Author note: This story, like all my Penelope Clearwater stories, follows the chronology of the original 1998 edition of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which unambiguously placed Penelope one year behind Percy at Hogwarts. I am aware that the 2004 British edition subsequently moved Penelope to Percy's year, but I am sticking to the original chronology. Works of fiction take on lives of their own once they're released into the public sphere, and (as literary critics have noted with respect to other authors) writers who amend their texts after first publication must always contend with readers who have already become invested in the original versions.

Details

Samantha flops down on Penelope's bed, still in her school uniform, and says, chin in her hands, "You know, I've never kissed a boy."

Samantha is twelve, so this is not an earthshaking revelation. But it's not as innocent as it sounds, either. Samantha may be twelve, but Samantha is brilliant: brilliant at math, brilliant at science, brilliant at languages, and brilliant at twisting her three older siblings around her little finger. Penelope, who is one of those three older siblings, knows quite well what Samantha wants.

She wants details.

Kneeling on the floor, Penelope plunges into her school trunk, which is brown and battered and ugly. Its only redeeming feature is that it's magic and it has three times the capacity it appears to have. Momentarily diverted, Samantha says, "Why didn't Mummy get you a nicer trunk? Alan got a really nice one."

Penelope sighs. She says, "You'll get a nice one, too." Samantha is going to Roedean in September. She says, "I had to have a trunk like this. It's in the rules. This is what all the kids have at Hogwarts." She retrieves the photograph. She looks at it, a photograph of a thin, freckly, bespectacled boy wearing a prefect's badge. It smiles at her, shyly, and her heart flips over. Silently, she hands it to Samantha.

Samantha gasps. "It's moving!"

Penelope says, patiently—because she's told her this before—"Samantha, all wizarding photographs move."

A week ago, she gave Percy a Muggle photograph of herself, the only one she had. He gasped. "It doesn't move!" And she said, patiently—because she had told him this before—"Percy, Muggle photographs never move."

"He's cute," announces Samantha, studying the photograph. "Does he always wear glasses?"

"Yes," says Penelope.

"Well, he's cute anyway. How did you meet him?"

Penelope considers how to answer this question. She doesn't say, "Well, I had a crush on him for a year," because that's more than Samantha needs to know. She says cautiously, "Well, we just sort of saw each other around. And then he invited me to go to Hogsmeade with him."

"Hogsmeade is the village," prompts Samantha.

"Yes."

"The only all-magical village in Britain."

"Yes."

"I want to go to Hogsmeade."

Penelope sighs. She says, "I wish I could take you." She says, "I wish you could. But, Samantha, it's a magic village. It's only for people who are magic."

"Why?" says Samantha.

"Security, I suppose," mutters Penelope.

"That's stupid," says Samantha. "I already know everything about Hogwarts anyway." She starts to recite The Standard Book of Spells, Grade One, which she knows more or less by heart.

"I'm sorry, Samantha," says Penelope. "I'm really, really sorry. I'll see what I can do. When you're a little older." She says it out of pity, and she says it out of love. She already knows the answer is no. No matter how badly she wants to take her sister to Hogsmeade, she won't be taking her there. Not now, not when she's older, not ever. Because Samantha is Muggle and Penelope is magic.

Samantha, however, is satisfied. She looks at the photograph again and she says, "What's the lion badge for?"

"The lion is a symbol of Gryffindor, just like Ravenclaw's symbol is an eagle. And the badge shows that he's a prefect."

"Oh, he's a prefect!" says Samantha brightly. Helena was a prefect at Roedean, and Alan is a prefect at Winchester. Samantha is predisposed to like prefects. "Are you going to be a prefect too?" she asks hopefully.

"I don't know yet," says Penelope quietly. "I'll find out this summer." She takes a deep breath. "Samantha, please don't say anything about that to Mummy and Dad. Especially Mummy. I've worked very hard and I've done everything I can do to be a credit to the family, but wizarding schools are different from other schools and wizarding standards are different from other standards and I don't know if I'm going to make the cut or not."

"Bet you do," says Samantha.

"Well, I don't know yet," says Penelope.

"It must be hard not to be a legacy," says Samantha thoughtfully. "It must be hard not to be an alumna daughter."

"The staff don't really care about that," says Penelope, "though some of the students do."

"Is Percy's family well-connected?"

"Yes," says Penelope quietly. "Though he doesn't know it. They're not well off," she adds, in answer to Samantha's quizzical look.

"Well, it's not like we come from a really fancy background either," says Samantha. "Not like Helena's friend who had the debutante ball." Helena's friend's debutante ball had been a event of some importance in the Clearwater household the previous year, necessitating the removal of Grandmother's pearls from their customary repose in a safe at the bank, the acquisition of a very expensive silk evening gown that, it was clearly understood by all parties, Helena would be saving to wear on sundry occasions during Eights Week, and the constant soothing down of a flurried and suddenly snobbish Helena who irrationally insisted on seeing herself as the Cinderella of Jenny Roth-Scott's debutante ball.

"I mean, it's not like we're rich," says Samantha. "It's not like we're ladies and lords."

Penelope says nothing. She looks around her shabby, perpetually chilly bedroom, and for the first time she sees it with Percy's eyes. A cashmere jumper slung over the back of a chair, a top-end graphing calculator (bought for her eleventh birthday, before they knew) lying on her desk. The bureau dotted with stationary Muggle photographs of herself and her siblings on holiday in Switzerland. Shelves and shelves of dog-eared children's books that she hasn't yet renounced, even though she's fifteen and she goes to boarding school and she has a boyfriend. The pages are worn and the pictures don't move, but some of them are first editions. The Tennyson's a first edition too, as is the Keats, as is Pride and Prejudice. There's a small fortune sitting on those bookshelves.

Mummy always insists that the Clearwaters are "new money," which means Victorian money instead of Elizabethan money and no hereditary titles. Dad always insists that the Clearwaters are "no money," which means that his elder brother got the funny little country house in Scotland and he can't yet afford to buy the summer cottage in Brittany that is, in his eyes, the sure sign of having made it. But this evening, for the first time, Penelope looks at her parents' home with Percy's eyes, and she sees a family that made it long ago.

Samantha doesn't notice her abstraction.

Penelope, distractedly unpacking her Hogwarts trunk, starts to wonder why she grew up assuming that all fifteen-year-old girls had graphing calculators and cashmere jumpers and Grandmother's pearls in the bank to be taken out if they ever got invited to a debutante ball. She's a smart girl and she's asked a lot of questions in her life but somehow she never thought to ask that one.

"When is his birthday?" asks Samantha doggedly, with twelve-year-old enthusiasm. In a minute she'll be asking what his favorite color is.

"August," says Penelope patiently. "Same week as yours."

"Did you kiss him?"

Ah. She knew it was going to come to that. She doesn't quite trust herself to speak, but she nods.

"And?" asks Samantha hopefully.

"And what?" says Penelope.

"Penny!" cries Samantha, exasperated. Samantha is the only person in the world who calls her that, and only when she is teasing or annoyed. Penelope looks at the photograph of Percy. It appears to be listening attentively. Can wizarding photographs hear? Will Percy start to think her loved ones always call her Penny? And in that case, did the photograph of Percy hear what she said—or what she didn't say—about whether she liked kissing him? And if the photograph can see—as she assumes wizarding photographs can—then will it see her getting undressed at night? Will it see how tangled and matted her curls look in the morning? And will it just be the photograph that sees, or Percy too? She's been at Hogwarts for four years now, she's spent four years in the magical world, and there's still a lot she doesn't know about magical photographs. She could use some details herself.

When she was twelve, as Samantha now is, she too imagined that having a boyfriend would be all about kissing. But it isn't. It's turning out to be about being Muggle-born when he's a pureblood, about being rich when he is poor. It's turning out to be about feeling alienated from her parents because they're Muggle and she's magic, about not even knowing if she's going to make prefect because she doesn't know what it takes to succeed in the wizarding world, about just being glad that there's someone, someone who wants her to be there and not here. She doesn't even know yet, if she likes kissing him, because she only kissed him twice, and it all happened rather fast, and she needs more empirical evidence before she can generalize.

She does like the photograph, though. It keeps smiling at her, shyly and sheepishly. She's going to pin it up on the corkboard above her desk, as soon as Samantha hands it back, but she's going to turn it to the wall each night, before she gets undressed.

Just until she gets the details.