She knows seven ways to kill another wizard, and she learned them all in the library. It's only shocking for a moment, she thinks, gazing into the greenish fire. She likes the greenness of it, wants to reach out and touch it because it's so strange. It should be orange, but here, in this new part of her life, fires can be green and even blue, they can burn cool even when they look hot. She loves this new alien world, but it's still that exactly. It's alien. It's something she's discovered in a book.

A letter came in the middle of the summer, just after she finished all of the recommended reading that her teachers for the next year could possibly suggest. She read through the classics by mid-June and started trudging through the soft covers on the wall at the library just after, desperate for something to fill the days. Other girls went to the swimming pools and ate sugar candies and learned silly little games, but other girls didn't know all of the answers in class. Hermione couldn't understand them. How could they sit in silence? How could they just not know? Didn't it keep them up at nights, sometimes? Ever?

She read Island of the Blue Dolphins last. When it was finished and stacked neatly with the other books she had read since the end of term, she cried for an hour. It was a happy ending, the librarian had promised, but Hermione couldn't see it. The girl character had been isolated but happy, and then they'd tried to rescue her. What seemed like good had just been more bad.

Two days later, a piece of parchment came through the mail slot. In green ink, it said, You are special and we will save you. She slept with it under her pillow for the rest of the summer and read nothing but books of magic. She didn't cry once.

Now, she sits outside looking at her lovely fire, a fire that no other first-year has cared to learn how to make, and she's crying like it's the end of her own book. It doesn't seem to matter that she's been discovered and her oddities explained. Even in a world of magic, everyone is just as incurious as before. There are still cliquish girls who worry about hair ribbons and shoe-buckles, still horrible boys who make fun of anything that can read. Even Harry, who should be the smartest, who should have the greatest thirst for knowledge of them all, seems happy to blunder along without every pushing the boundaries of what they are handed in class.

The bell rings, meaning everyone will be out in the hallway again soon. She sniffles at the thought of running into Harry and that horrible Ron Weasley and snuffs out the fire. She knows seven ways to kill a wizard already, she thinks, staggering back inside to hide in the lavatory, and she's not going to tell them even one.