Nearly ten years had passed since the Dursleys had woken up
to find their nephew on the front step,
but Privet Drive had hardly changed at all.
The sun rose on the same tidy front gardens and lit up the brass number four
on the Dursleys' front door; it crept into their living room,
which was almost exactly the same as it had been on the night
when Mr. Dursley had seen that fateful news report about the owls.
Only the photographs on the mantelpiece really showed how much time had passed.
Ten years ago, there had been lots of pictures of
what looked like a large pink beach ball wearing different-colored bonnets -
but Dudley Dursley was no longer a baby, and now the photographs
showed a large blond boy riding his first bicycle, on a carousel at the fair,
playing a computer game with his father, being hugged and kissed by his mother.
The room held no sign at all that another boy lived in the house, too.
Yet Harry Potter was still there, asleep at the moment, but not for long.
His Aunt Petunia was awake and it was her shrill voice
that made the first noise of the day.
"Up! Get up! Now!" Harry woke with a start. His aunt rapped on the door again.
"Up!" she screeched. Harry heard her walking toward the kitchen
and then the sound of the frying pan being put on the stove.
He rolled onto his back and tried to remember the dream he had been having.
It had been a good one. There had been a flying motorcycle in it.
He had a funny feeling he'd had the same dream before. His aunt was back outside the door.
"Are you up yet?" she demanded.
"Nearly," said Harry.
"Well, get a move on, I want you to look after the bacon.
And don't you dare let it burn, I want everything perfect on Duddy's birthday."
Harry groaned.
"What did you say?" his aunt snapped through the door.
"Nothing, nothing ..." Dudley's birthday - how could he have forgotten?
Harry got slowly out of bed and started looking for socks.
He found a pair under his bed and, after pulling a spider off one of them,
put them on. Harry was used to spiders,
because the cupboard under the stairs was full of them,
and that was where he slept.
When he was dressed he went down the hall into the kitchen.
The table was almost hidden beneath all Dudley's birthday presents.
It looked as though Dudley had gotten the new computer he wanted,
not to mention the second television and the racing bike.
Exactly why Dudley wanted a racing bike was a mystery to Harry,
as Dudley was very fat and hated exercise -
unless of course it involved punching somebody.
Dudley's favorite punching bag was Harry,
but he couldn't often catch him.
Harry didn't look it, but he was very fast.
Perhaps it had something to do with living in a dark cupboard,
but Harry had always been small and skinny for his age.
He looked even smaller and skinnier than he really was
because all he had to wear were old clothes of Dudley's,
and Dudley was about four times bigger than he was. Harry had a thin face,
knobbly knees, black hair, and bright green eyes.
He wore round glasses held together with a lot of Scotch tape
because of all the times Dudley had punched him on the nose.
The only thing Harry liked about his own appearance was a very thin scar
on his forehead that was shaped like a bolt of lightning.
He had had it as long as he could remember,
and the first question he could ever remember asking
his Aunt Petunia was how he had gotten it.
"In the car crash when your parents died," she had said.
"And don't ask questions." Don't ask questions -
that was the first rule for a quiet life with the Dursleys.
Uncle Vernon entered the kitchen as Harry was turning over the bacon.
"Comb your hair!" he barked, by way of a morning greeting.
About once a week, Uncle Vernon looked over the top of his newspaper
and shouted that Harry needed a haircut.
Harry must have had more haircuts than the rest of the boys
in his class put together, but it made no difference,
his hair simply grew that way - all over the place.
Harry was frying eggs by the time Dudley arrived in the kitchen with his mother.
Dudley looked a lot like Uncle Vernon. He had a large pink face,
not much neck, small, watery blue eyes,
and thick blond hair that lay smoothly on his thick, fat head.
Aunt Petunia often said that Dudley looked like a baby angel -
Harry often said that Dudley looked like a pig in a wig.
Harry put the plates of egg and bacon on the table,
which was difficult as there wasn't much room.
Dudley, meanwhile, was counting his presents. His face fell.
"Thirty-six," he said, looking up at his mother and father.
"That's two less than last year."
"Darling, you haven't counted Auntie Marge's present, see,
it's here under this big one from Mommy and Daddy."
"All right, thirty-seven then," said Dudley, going red in the face.
Harry, who could see a huge Dudley tantrum coming on,
began wolfing down his bacon as fast as possible
in case Dudley turned the table over.
Aunt Petunia obviously scented danger, too, because she said quickly,
"And we'll buy you another two presents while we're out today.
How's that, popkin? Two more presents. Is that all right?"
Dudley thought for a moment. It looked like hard work.
Finally he said slowly, "So I'll have thirty ... thirty ..."
"Thirty-nine, sweetums," said Aunt Petunia.
"Oh." Dudley sat down heavily and grabbed the nearest parcel.
"All right then." Uncle Vernon chuckled.
"Little tyke wants his money's worth, just like his father. 'Atta boy, Dudley!"
He ruffled Dudley's hair. At that moment the telephone rang
and Aunt Petunia went to answer it while Harry and Uncle Vernon
watched Dudley unwrap the racing bike, a video camera,
a remote control airplane, sixteen new computer games, and a VCR.
He was ripping the paper off a gold wristwatch
when Aunt Petunia came back from the telephone looking both angry and worried.
"Bad news, Vernon," she said.
"Mrs. Figg's broken her leg. She can't take him."
She jerked her head in Harry's direction.
Dudley's mouth fell open in horror,
but Harry's heart gave a leap. Every year on Dudley's birthday,
his parents took him and a friend out for the day,
to adventure parks, hamburger restaurants, or the movies.
Every year, Harry was left behind with Mrs. Figg,
a mad old lady who lived two streets away.
Harry hated it there. The whole house smelled of cabbage
and Mrs. Figg made him look at photographs of all the cats she'd ever owned.
"Now what?" said Aunt Petunia,
looking furiously at Harry as though he'd planned this.
Harry knew he ought to feel sorry
that Mrs. Figg had broken her leg, but it wasn't easy
when he reminded himself it would be a whole year
before he had to look at Tibbies, Snowy, Mr. Paws, and Tufty again.
"We could phone Marge," Uncle Vernon suggested.
"Don't be silly, Vernon, she hates the boy."
The Dursleys often spoke about Harry like this, as though he wasn't there -
or rather, as though he was something very nasty
that couldn't understand them, like a slug.
"What about what's-her-name, your friend - Yvonne?"
"On vacation in Majorca," snapped Aunt Petunia.
"You could just leave me here," Harry put in hopefully
(he'd be able to watch what he wanted on television
for a change and maybe even have a go on Dudley's computer) .
Aunt Petunia looked as though she'd just swallowed a lemon.
"And come back and find the house in ruins?" she snarled.
"I won't blow up the house," said Harry, but they weren't listening.
"I suppose we could take him to the zoo,"
said Aunt Petunia slowly, "... and leave him in the car. ..."
"That cars new, he's not sitting in it alone. ..."
Dudley began to cry loudly. In fact, he wasn't really crying -
it had been years since he'd really cried -
but he knew that if he screwed up his face and wailed,
his mother would give him anything he wanted.
"Dinky Duddydums, don't cry,
Mummy won't let him spoil your special day!" she cried, flinging her arms around him.
"I ... don't ... want ... him ... t-t-to come!" Dudley yelled between huge, pretend sobs.
"He always sp- spoils everything!"
He shot Harry a nasty grin through the gap in his mothers arms.
Just then, the doorbell rang -
"Oh, good Lord, they're here!" said Aunt Petunia frantically -
and a moment later, Dudley's best friend, Piers Polkiss,
walked in with his mother. Piers was a scrawny boy with a face like a rat.
He was usually the one who held people's arms
behind their backs while Dudley hit them.
Dudley stopped pretending to cry at once.
Half an hour later, Harry, who couldn't believe his luck,
was sitting in the back of the Dursleys' car with Piers and Dudley,
on the way to the zoo for the first time in his life.
His aunt and uncle hadn't been able to think of anything else to do with him,
but before they'd left, Uncle Vernon had taken Harry aside.
"I'm warning you," he had said,
putting his large purple face right up close to Harry's,
"I'm warning you now, boy - any funny business, anything at all -
and you'll be in that cupboard from now until Christmas."
"I'm not going to do anything," said Harry, "honestly!"
But Uncle Vernon didn't believe him. No one ever did.
The problem was, strange things often happened around Harry
and it was just no good telling the Dursleys he didn't make them happen.
Once, Aunt Petunia, tired of Harry coming back from the barbers
looking as though he hadn't been at all,
had taken a pair of kitchen scissors and cut his hair so short
he was almost bald except for his bangs,
which she left "to hide that horrible scar."
Dudley had laughed himself silly at Harry,
who spent a sleepless night imagining school the next day,
where he was already laughed at for his baggy clothes and taped glasses.
Next morning, however, he had gotten up
to find his hair exactly as it had been
before Aunt Petunia had sheared it off.
He had been given a week in his cupboard for this,
even though he had tried to explain
that he couldn't explain how it had grown back so quickly.
Another time, Aunt Petunia had been trying
to force him into a revolting old sweater of Dudley's
(brown with orange puff balls).
The harder she tried to pull it over his head,
the smaller it seemed to become,
until finally it might have fitted a hand puppet,
but certainly wouldn't fit Harry.
Aunt Petunia had decided it must have shrunk in the wash and,
to his great relief, Harry wasn't punished.
On the other hand, he'd gotten into terrible trouble
for being found on the roof of the school kitchens.
Dudley's gang had been chasing him as usual when,
as much to Harry's surprise as anyone else's,
there he was sitting on the chimney.
The Dursleys had received a very angry letter
from Harry's headmistress telling them Harry had been climbing school buildings.
But all he'd tried to do
(as he shouted at Uncle Vernon through the locked door of his cupboard)
was jump behind the big trash cans outside the kitchen doors.
Harry supposed that the wind must have caught him in mid-jump.
But today, nothing was going to go wrong.
It was even worth being with Dudley and Piers
to be spending the day somewhere that wasn't school,
his cupboard, or Mrs. Figg's cabbage-smelling living room.
While he drove, Uncle Vernon complained to Aunt Petunia.
He liked to complain about things: people at work,
Harry, the council, Harry, the bank, and Harry were just a few of his favorite subjects.
This morning, it was motorcycles. "... roaring along like maniacs, the young hoodlums,"
he said, as a motorcycle overtook them.
"I had a dream about a motorcycle," said Harry, remembering suddenly.
"It was flying." Uncle Vernon nearly crashed into the car in front.
He turned right around in his seat and yelled at Harry,
his face like a gigantic beet with a mustache: "MOTORCYCLES DONT FLY!"
Dudley and Piers sniggered.
"I know they don't," said Harry. "It was only a dream."
But he wished he hadn't said anything.
If there was one thing the Dursleys hated even more than his asking questions,
it was his talking about anything acting in a way it shouldn't,
no matter if it was in a dream or even a cartoon -
they seemed to think he might get dangerous ideas.
It was a very sunny Saturday and the zoo was crowded with families.
The Dursleys bought Dudley and Piers large chocolate ice creams
at the entrance and then, because the smiling lady in the van had asked Harry
what he wanted before they could hurry him away,
they bought him a cheap lemon ice pop. It wasn't bad, either,
Harry thought, licking it as they watched a gorilla
scratching its head who looked remarkably like Dudley,
except that it wasn't blond. Harry had the best morning
he'd had in a long time. He was careful to walk a little way
apart from the Dursleys so that Dudley and Piers,
who were starting to get bored with the animals by lunchtime,
wouldn't fall back on their favorite hobby of hitting him.
They ate in the zoo restaurant,
and when Dudley had a tantrum
because his knickerbocker glory didn't have enough ice cream on top,
Uncle Vernon bought him another one
and Harry was allowed to finish the first.
Harry felt, afterward, that he should have known it was all too good to last.
After lunch they went to the reptile house.
It was cool and dark in there, with lit windows all along the walls.
Behind the glass, all sorts of lizards and snakes were crawling
and slithering over bits of wood and stone.
Dudley and Piers wanted to see huge,
poisonous cobras and thick, man-crushing pythons.
Dudley quickly found the largest snake in the place.
It could have wrapped its body twice around Uncle Vernon's car
and crushed it into a trash can -
but at the moment it didn't look in the mood.
In fact, it was fast asleep.
Dudley stood with his nose pressed against the glass,
staring at the glistening brown coils.