All my life, people have destined me for greatness. “Young Carter is quite precocious! Following in his father’s footsteps, eh?” He’s driven, dedicated, intelligent; and it’s not necessarily a bad thing if I did...but it really doesn’t matter. It isn’t as if he notices much about me anyway. He notices those specific qualities...when I am the valedictorian of my class or that time I had to speak at a conference and represent my school. But other times? Times I volunteered to help those in need? Times I scored the winning goal at my football match? No. During those times it was as if he didn’t exist just as my mother doesn’t exist to us. She got tired of being ignored by him when I was four and left to start another life with another man...a life that apparently couldn’t be dragged down by a child because when she left him she left me too.

So he’s all I have and despite the high demands I try to make him happy. I try to get good marks in school and excel in the realm of intelligence but it isn’t easy when he’s a top professor at The University of Oxford, one of the world’s leading universities.

He was quite proud when his bright eyed son got a letter to Hogwarts. Hogwarts. It’s a school for magic which I barely know anything about. He says mum was of magic and she didn’t share that part of her life with him so he knows nothing but it does seem to intrigue him. Sometimes I wonder if the thought of a residency school isn’t actually what appeals to him, finally getting me off his back after eleven years.

I don’t quite understand it...how this magic business works. I would have said I didn’t believe it even but a couple years back I was with my father at a conference and all his research, his drafts, his papers...everything, blew from his suitcase and into a fountain nearby on a very windy day. He got so angry and as I sat there wondering if he would ever get so upset at anything that concerned me, all of the papers lifted at once, dried themselves off as if the water evaporated from them or perhaps never even touched them, and filed nicely back into his briefcase. He was proud of me then, too.

So...that’s it. It is sort of ironic that escaping my father’s intellectual demands is through my acceptance at this school. I’ll now be there hour after hour, day after day. I don’t know what to make of it yet. We shall see.