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𝐨𝐟 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬
Long before she received her first telescope, Mars had memorized the night sky. Its glittering constellations were as familiar to her as the freckles that speckled her father's face.
Before her eyes had even learned to focus, her parents would rest her on a blanket in their back garden. She'd stare into the heavens, soaking in the pale light with eyes like apertures.
In service of nurturing her curiosity, Mars received two telescopes on her seventh birthday. Both had once belonged to her father who worked in the Ministry of Magic's Department of Astrological Strategy and Innovation. One was a Muggle telescope, but the other was enchanted to allow her to look into the cosmos from any point along Earth's surface, giving her a whole new set of stars to memorize.
From there, she and her father would spend every clear night looking up into space—her telescope set up next to his, their faces pressed against the eyepieces.
Mars's mother was a Muggle who taught quantum mechanics at Oxford. After Mars filled up a forest's worth of notebooks with constellations, devoured several dense textbooks on astronomy, and could nearly quote the entirety of Carl Sagan's Cosmos series by heart, she decided it was time to take her daughter to talk to some astrophysicists at the university.
Almost instantly, the physics department faculty deemed Mars a child prodigy.
The Muggle scientists took her under their wing. They instructed her how to properly chart space objects, how to classify stars based on stellar spectra, and taught her about all kinds of new and exciting concepts in their fields.
For years, she was steeped in cosmic wonders, encouraged by an impressive array of adults who regarded her as special. She was unconditionally accepted.
Then, during the July that followed her eleventh birthday, she received her letter to Hogwarts. Her father was thrilled, but her mother was worried.
Mars's father brought back stories from people at the Ministry with children who attended Hogwarts. Forests containing a variety of deadly creatures bordered the school, a student had to thwart an evil professor's evil plan the year just before Mars's first (yes, that student was Harry Potter), and the school's main sport was played by flying around on broomsticks high enough off the ground that one could conceivably die if they fell.
From her mum's perspective, it was all horrifying.
Furthermore, Mars was an only child who'd been homeschooled her entire life and whose only friends were astrophysicists decades older than her. She was about to enter a world of other children who did not care about the same things she did and would not necessarily ignore whatever was odd about her. Her mother wasn't sure how she'd adjust.
No one would care how much Mars knew about astronomy and physics. And, certainly, no one would care how good she was at maths. The world no longer revolved around her.
