After a few days, I discovered the first serious flaw in my new life.
I still had to go to school.
An ordinary Muggle school.
No wands, moving staircases, or teachers turning into cats.
I was eight years old, had memories of a previous life, and owned a textbook whose greatest mystery was why anyone thought I needed quite so many addition exercises.
I thought I would at least get through the work quickly.
I would have, if anyone had been particularly interested in what I could do.
“Oliver Peverell?”
“Here.”
The teacher would mark something in the register and move on to the next name.
For the rest of the day, she barely spoke to me.
At first, I found it convenient.
No one called on me, tried to talk to me, or wondered why I was looking out of the window instead of listening.
The orphanage was much the same.
I received meals, clothes, and reminders that it was bedtime.
That was generally the extent of the staff’s attention.
I had peace and quiet.
At least, that was what I told myself.
In the evenings, I tried magic.
I waited until the footsteps in the corridor died away, sat on the bed, and held out my hand.
“Lumos.”
Nothing.
Changing the pronunciation didn’t help.
Neither did moving my hand differently.
I tried focusing on light, on my fingers, on that strange sensation inside me.
Every attempt ended much the same way: a faint stirring, a brief resistance, and silence.
After a few weeks, the word “Lumos” began to irritate me.
Not because I’d stopped believing in magic.
I could feel it.
I’d produced the same response too often to dismiss the whole thing as imagination.
But something stood between me and the spell.
Increasingly, I suspected that my magic had been blocked.
I didn’t know by whom, how, or why.
Nor did I have a book, a wand, or anyone I could ask.
What I did have was plenty of time to wonder whether the old man would consider this another excellent joke.
The thought of being a Squib didn’t trouble me all that much.
If I couldn’t feel anything, it probably would have been different.
Instead, every attempt brought me back to the same conclusion: something was there.
I simply couldn’t reach it.
Perhaps I needed the right trigger.
Perhaps I needed to be older.
Perhaps I needed a wand.
For now, I had no way to test any of those possibilities.
So I decided to work on something that should, at least, follow familiar rules.
My own body.
The first evening, I did a few press-ups, some squats, and a few abdominal exercises.
Then I sat on the floor, wondering why it had been so difficult.
The answer was simple.
I was a small, skinny child who hadn’t exactly been well fed or physically active.
I wasn’t going to fix that in a week.
I began exercising regularly, and ran a short stretch on the way home from school.
About three hundred metres was enough to make me slow down and pretend that had been the plan all along.
Wizards tended to solve problems with a wand.
I understood them.
If I could summon something from the other side of a room with one flick, I probably wouldn’t get out of my chair as often either.
But a good pair of legs could be useful even to someone with a wand.
For running away, if nothing else.
To begin with, I simply wanted to stop dying after a short run.
I’d already died once.
That was enough.
Around that time, I asked one of the carers about the day I had been found.
She barely paused.
She answered while going about her duties, as though I’d asked what time lunch was.
The first of August.
Shortly after midnight.
Apparently, I’d looked newborn.
I’d been lying on the doorstep wrapped in old clothes, exceptionally quiet.
“And no one heard anything beforehand?”
She shook her head.
That was the end of the conversation.
I returned to my room, but for a while I did nothing.
The first of August, just after midnight.
If I really had been only a few hours old, I could have been born on the thirty-first of July.
Like Harry.
The end of the seventh month.
I remembered the prophecy, and my stomach tightened unpleasantly.
The date alone proved nothing.
I knew there were other conditions in the prophecy, and I didn’t even know who my parents were.
I wasn’t certain of my birthday either.
Even so, I would rather have been born in November.
Or February.
Really, any month that didn’t bring Voldemort to mind would have been fine.
I didn’t want to take Harry’s place.
I had problems of my own, starting with magic that didn’t work and ending with eyes that were apparently going to kill me one day.
That was quite enough for someone who had only recently learned to reach the top shelf by standing on a chair.
Without more information, all I could do was come up with more possibilities.
So I set the matter aside.
I didn’t forget it.
There was simply nothing I could do with it.
Over time, the peace and quiet I’d initially enjoyed began to bother me.
There was something unnatural about the way people treated me.
If I spoke directly to a teacher, they answered.
A carer had told me the exact date I was found on the doorstep.
No one walked through me or bumped into me as though I were truly invisible.
And yet the moment I stopped speaking, their attention drifted away.
The other children didn’t invite me to play.
During group work, the teacher would assign me to a table, and the others would talk among themselves as though I were still sitting at the far end of the classroom.
It didn’t seem deliberately unkind.
That was the strangest part.
If they disliked me, they would at least have to notice me first.
Initially, I told myself I didn’t need the company of eight-year-olds.
I had different interests and far more memories.
Finding something in common would have been difficult.
All of that was true.
It was just that, after a few months, it still hurt when no one thought to speak to me.
I could consider children’s conversations stupid, then sit nearby a moment later, listening in case someone happened to call my name.
I didn’t like it.
In my previous life, I’d been quiet and rather lonely too.
Back then, though, I had a computer, games, books, and countless ways to avoid thinking about it.
Here, I was waiting for magic.
And magic wasn’t coming.
I came home from school, exercised, ate dinner, and shut myself in my room.
In the evening, I tried to make light again.
Then I went to sleep so I could repeat the whole thing in the morning.
One night, I spent a long time looking out of the window.
A few stars showed between the clouds.
On the other side of the wall, someone rolled over in bed, and a floorboard creaked in the corridor.
“All right,” I muttered at last.
“Tomorrow’s another day.”
I didn’t have much of a plan.
But I still had time.
By the first of September 1989, I was nine.
Roughly a year had passed since my arrival.
Two years remained until Hogwarts.
I hadn’t experienced a great awakening in that time.
I hadn’t discovered a secret entrance to the wizarding world or met anyone who happened to recognise my surname.
On the other hand, I could do twice as many press-ups.
It sounded pathetic compared with my expectations, but the result was real.
Running no longer left me completely breathless, my legs hurt less, and exercises that used to leave me lying on the floor had simply become part of the evening.
I’d done something and seen a result.
After months of fruitlessly whispering spells, it was surprisingly satisfying.
Magic was still going less well.
I couldn’t use it deliberately, although things I couldn’t explain were happening more often.
Objects were in different places from where I’d left them.
A few times, doors had swung open before I touched the handle.
I could have been mistaken about the objects.
I could have missed a draught.
The dust was harder to explain.
One day, I fell and struck my knee painfully against the floor.
I hissed, clenched my hands, and dust rose from the boards.
For a moment, it formed a shape.
I didn’t have time to work out what it was.
Something between a figure and a random swirl, too distinct to dismiss immediately and too brief for me to be certain what I’d seen.
The dust settled.
I remained on the floor with an aching knee and the strange feeling that, for a moment, I hadn’t been alone.
A shiver ran through me, but I didn’t want to run away.
There was something familiar about it.
I didn’t know why.
Later, the dreams changed.
I used to dream about my previous life sometimes.
Games, stories I’d read, familiar places.
Now I saw images I couldn’t connect to anything.
Most often, I remembered a mirror.
I stood before it as a skinny nine-year-old with messy black hair.
My eyes still looked ordinary.
Someone stood behind me.
The figure was too tall and utterly still.
I couldn’t see its face.
Sometimes I tried to turn my head, but the dream ended before I could look behind me.
I woke sweating.
Even so, the dreams didn’t feel like my old nightmares.
I didn’t feel as though something was trying to get me.
More as though something was waiting for me.
I wasn’t sure that was better.
Other nights, I dreamed of objects: old books with blank pages, keys whose locks I couldn’t find, stones dripping with blood.
In the morning, it sounded absurd.
If I told someone over breakfast, they would probably say I ought to read less before bed.
The problem was that long after waking, I remained certain those things existed somewhere.
That one day, I would see them.
I remembered that in stories about magic, dreams weren’t always just dreams.
But I also remembered how many different ideas authors could add to the same world.
I had no reason to choose one and call it an explanation.
Perhaps it was the curse.
Perhaps my magic was trying to break through.
Or perhaps a nine-year-old brain was struggling with everything that had been put into it.
During the day, life looked ordinary.
School, the orphanage, exercise.
Occasionally, someone glanced my way.
A teacher would pause at my name, as though trying to remember which boy it belonged to.
I got used to it.
The loneliness hadn’t stopped bothering me, but I no longer devoted an entire evening to it.
I knew my routine, knew how to fill my free time, and knew what to expect from other people.
Not much.
I’d learned to live with that too.
I was more interested in why the door had opened by itself again.
On the thirtieth of July 1990, my tenth birthday was one day away.
The summer holidays were in full swing, and things far stranger than moving objects had begun happening at the orphanage.
People were talking to me.
One of the carers stopped me in the corridor and asked whether I was all right.
Not in passing.
Not because I looked ill.
She stood in front of me and waited for an answer.
“Yes,” I said after a moment.
She studied me for another moment, then nodded.
Another placed a hand on my shoulder and smiled as she passed me by the stairs.
I turned to look after her.
In almost two years, I couldn’t remember her making a gesture like that.
Then the children invited me to play football.
“Oliver, are you playing?”
I looked at the boy by the goal.
“Me?”
“Yeah. We’re one short.”
That was the entire explanation.
They needed another player, had seen me, and had asked.
I stood up.
I wasn’t going to make a big thing of it.
It was just kicking a ball around the yard.
And yet, when someone called for me to pass, I smiled before I could think about it.
My eyes had been itching since the previous day.
Rubbing my eyelids didn’t help, because the feeling was deeper.
Sometimes it faded for a few hours, then returned and made it hard to concentrate.
The dreams were still strange, but now I woke with the feeling that something was going to happen soon.
The small, inexplicable incidents had become more frequent too.
Doors opened before I touched the handle.
Objects moved when I was nearby.
One day, I got caught in the rain.
It took me a moment to notice that my clothes were staying dry.
I was standing in the open.
Water struck the ground all around me, darkened the wall, and collected in the hollows of the yard.
Not a single drop landed on me.
I looked at my sleeve, then at the wet boards of the fence.
After all those failed attempts at making light, my magic had apparently decided to start with an umbrella.
I wasn’t complaining.
That afternoon, I saw a cat sitting on the fence.
It had amber eyes and watched me so intently that at first I thought it had spotted something behind me.
I looked round.
Nothing.
I went closer.
The cat didn’t run away.
It didn’t even change position.
“Noticed something too?”
Naturally, it didn’t answer.
We looked at each other for a while, then I went back inside.
Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have given a cat on a fence much thought.
Lately, though, it was getting harder to tell which circumstances were normal.
Late that night, I stopped in front of the clock in the corridor.
It read eleven fifty-nine.
The second hand moved with a quiet tick.
I waited.
It went round the face.
Then round again.
The other two hands didn’t move.
For several minutes, I stood against the wall, watching the clock count seconds without ever managing to finish the same minute.
Perhaps it was broken.
I wished that explanation still felt sufficient.
I rubbed my temple.
My eyes itched again, and somewhere deep inside, the familiar tension returned.
The same one I felt when trying magic, only stronger.
Eventually, I went back to my room.
I didn’t know what was going to happen after midnight or whether my birthday really had anything to do with it.
But after almost two years of waiting, for the first time I wasn’t wondering whether something would change.
I was wondering whether I’d be able to control it.
i need comments guys