table, she saw Harry's eyes go wide as it filled itself up. She poured the tea from her cup into his, put hers back, and waited for it to refill.
"How do you take it?" she asked. Harry stuttered out that he liked "mi-milk and ... and sugar."
She had him set down his cup and move back from the table a bit. "Tell me all the strange things you can remember," she said.
Something about her disarmed him and made him trust her, it seemed. As she wrote down all the incidents - his hair regrowing, his teacher's hair changing colour, flying onto the roof - and what is it with him and hair, she wondered, she hoped he was relieved to unburden himself of what had to be a painful amount of secrets.
"Okay," she said, as gently as she could, putting her notes away. "Strange things happen to me, too, as you can see." She pointed at the tea. "Now, I am going to show you some more, but please, please don't panic. Can you try to do that for me?" She had no idea if a plain, immature girl like her could make doe eyes, but she gave it her best shot, and he did nod his head.
However, when seven tiny voices rang out, saying "Welcome, Harry Potter!" he nonetheless shrank back in fear. Hermione got teary-eyed instead of what she'd attempted. She put her hands on Harry's shoulders and her eyes looked deep into his.
"They're my friends, Harry. The only ones I've ever, ever had."
Harry, being an isolated ten-year-old boy, didn't normally think about, or care about, how girls looked. Even the ones in shows and films on the TV. But when Hermione looked up at him pleadingly with her wide, brown eyes, he couldn't help but notice she was very pretty. And her eyes were super beautiful. Then again, when her dolls came alive, he could see why she might have trouble making friends. When she started to cry and told him she only had her dolls for friends, his heart went out to her. He tried to comfort her. He put his hands by her side but didn't really know what to do with them. She solved that by clinging to him, and he hugged her, stiffly.
Suddenly, he realized what he could do. "I'll be your friend if you want me to," he said in her ear. When he pulled back, she had another of those smiles that made his chest feel strange.
He forced himself to greet all the dolls. Bloody hell, this is like being in Alice, he thought. Living under the Dursleys had taught Harry discretion and tact, so he didn't change expression as he realised how many of the dolls' names could apply to Hermione. He did wonder what "Bucky" was about. Possibly from the same time when she regarded herself as "Plain?"
It was better to straightforwardly refuse information than to lie. Hermione told Harry she couldn't tell him how she knew things - it was a secret. But she could tell him things. Sometimes, she could share her research, too. After they finished their tea, they went downstairs and Mr Granger put on the video of Hermione practising Quidditch. She told Harry he'd be doing that in a few years. It seemed amazing to him. Hermione looked very cool.
They had a light supper, and Hermione gave Harry a selective view of what she knew about him so far. She again shamelessly cribbed from Rubeus Hagrid when she told Harry the truth about his parents. No car smash, she told Harry, could have taken James and Lily Potter. It was the work of a very bad man who could do magic as they could, and his very bad friends. She took his hand, seeing his expression on hearing that.
"I think things will be okay, Harry," she began. "We need to keep the man who put you with the Dursleys from finding out about me. Mrs Figg is his spy - spying on you. So don't let on what you know around her. We're going to feed you and get you healthy, and you and I are going to study. You have a lot to learn, and less than a year to learn it. And I and my parents will handle the Dursleys. We'll make them stop hurting you and making you slave for them. They will be threatened with the police, telling their neighbours, a lawsuit if they've taken money to help you, telling Vernon's employer, and if it comes to that, I'll threaten to go to the magical police. They are not kind to those without magic, Harry. But that's a last resort because we'd have to get them arrested before the man who put you there finds out."
They brushed their teeth and washed up. Mrs Granger donated an old pair of tracksuit bottoms and a sweatshirt for Harry to use as pyjamas. Noticing it seemed to stay up, Hermione told him he wouldn't need to change out of his track clothes to exercise. He could wear the same trousers after he showered, and change his underwear and shirt. She could tell by his expression she was being too bossy, but she also saw a lot more warmth in his eyes than when she met him on Privet Drive.
She showed harry a carefully vetted sample of her notes. He noticed quickly that some of them were in various handwriting. "Hermione," he asked suddenly, "do your friends ... the doll friends ... do they, like, um, tell you things?"
She admitted they did. "I have a lot of different sources, Harry," she said. "Please don't tell anyone else about the dolls. I'm keeping it a top secret." She got the impression sharing a secret like that was making them better friends already.
When he asked if they were alive, she replied they were close enough it would be rude to speculate on it.
They talked for quite a while with the lights out. Hermione told Harry this was what she imagined a "sleep-over" was like. Harry said he liked it.
Exercise the next morning was gruelling. Mrs Granger told Harry to keep the tracksuit, so he put it in the bin bag. Hermione had bought a pair of matched journals in Diagon Alley. She gave one to Harry, and showed him how writing in one made the writing appear in the other. He said it was too much, but the Grangers said it was a late birthday present.
"Some strangers gave me the best possible birthday present recently, Harry. And my uncle gave me the Quidditch practice you saw. So it's high time I give someone something good," Hermione explained.
They chatted for an hour to let breakfast settle before braving the bus again. Harry went behind Number Four and circled around before entering it, making it look like he was doing early morning chores. Soon enough, that became reality. He had gotten a second wind after being with the Grangers, so his chores went quickly. There was, as luck would have it, laundry to do, so he washed the tracksuit with it, and hid it in his cupboard.
Two meals at the Grangers meant he didn't have to parcel his food supply out in too meagre a fashion. He was tired, so he went to bed early. As he was falling asleep, he reflected on his day. True, "A Friend" turned out to be a strange little girl. Then again, he decided, she was undoubtedly a formidable one. On an impulse, he pulled the little chain attached to the naked bulb that lit his cupboard and opened the journal.
"Sweet Dreams, Harry."
He scribbled a response, closed the journal, and turned the light out.
"Sweet Dreams, Hermione."
