Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or Criminal Minds or any of their characters. I do however own this story, I wrote it and I do NOTgive permission for anyone to post it anywhere else. If you want to share it post a link.
Monday 27/8/90
Dear Spencer
The new garden is finished and it looks like something out of a magazine and totally foreign and not quite right in Privet Drive, but Vernon and Petunia are happy with it thank goodness. I'm back to regular chores and have managed to get to the library and spend a little more time at the restaurant helping out. The new menu's all done and seems to be a success from the amount of salad ingredients and pizza toppings I chopped up last night.
Don't worry they paid me well for my help, in my favourite pizza and a little cash so I can buy more envelopes and stamps.
I've been reading more detective stories, Agatha Christie's Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot stories are really good. They don't call their observations deductions, Miss Marple just predicts how a person reacts from the fact that their behaviour reminds her of someone else's behaviour which is really deductions by a different name. She must have been very observant of everyone around her and have had a great memory for that to work. Hercule Poirot has a sidekick and a tame policeman like Sherlock Holmes, it seems to be a fairly common formula for detective stories to make the police look stupid. Do you think they are? Do you think that they're going to believe all the gossip that I'm a juvenile delinquent?
I've also started reading myths and old faerie tales too to see if there's anything in them that's like what I can do. I know they're mostly fiction but ideas have still got to come from somewhere. My English teacher says the best stories are written about things you know. There's no point writing about posh rich people if you live in a working-class suburb or vice-versa the a rich person would never be able to write realistically about lifetime poorness, or a city dweller about farm life or living in the bush. So, it's possible some of those stories were written by people that lived with powers like mine.
I've been practicing deductions too but it is hard to know when your making a genuine deduction and when you're guessing. I deduced that Vernon has something going on at work that he doesn't want Petunia to know about. It's nothing bad, he isn't angry about it but he's going to work about ten minutes early and is about twenty minutes later home. Not late enough to miss dinner but late enough that he doesn't pour himself a whisky before dinner. He's been wearing his better work clothes to work. So there's someone he wants to look nice for but not something formal like a meeting with head office. Like you said about Travis not cheating on your Aunt Ethel, Vernon isn't acting terribly guilty with Petunia but was annoyed and evasive when she asked about his new work habits. So not an affair but perhaps a new pretty colleague he wouldn't mind getting to know a little better. Or a new friend, or he's managing to do something he either shouldn't or that gives him an advantage over someone he sees as a rival. It's not a potential promotion, he would've been boasting about that. Either way he seems happier and less inclined to punishing me, so that's good. I hope whatever it is lasts a long time.
Petunia doesn't seem to care about whatever it is, or perhaps she hasn't noticed since it's not occurring with the neighbours while she spies on them over the fence. And she hasn't noticed that I'm washing Vernon's favourite shirts much more quickly than normally, or maybe she thinks he's wearing his best work shirts all the time because I am getting them back to him before he has to wear the others. Either way she hasn't said anything about the washing.
I'm sure Petunia does know better than to feed Dudley all the rubbish he's eating, she doesn't eat it herself and she does try to cook healthy meals when they eat at home. When they take him out either Dudley or Vernon choose the restaurant, and the same with take-aways so that isn't her fault. The sweets and treats in the cupboards all the time is and I think they do it almost as one more thing they can feel good about depriving me of. Every time I see her give him a treat she glances at me and looks a little bit pleased, Dudley does it too, he asks for treats more when he knows I'm around, maybe because he knows he's likely to get more. I think they would have fed and parented Dudley more sensibly if they hadn't taken me in when my parents died. I admit that since I realised it, I have been encouraging her by attempting to look sulky when she glances at me like that. The more sweets he eats the slower he can run to catch me. And the more he wheezes and has to use his puffer which makes his friends stop chasing me too and help him. It does make me feel a little guilty but not enough to want him to be fitter if it means I get hit more.
It's more than just the food they feed him though. It's the way they let him get away with bullying me and praising him when he passes a test and blaming the teacher or me if he fails, making me do his homework so he doesn't learn the stuff he's supposed to. None of that is being good to Dudley either. It just means that they're making me do my homework even if I don't get to hand it in as my work, I'm still the one learning and practicing. No wonder Dudley's so stupid on the tests and it's so hard to do worse than he does, he's being tested on things he hasn't learned. He's also not learning how to work or to take responsibility for himself, they're teaching him to avoid working and to blame other people for your failures.
Your friend
Harry
A/N: Thank you to all those who reviewed followed or favourited this story for your support.