In My Dreams [Draco Malfoy]

chapter sixteen: letters

INDIGO

"Je as un chapeau? 'I have a hat.' Is that right?"

"No, it's j'ai un chapeau," I said gently, crossing out the 'as' with a red pen and writing the correct answer margin beside it. "Remember when we did the 'avoir' verb chart?"

"No," she said. "Oh, wait! I do remember that!" Then, she popped open her notebook and began looking through her notes.

Since the beginning of August, I had been tutoring a ten-year-old girl named Kelly. She was from the Clifton area of Bristol, where everything was a little more expensive than I was used to, and lived in a gated community full of fancy houses. Her parents desperately wanted her to learn French, but she had struggled with it for more than a year and, after coming home with a rather sad report card, her parents felt they had no choice but to hire a tutor. They went to the University of Bristol to find some knowledgeable college students, and were certainly not expecting to be given the name and telephone number of a "gifted" fifteen-year-old girl home from boarding school for the summer. That girl was me, and when I heard how highly Professor Wood had spoken of me, I all but laughed outright.

Even so, we had a week of trial sessions just to see if I was the right fit for Kelly, but when we hit it off and her French began to improve, her parents paid me up front for another week of lessons. They didn't pay me as if I was a fifteen-year-old with nothing else to do; they paid me like I was French major who had taken time out of her busy college schedule, full-time job and marriage life to tutor their illiterate daughter.

Kelly was not what I had expected either. From the outside, one might expect her to be a brat. Her house was probably three times the size of Mum and I's townhouse (owning a house in Bristol fetched a large sum to begin with, much less one with five bedrooms), and she was chock-full of pretty things and good connections. But Kelly wasn't a spoiled brat. She was wild, and funny, and loved animals. She was also an impeccable host, and was always helping the family's maid make fruit salad and sandwiches for me when I arrived. When I walked in, she would grin from ear to ear and offer me a piece of fruit, which I took happily.

I genuinely liked spending time with Kelly, and had been with her three days a week every week since we made our official arrangement. Since then, we had made significant progress on pronouns, common verbs, how to say you partake in specific activities (e.g. swimming, biking, painting...) and even the vocabulary for items of clothing and food. I had only been with her for three-ish weeks but I was proud to know that she would be caught up when she returned to school for her second year of French.

"I found it," she said, sounding immensely proud of herself. "Avweer?"

"Avoir," I corrected.

"Avoir," she repeated. "Avoir, avoir, avoir..." She continued to repeat it to herself as she pulled out a sticky tab and pressed it onto the top of the page. "So I can come back to it later," she explained.

I nodded. "Good," I said. "Practice makes permanent."

She frowned. "Wait, isn't it practice makes perfect?"

"That is the saying," I said, "but that isn't the truth. If you don't learn how to do it right in the first place, then practice it, you create a habit but..."

"Oooh," she said, understanding where I was going with this. "You create a habit but that doesn't mean you're doing it right."

"Exactly," I said. "You're so smart, Kelly."

"I don't feel smart," she said. "I hate French."

"You only hate it because you don't understand it. But you'll get it," I said, giving her hand an encouraging squeeze.