Finally, I believed him. How could anyone make a chair light on fire without touching it in any way, and what's more, not burn the chair or the person sitting on it at all? These "odd things" that people keep talking about too.... It's true that strange stuff happens around me. 

   Once, in third year, a boy called Augustus was chasing me and calling me a freak because it leaked out that I had received 105% on a test that everyone else had failed, especially him. He had wanted me to help him cheat, but I had refused.

   Wanting to beat me up in anger, he had run after me all across the field, all the way to the basketball court, and had had me cornered. He had approached me, cracking his enormous knuckles and flexing the muscles in his gigantic arms and legs. 

  "By the time I'm done with you, you'll be a pulp on the ground, Riddle." He had whispered, menacingly.

   I had closed my eyes, waiting, terrified, for the blows to come. But they never did. I had opened my eyelids to see Augustus Crowen hanging from his dirty, grey underpants on the basketball hoop, crying in pain, and I had no idea how it had happened.

   Another time, an immense, charcoal-coloured dog had been stalking up behind me, and had been about to take a chunk out of me when it had started whimpering like an injured puppy, crawling on its belly.

   Many unusual things had happened like these to me, and none of them, as far as I knew, had had anything to do with me. Or had they? If I was a witch, a sorceress like this man was telling me, wouldn't that explain all of this?

   "I know you're thinking, and everything, but I really have more interesting things to do than this." The man's.... Felix's voice cuts through my daydreams like a knife and drags me viciously back to reality.

   "Now, I suppose you are wondering what I'm going to do with a magical young lady like you?" He continues, this time addressing not just me, but my adopted mother and father too.

   "You suppose correctly," My father answers calmly.

   "And may I also suppose that you believe me now?"

   "Of course."

   "Well then. The real reason I have traveled all this way," I hear him put particular stress on the all, "Is because I have been asked to invite you," He nods at me, "Your daughter," His head bobs at my adopted parents, "To Hogwarts, that is to say, a school of magic."

   "You mean to say, our Scarlett has been - has won... a scholarship?" My mother asks.

   "Oh, no. She's been down on our list since birth, you see. No scholarship, no, definitely not." He smirks at me. "Hogwarts is a school of magic, where Scarlett will learn to control and construct her magical abilities, in a more secure way than just, well... Let us say, Learning by accident." He leers at me again. 

   "How is Scarlett going to get to this... Hogwarts?" Asks my mum.

   "You'll find all the information right..." He fishes in his robe pockets, and pulls out a yellowed parchment paper envelope, with spidery green writing almost the same shade as my eyes with a strange crest I have never seen before.

   "Here." He hands it to me. The paper feels rich and crumbly in my hands, and I can almost feel it buzzing with some kind of energy. I look at the address. 

   Miss Scarlett Zalikah Riddle

The Green Room

9 Canterbury Dr.

Cheshunt, United Kingdom

   Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry