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The first time Harry realized his Aunt and Uncle might be right about him being a freak, was in second grade. He was aware that his home life was a bit strange, and that the Dursleys didn’t like him, but he hadn’t really considered that he might actually be all that different from other people. He’d just accepted that he would never get along with the Dursleys and that was too bad, but he would probably do alright with someone else.
April of second grade had the class taking turns reading aloud from a book with easy words, so they could practice being faster. The book was about a family on holiday and didn’t have much of a plot, but Harry had still found himself thinking about it in between classes, so when the clock rang for playtime, Harry headed to the teacher’s table with a question.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Betham? I had a question about the book.”
She looked up from shuffling some stuff around her bag, to give him a slightly impatient smile.
“Of course, Harry. Ask away.”
“It’s just, I don’t really understand – I mean, I’ve heard the word before of course, but no one has really explained, so I wondered. I just can’t really-“. He took a deep breath, feeling kind of stupid. Everyone else obviously didn’t have trouble understanding. “What does it mean when the mum says she loves the kids? I mean, why? What is the definition? And how is it different from just liking someone? My aunt and uncle and my aunt Marge sometimes say it about Dudley too, but I’m just not sure what it actually means.”
The teacher gave him a very strange look that made Harry feel uncomfortable. She sat up a bit straighter in her chair and hesitated a few seconds.
“Well… It’s a bit of an odd question, but I can try to explain maybe. Love is the feeling you have for someone you are close to? Someone who is dear and important to you. Families love each other, and couples can love each other. You can also love close friends for example. It means that you feel affection and closeness related to that person.” She cleared her throat. “Do you understand? I’m not sure I’m explaining it well, but I’m sure you feel it. It’s very human to love, it’s what brings us together.”
Mrs. Betham was looking at the ceiling instead of at Harry, so she didn’t see his frown. She was a bit obvious about not wanting to talk about all this, but Harry still didn’t really understand. On the other hand, she sort of said she couldn’t explain better. Maybe he could sneak off to the library the next time he was sent shopping, or even if he has some unsupervised yard work.
Harry gave his teacher a smile, and didn’t answer her question, but just said: “Thank you Mrs. Betham. I’ll go play now.” Before skipping out of the classroom to spend the rest of playtime avoiding Dudley.
Trying to learn more about the concept of love didn’t really clear anything up for Harry. Slowly, he began to get the idea that it wasn’t actually something he felt for anyone. But that couldn’t be right, because the books he had looked at, seemed to agree with Mrs. Betham that love was a universal human experience, and that even if you could have problems with sorting out or expressing love, something had to go completely horridly wrong for you to not feel love. Like, you’d have to be some sort of psychopath with no empathy and a complete disinterest in the rest of humanity.
Harry didn’t feel like he was a psychopath.
Asking the librarian about psychopaths (and learning about that and sociopaths and people with some sort of personality or empathy disorder, as people couldn’t seem to agree on what was what, and what words you were allowed to use), didn’t really make Harry feel more like he belonged in that category. He had no problems with impulsivity or anger and felt plenty guilty when he did something wrong. So no lack of morality, and he didn’t think he had any antisocial behavior, as far as he understood it. He also didn’t want to hurt people and he could very easily feel sympathy and empathy with others when they were in pain. When Emily from third grade had fallen from a tree and broken her arm right next to him, he’d felt really bad for her and had hurried to get help, and he always got mad when Dudley tried to bully other kids.
But if he wasn’t a psychopath, he had to be able to feel love. Maybe it was just that no one in his life were worth loving? Maybe he had loved his parents back before the car crash, but just couldn’t remember? Maybe he would fall in love with a girl when he got older and be completely normal, and he was just worrying about nothing. Harry tried to imagine someone kind and gentle, who would hug him and listen to him and care about him. It felt nice. He tried to imagine how he would feel about them, tried to imagine the love that he would have to feel.
His insides seemed completely empty
Harry wasn’t a very emotional kid in general. Part of that was from being around the Dursleys all the time – they didn’t appreciate a lot of emotions on his side – but he also just didn’t really feel a lot of big things. He couldn’t remember the last time he had actually cried or laughed. He did feel sad or annoyed often; when Dudley made aunt Petunia think he did something bad, or when he didn’t get anything to eat before being locked in his cupboard. And he felt good often too; when he saw a cute dog, or when he finished his chores fast, or when he got a whole day by himself at Mrs. Figgs, because Dudley convinced his parents to take him somewhere.
But after becoming aware of his problem with the L word, he started noticing that he didn’t get upset very easily, that he spent most of his time just feeling either vaguely annoyed or amused or content, which where all pretty passive and mild ways to feel. Maybe that was the thing with feeling love too? That it just took a lot for him to get there and he had a milder version that he felt when he wasn’t getting very riled up?
Harry was still a little worried. The more he read (and he was getting pretty good at reading) the more he felt like he was different somehow. He’d picked a romance story for the mandatory home reading, and tried really imagining how that would be, but he still felt nothing but confused and empty about it. The local library didn’t have a lot of books about love that weren’t fiction, or way too hard to understand, but the ones he’d chewed through made him think that it was very important. The conclusion wasn’t great; the Dursleys were right, even if they didn’t know exactly what the problem was.
Harry was a freak.
Realising he was a freak gave Harry the first strong bad emotion in a long time. He didn’t have a good word for it, but it was some mix of anger and sadness and emptiness and frustration that made him feel like he was a little on fire but also standing in ice and his chest hurt.
It also made the dishes he had been doing at the moment of realization, spin in the sink and spray everything with soapy water. That was very strange.
When aunt Petunia called him into the kitchen to see the mess Harry had made, uncle Vernon sent him to his cupboard with a bruise on his chin. Harry wasn’t hit by his uncle very often, maybe because he usually kept to himself and did what he was told, so the bruise was a bit upsetting – also because it meant that Vernon would be fuming for days from having been made so rudely aware of Harry’s existence. But being sent to his cupboard did mean that Harry had time to think. He was thinking a lot about himself and his life, so it was quite natural for him to take some time to consider what it might mean, that strange things always seemed to happen when he was feeling big emotions. There seemed to be a clear connection.
Harry thought that maybe, since he already was a freak, it wouldn’t make much of a difference if he tried to look into that a bit more.
The first time Harry did one of his strange things on purpose, was when he was 8, almost exactly a year after he realized he was a freak.
He had spent some time trying to make himself very angry to see if anything cool would happen, but that hadn’t done much, except once making some leaves fly around. Harry had to admit that that might just have been the wind with the right timing.
Then he tried with other emotions, which was harder. It was very tough to be anything but annoyed and bored, when doing nothing but concentrating on feeling things.
It was only on his eight birthday, when Dudley kicked him down the stairs and he really hurt his knees, and aunt Petunia slapped him for getting blood from his scuffed knee on the hallway rug, that he did it again. He was disoriented from the fall, and his knee and hip and head really hurt. He also didn’t want his aunt to shriek loud enough to make Vernon come out. He got up from the ground quickly to get out of the way, and when he did, his knee stopped hurting and bleeding, and he felt like he could think better again.
He poked at the skin on his knee as soon as he was alone in the bathroom, and it didn’t hurt at all. There didn’t seem to be any hole for the blood to come out, but there was definitely blood on the carpet.
That meant he’d done it again, but it hadn’t been a specific strong emotion – more just a feeling of urgency and that he needed to do something. And then something had done the thing.
That gave Harry two ideas. One, that it was maybe less the emotion and more the jitteriness and the feelings in his body that came with the emotions, that made stuff happen, and two, that he might be able to not just have random things happen, but also things that were very useful to the actual situation.
Harry started trying another way to make the strange things happen – he focused very very hard on wanting a specific strange thing to happen, and then held his breath and tensed up and just really wanted and needed the thing to happen. Usually what he needed to happen was light to read by in his cupboard, but he also tried other things, in case only specific types of strange things could happen. And even though it didn’t work as well as he wanted, Harry felt something when he did that. It made his hair stand up, and his skin tingle, and sometimes it felt like some place deep inside him was rolling and pulsing.
And finally, one night as he was staring intensely at the dead lightbulb above his head, breathing hard and very red in the face, the lightbulb flickered.
Harry decided that he had special freak powers. It was very important that they were a secret, because people didn’t like freaks, and his aunt and uncle always got extremely mad when he did strange things, but he was going to keep practicing and get really good at using them, because if he was a freak anyway, he might as well be good at it.
It was also kind of fun and exciting.
Harry would sit up in his cupboard at night, and practice little things. Most of the time it still didn’t work, but after making it happen on purpose once, it kept becoming easier every time to make the tingly feeling come out. Especially for things he’d already tried before, like the freak powers had learned it, and had an easier time repeating that instead of doing something new.
By the end of third year of elementary school, Harry was not only able to read very well, but he had very high success rate with making things light up, and he had made a dust bunny from underneath his cot fly around a few times. Most importantly, he’d manage to unlock the door to his cupboard from the inside, so he was eating a lot more, which made his entire life much easier.
Harry was reading a lot. Dudley never went into the library at school, and it was something he could do in his cupboard to keep entertained when he was locked in. He had set a goal to read all the books at school, even though most of them were very boring.
The books for his classes where pretty easy, and the school librarian wanted him to read the children books, which was the worst. They kept being about love and family and he didn’t like being reminded that it was unrelatable to him. After having tried at least 30 different ones,Harry mostly gave up fiction as a bad job and focused on non-fiction of all sorts. He felt like he was learning so much, and it wasn’t at all as boring as sitting in school and listening or doing groupwork.
It did annoy him a little that none of the books he read had even the tiniest bit of explanation for his freak powers. A lot of the books tried to explain how the world worked from different perspectives, but some of it would make what Harry could do straight up impossible, so it had to be wrong. That, or he was missing an important perspective. It was frustrating that he couldn’t fit his powers into his growing knowledge, when he really wanted to understand and get better.
Around February, Harry was looking around the library to see if there was maybe a part of the non-fiction section he’d missed. Under F for freak og P for Powers, maybe? M for Magic? U for Unnatural? He wasn’t going to read anything else about folklore though.
He ventured away from his usual spaces, and accidentally ended up in the teenage fiction part of the library. There, the flashy title on one of the books caught him before he could turn away in disgust at the overwhelming number of couples on the covers in front of him. The title of the book was simply `Magic` and the book’s cover was nothing but a swirling of colors. Harry immediately picked it up. The Dursley’s had forbidden Dudley from watching movies or playing video games involving magic and got very upset whenever the word was mentioned. He hadn’t really thought about his freak powers in those terms, but it made a lot of sense actually.
He opened the book on a random page and read a bit. Words caught his eyes, wizard, power, darkness, teleport. Harry closed the book again, feeling like he was doing something wrong. Which was deeply silly, because all he was really doing was reading a fiction book, with completely made up stuff in it. Nothing to get worked up about. Still, he was almost squirming when waiting for the librarian to check out the book.
Of course, as soon as Harry read the book, more questions were created than answered. And some things in the book just didn’t fit at all with Harry’s experience. It seemed as if though, the guy who wrote it had the right idea in some places and was being very ridiculous in others. And the plot was just unnecessary. Couldn’t they just write about magic without all the other stuff?
Still, the next day, Harry borrowed 3 more books from the same section as the first one. There had to be something somewhere about how the characters in books learned all the magic. How they went from someone like Harry, to someone who cast spells and battled dragons and did all sorts of cool stuff.
He still had so much he wanted to learn, about the world and about magic. And not so secretly, Harry desperately wanted to know if there were other people like him. He had learned to take a bit of pride in being different from the Dursleys, since they weren't that great anyway, but he didn’t want to be different from everyone if he could help it. Being a freak was all well and good, but it was better to be freak(s), plural. And maybe when or if there were others, they could love each other. It made sense that freaks could only love other freaks, right?