Star of Gryffindor - Book 1

Chapter 1 - The Strange Dinner Guest

For a moment after I woke up, I wasn't sure where I was. Dimly, I recognized that I was still half asleep, but my brain was functioning much too slow to know what that meant. I lay in the dark, completely terrified, for a few moments. Slowly, my senses started coming back. Why was I scared? Probably a dream. I couldn't remember it, but it wasn't an extremely rare occurrence. Weird dreams were normal. At least, for me.

As I sat in the dark, trying to get my heartbeat back to normal, I suddenly remembered that it was my birthday. Today was the day I turned eleven. It practically marked eleven years here. I smiled slightly to myself. No one would remember it, of course. They never did. But it was still nice being eleven, instead of plain, boring ten.

Any minute now, the normal, incessant knocking would start up. I was too comfortable to stand up and turn on the lights, so I sat in the darkness waiting for my foster sister, Mara, to start pounding on the door.

For as long as I could remember, I'd lived here. Well, not here, in this room, exactly. This had happened seven years ago, when the twins were born. But I'd lived here, in this house, with the Lewises, for most of my life. My birth parents gave me up, or weren't able to take care of me properly, or something. No one seemed to know, and my whole life I'd been warned against asking too many questions. The point is, eleven long years ago, I got thrown into that wonderful beast they call the British foster care system.

The Lewises were my long-term foster parents. When I first came to them, as a newborn, the only child they had was Mara, a bratty two-year-old who wasn't incredibly happy to get a sister. My foster parents were delighted, at the time, though. My foster mum had been told that, after she got sick giving birth to Mara, she wouldn't be able to have more children. Sure, my foster dad had wanted a boy, but he had been content with two beautiful princesses.

I wish it had stayed that way.

Mara started pounding on my door, startling me out of my thoughts. I was tempted to push the door open and hit her in the face with it, but, of course, that would just land me in trouble. I waited until the banging stopped, then gently pushed the door open and slipped out. As soon as I did, Mara grabbed my wrist and dragged me into her room. She plopped down on a stool and airily pointed to a brush on her dresser, then got too absorbed in a texting conversation to pay any more attention to me. She got that phone on her seventh birthday, and the twins each got one when they turned five. I wasn't allowed to have one, in case I turned into "more of a bad influence." As if I was one already.

I pulled Mara's hair as tight as I could, making her grimace, but she didn't complain. If there was one thing I was good at, it was taming my sister's unruly black curls, and she knew it.

After she was satisfied with her braid, Mara waved me out of her room and I slipped down to the kitchen. Mum rolled her eyes when she saw me. "What are you doing down here? Go help Blaise get dressed." I turned on my heel and ran back upstairs, ignoring the impulse to roll my eyes. If she thought I was going too slow, I'd get smacked for sure.

Blaise and Cameron were born when I was four. I was incredibly excited about it, because maybe for once I wouldn't be the one getting in trouble! I'd always been blamed in every fight Mara and I had. I had naively thought it was just because I was the youngest.

However, even while my foster parents were celebrating, they were realizing that I was not the sort of child to be around babies. If it wasn't for the check they got from the government for taking care of me, they may have given me away right then.