Chapter Text
Dan can’t believe his eyes. He’s been in Diagon Alley for nearly three hours now, but he’s still afraid that the shrieking and cruel sound of his alarm will rip him out of this magical dream any minute now.
Actually, Dan stops believing his eyes – ears, nose, fingers, tongue, and intuition for good measure – about a week ago, when a bright red letter flies – flies – into the brightly lit living room and announces in a colourless voice that he has been accepted into the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. After that, the letter makes a polite pause and waits patiently for Dan’s mum to stop screaming about the devil’s antics and for Dan’s dad to stop looking around for his shotgun, and then adds that the list of books and other necessary stuff can be found attached and that on the first of September Dan should be at King’s Cross to get on the train to school. Upon finishing its monologue, the letter opens with a quiet rustle, leaving a very astonished Howell family to look at several parchment pieces filled with green ink.
For a week, a lot of which Dan spends trying to convince himself that what happened did actually happen, a lot of efforts go into persuading his parents that they don’t need a family counselling session (“I know you have a creative imagination, dear, but seeing red envelopes is never a good sign”). When his dad finally stops attempting to shoot the letter that’s long been silent with his newly found shotgun ‘just in case’, they all go to London to buy Dan all sorts of magical things.
Diagon Alley cannot be found on any map, and they spend a lot of time arguing that it means that it doesn’t exist altogether and this whole magic thing is just one big family hallucination. In the end, they end up getting help from the owner of a tiny bar, which Dan somehow manages to notice amidst the tall buildings of Central London. Following the instructions given in the letter, they exchange pounds for wizard money, and Dan’s mum keeps commenting under her breath about the unnecessary golden coins, while Dan’s dad refuses to walk into the bank when he sees goblins behind the counter. Dan himself can’t stop looking at white marble floors, glistening in the light of hundreds of floating candles, at weirdly shaped coins, piling over the familiar papers with the Queen’s face on them, and at the ever-serious goblins bending over thick accounting books. After finishing with boring formalities, they step outside on the street… and here they are. Dan can’t believe his eyes.
He stands in the Madam Malkin’s Robes For All Occasions completely alone – his parents, exhausted by the hooting of the owls in Eeylops Owl Emporium, the smell of frog spawn in the dark of the Apothecary, and strange book names like The Handbook of Hippogriff Psychology and The Noble Sport of Warlocks in Flourish and Blotts, refused to go with him and were waiting for him on the street. Madam Malkin has already taken all the necessary measurements and, pinching his cheek, disappeared inside the shop, so Dan has a moment to take a deep breath and try and convince himself for the hundred and fourteenth time that this is all actually happening. They have really bought a shiny copper cauldron for potions and wondrously precise scales for ingredients. He really has a wand now – a wand, even though it’s immediately taken away by his mum who is sure that he’ll start waving it around and poke someone’s eye out. The attempts to convince himself of this reality don’t really lead anywhere, and Dan finds himself grinning from ear to ear. Maybe this isn’t a dream, after all.
Dan is startled by the bell and he glances at the door to see another customer, a boy with dark ginger hair who looks just as scared and excited as Dan feels. His mum shouts something at him from the street, but the boy just waves his hand at her and tentatively steps inside. When he notices Dan, he smiles.
“Going to Hogwarts too?” Dan nods and awkwardly smiles back. “It’s my first year,” the boy tells him. “Martyn can’t stop saying how wonderful and magical everything in there is, so I really can’t wait to see how much of what he said is a complete lie.”
“Are your parents wizards?”
The question is out there before Dan can stop himself, and he’s filled with horror. What if that was rude? Impolite? Unacceptable? However, the boy just nods, and Dan nearly sways with excitement: he’s talking to an actual wizard from an actual wizarding family.
“And some great wizards, too,” the boy adds with the obvious pride. “My dad once transfigured one of those giant noisy Muggle things with propellers out a kitchen table, can you believe that? And it was able to fly, too! Mum was mad that it knocked down half the trees in our garden, but what can you expect from a thing like that?
Transfigured? Muggle? Unfamiliar words still seem more exciting than scary, but Dan doesn’t get the time to ask what they mean because the boy keeps talking.
“What about your parents?” he asks with interest, and for the first time today, Dan feels something that is not absolute joy. This boy is so sure that his parents also do something extraordinary for a living, like turning everyday objects into helicopters, but Dan knows that’s not true at all. Everything that his family does seems boring in the wizarding world.
“Well, my dad’s a lawyer,” Dan says anyway, preparing to see the disappointment on the boy’s face, “and my mum’s an accountant, but she’s usually at home with Adrian… It’s my younger brother,” he adds. To his surprise, the boy’s eyes light up.
“An acc-… Are you a muggle?”
Dan looks at him questioningly. “A muggle?”
“A person who can’t do magic,” the boy explains and still looks at Dan as if he just properly saw him for the first time. “Martyn always tells me that he has two Muggleborns in his year and they are better than him at everything! Of course, I don’t know how good Martyn is, because he’s not allowed to do magic outside of Hogwarts yet, plus all his stories are really exaggerated and he probably can’t do anything at all, but still…”
Listening to the boy talk about his, apparently, older brother, Dan can’t help but smile and breathe a sigh of relief. It seems like his non-magical family doesn’t make him boring or uninteresting and also doesn’t define his future at Hogwarts.
Madam Malkin finally reappears from the back of the shop and calls him over to give him a pile of new black robes.
“Here you go, dear,” she smiles and waits patiently for Dan to count the still unfamiliar money. “Have a nice year!”
Dan manages to give her the right amount of coins and turns to leave, glancing again at the boy who already has Madam Malkin fussing around him with rulers and tape measures.
“My name’s Phil, by the way,” the boy says, waving away a particularly annoying magical pencil. “Phil Lester.”
“I’m Dan. Dan Howell.”
The boy – Phil – smiles and waves at him. “See you at Hogwarts, Dan!”
Dan awkwardly waves back and runs to the sunlit street, nearly tripping over his own feet.
***
The next time Dan sees Phil is on the Platform 9 ¾ and smiles, remembering their brief meeting at Madam Malkin’s. That moment has been slightly overshadowed by a variety of others, including the one where Dan’s mum found out that they have to run through a brick wall to get to the platform and for the hundredth time tried to persuade Dan not to go and do ‘all that wizard stuff’. In addition to that, Dan’s dad in all seriousness promised to call the police and the fire brigade in case they don’t return from behind the barrier in ten minutes, but something tells Dan that he still won’t forget the first time he met a wizard his age for a very long time. He sees Phil on the other side of the Platform surrounded by his family: his mother, a short witch in light green robes who is saying something to a boy slightly taller than Phil (his brother Martyn, Dan guesses), and his father, a thin wizard wearing dark blue robes and glasses. When they come closer trying to find an empty carriage, Dan overhears bits of the conversation.
“…so no chocolate frogs on the train this year!” Phil’s mum finishes what was, apparently, a very long motherly lecture and gives both her sons a stern look. “I don’t want to receive any more Howlers, do you understand?” Once they both nod, she continues, but softer, “Martyn, dear, do look after Phil. You know how hard the very first year can be.”
‘Don’t worry, Mum,” Martyn grins and stretches out his hand to ruffle Phil’s hair. Phil rolls his eyes. “I’ll be the perfect older brother. By the way, if you’re not sorted into Gryffindor, we’ll disown you,” he turns to Phil, making a serious face. “But, you know, no pressure.”
“Martyn!”
“Just a joke, Mum.”
Their mother just sighs and turns her attention to Phil, letting her husband say goodbye to Martyn.
“Just be good, Phil, I know you can do that,” she smiles warmly at him and tugs him in for a hug. “And listen to your brother, but don’t take to heart everything he says.”
“Will do,” Phil mutters, his nose on his mother’s shoulder.
Dan can’t hear anything else because there’s a loud whistle, and the noises on the Platform get louder. The parents are trying to give the last advice to their children, who are leaving for the first or the last time, and the students are climbing into the carriages, pushing their suitcases and owl cages in front of them, and Dan himself gets a bone-crushing hug from his Mum, and she once again reminds him that if he changes his mind, he can come back home any second and ‘please send us letters, even with those god awful owls, I just want to know that you’re alright’. There is another whistle, and Dan jumps in the carriage with all the other students and waves at his Mum from the window. She waves back and then looks at her watch and quickly heads to the barrier, as if concerned that Dan’s Dad wasn’t joking about the fire brigade. The train slowly leaves the station, and the Platform filled with witches and wizards disappears from sight. Dan finds a free compartment and sits down, feeling his fingers shake with excitement. He’s going to be at Hogwarts in just a few hours.
***
When dozens of little boats with the first years, led by Hagrid, start moving across the Great Lake, the excitement in Dan’s stomach turns to nerves. What if he got the letter by mistake and actually he’s not a wizard? On the train, he overhears a girl with a big bushy pile of hair animatedly telling someone about the Sorting Ceremony, and it is then when he has his first shadow of doubt: what if this all-knowing Hat just laughs at him, like, how could you even think that this was real? Dan sees that girl now, she’s sitting in the boat next to him and impatiently drumming her fingers on its side, undoubtedly counting seconds until their arrival. Dan almost considers jumping in the Lake and swimming back to London.
When they pass the bridge and see the castle for the first time, Dan forgets all his fears.
There’s still a couple of hundred meters of distance left, but Hogwarts is already standing tall in front of them, ancient and dark, but instead of looking gloomy it looks friendly and welcoming, promising homely warmth. Dan stares at the castle, mouth wide open in awe, and tries to count the little lights that make this enormous building so bright. He looks at the towers, big and small with pointy tops aimed towards the sky, and wants to know where is the owlery with owls that will take his letters home, which one is the Astronomy Tower where he’ll be looking at the stars through a telescope that he spent twenty minutes choosing, and, of course, where’s the dormitory of his future House. Dan knows that there are four Houses in Hogwarts but still barely even knows their names; he wanted to find Phil on the train and talk to him some more, but he couldn’t see him anywhere at first and then the carriages filled with older students who were already dressed in school robes and were discussing upcoming exams, so Dan couldn’t muster the courage to leave his compartment.
Still, the boats reach the shore all too quickly, and when Hagrid knocks at the heavy wooden doors, Dan feels nervous again. Seeing a stern-looking woman, whom Hagrid calls Professor McGonagall, only scares him more, and she takes them to a little room, where they are told to wait for a few minutes. When she leaves, the first years start talking in whispers that eventually grow into loud voices, and although Dan is glad to know that he isn’t the only one practically shaking with panic, it does nothing to calm his nerves.
“Dan!”
Phil appears in front of him, looking equally excited and terrified, and Dan sighs with relief before smiling back at him.
“Wow, I can’t believe we’re finally here, you know?” Phil glances around the room in awe, and in any other situation Dan wouldn’t have understood his enthusiasm – brick walls, brick floors, a window, a couple of lamps dimply lighting the room – but in here everything seems magical. “I nearly fell out of the boat on the way here. Thankfully, they were quick to drag me back in, I wouldn’t want to become the Squid’s dinner on the very first day.”
Dan laughs because Phil does look like someone who would fall out of the boat upon catching the first sight of Hogwarts, but doesn’t get the time to ask about the Squid. Something quacks in Phil’s robes, and he gets a baby toad out of his pocket.
“Is it yours?” Dan asks with interest.
“Yup,” Phil nods, petting the toad with his finger. “Mum’s allergic to cats and owls need special care or something, so I got Winston.” The toad quacks happily at the sound of his name, and Dan decides not to laugh because the first thing that he did to his own owl was naming her Zelda.
Only standing so close to Phil Dan realises that something about him changed. His smile is just as infectious when he’s telling a funny story about Winston, his eyes are still lit up with enthusiasm, and his black fringe is still too long…
“Wait a second,” Dan says abruptly, “wasn’t your hair ginger?”
Phil stops midsentence and turns a deep crimson colour.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he tries to sound nonchalant, but his voice rises higher.
“Oh come on,” Dan insists, not understanding why such a simple question produced such a weird reaction, “when we met at Madam Malkin’s, you had…”
“Phil?”
A skinny boy with dark curly hair steps out of one of the groups and looks at Phil as if trying to recognize him.
“PJ!” Phil exclaims with apparent relief, and the boy comes to them, clapping Phil on the shoulder. “I was afraid you fell out somewhere between London and Cambridge.”
“Not this year.” PJ winks at him. “And speaking about falling, nice try to feed the Squid earlier, Lester. I was impressed with how safe and flawless the execution was.”
“He looked hungry and I had cookies!” Phil waves his hands defensively and Winston quacks, unhappy with the sudden movement. Phil notices that Dan looks at PJ with interest and says hurriedly, “Yeah, Dan, this is PJ, my neighbour from Manchester. PJ, this is Dan, we met in the Diagon Alley.”
“It was very nice of you to leave out the fact that we are best friends forever,” PJ rolls his eyes and offers Dan a friendly smile. “Anyways, rumour has it that the Hat is ready to sing its song, so my advice to you is to get ready as well. See ya!”
Clapping Phil on the shoulder once again, PJ returns to his excitedly talking friends. Dan decides to continue tormenting Phil about his sudden hair changes some other time and wants to ask how exactly did he plan on feeding the Squid cookies, but Professor McGonagall comes back and orders them to form a line and follow her, so he has to postpone this discussion as well.
The Sorting Ceremony goes too slowly and too quickly at the same time. When they enter the Great Hall, everyone is looking at them and Dan kind of wants to fall through the floor only to escape from all the attention. Fortunately, soon all eyes move to the Hat, who sings something about friendship and understanding, dreams and hard work, the founders of Hogwarts and the Houses named after them; Dan does not catch the details because his ears ring from the nerves and he almost forgets to clap when the song ends. Professor McGonagall uncurls a long scroll with the names of the first years and starts calling them out one by one, and Dan’s mind goes blank.
He looks at Phil when he, pale as a ghost, moves to the front and fidgets on the chair as the Hat is put on his head. The Hat is silent for only a few seconds and then it yells, “HUFFLEPUFF!”, and Phil runs to the table decorated with yellow flags, stumbling on his way, and his brother gives him the thumbs up from the Gryffindor table. PJ comes immediately after him and doesn’t look much more confident, and the Hat sends him to Ravenclaw, causing the blue table to erupt in applause. All other faces look the same and melt into one, and after Carrie Fletcher, the girl who talked about the Sorting on the train, goes to the Gryffindor table, Dan hears his own name.
The Hat doesn’t start laughing at him and doesn’t let everyone in the Great Hall know that he is a liar and an impostor with no magical abilities; instead, it softly chuckles in his ear, “Well, of course. SLYTHERIN!”
Dan manages to stand up without falling and, barely registering cheers and applause, makes his way to the table near the wall decorated in silver and green. Phil happily waves at him from his own table and Dan can’t help but smile back. He all but falls on the bench and only then is able to breathe again.
“Well, the hardest part is behind us,” the boy next to him, probably also a first-year, winks at him. Dan can only nod, practically melting with relief. He really did it. He’s not going anywhere. He’s a real wizard. “I’m Chris Kendall,” the boy offers him a hand and Dan readily shakes it.
“Dan Howell.”
“Okay, Dan,” Chris says, while Professor McGonagall folds the parchment and takes the Sorting Hat out of the Great Hall, “you can start getting attached to me now because we’ll be seeing a hell of a lot of each other in the next seven years.”
***
Days at Hogwarts are fantastically unlike the days that Dan used to spend at his old school in Reading, where he was falling asleep during Maths, blankly staring out of the window during English, or counting the minutes until the bell rings at Biology. Their very first class here is Charms, and Professor Flitwick stands on a pile of books so his head is visible over the teacher’s table and with one flick of his wand makes all their books go flying in the air; Dan exchanges excited glances with Chris, feeling ready to tackle any amount of theory that’ll make him able to do things like that. They have double Potions with the Gryffindors and Dan sits next to a boy called Felix, whose cauldron explodes four minutes into the lesson because he used a Valerian root instead of a Mandrake one. Professor Slughorn fixes Felix’s cauldron with a simple spell and tells him that it’s okay and that only an absolute genius could’ve managed to do everything right on the first try. Once he moves on to another table, Felix mutters something about ‘those damn Swedish genes’ that forbid him from becoming an absolute genius, and Dan can’t stop laughing. During Herbology they are working with the Hufflepuffs, and Phil always happily waves at him from behind the bizarre plants and Dan, who has never seen anything more exotic than a cactus, waves back at him with just as much enthusiasm and nearly knocks over a pot of fertilizer. Even the History of Magic, taught by Professor Binns who must have the most boring voice in the world, seems interesting to Dan and he diligently scribbles down dates of endless goblin wars and witch revolutions, while Chris next to him sleeps the lessons away, using the crisp white parchment as a pillow.
His free time doesn’t leave him disappointed either. PJ teaches him to play wizard chess that, much to Dan’s surprise, are a lot different from Muggle chess; those are not as chatty and the knights are less likely to offer pawns in exchange for their own freedom. Dan, of course, loses the first five games without standing any chance and Chris patronisingly pats him on the shoulder and tells him never to gamble, because ‘that stinky thief PJ will rob you of your last Knut’. When Dan goes to the Owlery for the first time to send his parents a letter, Phil comes along and meets Zelda, who gently pecks his hand while Dan hurriedly finishes writing. On that day they also find out that Winston, who has long claimed Phil’s pockets as his permanent residence, is incredibly curious but also incredibly scared of owls, so Phil has to pet him for several minutes after one of the school owls angrily hoots at him. And Dan quickly loses count of how many times they run away from Filch in the dark corridors because Chris wants to take a walk through the castle at night time or hide from Peeves in abandoned classrooms because PJ just likes to throw pebbles at him and yell, “Guess who!”, or have to tug Phil away from the Forbidden Forest because he thinks he sees a centaur or a unicorn. Dan gets used to the castle and its inhabitants very quickly and is no longer terrified when the Nearly Headless Nick floats by or when one of the portraits in the corridors suddenly speaks to him. He finds out which stairs change direction at three in the afternoon and learns to distinguish them from those which do that at half-past ten at night; he also realises that he needs to accept Hagrid’s cookies only out of politeness and that the tiny Madam Pince looks absolutely terrifying with a feather duster. New discoveries make the time fly by, and he barely notices that the first three months at Hogwarts have already passed and that it’s Christmas time.
On Christmas Eve they go to bed early, and Chris loudly announces that he’s drunk the Sleeping Potion just so he can fall asleep faster and be the first one to open the presents, but Dan can hear him tossing and turning until well after midnight. In the morning he wakes up because someone is jumping on his bed.
“Mmm?” he murmurs sleepily, refusing to open his eyes.
“Rise and shine!” Chris’s cheerful voice rings through the quiet dormitory. Dan feels his covers being tugged off of him and opens his eyes to see grinning Chris; there’s only two of them left, everyone else went home for the holidays, so he can be as loud as he wants. “If you sleep through Christmas, the Grinch will come and eat you!”
“Christmas doesn’t work like that,” Dan grumbles but sits up on the bed and focuses his attention on the pile of presents next to him.
“How dare you imply that I know nothing about Christmas!” Chris’s voice rises in mock offence. “For that, I won’t even open your present! Maybe this will make you understand how much you should cherish our friendship and how much you’re ought to appreciate…” Chris unwraps the present and its contents effectively cut off his monologue. “Oh man, the Headless Hat! Thanks, mate!”
“Merry Christmas,” Dan shrugs, but Chris is not listening anymore. He puts on the hat, which really makes his head disappear, and yells, “I’m off to scare Slughorn!”
Wishing Professor Slughorn to remain calm and collected during these trying times but thinking that that probably will not happen, Dan moves on to his own presents. He opens a gift from Chris first, afraid that something sentient, or worse, explosive will jump out if he isn’t quick enough. However, he is greeted with a new set of wizarding chess with a note that says, ‘So that you can finally do something about PJ and his corrupt knights’. There’s been a few times when he lost so hopelessly that PJ was running in joyous circles around the Great Hall, and Dan grins; apparently, Chris was more affected by it than any of them thought.
PJ gives him with socks that change colour depending on their owner’s mood. Dan quickly puts them on, which makes the socks become bright red, and discovers that he’s feeling ‘Christmassy and carefree’, according to the attached mood paper. Dan rolls his eyes at the phrasing but makes a mental note to thank PJ for adding colour to his otherwise black sock collection.
The last gift he opens is from Phil and it looks slightly bigger than the others. Unwrapping the paper, Dan sees a book titled Tales of Beedle the Bard and can’t help a smile. A couple of weeks ago he mentioned Red Riding Hood and was met with three pairs of questioning eyes. It took him ten minutes to try and explain that it’s just a Muggle fairy tale and not a horror story about a red-headed demon, and Phil still shook his head in doubt and promised to one day introduce him to ‘normal fairy tales’. Dan places the book on the bed and returns to the present, which also includes a little bag of homemade Christmas tree-shaped cookies. The note next to it says,
I told Mum that you have never tried the wizard sweets and she wouldn’t leave me alone until I agreed to give you her cookies. She bakes them only for Christmas and they are very good, really.
Dan’s heart fills with warmth for Mrs Lester, a woman who has never seen him but still decided to introduce him to the Christmas in the wizarding world through cookies. He bites the top off of one of the trees; the cookies are amazing and he needs to send an owl to the Lesters with at least a hundred thank-yous.
There is one more envelope left on the floor and Dan picks it up to see that it’s a letter from his parents.
Dear Dan,
Thank you for the frequent letters, we are very happy to hear that you are doing great. It is very important to find new friends, but studying is even more important, so do remember not to have too much fun. We do not understand a lot about your subjects, but if you like them, that is all that matters.
We are spending the holidays at Aunt Angie’s, you surely remember your Aunt Angie? You and Adrian used to always play hide-and-seek in her cellar until you hit one of the barrels and had to get stitches on your knee. She asks about you all the time, it is very unusual for her to see Adrian alone, but she is very happy that you are doing good at school (we told her that you are away at a boarding school studying physics and maths; there is no reason to tell her about the magical stuff, she will not understand it anyway).
We spent a long time thinking what to get you for Christmas but then realised that nothing from our world could possibly surprise you. You are in such a different place from home that anything we send you will look absolutely foreign. Enjoy the wizarding world, dear, gain knowledge and experience and come back to us in summer, filled with memories and positive emotions.
We love you very, very much. Happy Christmas.
Mum, Dad, and Adrian.
P.S. Adrian sends his thanks for the chocolate frogs. Although half of them escaped, while he was looking at the cards, so he asks you to please send some more. We liked them too.
The letter leaves Dan with mixed feelings. He’s happy to hear from his family; he’s glad that they’ve figured out how the owl post works, that they liked the sweets that he was so scared to send, that they seem pleased with his academic success, but… Dan rereads the part about Aunt Angie and it stings him a little bit. Aren’t proud parents supposed not to hide from the world what their child is really doing? Dan’s parents always wanted him to have interest in the exact sciences and even told him about the career as a lawyer that awaits him, but then came the letter from Hogwarts and now Dan is studying physics and maths only in his parents’ dreams. And the letter makes Dan realise that these dreams haven’t gone anywhere.
It seems that Chris has no plans of returning from his Slughorn-scaring mission any time soon, so Dan folds the letter and starts changing to go to breakfast. He can’t stop thinking about how Mrs Lester’s cookies brought him more joy than the letter from his own parents.
When he comes down to the Great Hall, Phil is already sitting at the Hufflepuff table in a knitted yellow scarf, eating cereal. He enthusiastically waves Dan over; there are so little people around that no one would mind him not sitting at his own table.
“Do you like it?” Phil asks, poking at his giant scarf. “My Mum made it. She wants everyone to know that I got into the House of the cool guys.”
Dan looks at the scarf in the colours of Hufflepuff and can’t suppress a smile. Of course, only Phil would call it that.
“I really like it,” he says honestly. Phil still notices that something’s wrong and frowns.
“What about your parents?” he asks cautiously.
“They sent me a letter describing their holidays at Aunt Angie’s. Apparently, she’s very happy to hear about how good I am at studying physics and maths.” Dan tries to sound nonchalant but something in his voice must betray him because Phil puts his spoon down on the table.
“Phys-…” he starts, confused, but quickly realises that’s not the root of the problem. “Oh.”
“Yeah,” Dan agrees, getting himself a plate and poking at the bacon with no interest. “I think they like all these magic things much less than they’re trying to show.”
“They’ll get used to it,” Phil assures him. “They have to, they’re your parents. For example, I didn’t have any magical abilities until I was, like, ten, and everyone was sure that I’m a Squib – a person who was born in a magical family but can’t do magic,” he elaborates at Dan’s confused look. “Anyway, even though Martyn was teasing me, Mum always said that it’s not a big deal and she will be proud of me either way. And the same will happen with your parents.”
Phil’s words make the tight knot in his chest loosen until it disappears altogether. This isn’t the first time when Dan notices that Phil has a truly magical ability to calm people down, and this trick cannot be learned from any book.
“So I could’ve been the one studying that physic thing,” Phil adds, his voice a little unsure. Dan snorts, imagining Phil doing equations, and Phil immediately looks relieved.
“You’d make a horrible physicist,” Dan says confidently. Phil crosses his arms, ready to argue.
“And why is that?”
Dan tells him about equations with unknowns because he heard something about them in school, about the Mendeleev’s table which hangs in the office at his house, about the atomic bomb because he used to scare little Adrian with it, and about electricity, even though the only thing he knows about it is that it makes the lights turn on. Phil claims that he has never in his life been afraid of the unknown and calls the table of ‘thingies’ a child’s toy. However, the atomic bomb makes him less confident in his abilities and, in the end, he reluctantly admits that he probably wouldn’t have been able to master electricity. Dan calls him a scientific disappointment until the end of breakfast, while Phil just rolls his eyes and hides his giggles in his scarf.
“Hey Phil,” Dan says when they are leaving the Great Hall. “Thanks.” Phil just shrugs and smiles, as if saying, It’s nothing. “By the way, your Mum makes amazing cookies.”
Phil’s smile grows bigger and brighter, and Dan forgets all about the letter.