Today's tennis camp lunch offerings consisted of a miserly sandwich filled with slimy ham and cheese, a mealy apple and an off-brand caramel wafer. Cho sighed as she considered the reality of her forlorn situation. Predictably, her mum had work over the summer holidays and Cho didn't attend any of the local schools which was a prerequisite for any of the summer groups there, so she had been sent to camp. It was a typical part of her summer and had been since she had been in primary school. This was however one of the better arrangements that had taken place, as one summer she had gone to circus camp which had been an unmitigated disaster. She ate the too wet sandwich, the too dry apple and the caramel wafer that was just ever so slightly wrong and drank some dusty water from a paper cup delighted for at least something to quench her thirst after a morning playing tennis. In the few minutes she had left she read a chapter of her favourite childhood book which she had brought along with her 'The Worst Witch' which her mum had also loved as a teenager.

"It's time to get back to it, Cho," the instructor said, coming over to where Cho was sitting alone under the shade of the sports club. She hadn't exactly made friends during her time at camp, but she hadn't made many enemies either. Happy wasn't exactly a term that could accurately describe her emotions surrounding the arrangements of the summer, but discontented wasn't either.

"Of course," she said, standing up and dusting crumbs off her trousers along with the sandy offerings of the tennis court. She put her book back in her rucksack and zipped it back up, spotting her Tutshill Tornados keyring and wishing more than anything that she was playing Quidditch instead. Tennis wasn't really her sport, but maybe this would all be worth it once she was back at Hogwarts and she finally had her shot at getting the recently vacant reserve Ravenclaw seeker position. It wouldn't guarantee a position in games, but it would be good practice.

She walked slowly back towards the tennis courts which had been divided in half to facilitate the rather meagre tennis offerings of the Dundonian youth whose parents, like Cho's, hadn't been able to wangle the entirety of the summer holidays off work. Cho had been at tennis camp for several weeks, taking the bus there every morning before returning home in time to walk back from the bus stop with her mum. The next summer camp was going to be youth glee camp which was unfortunate for the other attendants as Cho couldn't sing. Her summer camp attendance, however, was not in vain as it meant that her mum was able to take one week of July and two weeks of August off so they could spend time together. This was also because Hogwarts, although a school that happened to be in Scotland, kept the term dates of England in a manner similar to other private schools. It had been a point a frustration for Cho's mum as it meant that if she wasn't able to get the final two weeks of August off all the summer holiday camps would finish so there would be nowhere for Cho to go when she was at work. It had worked out well this year though.

All but one of her fellow attendants at camp were just as terrible at tennis as she was, and being the lucky social butterfly that she was, she of course ended up paired with the one good tennis player at camp.

"Ready to be beaten again?" Jules, who she had paired with said nastily. "What is it now? 10 to me, 0 to you."

Cho was reminded of Neville's nemesis Draco Malfoy who apparently had a lot to say about his Quidditch skills. Jules had been playing since she was four years old and attended a private school with, among other things, a tennis court.

"Tennis isn't my sport," Cho bit out, angrily gripping her tennis racquet. "We play Q- Netball at my school. I'm going to try out for the team this year."

"Then why are you at tennis camp again?" Jules asked.

Cho looked around at their fellow attendants who were failing just as badly as she was. Most of them were similarly incapable of serving, or hitting the ball, or in some cases, holding the tennis racquet.

"The same reason everyone else is," she said honestly. "Why are you here?"

By the end of her time at tennis camp, Cho had won just one game (although she attributed this to annoyance based accidental magic more than any actual skill or development) and was ready to do pretty much anything else.

Following the rest of tennis camp, and the disaster that was glee club, Cho and her mum departed Dundee for a week and headed to the southeast of England to visit Cho's aunt in Surbiton.

"Can I maybe visit a friend when we're down there?" Cho asked her mum on the train. They tended to take the muggle option whenever they could due to the exhaustion that could ensue from long distance apparition. That had always been the way, and Cho rather liked trains.

"Which friend?" Jen replied. "I don't know if we will have enough time to head to any m-mountain communities when we're down there."

"Addie. She lives in Surrey with her aunt and uncle. Can I message her and ask her?"

Jen leaned forward so that their neighbours couldn't hear them. "Message?"

"I'll explain it later."

Cho got out her calculator and started communicating. It was a crude means of doing so, but it got easier the more you did it.

"+E", she started, "1π-5√√Ey-2-C.Aπ+-MEE+."[1]

They arrived in Surbiton that day and unfortunately the experience ended up being much worse than Cho had predicted it would. It had been a trip that she had taken often with her parents when she was younger and she had always been excited to do it. Her dad would take his Walkman so she could listen to music while they travelled so she could simply focus on the countryside and towns and cities flashing by as they travelled south. When she had been younger her disdain for travelling had been passed off as one of those things that small children did and had been easily dismissed by a Walkman or a magazine with a free toy. From the time she had started primary school, her travels had become less and less frequent as it became clear that she would never like to travel by aeroplane or spend a significant amount of time in cars and routine changes took her a very long time to recover from. Since then, she had only travelled to Hogwarts. Nowhere else. She had not visited her grandparents in the time since they had moved back to China, and her aunt since she was about eight. Dundee to the south of England was a bearable train journey, but the routine change was not.

This year, however, her mum had asked her if she would go with her and Cho had agreed, reasoning that perhaps since she had managed to adjust to the strangeness of Hogwarts and not being at home she would be able to deal with staying in her aunt's house. After all, her memories of her aunt were of a very warm woman, and she was pleased to be seeing her again. Aunt Lynn hadn't changed much since Cho had been 5, but apparently Cho had, and not just in the physical sense.

"It's what the…schizophrenia…took from us," she said breathlessly at dinner the first evening and Cho's blood froze, recognising the words as they were being said for what they were. She had been told that various times when she had been younger by other relatives before they understood (although some of them never did) and her mother was often asked how she coped with the fact that autism had stolen her child, so she would never be able to do what she had expected her to.

"They don't call it that anymore you know. They changed the manual. Cho's diagnosis was autistic disorder. I told you, remember?" Cho's mum had tried to tell her.

"It's the same thing. You have a seriously unwell child. Look at her. She won't even make eye contact with me and remember what you told me about her refusing to go to school."

"Lynn…" Jen said desperately. "Cho's right here and she understands what you are saying about her."

"I'm doing much better now, you know – since my psychologist told me – and I've started doing pretty well at school. I even have friends now," Cho said, trying to advocate for herself at least a little bit. A few years before Hogwarts she had told her mum things to tell other people but she had more confidence now.

"It's just so sad to see you a shell of the person you were before," Aunt Lynn kept on saying. Cho was very pleased to leave at the end of the week. Hopefully, when she was actually an adult, her aunt would listen to her as an actual human being, but she wasn't counting on it. The only good thing that happened on that visit to her aunt was when she was hiding from her cousins (and her aunt) in a cupboard - that she received a response from Addie. All she received back was, "6√8-Aπy-FDAy-A+-11B√A√. 12:00-14:00."[2]

At first, Cho had been confused as to which library she meant as there were many libraries around, but was very quickly able to figure out which one she had been alluding to. Addie had mentioned several times having grown up with her aunt and uncle in Little Whinging which according to a quick check in her aunt's Britain based atlas had a dot near it bearing the word 'library' which seemed fairly clear to Cho. Once she had figured this out it became clear to her why Addie hadn't given her any more information than that. In their interesting calculator language the place was very different to get out and "11++1E-1π61πg" didn't really get the point across. The letters W and H were nightmares to type, so they would probably have to figure out a system for that.

At the end of the week before they drove their hire car back to London to take the train back home, she had gladly got back into the car and travelled to Little Whinging with her mum. She reckoned that she was more excited to go to Little Whinging than Addie had ever been, but that was more to do with the fact that she was going to see Addie than anything else. The morning they left, she sent a single word message: "T0Day."[3]

The Little Whinging library was hardly an impressive building, especially after having spent so long in the libraries at Hogwarts, but to Cho, the prospect of being able to visit a new place and visit her friend made it the most exciting place she had been to all summer. Tennis camp, glee camp and her aunt's house had nothing on this. Cho had of course been to muggle libraries before. When she had been little and there hadn't been enough money to be spared for books, she had been in her local one almost daily after school. Her mum may never have told her that things were tight, but she knew not to ask for too much. Her mum agreed to drive her there knowing how much Cho had always struggled to make friends, and wanting to see the child they were partially responsible for feeding (she had her own suspicions on that), she had of course agreed.

Together, she and her mum entered the library. After wandering about for quite some time – they must have not spotted her the first few times as the library was hardly big – she spotted familiar braids from one of the smaller separated off areas. Addie just so happened to raise her hand to wave at her and Cho smiled widely at her. Addie stood up and walked towards her, clearly eager to talk to her, and Cho decided that it was high time that they hugged, so they did. Addie looked surprised but pleased.

"It feels like forever since I last saw you, even though really hasn't!" she said as quietly as she could, after all, they were in a library.

"Yeah," Addie replied. "I've been so used to being at school all the time that it feels weird to not see you all twice a week."

"The first Tuesday, I felt as though there was somewhere I was supposed to be, but I couldn't quite place it. I was at tennis camp instead though so I was actually really busy," she didn't want to seem too much like she didn't have any other friends or had spent most of her summer that hadn't been spent at camp moping.

"Cho," said Mum, "aren't you going to introduce me to your friend?"

In all her excitement, Cho had completely forgotten that her mum was there.

"Mum," she said, "this is my friend Addie, and that," she gestured at Harry who was sitting unsuccessfully pretending to read the Beano, "is her brother Harry."

"Wait, you mean…"

It was only at that moment that Cho remembered that she had completely forgotten to tell her mum that her friend 'Addie' who she talked about all the time was Adelaide Potter, sister of the famous Harry from the same family. Oops.

"Addie, this is my mum," Cho said.

"It's nice to meet you Mrs…" Addie started.

"You can call me Jen," Cho's mum said. "If I had known that you were that Addie," Cho crossed her fingers and hoped more than anything that she wasn't about to be embarrassing, "then I would have wanted to meet you sooner. I knew your parents at school."

Wait what?

Addie echoed her sentiments while staring out to the other side of the library. "Really? The only person I have ever met that went to school with my parents was Professor Snape, and that's only because he spends so much time insulting my dad."

"Well, they always did have a rivalry," Cho's mum admitted. "It drove Lily to tears half the time. That wee eejit James Potter who spent most of his time mooning after her like she was Cher also spent half his time pranking Snape with his wee annoying friends."

"Wait, my mum didn't like my dad?" Addie sounded very confused by this, and Harry's pretend reading of the Beano ceased completely as he gaped at Cho's mum in shock.

"Oh, he stopped thinking he was god's gift when he was seventeen, and got married at nineteen. That was the war I suppose. Everyone got married young. They had to, in order to do it before dying young."

"Mum," Cho said abruptly, "you have to stop doing that!"

"Oh, I'm sorry for putting it like that," she said quickly. "Sometimes my mouth has no filter. Eventually they were both very good friends of mine, it was just that most people are awful when they are teenagers. I certainly was."

"I supposed that is a very…balanced take on my dad. How about my mum?"

"Oh, she was generally a very lovely person. Smart too. Don't go thinking that she was an angel though as she also made some questionable decisions as a teenager. Sometimes she was a bit hard to read which made her sometimes a complicated person to be friends with. James on the other hand, was an open book. Ridiculously honest. We had loads in common."

Addie and Cho sat down at a table and got to chatting about everything that had been going on during their holidays. Cho's mum settled down with a book on glass blowing which Cho hoped very much would not develop into her short-term hobby of the month. The welding incident of 1986 had resulted in a Christmas visit to A&E. Harry got back to reading the Beano.

"Have you been getting up to much?" Cho asked Addie. They weren't able to communicate much through the calculators, and this way there would be no room for misinterpretation.

"Not really," Addie admitted. "Harry and I have been ignoring each other. I think I might have upset him when I confronted him about everything that went on last year. I am trying to think the best of him, but the more he stays silent, the more I just find myself thinking that he has changed."

"School does that to a lot of people," Cho said. "I thought that Marietta had changed when she started trying to give me the slip, but I later realised that some people only accept you when they can't be seen doing so. The moment there was an audience, she bailed like her life depended on it."

"I try and tell myself that Harry isn't like that, but I have no idea what he's like anymore. We joined the magical world together, but it's like the more we have in common in that regard, the more we move apart. Well, let's talk about better things. How was your visit with your aunt?"

"Not much better," Cho said gloomily. "She's acting like I'm a changeling, and it really gets on my nerves."

"Did you ever get on?" Addie asked her, and Cho recalled what her childhood had been like before she had been diagnosed. She would always be sent down on the train to stay with her aunt for some of the summer. She had a son about Cho's age, and she would take care of them both while her mum picked up extra shifts. It was always really great. They were family on her dad's side and to start with it was really great to see a snapshot into their world. Later, she just liked to visit them and see how they were doing.

"When I was little we did, but then everything seemed to change overnight."

"I'm so sorry for your loss," Addie said softly.

"What? It's not like she's dead or anything." Cho wasn't sure whether Addie had misheard her or something.

"She may not be dead, but she treats you like you are a different person, so you could say that the fact that she treats you like you are a different person demonstrates that she is in turn a different person, because the person who you knew wouldn't have treated you like that."

"That is a very weird way of putting it," Cho said, because it was, "but I appreciate the sentiment. The main benefit of me deciding to come with my mum is that I have been able to spend time with you. I wouldn't have been able to deal with all that if it hadn't been a step on the way to seeing you."

This time it was Addie who initiated the hug and she held her for a second. "I am so glad that you asked me if I wanted to meet up. It's bizarre only having my brother to talk to."

"Now, do they have interesting books here?" Cho asked Addie, changing the subject to one of far more interest to either of them.

"Astronomy is that way!" Addie said, "I'll go over to history, and we can meet up back here in 5 minutes. Deal?"

"Deal," Cho agreed eagerly, before racing off towards the books on astronomy. While she was incredibly fond of the hand drawn star charts and moon stages that were in all of the magical astronomy text books, there was something even more magical to her (very ironically) in the muggle photographs taken from various telescopes around the world. To compare these photographs to the drawings in a magical textbook would be like comparing a stick figure drawn on a napkin to the Mona Lisa. The earlier was perfectly serviceable in some settings, but the latter had a certain something that the earlier did not. She very quickly found a book on Venus and made it back to the table in good time. Very soon after this, Addie reappeared, holding a book on early 19th century photographs of London that looked like it could very well be an original. They sat down, in usual formation, one at either side of a corner of a square table and got to reading.

Before they parted, Cho decided to make a book recommendation.

"Do you really think I'm the Worst Witch?" Addie asked her, disappointedly.

"No," Cho said, "I don't. This was my favourite book growing up and if you need something to read when you're done with history or maths you might enjoy reading it. The author wrote it when she was at school, and if I didn't know better, I would say that the school she went to was ours."

They hugged when they departed, and Cho saw Addie eyeing up the children's section of the library thoughtfully.

[1] Addie, in Surrey to see aunt. Meet.

[2] Great. Any Friday at library. 12:00-14:00

[3] Today