Amanda Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

4. The Confessions of Arabella Figg

   "You're a witch, Amanda."

Amanda Goodwin's hand was still clapped on top of her scar. It seemed, from the very moment she had turned eleven, something fiery had erupted inside of her neck. A sharp pain was pounding inside of her skull, seething inside of her brain, and eating away at her slowly. The feeling got stronger every moment, and the more she thought about it, the more she felt like collapsing on the spot. Her vision blurring, she beckoned her tawny, pug-faced, now curious, cat, Pandora onto her lap. She felt numb. She felt like everything she had ever known, had been turned on its head.

   'Mr. H. Potter' she thought. The emerald-green words seemed to have burned off the parchment envelope and etched themselves permanently into her mind. She could see Harry Potter again, a nine, almost ten-year-old boy, standing in the living room, wondering who she was. Amanda Goodwin, she had said. Was it true though? Was she truly Amanda Goodwin? Had she lied to the strange boy Harry, whom she could only vaguely remember? Did her grandmother lie to her? Her nine-year-old eyes rested on the boy's green eyes, black hair --- lighting bolt scar.

    Pandora's orange, scraggly fur was slipping out of her fingers. The whole attic --- everything from the creaky floorboards to the purple-curtained windows to the grimy rafters were slipping away into darkness . . . darkness . . . darkness . . . the scar

   Green smoke was billowing over her closed eyelids. An unbearable white-hot pain was searing all over her body, and she felt her scar prickling more painfully than it ever had in her life, as if her neck was being split open. Amanda opened her mouth to scream, but the sound had been drowned away by cold, merciless laughter. From the second she turned eleven, something had woken up in side of her, and it was angry. The smoke became thicker, the laughter got louder, a woman began screaming, and if it was possible, the pain got worse. Frightening images were shooting across her mind --- the sound of the woman's continuous screaming, a man gasping for breath and buckling to his knees, and then finally a roaring motorbike and a smiling, sleeping baby, everything being drenched away once more by the cold, piercing laughter and a vision of the scar beneath the black bangs on Harry Potter's forehead. She felt herself twisting in agony on the floor of the attic.

   Amanda Goodwin sat bolt upright, her sharp, green eyes fluttering open with a start, causing her nervous cat to squirt underneath the bed. She glared at Pandora's orange tail, which was visible under the musty sheet. With a ragged, wheezing breath, she wiped the cold sweat off her forehead, and hoisted herself onto her bed, her scrawny legs still rattling violently, just like her heart.

   "It wasn't a car crash," she said plainly, ruffling her cat's fur, "I don't know how my parents died. Gran --- I think she lied to me. I think I'm related to that neighbor boy, Harry." She looked down from the rafters and turned to her cat, who was curled beside her, watching Amanda vibrate as if a bucket of ice cold water had been turned on her head.

   She sighed, her lungs emptying of air, "That Figg. She's a mad old woman, that's what she is. What's that Dennis boy's mother going to say when her son comes home with a bloody nose and tells her that my grandmother went on about witches? And then there's the flying letter and the fact that my grandmother disappeared all morning! Who else is going to take me in? What's going to happen to my gran?"

                                          *                        *                      *

   Mrs. Figg wiped tears clean off her wrinkly face, as she ran a hand through her graying, flyaway hair, which had now escaped the once, most-Dursleyish bun, and let out another dry sob. Her head was pounding with the most horrible headache, and she was leaning entirely on the bathroom sink for support. Every time a thought issued from her faraway brain, it was the same thing --- I have failed Dumbledore, which thusly lead, once again, to more crying. She lowered her head into her hands and sobbed.