Being Hermione Granger

For years, Sunday afternoons at Hermione Granger's house were saved for cooking. Every week, Hermione and her father would put on their aprons and get to work, making dinner, or dessert, or something no one really intended to eat anyway. After her first year at Hogwarts, her father joked, saying she could easily whip up a meal with magic, and she would laugh and pretend, waving her wand around, but then admit what her parents already knew--that she couldn't do magic during the summer holiday. It wasn't a big deal that she couldn't levitate the eggs or heat up the onions, or shine a light into a dark cupboard. She had her magical life and her Muggle life, and liked them separate. At least she had, for a long time. She pushed spells and charms out of her mind, saving it for her study time, and talked about Hogwarts as if it were just like any other boarding school, admittedly a boarding school with an unusual selection of courses. Things had continued just as they were before, and while Hermione's parents knew all about Hogwarts and everything she'd learned there, she told them very little about a lot of what she'd been up to.

That was why Hermione couldn't figure out a way to tell her father she couldn't cook with him. She was bent over her History of Magic textbook, reading about Grindelwald, the dark wizard who'd terrorized the wizarding world during the second World War. It was frustrating, poring over dates and figures, when he'd come to power, when he'd lost his power, how many people he'd killed. Nothing at all about how he'd done it, or how he'd been stopped. She'd been reading all day, and still didn't feel like she'd be able to help in the fight against You Know Who.

There was a rapping at her door, and her father walked in without waiting for a response. "Ready to take a break?" he asked. "I found a good recipe for some apple tarts. You could take them to your friend's house when you leave next week."

"Umm, Dad," she started.

"Yes?"

And then she couldn't do it. "I just wanted to finish up this chapter, and then I'll be ready."

"Sure thing. Just call me when you're through."

Hermione turned back to her desk, frowning at the book open in front of her. She'd meant to tell him no, of course, that she had so much work to do she couldn't possibly take a break. But how could she? How could she even begin to make him understand how important it was that she spend hours poring over accounts of the life of Grindelwald, while summer holiday would still go on for another month? In her head, she imagined telling him and her mother.

"I can't cook today because I have to research ways to stop He Who Must Not Be Named. He's an evil wizard who wants to kill everyone Muggle born--I mean, like me--and take over the world. Oh, and he has a personal vendetta against Harry, so all his friends are in particular danger..."

It would be the best way to get herself dragged immediately out of Hogwarts and deposited in some safe English public school, where evil wizards would apparently want nothing to do with her.

She reached across her desk and lazily flipped over a scrap of parchment, her last letter from Ron. She had several short letters from him, and a few longer ones from Viktor. Harry had hardly been writing.

"We won't be at the house for the whole summer," Ron had written. "You'll come with us, when we go wherever it is we're going. I don't know when Harry will be around."

She put the letter down. She remembered what it said. On the pages before her, the words seemed to sink in and out of her view. A voice in the back of her mind told her to cook with her father like nothing had changed.

In a moment of total clarity, she slammed the book shut. Harry's defeat of You Know Who wouldn't be based on how well she knew wizarding history, after all. The fact that she knew all of the mental illnesses Grindelwald had suffered as a child wouldn't save his life.

But as quickly as it had come, the realization was gone, and Hermione prodded through the heavy book to find where she had left off.

By the time her father came back to check on her, she was reading about the humiliations Grindelwald had faced at Durmstrang, particularly when the other students made fun of his aptitude for Charms. Many scholars considered this the beginning of his obsessive love of the Dark Arts.

"Just about ready? I've got the ingredients all lined up."

"Dad..." she started, but again, couldn't finish. "I'll be down soon. It won't be much longer."

Her father sighed and left. He's already upset, she thought. I should just tell him now.

Instead, she found herself walking down the stairs, and breaking eggs open into a large clear bowl. She performed her tasks mechanically, cutting apples and pears while her father talked somewhere far away.

"So how has school been? You seem to be working hard."

Hermione started, and said in a rush, "Fine, it's fine."

"You used to talk so much about Hogwarts," he said with a smile. He was looking into the batter he was mixing. "The charms you could do, and what you turned into what, and how foolish Divination is."

That made her smile. "Divination is foolish. I stopped taking it."

"What about your friends?"

There were still lumps in the batter, and Hermione fought back the urge to grab the bowl and beat them out herself. Instead, she started to wash the dishes they didn't need anymore. "Harry and Ron still take it, but they just make up all their predictions and charts."

"No, I mean, how are your friends?" He'd stopped mixing all together now.

Ron is good, she wanted to say, but he's really busy with whatever it is his family's doing to fight You Know Who. And Harry I haven't heard from in weeks, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's still in a funk over watching Cedric die, and being tortured by You Know Who, not to mention...

"They're fine," she said, instead, ignoring a nagging twinge of guilt, and scrubbing an old purple bowl harder. "Just like usual." She felt the pressure to get back to her books building inside her as she thought about Ron and Harry and the danger they might be in. Calm, calm, she reminded herself. Be calm, breathe, breathe....

"Stop!" she said out loud, too loud.

Her father, who had gone back to mixing, turned around in surprise. "What's wrong?"

"Oh. Um, can I mix for a while?"

"Sure." He offered her the bowl with a confused smile. She mixed it quickly and handed the batter back to her father with the lumps still in it. She tapped her foot against the floor while he smoothed it into a pan.

Once it was in the oven, she ran upstairs to where the book was still open, and fought back the urge to be sick.

She underlined sentences with her finger as she read about Grindelwald's Five Step Plan for the Domination of the Wizarding World, forcing herself to concentrate, to focus on information she knew wouldn't help anyone. What could she possibly uncover that Dumbledore hadn't already considered?

By the time she followed the wafting tart smell back downstairs, she'd gotten through five more pages.

"I think your friends are going to like this," her father said when he spotted her standing in the doorway. The pan was cooling on the stove, and Hermione could see ten or twelve perfect triangle shaped tarts on it. When had that happened? She didn't remember shaping or folding the batter, but they were filled with fruit and obviously done. How long had she been upstairs?

She just smiled weakly. It was getting to be all she could do lately.

"So how about telling me what's bothering you now?"

"Er, what?"

"Hermione, you've been studying all day, and you don't have school for weeks."

"Right, but at Ron's, I won't have time, Ron can be so incorrigible about getting work done before the night it's due, and--,"

"And you haven't been into cooking at all today."

"Well, I'm busy, Dad, and you know, maybe I'm getting too old."

"You're not getting too old," he said calmly. How could he be so calm? Didn't he realize the world might be ending?

"I'm not! How can you tell me whether I want something or not?" But of course he didn't, he couldn't, and she wouldn't tell him. She knew acting like an immature brat wouldn't help the situation, but her anger had to go somewhere, and she couldn't seem to stop herself.
"I'm not telling you what you want. I just know. Why haven't you been talking about Hogwarts?"

"Because there's nothing to talk about! What do you want me to say? What I did in class? What I had to eat? What I read in the library? It's not interesting!"

"You used to talk about all those things, and I was perfectly interested. I'd love to hear what you read about," he replied, so calm, so composed, so like someone whose entire world was not in danger.

"Well, then, maybe I don't talk because you wouldn't understand," she almost yelled, finally saying the true thing she couldn't admit. "It's all getting more complex, and you're a Muggle, aren't you, so..."

"No, of course," he interrupted her, slipping the oven mitt off his hand. She'd never wanted to say anything like that, anything that cut her parents off so completely from her life at Hogwarts, something that suggested they weren't good enough to hear about it. She wanted to say sorry, and bake again, bake brownies or scones or anything to make him forget, but before she could say anything, he'd left the room.

-- -- --

Hours earlier, she had apologized sincerely, and shared an anxiety ridden ten minutes with her dad. She could hear him snoring peacefully in the next room, while she stared at the spokes of her ceiling fan whirring steadily. He probably thought this was all just about her growing up. That she was a normal teenager, going through mood swings.

She snickered, wondering what a normal teenager would do in her situation. Someone who hadn't faced a troll, or a three headed dog or a giant snake or a werewolf. Someone whose best friend wasn't expected to save the world. Those kids could probably cry, wail about the danger everyone was in. Hermione had felt increasingly distant from her Muggle family every year after Hogwarts, but this year was different. Nothing would ever be normal again after this year.

It was bad enough to think about Ron and Harry, and everyone at Hogwarts, but that wasn't at all everything she worried about, especially at night, especially in the dark. Whenever Hermione closed her eyes, she saw the Muggles at the Quidditch World Cup, how they floated powerless in the air as the Death Eaters paraded and humiliated them. She blinked to keep image out of her head, and when she couldn't, she opened her eyes. Her body was exhausted and her head was tired, but she collapsed into her desk and flipped her book open to where she'd left off. With any luck, she'd be through another chapter by dawn.