Leaving It Up to Chance

Chapter Three

Harry jerked awake; Topher was gnawing on his chain in boredom. The niffler licked his cheek as a 'hello' and Harry scratched behind its ears, thoroughly distracted. He had had a nightmare.

He was running into the street from an alley around midnight, chasing after a person. Someone that had to be Jenny. He was calling after her, "Wait! Stop! It's me, Harry!" But, Jenny was running into another alley, far ahead of him. He took one step onto the road when he heard a trucker honk its horn repeatedly. There was no time to run. Harry watched, frozen with terror, as the large Muggle truck neared, it's headlights blinding him. He automatically shielded his eyes, but even the headlights penetrated through, illuminating his face, making it whiter and whiter, until all you could see was his bright green eyes gleaming. The horn was blaring, and everything became slower and brighter until... Harry had woken up.

It took a while for him to realize that he was extremely shaky and was gasping for breath. He sat up and put his face in his hands, trying to erase the dream from his mind. But questions kept popping up; Harry's mind was racing.

Does that mean I'll never see her again? Does she not want me to, which was why she was running from me?

But Harry had the sinking feeling that she was going to be hard to find, elusive. Maybe he won't see her again... maybe he'll just have to leave it up to chance. Oh, who was he kidding? Harry had always been somewhat of a detective. From researching things like who was Nicholas Flamel to finding out information that would help Buckbeak, the hippogriff, with his appeal. Let's face it, Harry Potter always wanted to find information that would soothe his curiosity.

Not a plan that would help him find Jenny entered his mind, so he made two bowls of cereal, one for him and one for Topher. Harry had absolutely no idea what kind of food nifflers ate, so he decided to just try things out in the meantime. As he munched on cereal, he thought up ideas on how he could find this 'mystery girl', each one as impossible as the last. Then it hit him: Send in some sort of ad in the Daily Prophet! Surprised at his own genius, he ate his cereal happily. But then, his happy feeling ebbed away when he thought about Hedwig. She still wasn't back yet so he could send an ad in. But, I guess I can just use the Post Owls then, Harry thought to himself. Now with the promise of that, he became cheerful again.

With Topher left behind in the apartment, Harry paid a visit to the Post Office--literally. To use an owl, you had to cough up six Sickles. The owl he had paid for hooted impatiently as Harry scrawled his ad for the newspaper. And finally the now furious owl took off and Harry was quite glad to see it go. Every time Harry finished writing a word, it would peck at his ear angrily. Harry thought himself quite unlucky to have picked that particular owl.

Harry was walking home when a particular person with long brown hair was sitting in a chair outside of a restaurant, their back to him. Harry had the fleeting feeling that he got when he first saw Jenny and before he could stop himself, he was running across the street until--

"WATCH WHERE YOU'RE GOING, SIR!" an angry vender, who had been pushing a giant cart. But Harry could care less; he could possibly just be meeting Jenny again! Picking up the pace, he kept going until he was about a meter away from the brown-haired someone. He stopped at the small curb and took a deep breath. Thoughts such as This is it, THIS IS IT! kept interrupting all of his other thoughts. He stepped forward and tapped the person on the shoulder.

"What do you want?" said the person.

"Hey! It's me Har--''

Harry's eyes fell upon the person's face and the mustache and beard. He didn't remember Jenny having facial hair besides her eyebrows and eyelashes.

Horrified and embarrassed, he ran off with the man shouting after him, "Was that your idea of a JOKE!?"