Petunia's Loss

"Lily, Petunia," Sonya Evans called up the stairs. "Come down to the den. Your father and I need to talk to you!"

Lily and Petunia, only two years apart in age and inseparable best friends since they were in diapers, came tumbling down the stairwell. Neither worried that they would be in trouble; they were generally good kids and when they weren't, well, they watched each other's backs. When they reached the den, the sisters quickly arranged themselves on the couch in front of their parents, Michael and Sonya Evans.

Michael smiled lovingly at his two daughters, knowing that it would be hard to break this news to the girls. "This is really important, but you can't talk to anyone outside of this house about it. It has to be a secret. Do you promise?"

The girls nodded mutely. They had never seen their father so serious before.

He sighed. "Your mother and I are a witch and wizard."

The girls were confused. "You mean, like that Wicca stuff I saw in the bookstore once?" queried Petunia who was a voracious reader.

"No," replied Sonya. "We mean real magic. We were both educated at a school called Hogwarts a long time ago."

Lily, ever the logical one, laughed. "That's impossible! There's no such thing as magic!"

"There is too!" Petunia argued back. "I read about it in books! Oh, I've always dreamed about something like this! I just knew magic was real!"

"Oh, it is not," Lily replied huffily. "You just read stupid fantasy books. Real books, like ones for school, don't talk about magic! It's silly. Magic isn't real!"

"What about the mythologies?" Petunia snapped. "You were complaining about having to read about those Roman gods for your Latin class the other day. That's magic! And you have to read about it for school!"

"Yeah, but we don't believe in that stuff! Its just what a bunch of silly people thought a long time ago!"

"Girls," Sonya cut in warningly. She did not want this to break out into a full-scale argument. "Petunia is right. There is real magic."

Lily turned her unbelieving green eyes to face her parents. "Really? Then why haven't we ever seen you use it?"

"We went into hiding only a few years after our marriage," Michael explained. "We were quite powerful and an evil wizard wanted us to join him. We couldn't help him, but... bad things would happen to us if we didn't. We did the only thing we could. We stopped using magic and went into hiding as Muggles. A dear friend even faked our deaths for us. Just to be safe, we changed our names."

"What's a Muggle?"

Sonya grinned at Petunia's eternal curiosity. "A Muggle is a non-magical person. It is a common term in the Wizarding world."

"There's an entire Wizarding world?" Lily gasped.

"Yep," Michael replied.

"How could we not have heard of this?!"

"The Wizarding world keeps itself secret from Muggles. Sometimes they will watch out for Muggle safety. Like when this Dark wizard was gaining power, many wizards took it upon themselves to protect the Muggles who lived near them. But we lost contact with anyone in the Wizarding world when we went into hiding. We can only assume that the Dark wizard - Grindewald - was defeated."

"But," Petunia asked in confusion, "why are you telling us this? If we've lost contact with the wizards and we can't talk to anyone about this, why should we know?"

"Next week is Lily's eleventh birthday. Traditionally, Hogwarts sends out their letters on the recipient's eleventh birthday. Since both your father and I are magical, you two probably are, too. When you go to Hogwarts, you have to act as if you came from a Muggle family. Some may tease you for not coming from a Wizarding family, but under no circumstances can you tell them about us. It would be too dangerous."

Petunia and Lily nodded. "Do you have wands, like the witches in my books?"

"Of course!"

"What do they look like?"

"Well, mine is disguised as a potato peeler, and your father's is a wrench in his tool box. Do you want to see what they really look like?"

"Yeah!" the sisters chorused.

_

Two years later, Petunia woke up on her eleventh birthday, hoping and praying and expecting a letter from Hogwarts. Lily was always telling stories about her classes and her friends and the prankster boys in her House. Even though Lily complained, Petunia thought the boys sounded nice. Immature and stupid, but nice all the same. She couldn't wait to go to Hogwarts.

She had borrowed Lily's first-year books and read them all from cover to cover. She even insisted that Lily buy her regular wizard books, just so that she would know what the other students were interested in. By now, she understood Quidditch, Potions, a few Charms, and eagerly anticipated Transfiguration. Petunia was sure she would be good at magic. She had to be. Lily was. Her parents were. Why wouldn't she be?

Yet, the weeks dragged on and no letters arrived. Her parents and Lily would cast her odd looks at the dinner table and have whispered conversations Petunia didn't understand. The word "Squib" was passed about frequently, but they sounded disgusted when they said it. They couldn't be talking about her like that? No, they were her family. They loved her.

Finally, one day at the end of August, her family gave up on Hogwarts and broke the news to her. Petunia was a Squib. Inwardly, Petunia cringed when she saw the way her father's lip curled at the mention of the word. She became angry at Lily's well-meaning pity. But what hurt her most was that her mother, Sonya, refused to talk about it. Sonya would not allow Petunia to speak of magic in her presence anymore. She told Petunia that she was a Muggle and, by God, she would act like one. At night, Petunia would stay up late and read her favorite books, the ones where the heroines were whisked off to a happily ever after on the back of a unicorn.

The one thing she never did was cry. Crying wouldn't help anything, she thought. Lily wouldn't cry. Lily would deal with it and get on with her life. She had lived her whole life without magic. She could live the rest of it without magic, too.

The day Lily left for Hogwarts, Petunia burned her books. If magic could give up on her, she could give up on magic.