Miss Quinn

Prologue

Emma Quinn was turning eleven. For most British schoolgirls, eleven was just another year gone by. But for Emma, eleven was freedom from being surrounded by muggles that didn't understand her, who she must be guarded around. Because Emma was not an ordinary British schoolgirl. No, Emma was a witch, and in a few months, she would be attending the greatest wizarding school in the world: Hogwarts.

Her mother, Beatrice, was a pureblooded witch who had grown up in a old-fashioned family. She was extremely excited that Emma had gotten her letter, because Beatrice hadn't known if she would, with her father being who he was. Though Beatrice was a pureblood, Emma's father was something else entirely. Emma's father had never been around in her lifetime. Beatrice had always said she'd met him and instantly fallen in love, but he couldn't stay with her. Emma had never met her father, but she wanted to. After she finished Hogwarts, she planned on traveling to America to find him. Beatrice had told her that her father had lived in New York when she met him.

Emma had asked her mum countless times if they could visit him, but her answer was always no.

Beatrice knew that eventually, Emma would have to meet her father, because she wasn't like other girls. Emma's father was a very powerful man, and he had told Beatrice that Emma would have to visit him soon.

In mid-August, Emma and her mum went to Diagon Alley. They had been there before, but somehow it felt different for Emma. They stepped into Gringotts and walked up to the goblin at the front. Beatrice Quinn presented the key to their vault and they were taken down into the tunnels. The cart stopped at vault 657, the Quinn vault. Emma gathered up some of the coins and put them in a small bag. Emma could see that even though she took a lot of money, the stacks of gold, silver, and bronze seemed to not have changed at all. The Quinns were a wealthy family.

Emma and her mother went to the wand shop first. Ollivander welcomed them and handed Emma a wand. She waved it and wand boxes flew off the shelf nearest her.

"No, no, certainly not that one." Ollivander said, taking the wand back from Emma. Her handed her another wand, that one didn't work either.

Emma had gone through almost fifteen wands by the time Ollivander brought out the right wand. It was a golden yellow wand with vines swirling around it all the way to the tip. Emma wasn't sure, but she thought the flowers on the vines looked a lot like suns.

"Twelve and a half inches, unicorn hair, rosewood, and oh! My dear, this is an extremely powerful wand, treat it carefully. There is something else in this wand, but you will have to wait until you're older to find out what it is." Ollivander said.

Emma took her new wand, not fully understanding Ollivander's words, and put it back into its box. After she had paid for the wand, they went to Madame Malkin's robe shop. She was measured and received four sets of school robes and one winter cloak. Her mother paid and they continued their shopping.

When she had everything on her list, Emma asked her mother if they could go to one of the Muggle shops to buy clothes. Beatrice agreed, and so they went back into Gringotts to trade Galleons for Pounds, the muggle money.

At the end of their clothes shopping trip, Emma had four shirts, four pairs of jeans, and a comfy jumper.

They used the Floo Network to get home. The only thing special about Emma's house was the fireplace. It was magically enlarged so that it would fit a person comfortably inside. Everything else about their house was as normal and Muggle-ish as the neighbors'. Emma lived on Mellbrook Lane, in a London suburb. All of her neighbors were Muggles. And she'd attended a Muggle school with the majority of them for the past six years. Though she had a few friends, she wasn't sad to leave them. Muggles were annoyingly dull, and Emma wanted to be able to show off her magic without horrifying her friends.

One girl, Alice Dregger, had seen Emma turn a boy's fingers purple after he pulled her pigtails when Emma was seven. Alice and the boy -- who had moved away the next year -- screamed and told a teacher on her. Emma was put into time-out. She never let herself slip up at school again. But it didn't matter. Alice Dregger could spread gossip around like the plague, and soon all her fellow students were calling her a "freak." All except the two girls Emma could actually call friends: Fiona Justice and Hannah Smith. Since the incident, they'd become Emma's only friends. And they were the only two she was sad to leave. They'd always known she was strange, but so were they, in a different way.

When Emma and her mum appeared back in the fireplace at 25 Mellbrook Lane, Emma took all the parcels and packages upstairs to be packed into her trunk. Her room was decent sized. One could walk in and tell it was lived in. The bed was not made, there were clothes and books hastily shoved aside to form a pathway from the door to the dresser and to the bed. The dresser itself was piled with school papers and trinkets, and one of the drawers wouldn't shut. Emma didn't clean her room very often, but she didn't care about the mess.

Emma started packing her clothes and school books into her trunk. It was easy, everything fit perfectly inside. Her initials, EMQ, were engraved onto the front, right underneath the Hogwarts Crest. She moved her trunk into the hallway and lied back into her bed. She still had a month and a half before September First, when she'd be leaving for Hogwarts.

A/N Thank you for reading my first ever fanfiction :) The picture is of Emma. I hope you'll continue reading!
-Tessa