Safe and Sound

Chapter 3 - Unexpected Guests

The next day the letter was completely driven from Hermione's mind.

She woke up to find the hair at her temple matted and damp with blood, which had continued seeping from the shallow cut during the night. She spent most of her allocated three minutes in the cold shower trying to wash it out of her hair and quickly covered the cut with a cotton pad and a large band-aid. She wished that she was allowed to take some Tylenol to take the edge off the throbbing pain, but her parents kept a detailed inventory of everything in the medicine cabinet, and only let her use band-aids and bandages to stop any blood from dripping around the house. Anything else was considered pointless. Why should they waste perfectly good supplies on a worthless freak?

It wasn't always like this. Hermione remembered when her parents had loved her and treated her like a princess. They had given her gifts on her birthday, read books with her at night before tucking her into bed, encouraged her good grades at school. They had been proud of her, and bragged about her to their coworkers any chance they got, boasting about her academic achievements and how she was going to be attending a prestigious private school.

Then she got the letter. The letter that both ruined her life and gave it meaning.

Her parents had always ignored the strange things that happened whenever she got overly emotional as a child, passing them off as coincidences or the like. The way glass objects shattered when she cried, the way her stuffed toys seemed to be out of her reach on some shelf one moment, and the next they would be in her arms, and, eventually, they way the kids at school who teased her all broke out with a severe case of pimples on the exact same day, spelling out the word 'bully' across their faces. She couldn't remember what their explanation had been for that, but she was sure that even they hadn't really believed it. They lived in blissful ignorance, preferring to think that there was absolutely nothing abnormal about their perfect little girl.

But on the day of her eleventh birthday, they could no longer deny that their daughter was not in any way normal. When the letter arrived, they were convinced that it had been a silly prank concocted by some of the neighbourhood boys. But later that day, as promised in the letter, a woman named Professor McGonagall had appeared at her house to take her shopping to get the supplies she needed to attend a school of magic.

Finally there was an explanation for everything, and Hermione was ecstatic. Her parents were not, and they made that fact very clear to her once the Professor had left. That was the first time her parents had ever laid a violent hand on her, and it was definitely not the last.

Her home life quickly became unbearable, and she couldn't wait to leave, but her first few weeks at Hogwarts were not as wonderful as she had expected. At primary school, she had been teased and bullied for her dark skin and intelligence; at Hogwarts, she was ostracised because of her so-called 'dirty' blood and her determination to prove herself, which earned her the title of Know-It-All.

For a while she toyed with the idea of going home and attending a private school like her parents had always planned. Maybe if she did her parents would love her again, and it would be like the past few months had never even existed.

Then she met Harry and Ron, and for the first time in her life she had friends. Actual, honest-to-goodness friends, who didn't just like her because she could help them with their homework. The thought of returning to a normal, magic free life no longer seemed so appealing.

But although her school life had improved drastically, during the summer holidays after her first year at Hogwarts, the abuse only got worse.