Harry is five when she sees Aunt Petunia step out of the bath for the first time. There is a smooth place between her aunt's legs, though covered in hair, and Harry wonders when hers will look like that.

"Aunt Petunia?" she manages to speak up, after dinner when she is washing the plates and looking rather longingly at the leftovers.

"What?" her aunt snaps, looking up rather sourly from her cup of tea.

"When is this going to fall off?" Harry points awkwardly at her crotch, encased in baggy trousers threatening to fall off her hips. Aunt Petunia looks at her in confusion.

"What? Your penis? It doesn't," the woman says and gulps cooling tea.

"But it must," Harry persists, setting down the last plate in confusion. "I'm supposed to look like you. I'm like you, Aunt Petunia!"

The effect on Petunia Dursley is galvanic. The tea cup slams to the table with a rattle, and Harry finds herself dragged off to the cupboard under the stairs by her ear, her aunt's grip like claws.

"You will never be like me," Petunia hisses through the grate at the thoroughly bewildered and now crying five-year-old girl. "You're a freak, that's all you are! A freak!"

After that, Harry knows to keep her mouth shut. To stifle the tears that threaten when Aunt Petunia virtually shaves her head (although it all grows back overnight, and she hasn't the faintest how-no matter how her uncle blusters and threatens). To accept the ripped and dirty hand-me-downs from her fat, bullying cousin, no matter how much she longs to be allowed to wear skirts and blouses and those knee socks with ruffles at the top that Sally Mueller wears every Friday and gloats about how expensive they are. Really, Harry is more of a tomboy, but it's the principle of the thing, you know?

Uncle Vernon despises her, Dudley treats her like his own personal punching bag, and Aunt Petunia looks at her with the strangest mixture of pity, condescension, and disgust Harry's ever seen. Even from Mrs. Tetley, the counselor at her primary school that always gives her funny looks at break and passes her apples at lunch when no one's looking. You need your strength, she always tells Harry, and Harry always pretends not to notice the strange wobble in the woman's voice.

The other students are as bad as Dudley, really. Even if her cousin hadn't been around, Tommy Jakes sees Harry fiddling around with a hair bow she found on the street, and everyone teases her about it. She knows better than to speak up and say she's really a girl. It won't end well. She has the black eyes, split lips, and bruised knees to prove it. You shouldn't hit a girl! But somehow that doesn't matter when it comes to Harry. She guesses it's because Aunt Petunia's right. She is a freak.

The thing between her legs (she refuses to call it a penis, in dismal hope that it will eventually realise it's unwanted) never falls off. She shoots up a few inches, her hair grows even more untidy-much to Aunt Petunia's despair and Uncle Vernon's censure. It seems like it will never change, never get better.

Until the day, a few days into summer break, when Harry pokes through the mail as usual and uncovers a vellum envelope addressed to her.

And more importantly, addressed to Miss H. Potter.

And for a few moments, just a few, the world gleams that much brighter.