Susan's parents had hoped she would be a Muggle. It wasn't that they were anti-magic – they didn't mind her spending time with their friend Mr Cutwell, who was a wizard with a house full of interesting things like talking doorknockers. But they thought – especially, Susan's father thought – that for most people, science was a more helpful tool for understanding the world. When she was little, her father's favourite place to take her was the Natural History Museum, to see the fossils of prehistoric creatures, and her mother's favourite place to take her was the British Museum, to see pieces of stone engraved in ancient languages.
When Susan was ten, she took an entrance exam for a grammar school that had an excellent record in getting good A-level results and sending pupils to study at Cambridge. The summer that Susan was eleven, she received a letter telling her she had been accepted by the grammar school – and another one, brought by an owl of all the weird ways to deliver a letter, telling her that she had been accepted at a school for witches and wizards. Susan wanted to snort because that was silly, like something in books for little children. But she knew it wasn't, because of Mr Cutwell. And she knew she was – different. Now she knew why. It was because she was a witch.
When Susan started at Hogwarts, she found out that she wasn't normal even for a witch. She and a weirdly dreamy girl called Luna were the only ones in their year who could see the winged horses that pulled the Hogwarts carriages. Luna could see them because she had seen her mother die. Susan didn't know why she could see them. But mainly, she just thought that the idea of a winged horse was stupid. A normal horse couldn't fly even with wings. It was too big. And a magic horse shouldn't need wings to be able to fly. It should be able to fly just because it was magic, like the brooms.
There was a talking hat that sang a song about the four founders of Hogwarts and the four different Houses named after them. Susan couldn't shake the feeling that the name 'Salazar Slytherin' meant something to her – maybe she had met a wizard called Salazar, when she was little? But no, Mr Cutwell's first name was Igneous, after his troll godfather. She also thought that the head of Slytherin House, much younger than the other Heads of House, thin and bony with a pale face and long black robes, looked like someone she knew, someone who had been kind to her, and so she didn't feel a bit afraid of Professor Snape. She wouldn't mind being in his House, she thought. But all the same, it was exciting to be sorted into Ravenclaw, House of the wise.
Her parents still didn't tell her what was going on.
When she was in third year, Professor Flitwick called her into his office to tell her that her parents had died in a car crash. She didn't cry. Later, Luna said to her, 'It's okay if you don't feel like crying yet. I didn't cry until nearly a year after my mum died.' Luna was Susan's sort-of friend, mainly because they were both too weird for anyone else to want to be friends with them, and because Susan was so obnoxious that no-one except Luna was patient enough to put up with her, while Luna was just glad that Susan didn't actively bully her.
When she was in fifth year, Professor Flitwick had to speak to her again. No, it wasn't about going invisible to skive off her Divination classes to eavesdrop on seventh-year Arithmancy and Potions classes, or even about bunking off school for a few days and attending a Muggle rock concert. This was about pets. 'You know the rules,' he squeaked. 'You're allowed one small creature, like a rat or a raven. Not both, and especially not a horse.'
The skeletal rat regarded the half-goblin teacher suspiciously through where his beady little eyes would have been. Goblins – at least, the wild goblins who lived in the forests instead of running a bank in London – sometimes ate rats, though they weren't as fond of rat-meat as dwarves were, and most preferred rabbit, or stolen chickens.
'They're not mine,' said Susan. 'I think the raven might belong to another wizard.' She glanced at the raven to see whether he would indignantly deny belonging to anyone, but he kept his beak shut. There had been an advert in the Daily Prophet: 'Lost, one raven. Answers to name of Quoth.' This raven had said that he didn't have a name and didn't answer to anything except possibly 'Member of the most intelligent genus of birds.'
'And the rat and the horse belong to my grandfather,' Susan added. 'They just came to visit me because he'd – gone off somewhere, and they were worried about him. But he's home now, so I expect they'll be off soon.'
'Who will?' Professor Flitwick looked confused. There were no open windows in the room, but the rat and the raven were nowhere to be seen.
'Oh, just – all the students here.' Clearly, the Death of Rats shared her grandfather's – and her – ability to make even wizards forget they had encountered anything uncanny.
She had been placed back in time in the same night that she had left, just before the last day of term. It would soon be time to get on the Hogwarts Express and head back to London, where Mr Cutwell would be waiting to pick her up. She had found a summer job working in a holiday play-scheme for primary-school-aged children. She wasn't sure whether she knew anything about working with children, but – after interfering in time and history, finding out that her grandfather was the Grim Reaper, having to fill in for him while he was away, and discovering that her grandfather's housekeeper was Salazar Slytherin, how hard could this be by comparison?
As it turned out, it was both harder and more interesting than she had expected, when she had to teach Defence Against Dark Arts to a Muggle five-year-old who was being stalked by vampires. By the time she was back at Hogwarts in the autumn, Susan had made up her mind that she wanted to be a teacher in a Muggle primary school. She needed to make sure the next generation of children had more preparation than she had had for finding out how weird life could be.