Normal

Normal

You are thirteen years old, soon to be fourteen and everything is perfect. You get good marks in school, your hair is shiny and blond and the envy of all your friends and your parents love you. Your sister is a skinny, gangly red-headed shadow that likes to stare for hours out the window when she's not following you around. You don't really mind because it's nice to be the one who's followed, the special one. On Saturdays you go to your best friend's house, because Rebecca's mother always lets you try on her make up and short skirts, and then you and Rebecca walk down to the café on the corner just to show off. The boys all stare as you go by and you feel proud, walking beside the dark haired Rebecca, the two of you matching perfectly the way only opposites do.

(But sometimes when their looks become a little too intense, sometimes when the older boys watch me as though they want to claim me with their eyes, I want to flee... I pin my gaze ahead of me and wish with all my heart that the silly, clown red lipstick would just disappear. I want to run but I've only just learned to walk in these tall shoes and I'm so, so afraid of falling...)

You're not bookish the way your sister can be at times, hiding, nymph-like beneath the trees out back, her fingers wrapped so tightly around her book it's as though she's trying to keep herself from being sucked inside of it. Lily's the strange one, the one who doesn't quite fit in with her dark red hair, like the grandmother that died before you were born. Grandma Evans was strange, too, your parents say, and no one likes to talk about her much. She's taboo, the ghostly white elephant standing in the corner of every family reunion. Already you can tell that Lily inherited more from her than just her hair.

At home your parents dote on you. "That's our Petunia," your father is fond of saying, "she's going to make something of herself, you know!" You don't know yet what it is you'll do with yourself when you grow up, but you are so sure that it will be something important and unique. You can't imagine the gleam in your father's eye ever disappearing, or your mother ever smiling at anyone else the way she does at you when you bring home yet another perfect report card. Lily always just waits and stares from the corner or the doorway, a green eyed stranger, as foreign and exotic as the Chinese silks or the Persian rugs your mother likes to collect. Lily's marks are good, too, but never quite as good as yours. In fact, nearly everything about Lily is halfway: her presence in your family, her almost but not quite tidy room, the long books she never finishes. You never bother to wonder why Lily never finishes her stories; you just accept it as another one of her eccentricities and move on.

Then one morning you wake up and realize that the whole world shifted places while you slept. Everything is strange and off kilter and frightening. In the dining room you see your mother hugging Lily to her with an intensity you've never seen before, and your father doesn't even look at you when you enter the room. You open your mouth and a thousand words are dying on your lips in that instant.

(What's happening? Am I dreaming? Why won't anyone look at me? I don't understand! Someone, please, look at me! What's so special about Lily, anyway? I'm the good student, I'm the one with the pretty hair and I'm the one everyone notices, not Lily, who hides in the shadows as though she doesn't really belong here, in our world. What will happen to me if no one sees me anymore?)

But you can't bring yourself to say anything because your father is reading then, aloud from a letter written on antique looking paper. There is an owl perched on the back of a chair and Lily is stroking its feathers cautiously as she feeds it a piece of bacon. Your mother cries as she hears what your father is reading, but you can't hear anything, not past the roaring in your ears, signifying the end of the world.

And then that's when you hear it. That word. Magic. You've heard it before, but never like this, never with that breathless wonder that infuses your father's voice as he speaks. Suddenly everything is frighteningly real: wizards and dragons and magic wands and flying brooms and unicorns and ghosts and curses and all the half-imagined things that lurk underneath beds or behind closet doors. You want to scream. Lily is a witch. You realize in that instant that you've lost. Lily is the special one and there's no way your blond hair and good marks can compete with that.

Indifference is already growing, mutating into something far more sinister as you watch Lily. Everything is changing. Her plain features look prettier, more defined; her red hair is no longer just peculiar, it's beautiful, like a waterfall of fire, cascading over her slender shoulders. You feel yourself fading, as though Lily were a vortex, sucking all the light in the room towards herself. As she burns, powerful and intense, you feel yourself growing colder, and there's only one thought in your mind.

(I hate her.)

******

You are fifteen years old and you want to run away from home. You hate your parents, especially your stupid, good for nothing father, too drunk to work and too pissed at everything to pay any attention to you. You hate him more than anything in the world, more than your brat of a little sister or your disgusting older brother. You do what you have to to get him to look at you, and sometimes that means getting into fights at school (which you always win, since you've got more experience with fat lips and bloody noses than any of the other blokes your age) and sometimes it means skipping school every day for a week to go smoke fags and drink whiskey with your mates. It's never much fun when your dad does notice, but even through the pain and the humiliation you're glad that at least he sees you past the hazy clouds in his eyes.

Your sister just laughs and calls you a fool for bringing it on yourself the way you do. Her dark eyes light up with cruelty and you wonder sometimes if the ugliness in your family is a genetic thing or if it's just the result of Dad having fucked everything up in the first place. You tell yourself a lot of things to make living worth it, because sometimes you hate everything so much that you think about leaving, but you know you don't have the guts to go through with it.

(I'm better than this place, better than all of them. Someday, I'm going to get out of here, out of this shitty, hole in the wall apartment, out of this pathetic, run down neighborhood. I'll have a house with a nice lawn and a nice car on the driveway and a beautiful wife. I'm better than all of this and I deserve more than them. Someday I'm going to have everything I deserve.)

You hate to look at yourself in the mirror, because you only see your father when you do. It might as well be his narrow, squinting eyes, his long thin lips, his red face. He's everywhere and you feel like you can't escape him. You've got your father's girth, too, even though you're still a teenager. It's useful when the other boys try to mess with you because you're so much bigger than the rest of them, but the girls never look twice at you and you hate it. You're ugly and the worst part is you know that you're ugly and that there's nothing you can do about it.

You're in love with the dark haired girl in your English class. Her name is Rebecca Wells and you think that she's the most beautiful girl you've ever seen. Rebecca has a tiny waist and slender white limbs and hair as black as night, and she wears lipstick so red that her mouth shines like a candied apple. She's a forbidden fruit, your Rebecca, and you don't dare touch her because you know that the consequences for doing so would be unbearable.

Instead you flirt with the gangly mousy-haired girl that always hangs around Rebecca like a dirty-blond shadow. Petunia, you think, has to be the stupidest name you've ever heard of, with the exception of your own name, Vernon, which you've always despised. Petunia accepts your advances easily enough; you can tell that she doesn't really want you, but you know that she's glad to be the one receiving attention for once and you're more than willing to exploit that as a way to get closer to Rebecca. Rebecca treats you like a minor annoyance and it kills you every time she dismisses you, as though you're worthless. Your love for her starts to change, decaying rapidly inside of you, becoming something black and bitter.

(Fucking Rebecca Wells. She thinks she's so goddamn perfect, doesn't she? I hate her. Nothing I do means anything to her, because she's so beautiful and that makes her worth so much more than the rest of us. Fat, ugly Vernon gets stuck with plain, skinny Petunia; it figures, doesn't it? No one wants you if you're not perfect. It doesn't matter what kind of person you are as long as you're beautiful. Beauty is power... But then, there are other ways of being powerful.)

And then one day you come home from school to find your older brother, Gordon, making out with a girl in the room the two of you share. Their faces are flushed and his hands are busy fighting with her bra clasp. Gordon's tall and muscular, and while he's not particularly handsome, he's a great deal better looking than you are and you've always resented him for it. It's not the first time you've caught him with a girl, but what makes you stop this time is the girl's dark hair, long and beautiful and you know even before you see her face that it's Rebecca.

There's a well of ugliness inside of you that's rising to the surface. You can feel it spilling over as you move forward and throw your brother to the floor. Rebecca screams and you can hear the sound of your brother's head connecting with the dresser as it rings through the room, a loud crack, like thunder. But you don't care about anything other than the anger and pain inside of you, releasing itself in a storm of violence as you smash your fists, again and again into Gordon's face. There's so much blood, it's everywhere, all over your hands, all over your clothes and Gordon's and it's seeping into the carpeting like a dark stain but you don't stop until you feel fingers wrapping around the back of your collar, and suddenly you're on the floor looking up at your father.

(Don't hurt me I didn't mean for this to happen it was a mistake I'm sorry the blood won't come off my hands and I'm so fucking scared please don't hurt me again Daddy I was angry it's all Gordon's fault it's not fair I wanted her I loved Rebecca so much and she never even looked at me, you never even look at me and all I wanted was to be seen don't hurt me please I'm scared)

Your father doesn't say anything and that's the worst kind of accusation of all, because it lets you fill in all the blanks. Suddenly you realize that you hate yourself more than anything in the world and it terrifies you; it's so easy to hate everything else, to blame your father and your mother and God and everything. But when it's your fault? What then? The guilt and the shame consume you, and you can feel Rebecca's eyes watching you, full of fear and disgust. You can't stand it anymore. You stagger to your feet and before your father can stop you you're running, out of your tiny, decrepit apartment, out of your ugly neighborhood, out of everything that reminds you of yourself. You don't stop until you get to Petunia Evans' house and when you do you fall to your knees with your brother's blood on your hands and you let Petunia hold you.

She's soft and faded, like the old wooden statues of the Virgin Mary you see at St. Peter's Church on your way to school. They always look so sad, their paint peeling and chipped, reminiscent of something that was beautiful once. As you press your face against her pale summer dress, you choke on a hundred thousand words that refuse to free themselves.

You want to repent, you want to die, you want to be baptized in dust and dirty-blond warmth, you want to purge yourself of all the beautiful, black haired demons that still claw at you, tearing you up inside with their indifference.

Slowly, everything fades away.

(I'm sorry.)

******

You are seventeen years old and you wish you were somewhere else. You don't really care where, just as long as it's somewhere other than the indefinable grey space that exists between your ears, behind your eyes and everywhere else you try to escape to. The rain is coming down hard, beating on the rooftops and pounding the streets into submission. It makes everything seem smaller: the houses shrink the way children do when they're scared, limbs wrapped tight around themselves and faces withdrawing. The trees bend and tremble, and the fierce wind bullies all the living things into hiding. You want to hide, too, but there's nowhere for you to go.

Sometimes you wonder what it would be like to go home. Home doesn't really exist anymore; there's a new house there to replace the ashes of the one you grew up in, with a new family and new furniture and a new car on the driveway. You know because you go by there sometimes just to look at it. You like to pretend that it's yours, that you can just walk inside anytime you like but then you notice the alien daisies clustered beneath the front window where your mother kept her hydrangeas. It's funny how something so small can destroy everything, the way those silly little white flowers tear apart your memories before they've even had a chance to resurface.

(One foot in front of the next foot in front of the next, one two three four, four, number four Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey, approximately thirty miles from London, approximately a million years from where I belong.)

Right now you find yourself wandering, in more ways than one. These days your mind likes to travel as much as your feet; even when you're not moving you're pacing the well-worn footpaths of your mind, feeling restless and uneasy. The streets of London open up to you an endless network of wet concrete and dirty things. There's a tangled jungle of weeds and trash pushing up between the cracks in the sidewalks and great boulders of wet newspaper lurk in the shadows, waiting to trip the unwary passerby.

You've "tripped" more than enough already though, without the help of any soggy old newspapers. Disjointed thoughts crowd your head like puzzle pieces, each from a different puzzle and none of them will go together. You think about finding one of them and having them point their magic stick at you to make it all go away. Right now you don't care if it's pain or death or salvation that they offer, just as long as it makes you forget.

It's ironic how, even though out here you have more freedom than you've ever had in your life, you've never felt so powerless. Everyday is a struggle to hang onto the simple power of survival. Death isn't just looming around every corner; it walks beside you, just a step or two behind, and takes on a personality all its own. You know it's probably just a side effect of all the drugs swirling around in your system, breaking down the circuits in your brain, but lately Death has become your most constant companion.

Most days Death appears in the form of a scrawny little boy with messy black hair and a strange scar over his bright green eyes. You've only ever seen that shade of green once before, but you try not to think about that.

"Why don't you just give up already, Dudders?" Death asks today. His voice is taunting and carries with it an edge of violence that sends shivers down your spine. "You ought to go dump your sad body in the Thames and just get it over with."

(Ice cold water thrusting its way into my nostrils and past my lips, invading my body despite my struggles to keep it out, out of my throat, out of my lungs, out of my mind, I've been out of my mind for so long I don't remember what it looks like anymore and I might as well give up on ever returning again, on ever returning anywhere, except, perhaps, for the formless, lifeless place that I came from)

You get tired of walking and sit down in the small crevice between two dumpsters in a dark alley. Just a year ago you never would've been able to squeeze your large frame into such a tight space, but like everything in your life, the street has worn down your body until all that's left is a drooping shadow of what used to be. Even though it smells here, the wind can't touch you and for a moment you feel safe. Death crouches down in front of you, poking at a dead bird with a stick. The raven's head lolls and its glassy eye pins you back against the shadows.

"It's getting colder out, isn't it?" Death asks rhetorically. "Winter's coming soon. Think you'll freeze to death this year?"

The raven's beak is open, and for a wild second you think that it's trying to speak to you.

'Was that a threat or a promise?' you want to ask. You're not sure if it's Death or the raven that you're addressing. You realize that you've spoken it out loud when Death turns and sends a crooked grin in your direction.

You wrap your arms around yourself and try to sleep. The moment you close your eyes, images come, floating upward out of the darkness as though from a deep, murky lake. You see pale faces, white with cold and spotted black with mildew, the skin rotting slightly. A long thin nose, pinched lips and frayed, dirty hair--your mother. Another face, wider, with narrow eyes and a large mustache obscuring the mouth--your father. You want to look away, but even you can't escape your dreams. Once again you feel weak, dependent, powerless.

You see green lights and the bone pale face of a monster, red eyed and razor edged. You never hear their screams--although you know the sound all too well. All you hear in the silence of your memories is the bitter, ironic laughter of your cousin. Your cousin, with more power than you've ever dreamed of; your cousin, so skinny and pathetic and yet in his callused, bony hands lay the power over life and death.

You wake up with a start. Death is still playing with the dead raven, holding it by its wings and making it dance in a mockery of life. Its beak clacks together loudly, echoing in the darkness. You scramble to your feet and the minute you're touching ground again you're running.

(Why am I still here?)

An hour later you're standing in front of a house that isn't yours. Its walls and doors and windows belong to someone else, and all you have left is a handful of memories that you can't hide from. The wind is so strong that it makes the rain fall sideways but you hardly notice it as you walk across the street and past the sidewalk that used to stand like a cement barrier between you and the past every time you came here before. You're walking over the lawn now, the wet mud squelching over your beat up trainers, and you collapse beneath the ghosts of the hydrangeas, curling up like a child within their shadows.

Death is standing on the lawn staring at you. He looks older now, seventeen, the way your cousin looked the last time you saw him, on the night your parents died and your house burned down and you became homeless in every sense of the word. Death doesn't smile or mock you; he simply stands there, hands hanging in fists at his sides, green eyes flashing like power in the night. Every advantage you had ever had over Harry was gone that night; your family, your home, your friends. Your life had become as empty as his had always been. But where you trembled and submitted like a coward to Death, Harry stood, shoulders thin but strong, his jaw set.

Harry was powerful. You were, are, nothing.

You close your eyes again and fall asleep, and dream of Harry pointing his wand at you, and green light blazing like a purifying fire all around you until you're consumed entirely by it.

That night you freeze to death.

(I'm coming home.)