Elephant Skin

When Harry turned five, he was given something that, for all his years, he could not remember ever having received before - it was something new. And, unlike most everything else that he had ever held precious, his cousin Dudley did not want it. While Dudley did enjoy tormenting Harry about his new possession, Dudley felt no need to own his own pair of spectacles.

Harry liked his specs. With their thick black frames, they dominated his small face, and he often pretended that they were actually a carnival mask, one that he could hide behind from any number of things, including his much larger cousin.

Harry had found, over the years, that it was easier to hide than to try to stand up to his cousin.

At the age of six, Harry found something wonderful. He had been running away from the malicious intentions of Dudley and his cronies, and had somehow found his way into the local cemetery. It was there, in the shade of a young oak tree, that Harry found the tombstone.

There were weeds and toadstools growing in font of the stone, and Harry had to pull them away in order to read what was written. The inscription was not very fancy, but that was just as well, since Harry would not have been able to read anything much more complicated. "Lily Evans," said the words on the small stone.

Harry had found his mother.

When both Harry and his cousin were seven, the teacher asked the class to draw a picture of the person who was most important to them. Dudley drew a picture of himself. When he broke his yellow crayon by pressing too hard with it, he took Harry's.

Harry drew a picture of his mother. He gave her long hair, black like his own, because he had been told that children often looked like their parents, and he often saw the resemblance between his uncle and his cousin. His picture-mother had happy green eyes and was wearing a blue dress. She had a blue dress because, whenever Harry thought of her, he remembered laughter, warm sunshine, and the color blue. He also remembered bright headlights, screeching brakes, and the inertia of his pram being pushed out of the way as a car sped out of control towards the crosswalk, but he tried not to think of those things.

The two of them took their pictures home, Aunt Petunia cooed about what an artist Dudley had become, and Uncle Vernon patted his son on the back and said he was glad that his boy knew who was important in the world. When Harry showed his aunt his own picture, Aunt Petunia hadn't known who it was, and Harry had had to explain. She then informed him that his mother had looked nothing like his idealized picture, and that it was just as well that Harry did not know what "that hussy of a sister of mine" had looked like.

Dudley's picture was framed and put in a place of prominence on the sitting room mantel, where relatives and guests alike could see and admire it. Harry tacked his own picture to the wall of his cupboard, and he was the only one who ever saw it. He knew that it wasn't really his mother, but he had found that it was easier to live in dreams.

The year after that, when Harry was eight, he received something marvelous. His teacher, having decided to retire at the end of the year, told her students that they might choose one book from the class library to take home to keep. Harry didn't know what book to pick, there were so many of them, and he had never owned a book before. Finally, the teacher chose for him, and so he was made acquainted with "The Dark is Rising."

Harry took the book home and spent the first few weeks of his summer holidays living in the world of Will Stanton and his many siblings, wandering the territories of the past with Merriman Lyon and John Wayland Smith. He could not wait to turn eleven, for he felt sure that when he did, he would discover that he was an Old One, a wizard of tremendous power.

And even though Dudley later succeeded in spilling chocolate milk on the book, ruining it before summer had even ended, Harry didn't care. He had something much better.

Harry had found magic.

When he was nine, Harry's teacher told the class that they would be learning about their families. Each student had to put together a book with photographs of their immediate family, as well as their aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. The book would also include a family tree, and the story of the life of an older relative, preferably a grandparent or great aunt or uncle.

Aunt Petunia had a wonderful time helping Dudley with his project. She took out all the family scrapbooks, selecting pictures that could be used. The family took a trip to visit Dudley's paternal grandmother, who was a thin, pinched woman that Harry didn't like very much, so that Dudley could interview her for his story of her life. Harry had to stay in the car throughout the entire visit, because old Mrs. Dursley would not allow her home to be contaminated by "his sort of trash."

Aunt Petunia did not help Harry with his project. He carefully drew his family tree by himself, writing in his mother, aunt, uncle, cousin, and maternal grandparents. He tried to ask his aunt what his father's name was, but she would not tell him, and screamed at him for mentioning "that worthless vagrant" in her house. Harry decided that she did not know his father's name, and so he left that part, along with the rest of the paternal side of his tree, blank.

He found a photo of Aunt Petunia, Uncle Vernon, and Dudley that he could use for his book, one of the ones that Aunt Petunia had deemed unworthy to be a part of Dudley's project. There were no pictures of Lily Evans to be found in the house, so Harry resorted to taking down the picture that had been tacked to the wall of his cupboard, and included that. Not having anyone else to write about, Harry tried to interview his uncle. Uncle Vernon was not flattered by his nephew's attentions, and yelled at Harry to leave him alone, as he had important things to do.

Dudley received a "well done!" and three gold stars for his family book, even though Aunt Petunia had done most of the work. Harry's book did not merit any stars, it came back to him with "incomplete" written across the front in bold red letters. When they had to present their books in front of the class, everyone else had laughed at him because he didn't have a father.

At nine, Harry found out that a neglected tombstone and a crayon drawing could not make up for having only one parent, and a dead one at that.

The next year, when he was ten, Harry found the fiction section of the school library when he was looking for books about the reproductive system for a school report. He had not wanted to do the reproductive system, would have preferred the nervous system, since it had the brain and was therefore more interesting, but he had been one of the last to choose, and so had ended up with a topic that no one else had wanted.

In the fiction section, Harry found the rest of the Dark is Rising sequence, and so was finally able to finish the story he had started years earlier. He found other books as well, books with wizards, dwarves, elves, witches, hobbits, dragons, and warlocks. There were enchanted princesses, dashing young princes, heroes and heroines; evil lords, wicked queens, and dangerously ambitious regents. Immersed in this world, he lost track of the time, and so he alone came empty handed when the rest of the class lined up at the checkout desk with their research books. The teacher informed him that he would have to come again after school for his books, since the class was leaving the library.

After school, Harry found and checked out the books he needed for his project, but he also checked out books from the fiction section, which he clutched close to his chest the entire way back to his uncle's house. When he arrived, Harry was chastised for being home late, but for him it didn't matter.

He had found another world, one where it did not matter that his mother was dead and his father missing. In the library, Harry had found a sanctuary.

When Harry turned eleven, he stayed up until two in the morning, some part of him still hoping that Merriman or Will would come and tell him that he had magic. No one came, however, and so Harry had to console himself with his sole birthday present: a new school uniform. It was actually just some of Dudley's old clothing that Aunt Petunia had dyed grey - Harry had seen her stewing the big pot of dye on the cooker earlier that month - and it hung loosely on his slender frame the way that all of Dudley's old clothing did, but it meant something. Specifically, it meant that this year there would be no Dudley at school. Harry's cousin and tormentor was going to Uncle Vernon's old school, while Harry would be attending Stonewall High, the local high school.

Later, as he sat in class during his first day at Stonewall High, it occurred to Harry that maybe it would not be as wonderful as he had thought it would be. The other children did not have uniforms made up of old, mismatched, too-large castoffs. Yes, Harry's uniform looked very much like everyone else's, being the same dull, agnate grey, but it was too big. And that set him apart.

Those classmates who knew him from grammar school talked to those who did not, and it was not long before the entire class knew that Harry's mother was dead and that he did not know who his father had been. Someone made the snide remark that, with his loose uniform, he looked like the elephant from "Just So Stories," with his baggy clothing wrinkled all about him. The name stuck, and Harry became known as Elephant to most of his classmates. In his later years at Stonewall, students no longer remembered the original reason for the name, though Harry did. Elephants, after all, never forget.

That year, Harry learned that you can never really escape from who you are.

In his second year at Stonewall High, when Harry was twelve, he became friends with another boy in his year. The boy, whose name was Richard, was also an outcast. His mother had run off with the boy who minded his baby sister over the holidays, and now Richard's parents were getting a divorce.

Their friendship lasted all of three months, at which time Richard moved away from the area, and went to live with his grandmother in Wales. Harry tried writing letters to Richard, but after failing to receive a response to any of them, he ceased to do so.

Harry had found that a friendship only lasted when both people wanted it.

In his first year as a teenager, when he was thirteen, Harry was quite sure that he had fallen in love with a girl a year ahead of him. She had long, pretty brown hair and warm grey eyes. Her name was Marilee, and Harry thought that she was quite possibly the most wonderful girl he had ever met.

He met her, strangely enough, at the school's model airplane club. Harry joined the club thinking that he might get a chance to fly one of the other members' planes. He had had a fascination with the sky since he was quite small, and thought that he might be able to fly vicariously through flying one of the planes.

Harry's membership in the club did not last long, as he was politely asked to leave when it was discovered that he didn't own, and would most likely never own, a model plane. His infatuation with Marilee Smith ended not long after when he discovered that she and her friends had been giggling about him behind his back. Her taping a poem that he'd written for her up on the blackboard in the English classroom did not help any either.

That year he found out that there was no such thing as unconditional love. There was always a price to pay.

At fourteen, Harry took a book out of the library on chess. He had become interested in the game when, at the beginning of the term, he began noticing students setting up small, portable chessboards in their free time. It was the newest craze, and, while Harry rarely tried to follow fads, this one fascinated him for some reason he couldn't quite understand.

Because he didn't have a chessboard or pieces, and had no way of obtaining either, Harry played out imaginary chess games on pages of graph paper he had torn from his maths notebook. Having no one else to play with, Harry played against himself, imagining long, drawn out battles that would take up several sheets of paper, and span several days.

One day, a boy in his class came up behind Harry while he was trying to figure out how to counter a move he had just made, and asked Harry why, with tactics like that, he was not on the school chess team. Harry, who had not even known that Stonewall High had a chess team, replied that he did not know why he was not on the team. The other boy, Michael, wrote down the place and time that the team met on Harry's gamesheet, and told him that he would expect him at the next meeting. Two days later, Harry was, for the first time ever, a part of something.

Harry had discovered that, in order to fit in, all he needed was to be good at doing something.

During Harry's fifth year at Stonewall, his History professor asked each pupil to make a personal crest for themselves. They were learning about the middle ages, and the professor was a young woman who did not understand that her students were old enough that they saw such assignments as silly, childish busywork.

Though he knew it was silly, Harry found the assignment to be intriguing and interesting. He spent a lot of time trying to decide what kind of animal to put on his crest, what colors to use, and whether he should use a motto or not.

In the end, Harry's crest portrayed a single stag on a field of navy blue. He had spent a great deal of time in an effort to draw a stag that truly looked noble. It was important, because for Harry the stag represented peace, solitude, and most importantly, an ability to survive without others.

The other boys in his class chose serpents, lions, and dragons, using brilliant, blazing colors like tawny gold, cherry red, forest green, and electric blue.

Harry had found that he no longer needed to force himself to stand out, that sometimes it was better to be lost in the crowd.

When, at the age of sixteen, Harry went to visit his mother's grave during the Christmas holidays, he was shocked to find that the tombstone had fallen over. Over the years since he had first found the little forgotten plot when he was six, it had become his constant. When he became upset with his cousin or frustrated with school work, Harry would retreat to the quiet of the cemetery, and sit next to Lily Evan's grave marker, talking about his problems.

It was always very comforting for him to know that someone was listening to him, that someone cared about what happened to him.

After finding the stone toppled, Harry did not know quite what to do. He laid the spicy-smelling evergreen bouquet he had brought with him in the snow, sank to his knees, and wept.

He was only sixteen, and Harry had lost his mother.

Harry is seventeen now. He is writing essays and filling out forms, applying to almost two dozen different scholarships and for nearly as many universities. He does not plan to still be living in the Dursley household when he turns eighteen.

He is third from the top in his year, a position that he has earned by spending nearly every free moment of his time studying. It is not hard to find the time to dedicate to his schoolwork; he does not really have any friends other than a few acquaintances from the chess team and the Latin club. The other pupils whisper behind his back, and sometimes in front of his face, that he is a dry, uninteresting person. He does not try to make friends, he does not go to school social functions. His clothes continue to be too big, and he walks with a perpetual hunch (the result of sleeping and studying in a cupboard, though his classmates do not know that this is the reason).

He no longer spends long hours in the fiction section of the library, as that is time that can be spent in much wiser ways, studying his textbooks. His marks are important to him, he is determined to show that he can still make something out of himself, even if his mother is dead and he does not know who his father was. Occasionally, he will stare up at the sky for hours on end, and dream of flying.

Harry does not remember that he once believed in magic.