Harry Potter and the Sword of Gryffindor

Chapter 19

On the following Saturday, a chilly, blustery, nippy November day, Harry felt almost glad that he wasn't joining the group of chattering Gryffindors on their way into Hogsmeade. Ron and Hermione carried a few of Harry's Sickles and Knuts with orders for purchases at Honeydukes and extra bottles of butterbeer. After they left he settled himself into a chair in front of the fire in the Gryffindor common room with a contented sigh and opened on his lap a gigantic book bound in smooth vinyl.

Harry thought wryly of the day Professor Lupin had given him the huge book.

"How is the reading going, Harry?" Lupin had asked one day, pulling him aside after class.

"Fine," Harry had initially responded. "Hermione reads all the assignments."

"Bit tough on her, isn't it?" Lupin had persisted.

Taken aback, Harry had paused, uncertainly. "I do pay her, as Professor McGonagall suggested I ought..."

"And the writing? Note-taking?" Lupin had asked.

Harry frowned. To tell the truth, he had not been taking notes at all. He relied on Hermione's notes and his own memory to recall information, a system that had proved to be as full of holes as a spider's web and his poor marks reflected it.

That's when Professor Lupin had pulled out the Braille book with a sort of triumph as if he had simply been waiting for Harry to struggle to the point he'd realize he needed it. He'd placed the hardcover volume in Harry's hands, surprisingly light for feeling as large as a dictionary. Harry had set it on the desk and opened the front cover, feeling the tangle of tiny dots sprinkled randomly across the page and wondered how in the world he would ever decipher them.

As he opened it now, before the fire in the common room, the book covered his lap and spilled over on each side onto the chair. He looked down at it, feeling the familiar frustration of seeing only a sea of blurry white, with no writing, no pictures. Every book, newspaper or piece of parchment this year had been similarly opaque to him and he missed the ease of taking in the printed word. Though he'd never been much of a student, he still enjoyed a book from time to time.

His assignment today: the alphabet. He felt for a moment like he was back at the little brick school two blocks past Privet Drive, ducking away from Dudley and his friends on the walks there and back, sitting in the desk with his name-tag and a grotesque cartoon of a frog pasted to it. The smell of paste and the sight of a freshly sharpened pencil came back to him as he remembered his small self, struggling to print his alphabet.

Harry shook his head. If he didn't quit this absentminded reminiscing, he'd never learn anything. He touched the white page in his lap. For a moment the bumps felt just as random and he frowned, sweeping his fingers over the page, lightly, as Professor Lupin had taught him. Finally he found the blank spaces between the lines and he followed them with his finger, orienting himself to the page.

With effort, he found the blank lines in the middle of the page, then the chart of the letters of the alphabet he was supposed to be memorizing. He shifted in his chair, biting his tongue in concentration. "A." There. He'd found the single dot at the far left side of the line that Lupin told him represented the letter A. He was on his way. He felt over and over the groups of dots, trying to memorize their configuration, as if he was learning a page of minuscule constellations.

Curiously he read each letter, counting along the alphabet in his head, hoping he matched the right shape with its counterpart, printed in his mind. Minutes or hours passed and his fingertips began to feel numb. Every shape felt the same and the dots seemed to crawl across the page. Harry flipped the book closed, promising himself he would return to it again.