Fair Game | HP

1 - Phoebe Carter and the Love of the Game

Phoebe Carter only had one thing going for her during her school years at Ilvermony. Not terribly bright in any of her classes or even determined to change that narrative, she skated by with averages in everything, only really putting in the effort if she was in trouble with being ineligible for playing on her team.

Because the one thing she cared about in all her seven years was Quidditch.

She discovered Quidditch at a very young age, which was the one thing her father, Theo, cared about every Sunday. Tuning into the radio and hearing the weekly Quidditch games. It was a whole ritual; he had an entire wall of his house dedicated to his Sunday Quidditch time and a chair next to the radio he sat in during the matches. The wall was equipped with a roster he wrote in with every match, and he had a whiteboard with which he kept the score alongside the announcers. He never had a favorite team; oh no, he rather had a love for the sport rivaled only by the other two most important things in his life, his wife and child.

Even then, his wife Darla sometimes questioned his priorities in life.

Phoebe saw her father's love for the game and was drawn to it herself, if only to stay relevant in his life, begging her father on the weekends once she finally had finished slogging through her tedious homework to "play Quidditch." He would give in and set her on his battered Cleansweep 2, and she would try and learn all of the tricks the two had heard over the radio. This led to Phoebe having a very unique style of flying, as neither of them knew what they looked like and were just going off of the announcers' descriptions.

Theo would never say this to her face, but he had hoped Phoebe would go pro and he could watch an actual Quidditch game every Sunday instead of hearing it over the radio. It was an investment if you will.

Phoebe kept this fanatic love of the sport for years, and when Darla and Theo got the letter in the mail that Phoebe had been accepted into Ilvermony, she felt as though she could take her father's broom to the moon and back.

She may have tried. And got banned from flying for a full week. It was supposed to be a month. Theo fought back.

But yes, Phoebe could hardly wait until her first day at her new school. She counted down the days until September first, flying for hours and hours trying to perfect her moves in the field by her house, waiting until she could show them off to a real Quidditch Captain and become the youngest and best Chaser on the Thunderbird Quidditch team Ilvermony had ever seen.

But her mother read her acceptance letter a bit closer one day, and disaster struck.

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"Bee?" Darla called one afternoon, 27 days before September 1st.

"Mom, you can't call me Bee once I go to—" Phoebe answered, entering the kitchen.

"Ilvermony, yes, I know, but you haven't left yet. Anyways, I'm afraid I have some bad news." She set down the letter on the counter and pointed to a truly terrible sentence at the end of Phoebe's booklist letter.

"PARENTS ARE REMINDED THAT FIRST-YEARS ARE NOT ALLOWED THEIR OWN BROOMSTICKS."

Phoebe couldn't believe it. All these years of practicing. For nothing. All those hours in the field, all of the Sundays spent listening to matches and taking notes on moves and tactics for no reason.

"I did all of this for nothing?" Her eyes welled with tears.

"Oh honey, not for nothing, you just have to wait a year." Darla knew she would take it to the extreme.