Chapter Text
Harry hadn’t meant to lie to the entire Wizarding world. Really. It had been an accident.
It started with his letter. His Hogwarts letter. His official letter from an official school that somehow knew where he was—exactly where he was, under the stairs of Number 4—and, even more shocking, it also knew his name. No one had known his name before that, except him of course. He’d found it in a school book: Harry. And he’d fallen in love.
Everyone else called him a different name. Well, most of the time the Dursleys just called him “girl” or “hey, you.” He’d never told anyone that his name was actually Harry, only whispered it softly to himself at night, a soothing mantra when he woke up from a nightmare, usually involving a blinding green light and a distant, echoing scream.
So when he got his Hogwarts letter, he was stunned. So stunned that, instead of bringing it to the kitchen with the rest of the mail, he slipped it through the slot of the cupboard door, determined to save this one piece of paper that said his name. It was like a fantastic sort of dream—someone knew he was a boy? Somewhere, someplace, he could actually be Harry?
“Hurry up, girl!” his uncle had called, and the dream was shattered instantly. He forced it back into the corners of his thoughts and hurried into the kitchen. “Coming, Uncle Vernon.”
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All his life, people had thought he was a girl. But as he grew up, short and skinny and stunted under the stairs, he realized that he wasn’t. It was simple enough: one morning, when he was four or five, he caught a glimpse of the telly Dudley was watching and saw an advert for a new lightsaber toy. “Coo-ool,” he said, the word slipping from his mouth before he could catch it.
“Shove off,” Dudley yelled. “Star Wars is for boys, not girls.” And then, when Harry just looked at him, he yelled, “Muuuum! She’s watching telly and won’t leave me alone!”
Harry scampered before Aunt Petunia could come with the frying pan. But that night, he realized that he still liked Star Wars, even though Dudley said it was supposed to be for boys. He’d never seen it, of course, but the telly made it look so cool, so daring. He imagined himself like Luke Skywalker, fighting against Darth Vader. In the yard the next day, he picked a branch from the grass as he was doing his chores and began swinging it around, making the whish noises with his mouth, pretending he was in a brave fight with the Dark Side. When Aunt Petunia saw him through the window, she shrieked. “What are you doing? Drop that at once!” she yelled, grabbing his wrist tightly and dragging him back into the house.
“What sort of nonsense are you getting at?” she said. “Magic isn’t real!”
“I know it’s not,” Harry said. “I was trying to be Star Wars.” But she didn’t listen to him. She slammed him into his cupboard, and in the darkness, he held his sore wrist and thought, why would she think I was playing magic?
He stayed in his cupboard for the rest of the day until she let him out to pee and help with dinner. “Girls don’t play outside like that,” she said sharply, refusing to look at him as he helped chop the vegetables. “You will not do that again.”
He nodded, and said “Yes, Aunt Petunia,” but in his head he held the truth triumphantly, a lightsaber against the rest of the world, and thought, I am not a girl.
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Over the years, Aunt Petunia started to notice. His hair never grew past his shoulders, even though she never trimmed it. People on the street—the rare occasions he was out with the family—would compliment her two sons and call him a “little gentleman.” At the beginning of school, the teachers got confused when they called roll and he answered to a girl’s name.
When he was younger, she just gave him Dudley’s old clothes, massive and worn, but after a while she got angry. “She looks too much like a boy, Vernon,” she told his Uncle. “What will the neighbors think?” And so Uncle Vernon let Aunt Petunia take him to the mall, after threatening him that if he did anything, any funny business, he’d be in his cupboard for a month.
Aunt Petunia took him into the girl’s sections of the stores, but when she asked for help the assistants would turn to Harry and ask, “Are you buying your sister a present?” And when his Aunt snapped at them that no, the clothes were for him, they were confused. “The boy’s section is to the left, ma’am,” they would say politely, and she would yell and shriek and pull him out of the store, pulled him into the next one. Eventually, she gave up asking for help, grabbed a few skirts, dresses, and blouses—all in hideous pinks and lavenders that made Harry cringe—and stormed from the mall, Harry in tow.
She tried to make him wear the new clothes, but every time he put them on they shrank. Eventually, they were so small they couldn’t fit over his head, and Aunt Petunia, infuriated, threw them in the bin. Uncle Vernon refused to let her spend any more money on him, so he continued to wear Dudley’s cast-offs.
In the bathroom, he would look in the mirror and try to judge his face. If someone saw him for the first time, would they think he was a girl? He couldn’t see any way. His hair was short, black and messy, and his face was thin and pointy. Nothing about him said “girl.” He would smile to himself, at his little secret.
Really, he hadn’t meant to lie to everyone. But when Hagrid came to the hut on the rocks and called him Harry, when he looked at him and saw nothing but a boy, Harry didn’t bother correcting him. He didn’t know how or why everyone who did magic thought he was a boy, but he was, and they did, and when he saw Hagrid’s squashed, lumpy cake that said “Harry” on it, he nearly cried.
“Cor, you never got a cake b’fore?” Hagrid asked, clapping him on the back with his heavy hand, and Harry shook his head numbly, a solid lump in his throat.
And when he got to Hogwarts, no one seemed to know any different. As he waited for the Sorting Hat to call his name, his hands shook. Now everyone will know, he thought. He wondered if Ron, the nice boy from the train, would still be his friend. Would anyone? Certainly not Draco, the blond prick he’d met at Madame Malkins. When the Sorting Hat called him it called, “Potter, Harry,” in his shock of relief he forgot for a moment what he was supposed to do. Placed on his head, the Hat laughed to see his thoughts. Your secret’s safe with me, Mr. Potter, the hat said. Your magical core tells me who you are. Harry didn’t really know what that meant but gave a small smile. Quite brave, aren’t you? To be who you are? the Hat asked, and before he could reply the Hat loudly declared, “Gryffindor!” He trotted quickly to the red and gold table where Ron waited for him, beaming.
So no one knew, and it was perfect—unless you count things like Voldemort hiding under his professor’s turban and great big basilisks trying to kill his friends. It was perfect, that is, until the summer before his third year. Because, one sweltering July morning, after he stumbled from a bad dream to the bathroom, he found—to his absolute shock and horror—that he was bleeding.