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Wednesday 8/28/92
Dear Harry,
You cannot possibly go back to the Dursleys. I know you were trying to keep their treatment of you quiet, spending as much time as you could with friends, and biding your time until you were old enough to live on your own so you don't fall under the control of someone else you can't trust not to manipulate you, but you need to tell the authorities. Petunia's neglect would have killed you this time if it wasn't for two friends'moms sending you food and a third set of friends coming to help you escape. Did Ron and the twins tell their parents about what they rescued you from? Are they taking it seriously? Maybe they could take you to the magical world's version of the police or child services, they must be harder for whoever is trying to keep you there to influence. Your world does have laws against child abuse doesn't it? I know you said it's years behind the rest of the world technologically and culturally, are the laws that backwards too? Child protection laws only came into being in the 1920's in the non magical world but surely that's one thing that your world has taken from ours if they didn't already have them.
Did you get your passport from the Dursleys, if so you could come and stay with me for the summer next year if nobody is willing to find you new guardians and a safe place to stay, either at the hideout if I have to go back to Vegas (it's still there, the company that was going to pull it down and build on the site went bankrupt), or maybe at the dorms at Caltech, hopefully I can stay here next year and do a summer semester. I could enrol you in one semester of summer school here. It would put you six months behind where you'd be if you went back to Scoil Draiocht, but at least you'd be safe for the entire summer and I'd love to see you in person. Nobody pays much attention to guests and there was hardly anybody about over the summer anyhow. I can do some extra tutoring to help you pay for a plane ticket if you need me too. Or it sounded like Dean, Seamus and Ron would each be willing to have you stay part of the summer again since you're already planning to spend the middle month at school. Do they have classes in the first month as well that you could do? I won't take offense if you would rather stay with them in the magical world, but please know you are always welcome wherever I am and I'll do my best to make sure you're safe, warm and fed, and I'll try to get you into summer school here if you want me to, though of course it wouldn't be under a fancy time compression or you could have some real time off.
I know it embarrassed you to see how empty the Weasley's vault is compared to your own but Mrs Weasley must have known it would happen when she insisted that she accompany you to your vault.
She must have known it had the potential to make things awkward between you and between you and Ron or Ginny. Maybe she was hoping to play on your sympathy and get you to spend some money on your friends. Maybe offer to buy Ron a new uniform since he hates wearing hand-me-downs so much, or Ginny a new wand since I don't think that should be the sort of thing handed down from the trouble you told me Neville has with his father's. But remember Harry, you are an orphan, that money has to get you through the rest of your school years with two sets of school fees if you're going to continue spending the summer in nonmagical classes, and still have enough left afterwards to set you up with a place to live while you go to university or whatever the magical equivalent is and until you start earning money of your own. Mr Weasley will get paid again in a couple of weeks. Your parents wouldn't want you to give away your money and risk not having enough to live comfortably later. Remember the Weasleys knew how expensive bringing up children and sending them to Hogwarts would be before they chose to have seven children, and they can't be that broke if they're happy to let Ron eat three times as much as a normal person at every meal and if they'd been that hard up then Mrs Weasley would have made them all a packed lunch for their trip to Diagon Alley rather than buying expensive ready-made food. They didn't have to allow Ron to invite you and Hermione both to stay with them either. None of the other's have friends over, though it would make sense if they'd invited them at different times throughout the summer.
If they wanted you to help out with the household expenses while you're there then they should have negotiated that before your visit when you had the choice to say you couldn't afford it, or didn't think it was worth the money, like Mrs Thomas and Dean did, not tried to guilt you into it when you'd already been there a week and felt that it would be wrong to say no if they asked for help.
You said that you thought it was stupid if Dumbledore would think that you'd learn to trust him just because you spent a couple of weeks staying with people who think that he's great but I don't think you realise how trusting most eleven and twelve year olds from normal happy homes are. They do trust their parents and their friends' parents and don't even stop to think whether people they meet can be trusted, they haven't been taught to question it. If you had been at the Dursleys the whole summer even if they hadn't beaten you and had fed you decently, you would be desperate for some kindness and positive attention. You would have wanted to trust them and would want to trust the people that trusted them to look after you. If you hadn't already distrusted them and Dumbledore as much as you do, it might have worked.
The Weasleys house sounds odd, surely even with magic it would take less effort to build and maintain a house that doesn't defy the laws of gravity, I wonder if it's normal for wizarding homes, Seamus' house wasn't like that was it? In fact, the Weasleys' house sounds like a perfect metaphor for most of the magical world, it defies the laws of physics and logic and basic common sense and yet it still exists. It's not even practical to have to go up and down so many stairs every day when they had space to build a house with more rooms on each floor and less levels. Why on earth someone would build a house like that boggles the mind, it's beyond comprehension, not to mention that you've told me about the statute of secrecy and I'm sure that if I saw a house like that I would suspect there was something odd going on and try to find out more about it.
Don't worry too much about Ginny, it sounds like she has a crush on you. It isn't your fault and there isn't much you can do about it other than be kind but a little bit distant so you don't encourage her, it should pass soon enough. In fact, it probably will have by the time you get this. Unless you genuinely return her affections you're not going to be able to avoid hurting her so it's best to be honest from the start, it will hurt less that way in the long run.
I share your suspicions of why Dumbledore wanted you to go to the Weasleys, but I can't think of a specific reason he would other than the hope they would encourage you to trust him more. Do you think he even realises that you don't trust him? When you add that to Molly's odd behaviour over the Christmas present and at the station last year, it seems even more suspicious. Dumbledore and Molly obviously want you to like and trust the Weasley family but I don't know what motive they have for that.
Keep in mind though that Dumbledore thinks Ron and Hermione are your only friends close enough to invite you to stay with them so not letting you go anywhere else might just mean not wanting you to go to Hermione's. One of the only reasons I could think of for not letting you stay with Hermione's family is that he doesn't want you to have any fond memories of the non-magical world. If you'd only had negative memories of the Dursleys and then positive memories of staying with your friend in the magical world and your amazing school, you'd be far more likely to stay in the magical world when you graduated but I've no idea why that might be more important to him for you to stay when he's not really making that much effort to make sure the students from non-magical families don't return to the non-magical world. Or he could be trying to limit your access to information out of his control though I cannot see any harm in you reading all Hermione's books, she has the information and from what you've said she's willing to share it, and he encourages her to be your friend. The other explanation is that whatever is influencing Hermione's attitudes only works or is much stronger in your proximity and they don't want her parents to notice the changes.
Your friend always
Spencer
A/N: Thank you to all those who reviewed followed or favourited this story for your support.
Stay safe everyone. Please stay safe.
A/N2: At some point soon I'm going to have to slow down posting as I'm coming towards the end of this set of prewritten chapters and I have to go back and read the "Chamber of Secrets".