Chapter 150

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3/14/93

Dear Harry

You have done nothing to deserve the other students turning on you like that. You know this, don't let them make you start to question it. What's happening is a bit herd mentality, some students would be going along with it in fear of the herd turning on them if they speak up in your defence, others are taking the opportunity to bully you because you suddenly seem like a target they'll get away with cursing, only a few probably really believe that you're behind what's going on and of those only Colin's and Justin's closest friends would be attacking you out of revenge. As for the rest, I know you've had too much experience dealing with bullies in your life not to recognise the behaviour. I know it hurts more for it to suddenly start again when some of them are people you thought of as friends or at least friendly classmates and people you trusted. Just keep your chin up and try to hide your reactions, remember that you'll be out of there soon enough. If it wouldn't arouse the attention you need to avoid from Dumbledore and whoever else is watching you I would suggest finding a way to hex them back in the most embarrassing ways you can think of, but it isn't worth it if it causes more scrutiny and prevents you following through on your plans for the summer. Perhaps on the train on the way home you can go along and hex the lot of them, starting with Ron Weasley. If you could find a spell you could do without your fake wand I bet nobody would even know it was you and you could hex Hermione as well. I'm sorry I can't offer you any real support against them but knowing that you were there for me, not judging me for what happened was a huge comfort for me when I was being bullied in High School. I hope that my letters can give you some of that support and comfort too. I'm glad that I'm now in a place where I'm safe from all that and that I've made some friends here but having you for a best friend is what got me through that horrible time and gave me the courage to try to make friends when I got here. If I hadn't had you I might have lost all confidence in my ability to connect with people around my own age at all and rejected even the hope of having friends.

The idea that there're spells imbedded into one magical newspaper whether it is run by the government or owned by a private person or group is deeply unsettling. That one person or group could influence the ideas of a large portion of a nation without anybody realising and doing something to stop it is frightening. Do you know who owns 'The Daily Prophet'? Worse if it could be done once, it could be done again. Can you send me a newspaper, I want to see if I am influenced to believe the articles in it. The results wouldn't be conclusive, even if there was magic it might not work on nonmagical people or it could fail because I'm deliberately looking for traces of it. I didn't notice it before in the newspaper you sent me but that was when the whole wizarding world was completely new to me and all the articles were about people I had no knowledge of. I also was used to the nonmagical newspapers who can be sued for defamation and libel if they knowingly print anything untrue or unable to be substantiated.

You're right about Hermione's intelligence, it's incredibly rare in academic circles that a memory like that doesn't lead to questioning the state of things in the person's area of interest. There are professors and scientists who have very little knowledge of their world outside their chosen area of expertise, McGonagall and Flitwick could be like that and I could see Hermione becoming a person like that too. Of course, Hermione is still very young and if she wasn't advanced through elementary school and hasn't continued in any nonmagical education she hasn't really been taught much about deductive reasoning or to look for the motivations (overt and subtle) behind various pieces of writing. I know that you'll tell me that she's the same age as you or older but even when we met you were reading well above your age level and choosing books with more emotional maturity and complex themes running through them. And growing up as neglected as you did, forced you into developing your independence at a much younger age, not just the ability to do things for yourself but the ability to find information rather than asking your family, the ability to think for yourself and to see that parents and teachers don't know everything. Seeing the way Vernon and Petunia changed the way they spoke to and about you in various public settings also let you see that adults can answer questions and express opinions dependent on factors such as the person they're talking to and who else might be listening and what they want from those people, rather than always expressing the opinions they truly believe. Knowing that Vernon and Petunia did that most of the time, you were able to expand it to other adults around you and then to the books and things you read. Thinking back over our correspondence I've realised that I might also have encouraged you to question information more deeply than your teachers did, because that's the way I was taught to read books. The consequences of being read to by a literature professor.

Anyway, if Hermione was a genuine friend, I would be encouraging you to be glad that she had the sort of upbringing that allowed her to still learn like a child, rather than an upbringing more like yours, and to gently encourage her to read more than magical textbooks or to take an English or History class over the summer to learn to read more discerningly. I think if she was more widely read and able to see things more maturely, she would be able to see that her actions haven't always been that of a friend to you.

Arithmancy and Runes both sound like amazing things to learn from what the books you've sent me say about them, maybe to me because the seem like something a nonmagical could learn to do even if I would need someone else to power the runes for me or maybe just because Arithmancy seems to be like the science behind spells. They also sound like subjects you could continue to learn on your own for a while if you do end up attending a nonmagical school next year.

I don't know why Hermione or Ron would think they have any influence in what subjects you choose to study, I doubt that either of them will care what you think or ask your opinion when they make their own choices, and nor should they. Each person has to put in the work to complete the subject so it should be entirely their choice if they want to do it. It's like over the summer when you advanced a couple of classes, Dean and Seamus might have thought you were mad signing up for that much extra work but it didn't affect them and they would be bad friends if they'd tried to stop you doing what you wanted to do. They didn't get upset with you about the choice you made or the fact that you were offered an opportunity to move up and they weren't.

Batman was from another planet whose people were able to build spaceships that could travel to other solar systems. He turned out to be a good guy when brought up by decent humans but you have to wonder what his parents would've done if they'd come with him.

Your friend always

Spencer

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