Amortentia: A Hogwarts Story

Chapter One

It was 9 a.m. Saturday, the eighteenth of August, two weeks before the fall term began. I was sitting on the train from Leeds to London's King Cross, looking like every other Muggle girl, wearing a light jacket over a pastel blue summer dress with small white daisies, my long brownish-black hair in a French braid down my back and the basic white earbuds in my ears connected to my iPhone 5 (my family didn't find a point in upgrading it, since I only ever used it during the summer). My dark blue backpack sat at my feet. I was the only girl in my dormitory (probably all of Hogwarts, except for my younger sister) who didn't have the brown trunks. When I had asked, my parents had deemed it ridiculous and sent me off with a very "modern" black suitcase that didn't exactly fit everything I needed. Demetrius's mom had charmed this backpack so that it could fit more than what I needed (including a broomstick and all my clothing and textbooks for the school year, as well as my cat, Hyacinth) for my thirteenth birthday, right before the start of my third year. The best part about the backpack was it barely felt like it weighed anything.

I was on my way to the Leaky Cauldron to meet my best friend, Demetrius. My little sister, Cassie, now almost a fourth year Slytherin, had gone almost two weeks ago, and was staying with her friend Giselle Schram until school started.

I never understood why my parents paid the 35 pounds for me to ride two hours to London, when it would have been much easier to just send me through Floo powder. They thought the whole wizarding world thing was overkill. Cassie thought that they were just jealous because it was a part of our lives that they would never get to have a part in, so they wanted to keep as much of us as they could. I knew that if it was their choice, I would probably be at some boring local high school so that I could do just enough to be admitted into the University of Leeds, where my dad was a professor.

Do you have everything you need? My mom texted me, even though she had literally just seen me off at Leeds Station an hour ago.

Yeah, I should be good, I quickly replied, so that she didn't worry. I couldn't wait until I didn't have to be bothered by them with their constant texting and worry.

Have a good school year! Write often, and don't get injured playing quidditch or whatever you guys do at wizarding school. She sent. I wondered what  the carriers thought of our conversations. They probably thought we were joking, since many wizards still didn't deal with "tricky phone business."

Really, I wasn't expecting Year 7 to be much different from every other year. Of course, it was much more interesting than what I assumed staying at home would have been like, but it wasn't like I was expecting to save the entire wizarding world. That was a role reserved for Harry Potter. Or maybe his son Albus, who was going to enter second year, but I hadn't heard whether he had saved Hogwarts or not. Cassie said that Albus was alright and that him and his best friend, Scorpius Malfoy were super cute, even if Scorpius was the son of Lord Voldemort. Not that either she nor I had ever believed that rumor.

What I was expecting was going to classes, hanging out in the library and common rooms with Demetrius, playing Keeper and acting as co-captain for the Ravenclaw Quidditch team, weekend trips to Hogsmead, and plenty of studying for NEWTs (the Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Tests). Of course, I wanted to take my crush on Lex Stafford, the legendary Gryffindor Quidditch Captain, to the next level, but I doubted it would ever happen.