Writing

Ginny knows she should associate more with her fellow Gryffindors. But she feels intimidated by Isabel's sparkling teeth, the cut of Mary's robes, and the self-assured tilt of Rose's head. So bright, so fine, so confident, that it seems they belong and the hallways appear designed to fit them. They're as much a part of Hogwarts as the ghosts and the portraits. But Ginny only becomes a part of Hogwarts by fading into the background. A stone in one of the walls, or a tile, or a candle in the Great Hall, ubiquitous and nondescript.

Ginny wishes she weren't so inconspicuous, so easily passed over. But when she tries to talk to the other girls, they only chatter of boys and makeup and how cute Fred and George are. Surely she must know some tales about her funny older brothers, have some pictures? And she does, but she wonders if she'll always be overshadowed by her family.

So Ginny begins to write in her diary again. She had given up the habit when Ron found her old diary. All the pretend secrecy charms piled on top couldn't keep her safe, and he had read bits aloud until she'd run away crying, hands covering her ears. But now she knows real charms and tries to ward her ratty book until her breath comes in gasps. Spells of hiding, spells of locking, spells that all pour off the book like so much oil on water. Concealing magic won't stick to it, and she resigns herself to hiding it with more mundane methods.

After the first month of term, Ginny is tired. The other Gryffindors have taken to--not shunning her, precisely, but they've formed their cliques and it's too late for her to join any of them. Growing up in the Burrow she's had a surfeit of company--there were red-haired brothers around whether she wanted them or not. Now that she has to search for it, she doesn't know how. The cozy circles in the common room are impenetrable and she's tired of hanging around on the fringes. So she crawls off by herself and writes and fills page after page with her worries. Harry still doesn't like her, the other first years don't like her, and she's so lonely, Hogwarts isn't the cozy place that Mum had described it as. The sight of Ginny Weasley scribbling in a notebook becomes a fixture of Gryffindor's common room, a quiet part of the background.

One day Ginny reaches the last page of her diary and exclaims. She can't buy another one anywhere, and she hasn't the money to pay for one, anyway. There's nothing to write on and she contemplates dripping her woes over the floorboards beneath her bed or the inside of the bedcurtains. Idly flipping through the parchment pages, she notices something odd. She's never looked back through her old entries, she prefers to think that once her words are written and transferred from her head to the paper they don't exist. Reading them would merely reanimate the small hurts, the worries. So this is the first time that she sees that the pages are blank, empty of nightmares, schoolgirl tears, and blotchy handwriting. Blank, empty.

Ginny rubs the pages, drips water on them, even holds a match on one as if that will reveal her words. Perhaps one of her dormmates has switched her diary with one of their notebooks. Panic rising--it would be just like nosy Isabel, and only yesterday she had been asking what Ginny was always scribbling about--she examines the book again, but it's hers, mouldy cover and all.

Curious now, Ginny doodles on the first page and watches as the ink spreads. It stays there, a black lightning bolt and glasses, and she wonders how to make it disappear. Maybe she has to write? She sketches out a Hello, my name is Ginny Weasley, and waits. The words seep deep into the fibres of the parchment, and stain them a dull black. Half an hour later, she wakes up to find ink smudged all over her cheek and the open pages. Maybe the blankness is a figment of her imagination, or maybe the hours spent writing were delusions. It's unclear and she's uncertain and there's no way to find out what's happened to her words, or if they ever existed. The diary must have a curious enchantment on it and she resolves not to touch it again.

But it's harder than Ginny thinks it should be. She's used to writing all the time, about thoughts that come into her head during Transfiguration, the strawberry jam at breakfast, the delicate silver filigree on Mary's hair clips. When Professor Grubbly-Plank nearly loses a hand to a venomous chimaera, Ginny instinctively reaches for a scrap of parchment and starts jotting down a description of what's happening. She can't stop, and now her notes are impossible to read, with writing cramped into the borders and between the lines and she's running out of scrolls for her essays. This will never do, and so she returns to the diary. She opens it again and writes over the fresh, blank pages with flourishes and ink blots and freely strewn ink and it feels right. The desperate craving for her journal is sated and she realises that she can't part with it again. Enchanted or not, it's the only object in which she's confided all her worries and she writes these thoughts across the pages in loopy script.

At last, she's spent and today's entry finishes off with Property of Ginny (Virginia Beth) Weasley. Never to be parted from her. Mine. With a sigh of satisfied relief, she's closing the cover when she notices that all her writing is fading away again, and slams the diary back open, scribbling, WHAT'S HAPPENING? in bold, frantic capitals. But those vanish, too.

Then they reappear, but these aren't her words, she's never written them, and--

Hello, Ginny, my name is Tom Riddle.