Next up, Ginny.

It's not easy growing up in a house full of boys. She loses count of how many clothes are handed down from Ron and the twins, artfully patched and given badly done colour charms, to make them appear more feminine. She learns quickly that it's impossible to be quiet if you want to get anything done. It's impossible to be ladylike when you're liable to wake up with frog spawn in your boots and your pillow dipped in rain water again.

She learns how to be sneaky. When her brothers refuse to teach her how to fly, she teaches herself, sneaking their brooms out of the shed while everyone is asleep. It takes a lot of falls, but she doesn't care, and hides her bruises with inexpertly applied glamours and stingy applications of bruise balm. Her mother gives her knowing looks at breakfast, but she doesn't tell Ginny to stop, and it isn't for weeks that Ginny notices the protection spells newly placed in the back garden.

Hogwarts terrifies and excites her. She gets on the train with a trunk full of hand-me-down books and tattered robes, holding her new-found diary against her chest (where it beats like a second malignant heart). Luna Lovegood sits next to her and tells her about Nargles and Wrackspurts until her head goes a bit fuzzy, but she likes it all the same. Luna shares her chocolate frogs and Ginny shares her mum's slightly squashed sandwiches, and even if her new friend is a bit odd, with cork earrings and a necklace made out of Muggle bottle-tops, Ginny's relieved to have her.

Everyone in her family has been in Gryffindor, but she confides in Luna that she wouldn't mind being somewhere else. I want to be my own person, she admits, biting her lip. Luna nods, and it doesn't feel like a dismissal.

Ron's not there when she's Sorted, but perhaps that's for the best. Because the Sorting Hat, slumped to one side on her bright red hair, reads her thoughts and feelings and ambitions, and decides to put her in Slytherin. Fred and George leap up and protest, and Percy looks like he's been Stunned. There's such an uproar the Headmaster has to cast a Silencing Spell, and Ginny makes her way to her new table on stiff legs. She wonders if green and silver make her a traitor.

Malfoy sneers at her, but she expects that. She doesn't know how to deal with the look of betrayal on her brothers' faces, or the surprise on Luna's. When Ron finds out, he ends up with a week's worth of detention tacked on for the number of epithets he hurls at Professor Snape. Ginny wants to be brave, but she doesn't know how anymore. The snake's den isn't for lions, but maybe she wasn't intended to be a lion.

It's nothing like she expected. Tom exults when she tells him that she's been Sorted into Slytherin and it's the first time she finds out that he was placed in that House as well. Her mother sends her letters every morning, and at first they all say the same thing. I love you. I accept you. Your Sorting is not wrong. They make her cheeks glow pink, and her eyes brim with tears she is careful not to let fall. It's nothing like she expected, but everything that she could have asked for.

Tom grows impatient. Her memory starts to blur. She wakes up one morning with chicken feathers stuffed in her pockets and what looks like blood crusted under her fingernails. It takes forever to scrub away, and she tries to hide it from her dorm-mates, but one of them fetches her Head of House. Severus Snape is terrifying but when he sees the diary lying askew on her pillow, his face turns paler than chalk.

Are you all right, she tries to ask, but it doesn't matter, because in the next instant, the diary is lost within Snape's robes and she is whisked unceremoniously to the Hospital Wing, where she spends the next month. It isn't until three days later she finds out who Tom Riddle really is, and she heaves for twenty minutes into a basin Madam Pomfrey holds for her. Throwing up bile is painful, but afterwards, she feels cleaner than she has in months. The mysterious Chamber Tom spoke of is never opened. She doesn't ask, but Severus tells her the diary was destroyed anyway.

Luna visits her often in the Hospital Wing, telling her of Crumple-Horned Snorkacks, and Ginny stops asking why Luna's shoes are missing, or why her bookbag has three locking charms layered on it. Instead, she resolves to get even, and the weekend after Ginny is released, several of the Ravenclaw first years turn up in a corridor, faces stinging from several minor (yet still quite painful) hexes. They don't all leave Luna alone, not yet, but they start to learn.

Her brothers visit her, too, and Ron apologizes every time until she thumps him over the head with a Transfiguration textbook and tells him to stop being so silly. Houses don't matter, she tells him fiercely. Family does. We are family.

She still has a crush on Harry Potter, but at least she stops going quite so red-faced and spluttering when she sees him. Instead, she asks Ron and his friend Hermione for tips, and spends most of her free time in the library looking up defensive spells (until the incompetent Lockhart is finally fired). One morning at breakfast, Harry smiles at her and tells her that she looks good in green and silver, and although she can't help but feel like he was put up to it by Hermione, she still grins until her cheeks hurt.

Hogwarts is home, and when she steps off the Hogwarts Express at Platform 9 3/4, the Burrow is still home, too, and her mother gives her a hug so tight, she nearly loses her breath. I'm so proud of you, Molly Weasley tells her youngest, and Ginny believes it.