Manon wasn’t sure whether she felt relieved to be away from the wizarding world for the summer, or more anxious about it than she ever had. She could use a break from school, of course. These days she always could. More to the point, though, she was looking forward to having a bedroom to herself. She had never considered herself solitary in nature—solitary in circumstance, if at all. But this summer she was relishing the absence of her schoolmates. Just one or two in particular, perhaps, but also the stress that living with all the rest of them created.
However, Manon couldn’t set aside wizarding politics for the summer as easily as she could her social life. Keeping up with the news felt much easier at Beauxbatons. There she was keeping tabs on current events, but at home it was more like reading the plot of a television show—distant, somehow. That bothered her. Manon disliked the way that magic began to feel fake when she spent time among Muggles. It was very much a matter of life and death, and she preferred to think of it that way.
She untied the day’s newspaper from the delivery owl and tucked coins into its pouch in exchange. “Thank you,” she said before it flapped off into the dawn. Manon knew some Muggle-born families wouldn’t allow a daily owl service, but her parents didn’t mind them delivering the paper to their Muggle home as long as they arrived before daylight. Usually her mother was up to open the kitchen window. Manon, however, rarely was. Today was special. She flattened out the scroll next to her parents’ Muggle paper and glanced at the headlines. She’d read it later. At the moment she had to get ready to go and see Jazz.
Her father took the train with her to Paris, where he saw her off at the Ministère and she got a portkey across the English Channel. It would probably have been just as easy to go through the Channel Tunnel, he told her.
Technically, maybe. But Manon wanted to come out among wizards on the other side. It made her feel somehow safer. Though it shouldn’t have: from the British Ministry she took, according to Jazz’s instruction in her last letter, a short, harrowing trip on a purple double-decker with little regard for traffic safety. And then she arrived outside a dirty-looking pub. The English, it seemed, hid their magical enclaves deliberately in the ugliest places.
Wobbly-legged, Manon was led through and out the back into Diagon Alley. She still had the French paper rolled up and sticking out of her bag. She’d been intending to finish it on the way, but the bus hadn’t allowed for relaxation and there was far too much to look at here. Just past the brick arch she paused in front of a robe shop’s colorful display. Next door she bent down to read the titles on a shelf of magical cookbooks, and across the alley from that she gazed at a window of crystal balls until she was hugged from behind very quickly and with great force.
“Hello!” gasped Manon. She smiled broadly as Jazz released her, and behind it hurriedly tried to come up with something to say that she
could say. She’d practiced her English for this but still didn’t feel entirely confident. “The Knight Bus, Jazz!” she ended up saying, making a pitiful face at the other girl. “Was that trying to be funny?”
It occurred to her suddenly that Jazz had only ever heard her speak in magically-translated English. Manon realized now that she didn’t have any idea how the translation magic at Academy Anansi had actually
worked. Had they heard different voices altogether? Had it known how she would sound if she’d grown up a native English speaker? Manon hoped her accented English didn’t sound stupid without it.
@Jasmine Williams 
