Power of the Musea

Chapter 5: A Wooden Letter

The buzzing drone of the alarm clock opened Melanie's eyes. She groaned and rolled over.

"Rhonda...what's making that noise?" she muttered, until her eyes finally focused on her surroundings. She was in her New York bedroom, not the circular Ravenclaw dormitory she had expected. There were no soft blue sheets around her, but periwinkle ones covered with little white flowers. The walls were not stone, but were painted and covered in posters and pictures. Melanie sat up and looked over at the foot of her bed. There was no trunk, only soft grey carpet.

"Was it all a dream?" she thought to herself. She grabbed the key from her jewelry box and quickly unlocked the writing desk drawer. She slowly opened it. There was her diary. She let out her breath and pulled the drawer open the rest of the way. Her wand rolled forward on top of the diary. She picked it up and just looked at it, everything that had happened yesterday flooding back into her mind-Monday classes, meeting her mother in Dumbledore's office, flooing back home. She sighed and pulled the Ravenclaw badge out from under the diary. Her father must have already put the trunk in the attic. There was no way for her to get it back down, so all that she had left were these small fragments.

Her attention turned to the pile of books on her desk. She groaned at the thought of going to school that wasn't Hogwarts, that wasn't magic. She couldn't imagine being forced to turn from all of the progress she had made to her ABC's and 123's.

She put the wand and badge back into the drawer and picked up her school schedule that was sitting on top of the books. First period she had U.S. History, then Advanced Chemistry, followed by choir and P.E. She groaned at the thought of smelly P.E. before letting her eyes pass over lunch onto fifth period American Literature, sixth period Algebra II, the seventh period Latin III. She let herself laugh at Latin. Her school required the study of a foreign language, and her father had insisted she take Latin. She didn't see the point in studying a dead language, but it had helped her learn and understand spells much more quickly. At least, that had been Hermione's observation...

"Don't think about that," she told herself, trying to fight back the tears. She quickly locked the drawer and tried not to focus on Hogwarts. "It's like Dad said- you can't have everything in life. Time to get over it and move on." She took a deep breath and walked to her closet to pick out her clothes.

Once she had changed, she sat down in front of her vanity, but all she could do was stare at its crowded surface. It had been so long since she had used any of these things...

"Don't think about it, be normal," she told herself. She plugged in her curling iron and started to attack her makeup. The foundation went on fine, as did the powder. Then she put on a little too much blush, poked herself in the eye with her eyeliner, and glopped her mascara.

She took a deep breath to calm herself and turned to the curling iron. She curled one part of her hair, but it refused to stay as she wanted it. She moved onto another section of her hair, but it too refused to do anything. Finally, she yanked the plug out of the wall and ran into the bathroom. She washed off all of her makeup and just pulled her hair into a ponytail.

"It's my first day back, who will care? I am supposed to look like I just got back from the hospital anyway," she told herself as she went downstairs for breakfast.

"Morning," Simon greeted her, barely looking up from the notebook he was hastily writing in.

"Did you not get your homework done?" she asked as she poured herself a bowl of cereal and sat down beside him.

"Can you get homework done when there are model cars to be built?" he asked, finishing his homework with a flourish. "Aha! The finest work ever."

Melanie looked over his shoulder and nodded. "Yeah, it's pretty good for BS..." She laughed as she ate a spoonful of her cereal.

He stood up and bumped into her as he walked by. "Well, you seem to be in a better mood. I assume you want a ride to school?"

"Yeah," Melanie said, looking down as she swirled the cereal around in the milk with her spoon.

"Well, I'm leaving in a few minutes. Coach called a meeting before school and I have to be there early."

Melanie nodded and finished off her cereal. "I just have to grab my books." She ran upstairs and shoved her books into a backpack. She came back down and met Simon as he was grabbing his keys.

"Are you going to school like that?" he asked, looking in surprise at her face and hair.

"I just don't feel like impressing everyone today," she told him, walking past him and out the door.

When they reached Benjamin Franklin High, Simon went off to his meeting, and Melanie made her way towards junior hall. She had only taken two steps when she was attacked by a group of preppy girls in designer jeans.

"Melanie!" they squealed, bombarding her with hugs.

"We didn't know you were going to be back today!"

"How are you feeling?"

"I'm fine," Melanie told them, trying to push her way out of the mob. "I just need to get to my locker." She looked down at her schedule and headed towards locker number 452. Most of the group fell back as she walked towards her locker, but two others followed her. One girl, a short brunette with a perfectly circular face, opened the locker next to Melanie's and started to rummage through the things inside.

"How are you handling things?" she asked.

Melanie shrugged her shoulders and started arranging her books inside the locker. "Well enough, I guess."

"Are you sure you're ready to be back?" the other girl, another brunette with rather pointed features, asked, putting her hand on her hip. "I mean, you don't look well enough to be back."

"What do you mean?" Melanie asked, closing the locker.

"Have you looked in the mirror this morning, Melanie? Your hair looks like crap, you have no makeup on-it looks like you just walked out of the hospital two minutes ago."

"Thanks, Ashlea," Melanie said, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. She started to walk past her towards the history wing.

"Well, I'm just telling you the truth. You can't expect Billy Willis to ask you to the homecoming dance if you look like that," she returned.

"Billy Willis?" Melanie asked as she sat down in front of her locker.

"Of course!" the girl with the circular face said, sitting down next to her. "He's been very worried about you. Maybe all of this will make him realize how much he likes you back."

"Oh," Melanie said softly.

"What's wrong with you, Melanie?" the pointy-faced girl asked. "Don't you care? You've only had a crush on Billy Willis since last year!"

"He so would have asked you to prom last year if he hadn't taken that slut Betsy Lewis."

Melanie just nodded, staring down the hall as it slowly started to fill with students arriving at the school.

Her two friends looked at her in surprise.

"Melanie, what's wrong? You never missed a chance to dis Betsy Lewis last year. I mean, with what she did last year..."

Melanie shrugged her shoulders. "I guess I just don't care anymore. It's in the past, does it really matter?"

The two girls were quiet and just looked at her for a minute. "I guess with everything that's happened over the summer, Betsy stealing Billy from you doesn't seem like that big of a deal," the girl with the round face said quietly.

There was another awkward silence, so the other girl started to talk. "Melanie, have you had a chance to see the September issue of Cosmo yet? They have this great article on the twelve commandments of eye shadow..."

She went on, but Melanie tuned her out. She didn't care if Cosmo dictated that green eye shadow should not be used on someone with an autumn complexion. She stared into space as other students walked past. As a bushy head of brown hair bobbed past, Melanie's neck turned like lightning to follow the figure down the hall. She sighed when the figure turned around and she saw a rather pimply sophomore turn into the nearby math classroom.

A warning bell rang throughout the hall, and the two girls sitting next to her stood up.

"What do you have first period?" they asked.

"U.S. History," Melanie answered, standing up and heading towards the history wing.

"Oh. We have American Lit. first. We'll see you at lunch, then?"

Melanie nodded as the two girls headed off to the left. She turned to the right and followed the crowd to a small classroom where the hallway intersected another to form a T.

Ms. Turner's history classroom was covered in laminated copies of old newspapers from famous events and posters of famous people. Among the larger wall decorations were several small comics proclaiming curious and amusing theories about historical events. The desks spread throughout the room were starting to fill, so Melanie quietly slid into a desk in the corner and set her book on her desk.

The rest of the class chattered around her, but she heard a voice behind her.

"Welcome back, Melanie. It's good to see you," an elderly voice greeted behind her. Melanie turned around in her desk and saw Ms. Turner standing behind her. The U.S. History teacher was short, old, and had splendidly grey hair, but she still had a youthful glint in her eyes as she smiled at Melanie.

"Thanks, Ms. Turner."

Ms. Turner nodded. "Well, you've missed quite a few classes. I was already planning on giving the first test next week. I will offer you an extension, though, and I trust that you will catch up soon enough."

Melanie nodded. "Thanks. I'll get to work on it."

"Good. I'll have some handouts to help you if you want to stop by after school and pick them up," Ms. Turner told her as the tardy bell rang and she started to approach the front of the room.

"All right, everyone calm down," she announced, and the chattering stopped. "Now, as many of you know, the school district is trying to promote cross-curriculum studies. Tomorrow, your American literature classes will begin studying Arthur Miller's play The Crucible. So, since it fits into our study of colonial American history, today I am going to give you an overview of the actual historical facts of the Salem Witch Trials."

Melanie suddenly held her breath and closed her eyes. "Calm down," she whispered to herself as Ms. Turner continued.

"Now, maybe we should start with a discussion of what you do know about Salem before we get into my lesson plan. Yes, Tommy?"

A small boy with dark black hair and dull brown eyes stood up. "They killed witches! They threw them in giant tubs to see if they would float and then burned them at stakes."

The class burst into giggles.

"Not quite, Tommy, although that did happen often during Europe. Nobody at Salem was subjected to the water test or burned at the stake. They were convicted using American trial by jury, and nineteen people were hung as a result."

Melanie flipped through the pages of her history book, stopping at a picture of gallows. She took in a deep breath and closed the book; it was too hard to keep herself from picturing herself in the noose.

"But witches can't be killed by hanging them!" the boy sitting next to Tommy burst out. "Burning them is the only way to get rid of their spirit!"

"That's crazy!" Melanie blurted out. "A witch isn't some evil spirit that floats around trying to harm people. Besides, the people in Salem weren't witches, and neither were any of the other people ever executed for witchcraft. If they had been, they would have easily been able to escape. It's just the poor muggles who die." Her lower lip started quivering.

Ms. Turner gave her a curious look. "You are correct, Melanie," she said slowly. "Everyone executed in Salem died professing their innocence. And, looking back, most people now agree. The Salem Witch Trials was a product of mass hysteria, brought on by a strange illness infecting several girls. There are no such things as witches. The colonists simply believed that there were and that was enough to justify the deaths of many people.

"Now, the hysteria that created the trials began at the end of January in 1692 when two girls, Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams, started to suffer from an unexplainable illness. They suffered from convulsions, hallucinations, and many other things. Several other girls began to exhibit the same symptoms and, since no medical cause could be found, the doctors blamed their illness on the devil."

"Convulsions..." the word echoed in Melanie's mind. Unexplainable convulsions. Only there was a way to explain them. Melanie had remembered Hermione talking about the Cruciatus curse during the summer, and what it did. She could imagine a dark figure hunched in a corner of a small room in Salem, smiling with glee as they pointed their wand at the poor child...

The room elongated and turned into an alley; the child turned and looked at Melanie. It was Sophie. She was backing away, trying to run away, but the figure kept his wand drawn. A smile crossed his face. "Avada murim..."

"Sophie!" Melanie yelled, and everyone in the class looked up at her in surprise.

"Melanie?" Ms. Turner asked, giving her a concerned look.

Melanie looked around the room and blushed. "I'm sorry, I don't know what came over me..."

"Are you all right?" Ms. Turner asked, the look of concern not leaving her face.

Melanie nodded as the bell rang to dismiss class. She quickly stood up and bolted out the door, not bothering to listen to the homework assignment. She pushed past everyone in the hall towards the science classrooms, rushing into the sanctuary of the chemistry lab.

"Oh, yes, Melanie," Mr. Wikson said, looking up from his desk. "The teachers were told to expect your return today. I'm glad to see you back in advanced chemistry. You are one of the most talented students I've ever taught- you just seem to have a natural instinct as to how to properly mix chemicals."

Melanie nodded meekly as she sat down at one of the stations and other students began to trickle in.

"I was planning on pairing you with Helen for a while. She should be able to catch you up in no time."

Melanie nodded again and took out her book. She flipped through until she reached the pages listed on the board and started to look over the directions.

"Morning, Melanie," Helen greeted softly as she sat down next to her. She gave Melanie an uncertain look as the tardy bell rang. "I'm glad you're back."

Melanie nodded wordlessly as Mr. Wikson began to explain the day's experiment. She relaxed as she hurried around the room, gathering the materials and compounds needed. She set them on the table by Helen, who was putting on a pair of safety goggles.

"Can you light the fire?" Helen asked, taking out a graduated cylinder and starting to measure a yellow liquid.

"Sure," Melanie said, instinctively reaching for her pocket. Her hands grasped only cloth and she slowly pulled her hand out and looked at it. Why had she reached for her wand? "I should be over that," she whispered to herself.

"What?" Helen asked, looking up at her. When she didn't get an answer, she looked over at the Bunsen burner sitting nearby. "The Bunsen burner, Melanie, can you light it?"

Melanie sighed and nodded, grabbing a pack of matches from their supplies. She quickly lit the burner and turned back towards Helen, who was holding a beaker. Helen wordlessly looked at her and then set the beaker on the ring stand above the flame.

"Good. Now we just have to wait for it to come to a boil."

They both stood there in silence as the class chattered away around them. They uncomfortably looked away from one another until Helen cleared her throat.

"It's nice to see you back," she said slowly. "We were all really worried about, well, you know, what happened in London."

"I'd rather not talk about it," Melanie said quickly as she used a pair of pincers to take the now-boiling liquid off of the flame. She added another mixture that Helen had prepared and watched carefully as the colors swirled together.

"That doesn't quite look right," Helen said as they wrote down the results on their lab report. She pulled out some pH paper and tested the mixture. "Yeah, it's too acidic."

"Then add some chopped sunflower stalks," Melanie said quickly, not looking up from the report.

"What?" Helen asked, turning and giving her a confused look. "What do chopped sunflowers have to do with chemistry?"

"Oh," Melanie stammered, blinking quickly. "Sorry. I don't know where that came from." She scanned the page of instructions again. "Did you add the sodium bicarbonate?"

Helen nodded, pulling the paper towards her and checking items off with her finger. "Yes, I followed the directions exactly," she said as she made her way down the list.

Melanie looked over her shoulder, then at the used graduated cylinders. "Did you add five centiliters or five milliliters of hydrochloric acid?" she asked.

Helen's eyes flashed from the cylinders to the paper. "Oh, crap! That's what I did wrong. Of course it's too acidic."

Melanie nodded and quickly washed all of the containers. "Well, let's hurry. We still have half an hour in the class, so we have time to redo it if we're quick."

Melanie worked at a lightning quick pace, measuring everything out with an expert hand. By the time they had taken the mixture off of the fire and finished the experiment, they had reached the target pH. They quickly wrote down their findings and cleaned everything as the bell rang.

"I'm really glad you caught that mistake, Melanie," Helen said as they both headed to choir. "I can't believe I was that stupid."

"It was a simple mistake, anyone could have made it," Melanie reassured her as they opened the door to the chorus room. As soon as the two took a step into the room, Mrs. Miswick ran up to them and pulled Melanie aside, giving her a large hug.

"I'm so relieved to see you all right," her teacher told her. "I feel so horrible about what happened."

Melanie nodded, trying to plaster a smile across her face. "It wasn't your fault. There was no way that you could have known..."

"But I was still responsible for you! I was your teacher and chaperone..." she trailed off, her voice becoming higher.

Melanie tried to inconspicuously back up. Her choir teacher becoming hysterical was the last thing she wanted. Luckily, Mrs. Miswick took a deep breath and shook her head. "I'm sorry, I'm sure that you want to put all of that behind you, and here I am forcing you to relive it all."

Melanie gave her a weak smile as Mrs. Miswick reached towards a shelf and handed her a choir folder. "We're working on a patriotic medley for our first concert. There are a few solos, and I'd assume that you want to try out for one."

Melanie opened her folder and looked briefly at the music lying in front of her, nodding.

"Good," Mrs. Miswick continued, "we had auditions yesterday, but I'll let you do a last minute audition in front of the choir when we get to the part today."

Melanie nodded and walked to her old spot on the risers. A very bouncy freshman stood next to her in what had once been Sophie's place. Melanie took a deep breath and turned away, absorbing herself in the music and ignoring the whispers and glances of everyone around her.

"What is with everybody?" she whispered to herself as she looked over a page of Bach Chorales.

"They're all still abuzz from this summer," Helen whispered from behind her. "It was sensational. We got to the Royal Festival Hall and you and Sophie were missing. Mrs. Miswick was running all over the place, and we were all interviewed by the police. We spent days locked up in the hotel not able to go anywhere.

"Then, this one afternoon, some strange man with the longest beard I've ever seen came to her hotel room. A few minutes later, Mrs. Miswick came out with this glassy look on her eyes and got all of the chaperones together and said that we were going to leave London on the first flight out. She said that...that you'd been attacked, Sophie was dead, and you were in a hospital. Then, when we got back home there were all of these meetings and interviews. Nobody seemed to be able to actually explain what happened. We all thought that Mrs. Miswick was going to be fired for a while. But, another strange person from England showed up at a school board meeting and convinced them not to." Helen shook her head. "The English are really weird, you know."

Melanie nodded halfheartedly as Mrs. Miswick walked up in front of the group and the whispers finally stopped. She absorbed herself in the music as they sang through some warm-up exercises, then sight-read some of the Bach chorales.

Finally, Mrs. Miswick nodded. "That's good. This group's sight-reading is really improving. Now, let's move onto the patriotic medley. Now, I'm pretty much decided on the solos, but I thought I'd let a few people who weren't here yesterday audition before I made the decision final." Every eye in the group went to Melanie, who just drew herself up proudly and walked to the front of the group as though she could not hear their whispers.

"Now," Mrs. Miswick continued, sitting down at the piano, "turn to measure 76. There's a solo there that I think would fit into your voice quite nicely. I'll start playing at measure 74 so you know when to come in."

Melanie nodded and turned a few pages as music began to come from the piano. Melanie counted the measures in her head as she looked at the music. Her eyes widened as she stopped breathing. Soon, the piano stopped.

"Melanie, is something wrong?" Mrs. Miswick asked, looking around the piano at her. "You were supposed to come in then. I assumed you would know the words and melody, I mean, they're so familiar..."

"Oh, I know them," Melanie assured her. "I just wasn't ready. Sorry." She took a deep breath as Mrs. Miswick nodded and began to play again at measure 74. "Just think about the music, just the music," Melanie whispered to herself as she looked determinedly down at the music and began to sing.

"Yankee Doodle came to town, a riding on a pony," her voice was confident. "See?" she thought to herself, "I can do this. I can sing this song and not think about Draco..."

Her voice started to shake. "Stuck a feather in his cap..." Her mouth suddenly became dry, her throat tightened and it became nearly impossible for her to sing. But she felt dozens of eyes on the back of her head and pushed onward. "And called it macaroni."

Macaroni. Pasta. Boiling water. Suddenly she saw herself back in the dungeons, next to Rhonda, peering at the veritaserum.

"For some reason I want to put pasta in it..."

The music continued, but Melanie stopped. She took a few deep breaths and then suddenly ran from the room. She sped down the hall, neither thinking nor caring about where she was headed. She breathed a sigh of relief as she pushed through the door into the girl's bathroom and enclosed herself in a stall. She put the seat down on the toilet and sat there for a few moments until she heard the door open cautiously.

"Melanie?" a voice asked.

Melanie closed her eyes and sighed. "What?"

"Are you all right? Do you feel sick or something? 'Cuz Mrs. Miswick said to check on you."

"I'm fine," Melanie lied, trying not to burst into loud sobs.

"Okay, I'll tell Mrs. Miswick. She said you can stay in here as long as you need to, or you can just go home."

Melanie nodded to herself as she heard the door close again.

"Home," she whispered to herself. It sounded nice, to be able to go back home and leave this horrible day behind her. It was only a short walk home, and she had a key to the house. An afternoon spent cuddling with her stuffed animals suddenly seemed appealing.

She stood up and reached for the latch on the door, but stopped. There, carved in the wood above the metal latch, was 'Lucille is a'. The first letter in the word underneath was scribbled out, but the other four letters in the word, 'itch,' were clearly visible. The carving had been there since her freshman year, and Melanie had never paid attention to it before, neither wondering who Lucille was nor who had defended her enough to scribble out the first letter. But Melanie couldn't keep herself from reaching up to the door and tracing an invisible 'w' over the scribbles.

"Where is home?" she asked herself out loud. "I don't want to be at home home, I want to be at Hogwarts home." She sighed. She had a million and one reasons to want to leave Frank High, and most of them were related to missing classes at Hogwarts. She thought back to the comfy beds in the Ravenclaw dormitory, to the beauty of the ceiling of the Great Hall. She even, on some disturbed level, missed the horrible pictures in the defense room. She shook her head and turned away from the carving.

"I can't go back, it's useless. I just need to suck it all in and deal with it. Being weak and going home won't help me deal with it any more."

She let herself sit in the bathroom stall for the rest of third period, though, and then managed to talk her way out of PE the next hour. Instead, she sat in the study hall room and read through the first chapters in her American history book, constantly suppressing questions of how witches and wizards had affected colonial America.