Minerva O'Malley

Backstory

All my life I knew I was different. Strange things always seemed to happen, and strange people seemed to follow me wherever I went. Out of the corner of my eye, I would see them watching me, but when I turned to meet their eyes, they'd already be focused elsewhere. I could never shake off the feeling of being watched.

Once when I was 8 years old and fed up with the looks, I tried to confront a little old man who I caught staring at me as I was walking through town with my mother. He couldn't have been younger than seventy as he had a few gray hairs visible underneath his black newsboy hat. He was wearing a plaid sweater vest with a gold pocket watch stuffed into the pocket of his tan slacks. I let go of my mother's hand as she stopped to admire a pair of amethyst earrings in a store window display, and started to move towards the strange little man. He began fumbling with his glasses, as if that was all he had been doing. As soon as I got close, a window shattered from the department store behind me. The same one my mother was in front of. My mother was screaming. She was unharmed, but very startled. Alarms started blaring and the owner of the shop was outside yelling at my mother, accusing her of attempted theft. I ran back to her to be by her side, and as I crossed the street, I looked back one more time, and the little old man was gone.

When the police came, they didn't arrest my mother. They quickly came to the conclusion that if she had broken the window, her fingers would have been badly damaged. The shop owner argued that she must have used something, a rock or a bat, to break through the window. However, the police could not find any object nearby that she could have used to cause the shattering, and they dismissed her as a person of interest.

But how did that window shatter? I didn't know it then, but I was the culprit. See, when I was angry, objects such as mirrors and vases were apt to explode, papers and fabrics ignited into flames, and wires and circuits sparked electricity and short-circuited. Sometimes, objects would even fly through the air and knock into things or shatter upon falling to the ground. My parents chalked it up to a combination of me being clumsy, and our family having bad luck. They didn't believe me when I told them about the strange people I would catch staring at me. They even thought it was a hoax when I got my Hogwarts letter. They thought I wrote it!

After being sent a hundred more letters, my parents finally realized that this wasn't a joke, I was really a witch, and all the weird things that happened was my magic expressing itself the only way it knew how. So here I am, in my first year at Hogwarts, ready to harness my magical abilities into something spectacular. I still don't know who all those people were who were staring at me, but I think I'm about to find out! Stay tuned for more on my Hogwarts adventure!