Fictionally Yours, Hermione

When she was young and naïve, slim ankled and bushy haired Hermione never suspected for a moment that books lied.

Books are straight spined brazen liars.

All of them.

Hermione was young and small and attended a primary school where the words muggle and death eater never passed her lips and never had reason to.

She had not yet realized that literature wasn't the omniscient infallible guide to life that it pretended to be.

At that point in her life she decided, she would embark on some great adventure.

She was at the part of the story were our young heroine would stumble onto some secret pathway or uncover some plot.

The air would be lighter and the sun would be brighter and the children who mad fun of her looks and bookish ways and inadequacy would understand and admire her.

If they didn't, it would be irrelevant because she would be on an adventure, she wouldn't need them.

Adventure didn't come.

She started to wonder; if her life was a story maybe she just wasn't the protagonist.

And then like mana from heaven, like the bits in fairy tales you never believe because they're just too perfect, on her eleventh birthday she received a very unusual letter.

She smiled, danced, and carried on as eleven year old girls often do- although in a very Hermione way.

Part of her seethed at the injustice of it all.

Part of her cried out that it wasn't fair.

Why couldn't it have happened three years ago, two, one? Why couldn't it have happened when she needed it?

But she went and endured because she was just being silly and childish, it was such a great opportunity to learn.

She had convinced herself that Hogwarts would be different, she built it up as some utopia of misunderstood gifted children, and really wasn't worried in the slightest.

She found her paradise occupied by humans.

The scenery was different, but students rolled their eyes and talked under their breath loudly enough she knew she was meant to hear.

People jostled her in hallways, watched her drop her eleven library books and kept walking, because they're already late and if she's crazy enough to drag that many books around it serves her right.

They still stared at her as though she'd stumbled into the wrong room on the wrong planet. With each second her actions became more stilted, and their glares became more tangible, and in the end her life felt more like an exaggerated play for their benefit than well, her life.

And then there was a troll.

Suddenly she was part of a group, a unit, and there was going to be an adventure.

Hermione soon realized that she may have been a dreamer but she was a sensible dreamer, and if sometimes her head was in the clouds her feet where always on the ground.

Real adventures weren't like the ones in books.

People got broken and couldn't be fixed.

There weren't any underlying metaphors, plot arcs, simple neat happy endings.

Hermione started reading non-fiction.

And although she was young and buck-toothed and bushy haired somehow gradually the concept of the world as not one clean simple thing but rather a seething mass of life where you where wrong and got hurt and had to live with ambiguities and faults and pimples began to dawn on her.

Somewhere in the middle of her story, beyond a grandiloquent play at maturity Hermione Granger began to grow up.

She didn't like it one bit.

If circumstances had been different and her adventure had never come, she could have remained a child forever.

Most adults do.

Circumstances weren't different and an adventure came.

She forgot to specify with her wish for bold deeds that they absolutely under no circumstances be real.

Real meant more funerals than birthdays, staying up nights frantic trying to change the orbits of stars with bare hands, seeing the broken look in a professor's eyes that meant another friend dead.

And now Hermione is neither young nor naive, has outlived most of her enemies and all of her friends and sometimes is so very, very tired she can feel the earth groan with her.

She understands the danger of books and dreams, and remembering old grudges turns first to non-fiction for comfort.

But sometimes at the end of the day she allows herself to sit back with a paperback, deceitful as it is, and pretend.