13 June, 2019
At 4 o’clock on Thursday afternoon, ten-year-old Clara Goldstein was lying on her stomach on the floor of her living room, reading
The Return of the King for the second time, when she heard the doorbell ring. Glancing up, she watched her father fold his newspaper, rise from his seat in the dining room, and walk to the front door. From where she lay, she couldn’t see what was happening, but she could hear her father’s voice, and the deep baritone of a stranger. She listened curiously to the short conversation that ensued, wondering who it could be.
“Hello?” began Mr. Goldstein, opening the door.
“Good afternoon,” said the stranger. “Is this the Goldstein residence?”
“It is, yes. How can I help you?”
“My name is Thaddeus Pritchard, I’m a representative from Hogwarts School. Is your daughter home, by any chance?”
Clara perked up at this. A school? That couldn’t be right, she hadn’t applied to any schools...but the man had confirmed the address. Maybe there was another Goldstein they were looking for? It wasn’t an uncommon surname.
“Clara?” Mr. Goldstein called, summoning her to the door. She scrambled to her feet and poked her head around the corner, assessing the tall, official-looking man at the door before coming to stand beside her father.
The man turned to address her, holding out his hand. “Hello, Clara. I’m--”
“Thaddeus Pritchard. I heard. What’s Hogwarts? I didn’t apply, I think you have the wrong address.”
“Clara!” her father admonished her. She looked up at him with slight confusion before she realized he was probably telling her off for being rude. Whoops.
“Sorry,” she said after a pause. Thaddeus just chuckled.
“May I come in?” the man requested, looking back at Mr. Goldstein. The patriarch of the family considered the strange man for a moment, glanced at his daughter, then opened the door further and stepped aside. Thaddeus crossed the threshold and strode purposefully into the living room, taking a seat on the sofa. Mr. Goldstein sat in the armchair across from him, a befuddled look upon his face, and Clara perched on the arm of her father’s chair, a wary look upon hers. The man smiled and reached into his suit jacket, pulling out a letter in a crisp envelope with a wax seal. He held it out to Clara, and the young girl got up and crossed the room to take it.
She inspected the envelope first. It was addressed in emerald ink to Miss Clara Goldstein, and the address was correct. It was looking more and more likely that they had the right person. She flipped over the envelope to reveal a crest with a lion, a snake, an eagle, and a badger on different coloured backgrounds surrounding the letter H--for Hogwarts, she assumed--and a banner underneath. Looking closer, she was able to read the words “
draco dormiens nunquam titillandus.” Never tickle a sleeping dragon? What kind of motto was that? She glanced up at Thaddeus, the scepticism plain on her face. He motioned for her to open it.
Sliding a finger underneath the seal, she broke it open and removed two folded sheets of heavy paper. No, parchment. Who used parchment anymore? The longer she waited for answers, the more questions she accumulated. Clara opened the first letter, her eyebrows climbing up her forehead as she quickly scanned its contents.
At the top of the page, in large letters, were the words “Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.”
The look she sent her father screamed very clearly, “Why did you let this lunatic into our house?”
Mr. Goldstein had no idea what the letter said, but he nonetheless began to regret his decision to open the front door.
Clara continued reading. She’d apparently been accepted to a school for wizards. The next page held a list of outlandish school supplies, including a pewter cauldron and a pointed cap. If this was a prank, someone had put a ridiculous amount of effort into something that was doomed to fail. No matter how professional the letter looked, or how imaginative it was, Clara wasn’t stupid--one would have to be exceedingly gullible to fall for something this silly.
The motive was hard to discern. For the life of her, she couldn’t think of anyone who would pull this sort of prank on her, or why they would do so. But the fact remained that it was obviously fake. She’d figure out the details later.
She looked up to find ‘Thaddeus’ staring at her. She opened her mouth to say something, but she didn’t quite know where to start.
“Let me get this straight,” she finally began. “‘Hogwarts’ is a school for witches and wizards, and you’re here to convince me that I’m one of them?”
Whatever Mr. Goldstein had expected to hear, that was not it. He looked at his daughter incredulously and rose from his seat, taking the letter from her hand and skimming it for himself. The surprise quickly turned to derisiveness as he peered up at the stranger, adjusting his glasses.
‘Thaddeus’ simply nodded, his face serious. “Yes.”
Clara laughed scornfully. “I may be ten, but I’m not an idiot.”
“Of course you’re not an idiot. You skipped a grade in muggle school, that’s why we approached you a year early.”
“In
what school?”
“Muggle. Non-magical.”
“Look,” Clara rolled her eyes, “while I appreciate the world-building you put into this, I’m finding it hard to suspend my disbelief when your magical school requires its students to buy pointed hats.”
“They’re only for special occasions.”
“If that’s all you’re here for,” Mr. Goldstein interrupted, folding the letter back up and tossing it dismissively on the coffee table. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“If that’s all? Of course that’s not all! I still have to take her shopping, and--”
“You’re not taking my daughter anywhere.” The middle-aged maths professor was by no means intimidating, but his gaze was steady and his voice firm. Clara looked between the two uncomfortably, unsure of how to proceed.
‘Thaddeus’ straightened indignantly. “Mr. Goldstein, I must insist--”
“What are you going to do, turn me into a toad? Get out.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“What gave it away?”
“I can prove that magic is real, if that would help.”
The two Goldsteins gazed at the stranger with identically sceptical expressions. It was Clara who spoke.
“Fine. Prove it.”
“What would you like me to do?”
She narrowed her eyes at him, searching for some kind of trick. She would have expected him to have his own rehearsed routine, but he was asking her for suggestions? Very well, she’d give him a suggestion.
“Make the sofa disappear.”
The man stood up and pulled a stick from his sleeve. Clara raised her eyebrows. He smiled, turned around to face the sofa, pointed his stick/wand/thing, and said, “
Evanesco.”
The sofa vanished. Clara blinked. In the back of her mind, she recognized the word as Latin. In the front of her mind, she searched for any way that could have possibly happened without magic.
“Where did it go?” she asked, stepping forward and waving her hand through where the sofa should be. It passed through empty air.
“Nowhere,” said ‘Thaddeus’.
“Well, that’s not possible. The Law of Conservation of Mass states that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. It had to have gone somewhere. Can you bring it back?”
“Ah, sort of. Not the exact sofa, but I can conjure a replica.”
She turned to look at him incredulously. If she’d actually believed him capable of vanishing their furniture, she probably would have asked for something different. As it was, the sofa was apparently lost forever. ‘Thaddeus’ shrugged apologetically before waving his wand again with another incantation. The sofa--or a replica, apparently--returned to its original position. She shook her head in disbelief.
“That’s not...that doesn’t make any sense,” she said, looking to her father for support. Mr. Goldstein looked thoroughly perplexed.
‘Thaddeus’ gazed at the two expectantly. Clara, faced with this new evidence, tentatively began to entertain the notion that perhaps this man really was named Thaddeus Pritchard, and he really was telling the truth.
But good scientists never came to their conclusions based off a single test.
“What else can you do?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Lots of things. I can apparate, I can--”
“What's that?”
“Apparation? Like this,” he said, and promptly disappeared with a
crack. Clara flinched, then looked around, wondering where he'd gone.
There was a knock at the door. She practically ran around the corner to pull it open, and found him standing on the front step as if he'd never come in at all.
She wondered if she really needed another test. By this point, she was fairly convinced that, if not magic, at least
something impossible was happening, and it probably wasn't a prank.
But then came the matter of her acceptance letter. Because, if they assumed for the moment that magic was real, and she had received an invitation to attend a school for it, then that meant…
“Can I do that too?”
She didn't think she'd truly believe that it wasn't some trick unless she did it herself. The existence of magic did, after all, go against everything she'd ever learned or believed. And while scientists were required to accept when their beliefs were debunked, she wasn't sure if that applied when the belief was science itself.
“Eventually, yes,” Thaddeus replied. “Though you'll have to learn how. That's what Hogwarts is for.”
“But how do you know I have the potential?”
“Have you ever noticed strange things happening around you? Maybe when you get upset?”
Clara thought about it, absentmindedly stepping aside to let Thaddeus into the house again, despite her father’s wary expression.
She had, in fact, noticed that weird things happened when she got upset. But correlation was not causation. Had anything happened that couldn't be better explained by something non-magical?
Well there was the time two years ago when all of Marissa Harisson’s hair fell out. Clara had been reading a book during playtime, minding her own business, when Marissa came up behind her and started tugging on her hair. To anyone else, this may have been annoying, but not particularly upsetting. Clara, however, had made it very clear that she despised being touched. It made her skin crawl uncomfortably. When she turned around to tell the other girl to stop, Marissa took her book from her hands to see what she was reading. Clara, frustrated at the girl's lack of a concept of personal space, had yanked Marissa’s hair in return...and then it all fell out. The girl shrieked, called her a freak, and then hid inside the toilets for the rest of the day.
Yes, there wasn't really another explanation for that.
She looked at Thaddeus, then her father, then back to Thaddeus. “So...assuming I can do...magic, what does that entail?”
She had so many questions. Firstly, was there an entire society of magical people that nobody knew existed? And if so, how did people not discover that magic existed, even by accident? And how did magic work anyway? Was it not incompatible with the natural laws of the universe? Were all the great scientists wrong--Newton, and Lavoisier, and Dalton…? No, that couldn't be right. Maybe magic followed similar rules. Maybe the wizards just didn't realize it.
In any case, she needed to learn more.
“Well,” Thaddeus began. “We’d need to go to Diagon Alley to get all of your supplies--with your father's permission, of course,” he said hurriedly, glancing at Mr. Goldstein, “and then, starting the first of September, you would attend Hogwarts. I'd take you to the train station, show you to the platform, and you'd stay at Hogwarts until June and learn about magic.”
“It's a boarding school?” Mr. Goldstein cut in.
“Well, yes.”
Mr. Goldstein hesitated. “We're going to need some time to think about this. I'll have to discuss it with my wife.”
“Of course. I'll come back in two weeks?”
“Er...yes, two weeks should be fine.”
“Excellent. Well, until then…” he bowed his head at them both. “Farewell. I do hope you decide to join us, Clara, I think you'd be a wonderful addition to the student body.”
And with that, he stepped out the door once more and disappeared with another
crack.
“O...kay,” Clara said slowly, closing the door behind him. She shared a look with her father, then walked back into the living room and collected her book from the floor, her head spinning.
Ten minutes later, the door opened to admit Mrs. Goldstein, returning from work. Mr. Goldstein sighed, rubbed his forehead, and went to greet his wife.
“There's something we need to tell you…”
by 
