WARNING: THERE ARE BOOK 6&7 SPOILERS, however if you have managed not to recieve book 6&7 spoilers by now, you won’t understand the story.
A Childhood Ending
A Childhood Ending
That Saturday in July was typical for most people, but for me, and several thousand others, it was the ending of something we hoped never would. I stood in line at Barnes and Noble for five hours at the midnight release. I wouldn’t start the book until the sun rose, but I needed to have in my hands as soon as possible.
That night as I slept I kept one hand on the cover. I barely slept for more than three hours in anxious excitement. In my hands lay the apex of the last ten years of my life, everything that I had awaited the last two years for. Inside the 759 pages was the end of my childhood, the end of the journey of Harry Potter.
By four o’clock Monday afternoon on my way to work, about 630 pages into the book. I sat alone in the back corner of the K-Mark parking lot in Portsmouth New Hampshire, locked inside my Lancer, Deathly Hallows propped open against my steering wheel.
Alone in my head, deep within the walls of Hogwarts school of Witchcraft and Wizardry, I thought that nothing bad could possibly happen in the last seven pages of the chapter entitled “The Second Battle for Hogwarts.” What could possibly be worst than Snape killing Hedwig, or losing of Mad Eye less than a quarter in the book? I found my answer on page 637.
As I read the words my mind couldn’t wrap around what J.K. Rowling had just done to my life. I re-read the page, hoping my mind had tricked me. It hadn’t. Percy Weasley had killed his brother, Percy Weasley, the most hated of the Weasley brood was the reason Fred lay dead before the entry to the Great Hall. Fred Weasley was dead. And I had to punch into work in less than five minutes.
To fully understand my emotions at this moment in time, I should take you back to age eleven: the first time I read The Sorcerer’s Stone. When Harry Potter first enters Platform 9 ¾, and he meets the younger Weasley children; his soon to be best friend Ron, his little sister Ginny, and the twins, Fred and George. As Harry loads into the Hogwarts Express, Fred and George yell to their mother, that they’ll send her a Hogwarts toilet seat. In that five page exchange I fell in love with a pair of fictional trouble makers. They were everything I wanted to be, the opposite of what I was.
Fred became my favorite because he was a better trouble maker than George was. While George stood in the background of the books, his twin brother took more a leadership role in the family business they created. In a way I became Fred Weasley as I grew to understand myself. Junior year of high school, my best friend and I, after discovering that we both loved the Weasley twins, assigned each other names of fictional red-headed brothers. She was George. I was Fred. In a twisted way, one that only a true Harry Potter fan could understand. I was the brave one, although in reality I was never the brave one. Being Fred Weasley to my best friend gave me inner power I would not have found otherwise.
By the third book I had fallen completely for a fictional red-headed boy. I knew at the age of thirteen, that I loved, and would always love Fred Weasley. Life was simpler then, J.K. Rowling hadn’t killed anyone we, the Harry Potter fandom, had grown to love. It wasn’t until we all saw Cedric Diggory, laying dead in Little Hangleton graveyard, killed by Voldemort in The Goblet of Fire, when his ghost comes out of The Dark Lord’s wand and says: “Harry… take my body back, will you? Take my body back to my parents…,” that the first thought that something could possibly happen to my Fred. When Sirius, fell behind the veil in Order of the Phoenix, the thought crossed my mind again. Cedric was a fringe character. Sirius was fast becoming a main part of Harry’s life, but Rowling wouldn’t kill a Weasley, not a main character like Weasley.
In The Half Blood Prince, all the thoughts of what J.K. Rowling was capable of changed on page 596, when Snape held the wand that killed our beloved Headmaster, Albus Dumbledore.
Anticipation of the seventh book grew everyday after finishing book six. With each passing day the thoughts of what Rowling would do grew scarier, yet I never thought a Weasley would lay victim to the second battle for Hogwarts, not a beloved Weasley, not Fred.
I sat in my car that Monday, tears running down my face. I had to bring myself back together to work my cash register, but the boy I’d loved since I was eleven was dead. My fictional boyfriend, as sad and ridiculous as it was, lay dead. Fred wasn’t just my fictional boyfriend, but a part of me. I was lying dead on the floor outside the Great Hall of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. My imagination in pieces.
Slowly, I walked across the mostly empty parking lot, the orange book clinched to my chest. I entered the through the automatic doors. I turned to the service desk. Barbara and Jo stood by the time clock.
“Are you alright?” Jo asked.
I replied with something the sounded like: “Harry Potter. My boyfriend. Percy. Killed. Wall. Fred. Dead.” And the tears poured down my face.
Jo, who was also a Potter fan, seemed to understand. Although she hadn’t read the sixth book yet, there was a look on her face of understanding. “Are you going to be alright?”
“No,” I cried, pulling the book closer to my face, smelling the pages. “Fred. Stupid. Percy. Unneeded. Deaths.” I gasped.
“I’ll call in Lisa,” Barbara said, picking up the phone. “I don’t think she reads Harry Potter.”
Jo took me by the arm and led me into the back room. We sat there together until I could breathe again. Then, she sent me home.
Back in my bed room, I locked myself in my room and cried. I cried of two straight days. I did not look at the book again until Thursday, when I became curious of who else’s life J.K. Rowling would destroy for no reason, first Cedric, then Sirius, then Dumbledore, then Hedwig, then Mad-Eye, and Fred. Five more senseless lives, Professor Lupin, his young wife Tonks, Colin, and others would be taken in the Great Hall in the next three chapters. Then Jo Rowling confuses her readers who had for so long hated Professor Snape, by making him a better character than Harry, and throws salt in our wounded hearts and imaginations by giving an epilogue that contains nothing but crap. Then it was over. The last ten years of my life, the Harry Potter years were over.
My world was upside down. My childhood was over. It died on page 637, along with Fred Weasley, with a smirk on his face.
