Adventures of Harriet Potter

The Scar

Harriet lay flat on her back, breathing hard as though she had been running. She had awoken from a vivid dream with her hands pressed over her face. The old scar on her forehead, which was shaped like a bolt of lightning, was burning beneath her fingers as though someone had just pressed a white-hot wire to her skin. She sat up, one hand still on her scar, the other reaching out in the darkness for her glasses, which were on the bedside table. She put them on and her bedroom came into clearer focus, lit by a faint, misty orange light that was filtering through the curtains from the street lamp outside the window.
Harriet ran her fingers over the scar again. It was still painful. She turned on the lamp beside her, scrambled out of bed, crossed the room with a slight limp, opened her wardrobe, and peered into the mirror on the inside of the door. A skinny girl of fourteen looked back at her, her bright green eyes puzzled under her untidy fiery-red/orange hair. She examined the lightning-bolt scar of her reflection more closely. It looked normal, but it was still stinging. Harriet tried to recall what she had been dreaming about before she had awoken. It had seemed so real. . . . There had been two people she knew and one she didn't. . . . She concentrated hard, frowning, trying to remember. . . .
The dim picture of a darkened room came to her. . . . There had been a snake on a hearth rug . . . a small man called Peter, nicknamed Wormtail . . . and a cold, high voice . . . the voice of Lord Voldemort. Harriet felt as though an ice cube had slipped down into her stomach at the very thought. . . . Something usually reserved for when Uncle Vernon visited her to punish her for being a girl. . . . She closed her eyes tightly and tried to remember what Voldemort had looked like, but it was impossible. . . . All Harriet knew was that at the moment when Voldemort's chair had swung around, and she, Harriet, had seen what was sitting in it, she had felt a spasm of horror, which had awoken her . . . or had that been the pain in her scar?
And who had the old man been? For there had definitely been an old man; Harriet had watched him fall to the ground. It was all becoming confused. Harriet put her face into her hands, blocking out her bedroom, trying to hold on to the picture of that dimly lit room, but it was like trying to keep water in her cupped hands; the details were now trickling away as fast as she tried to hold on to them. . . . Voldemort and Wormtail had been talking about someone they had killed, though Harriet could not remember the name at the moment . . . and they had been plotting to kill someone else . . . *her!* Harriet took her face out of her hands, opened her eyes, and stared around her bedroom as though expecting to see something unusual there. As it happened, there were an extraordinary number of unusual things in this room. A large wooden trunk stood open at the foot of her bed, revealing a cauldron, broomstick, black robes, and assorted spellbooks. Rolls of parchment littered that part of her desk that was not taken up by the large, empty cage in which her snowy owl, Hedwig, usually perched. On the floor beside her bed a book lay open; Harriet had been reading it before she fell asleep last night. Trying to calm herself after another punishment visit from Uncle Vernon that had been particularly brutal as he still couldn't figure out how she hadn't gotten pregnant yet. The pictures in this book were all moving. Men in bright orange robes were zooming in and out of sight on broomsticks, throwing a red ball to one another.
Harriet walked over to the book, picked it up, and watched one of the wizards score a spectacular goal by putting the ball through a fifty-foot-high hoop. Then she snapped the book shut. Even Quidditch — in Harriet's opinion, the best sport in the world — couldn't distract her at the moment. She placed Flying with the Cannons on her bedside table, crossed to the window, and drew back the curtains to survey the street below. Privet Drive looked exactly as a respectable suburban street would be expected to look in the early hours of Saturday morning. All the curtains were closed. As far as Harriet could see through the darkness, there wasn't a living creature in sight, not even a cat.
And yet . . . and yet . . . Harriet went restlessly back to the bed and sat down on it, running a finger over her scar again. It wasn't the pain that bothered her; Harriet was no stranger to pain and injury. She had lost all the bones from her right arm once and had them painfully regrown in a night. The same arm had been pierced by a venomous foot-long fang not long afterward. Only last year Harriet had fallen fifty feet from an airborne broomstick. She was used to bizarre accidents and injuries; they were unavoidable if you attended Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and had a knack for attracting a lot of trouble.
No, the thing that was bothering Harriet was that the last time his scar had hurt her, it had been because Voldemort had been close by. . . . But Voldemort couldn't be here, now. . . . The idea of Voldemort lurking in Privet Drive was absurd, impossible. . . . Harry listened closely to the silence around her. Was she half-expecting to hear the creak of a stair or the swish of a cloak? And then she jumped slightly as she heard her cousin Dudley give a tremendous grunting snore from the next room. Harriet shook herself mentally; she was being stupid. There was no one in the house with her except Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia, and Dudley, and they were plainly still asleep, their dreams untroubled and painless.
Asleep was the way Harriet liked the Dursleys best; it wasn't as though they were ever any help to her awake. Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia, and Dudley were Harriet's only living relatives. They were Muggles who hated and despised magic in any form, which meant that Harriet was about as welcome in their house as dry rot. They had explained away Harriet's long absences at Hogwarts over the last three years by telling everyone that she went to St. Marie's Secure Center for Incurably Criminal Girls. They knew perfectly well that, as an underage witch, Harriet wasn't allowed to use magic outside Hogwarts, but they were still apt to blame her for anything that went wrong about the house. Harriet had never been able to confide in them or tell them anything about her life in the Wizarding world. The very idea of going to them when they awoke, and telling them about her scar hurting her, and about her worries about Voldemort, was laughable. Uncle Vernon would likely give her another dose of "Because you're a girl" punishment for troubling them.
And yet it was because of Voldemort that Harriet had come to live with the Dursleys in the first place. If it hadn't been for Voldemort, Harriet would not have had the lightning scar on her forehead. If it hadn't been for Voldemort, Harriet would still have had parents. . . . Harriet had been a year old the night that Voldemort — the most powerful Dark wizard for a century, a wizard who had been gaining power steadily for eleven years — arrived at his house and killed his father and mother. Voldemort had then turned his wand on Harriet; he had performed the curse that had disposed of many full-grown witches and wizards in his steady rise to power — and, incredibly, it had not worked. Instead of killing the small girl, the curse had rebounded upon Voldemort. Harriet had survived with nothing but a lightning-shaped cut on her forehead, and Voldemort had been reduced to something barely alive. His powers gone, his life almost extinguished, Voldemort had fled; the terror in which the secret community of witches and wizards had lived for so long had lifted, Voldemort's followers had disbanded, and Harriet Potter had become famous.
It had been enough of a shock for Harriet to discover, on her eleventh birthday, that she was a witch; it had been even more disconcerting to find out that everyone in the hidden Wizarding world knew her name. Harriet had arrived at Hogwarts to find that heads turned and whispers followed her wherever she went. But she was used to it now: At the end of this summer, she would be starting her fourth year at Hogwarts, and Harriet was already counting the days until she would be back at the castle again. But there was still a fortnight to go before she went back to school. She looked hopelessly around her room again, and her eye paused on the birthday cards her two best friends had sent her at the end of July. What would they say if Harriet wrote to them and told them about her scar hurting? At once, Hermione Granger's voice seemed to fill her head, shrill and panicky. As if she were in the room with her, which Harriet was grateful couldn't be true because Uncle Vernon would likely violate Hermione the same way he violated Harriet.
"Your scar hurt? Harriet, that's really serious. . . . Write to Professor Dumbledore! And I'll go and check Common Magical Ailments and Afflictions. . . . Maybe there's something in there about curse scars. . . ."
Yes, that would be Hermione's advice: Go straight to the headmaster of Hogwarts, and in the meantime, consult a book. Which wouldn't be bad advice to anyone else. Harriet stared out of the window at the inky blue-black sky. She doubted very much whether a book could help her now. As far as she knew, she was the only living person to have survived a curse like Voldemort's; it was highly unlikely, therefore, that he would find his symptoms listed in Common Magical Ailments and Afflictions. As for informing the headmaster, Harriet had no idea where Dumbledore went during the summer holidays. She amused herself for a moment, picturing Dumbledore, with his long silver beard, full-length wizard's robes, and pointed hat, stretched out on a beach somewhere, rubbing suntan lotion onto his long crooked nose. Wherever Dumbledore was, though, Harriet was sure that Hedwig would be able to find him; Harriet's owl had never yet failed to deliver a letter to anyone, even without an address. But what would she write?
Dear Professor Dumbledore, Sorry to bother you, but my scar hurt this morning. Yours sincerely, Harriet Potter.
Even inside her head the words sounded stupid. And so she tried to imagine her other best friend, Ron Weasley's, reaction, and in a moment, Ron's red hair and long-nosed, freckled face seemed to swim before Harriet, wearing a bemused expression.
"Your scar hurt? But . . . but You-Know-Who can't be near you now, can he? I mean . . . you'd know, wouldn't you? He'd be trying to do you in again, wouldn't he? I dunno, Harriet, maybe curse scars always twinge a bit. . . . I'll ask Dad. . . ."
Mr. Weasley was a fully qualified wizard who worked in the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office at the Ministry of Magic, but he didn't have any particular expertise in the matter of curses inflicted upon witches and wizards, as far as Harriet knew. In any case, Harriet didn't like the idea of the whole Weasley family knowing that she, Harriet, was getting jumpy about a few moments' pain. Mrs. Weasley would fuss worse than Hermione, and Fred and George, Ron's sixteen-year-old twin brothers, might think Harriet was losing her nerve. The Weasleys were Harriet's favorite family in the world; she was hoping that they might invite her to stay any time now (Ron had mentioned something about the Quidditch World Cup), and she somehow didn't want her visit punctuated with anxious inquiries about his scar.
Harriet kneaded her forehead with her knuckles. What she really wanted (and it felt almost shameful to admit it to herself) was someone like — someone like a parent: an adult witch or wizard whose advice she could ask without feeling stupid, someone who cared about her, who had had experience with Dark Magic. . . . And then the solution came to her. It was so simple, and so obvious, that she couldn't believe it had taken so long — Sirius. Harriet leapt up from the bed, hurried across the room, and sat down at her desk; she pulled a piece of parchment toward her, loaded her eagle-feather quill with ink, wrote Dear Sirius, then paused, wondering how best to phrase her problem, still marveling at the fact that she hadn't thought of Sirius straight away. But then, perhaps it wasn't so surprising — after all, she had only found out that Sirius was her godfather two months ago.
There was a simple reason for Sirius's complete absence from Harriet's life until then — Sirius had been in Azkaban, the terrifying wizard jail guarded by creatures called dementors, sightless, soul-sucking fiends who had come to search for Sirius at Hogwarts when he had escaped. Yet Sirius had been innocent — the murders for which he had been convicted had been committed by Wormtail, Voldemort's supporter, whom nearly everybody now believed dead. Harriet, Ron, and Hermione knew otherwise, however; they had come face-to-face with Wormtail only the previous year, though only Professors Dumbledore and Snape — who witnessed the whole thing — had believed their story.
For one glorious hour, Harriet had believed that she was leaving the Dursleys at last, because Sirius had offered her a home once his name had been cleared. But the chance had been snatched away from her — Wormtail had escaped before they could take him to the Ministry of Magic, and Sirius had had to flee for his life. Harriet had helped him escape on the back of a hippogriff called Buckbeak, and since then, Sirius had been on the run. The home Harriet might have had if Wormtail had not escaped had been haunting her all summer. Particularly as she lay sobbing with Uncle Vernon's seed leaking from her teenage slit. It had been doubly hard to return to the Dursleys knowing that she had so nearly escaped them forever.
Nevertheless, Sirius had been of some help to Harriet, even if he couldn't be with her. It was due to Sirius that Harriet now had all her school things in her bedroom with her. The Dursleys had never allowed this before; their general wish of keeping Harriet as miserable as possible, coupled with their fear of her powers, had led them to lock her school trunk in the cupboard under the stairs every summer prior to this. But their attitude had changed since they had found out that Harriet had a dangerous murderer for a godfather — for Harriet had conveniently forgotten to tell them that Sirius was innocent. Though the knowledge hadn't stopped Uncle Vernon from violating her. She shuddered as she remembered how, that first day of holidays, Uncle Vernon had done it and forbidden her to tell Sirius that it was going on.
Harriet had received two letters from Sirius since she had been back at Privet Drive. Both had been delivered, not by owls (as was usual with wizards), but by large, brightly colored tropical birds. Hedwig had not approved of these flashy intruders; she had been most reluctant to allow them to drink from her water tray before flying off again. Harriet, on the other hand, had liked them; they put her in mind of palm trees and white sand, and she hoped that, wherever Sirius was (Sirius never said, in case the letters were intercepted), he was enjoying himself. Somehow, Harriet found it hard to imagine dementors surviving for long in bright sunlight; perhaps that was why Sirius had gone south. Sirius's letters, which were now hidden beneath the highly useful loose floorboard under Harriet's bed, sounded cheerful, and in both of them he had reminded Harriet to call on him if ever Harriet needed to. Well, she needed to now, all right. . . . Harriet's lamp seemed to grow dimmer as the cold gray light that precedes sunrise slowly crept into the room. Finally, when the sun had risen, when her bedroom walls had turned gold, and when sounds of movement could be heard from Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia's room, Harriet cleared her desk of crumpled pieces of parchment and reread her finished letter.

Dear Sirius,
Thanks for your last letter. That bird was enormous; it could hardly get through my window. Things are the same as usual here. Dudley's diet isn't going too well. My aunt found him smuggling doughnuts into his room yesterday. They told him they'd have to cut his pocket money if he keeps doing it, so he got really angry and chucked his PlayStation out of the window. That's a sort of computer thing you can play games on. Bit stupid really, now he hasn't even got Mega-Mutilation Part Three to take his mind off things. I'm okay, mainly because the Dursleys are terrified you might turn up and turn them all into bats if I ask you to. A weird thing happened this morning, though. My scar hurt again. Last time that happened it was because Voldemort was at Hogwarts. But I don't reckon he can be anywhere near me now, can he? Do you know if curse scars sometimes hurt years afterward? I'll send this with Hedwig when she gets back; she's off hunting at the moment. Say hello to Buckbeak for me.
Harriet.

Yes, thought Harriet, that looked all right. There was no point putting in the dream; she didn't want it to look as though she was too worried. And in accordance with Uncle Vernon's orders she hadn't mentioned him violating her at all. She folded up the parchment and laid it aside on her desk, ready for when Hedwig returned. Then she got to her feet, stretched, and opened her wardrobe once more. Without glancing at her reflection, she started to get dressed before going down to breakfast. Her bubbies were squeezed tight in the hand me down bra Aunt Petunia had, rather reluctantly, given her out of necessity. The rest of her clothes were hand me downs too, if you could count clothes from your roughly same age cousin as hand me downs. But Harriet had given up on getting proper clothes from the Dursleys long ago, accepting what she had with as much gratitude as she could muster. Which wasn't much, she thought as she pulled a very big on her frame shirt over her head and slid her scratchy legs into an old pair of Dudley's trousers.