Last Row, Single Desk
By Dayse

The small, dark-haired boy who sat in the single desk at the back of the class often went unnoticed. Slumped over an open textbook, his thoroughly chewed pencil tapping against the white page, he was innocuous and forgettable; a pretty blur of extraordinary boy to people who bothered to look closely, pasty little runt to those who didn’t. It was fine, he preferred it that way, and a lifetime of Dursley-induced training had taught him that attention was never a good thing.

He liked being small and quiet, unnoticed and tucked away in a corner or a cupboard where he could be relatively alone. Lonely.

“Mr. Potter.”

He looked up with a grimace, eyeglasses catching briefly in the stream of light that spilled in from the window. The teacher was looking at him expectantly, not unkindly, but somewhat impatient nonetheless. Maybe he had been drifting again, daydreaming. It was easy to do such things when you were so … invisible.

“Did you do the homework?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then please come up to the board and complete question four.”

Sighing, Harry pushed himself away from his desk and started the long journey up to the front, stepping over feet that shot out automatically to trip him, dodging grubby hands that took surreptitious swipes at his arms and sides when the teacher was turned away.

The boy thought with some viciousness, Dudley, the little sod with his mean, mean eyes and fists, intimidating a whole school away from him.

He reached the front without incident, and accepted the stub of chalk that was handed to him, staring at the equation blankly for a moment before he started to write.

There were snickers behind his back, audible gawking and hissed insults about dead parents and ugly scars. He stiffened and hurriedly finished what he was doing, wanting to be done, wanting to be back in his seat at the back of the class where he could once again fade into the background and away from the danger of all this cruel attention.

Relieved when he finished, when the last number was scrawled with messy abandon, he turned to go, spinning just in time to see it flying towards his face, something round and hard and painful and bloody sodding Hell what had he ever done to ANYONE …

Then everything seemed to stop, to freeze like the family tape player when Dudley hit pause to use the lavatory or get a snack, and he thought about that now, a tape stopping somewhere, the spools of black film freezing mid-frame.

It was a baseball, he realized, hovering just inches before his face, suspended in the air as if hung like a Christmas bobble on some invisible branch.

The class was holding its collective breath, staring; behind him, the teacher’s limp fingers dropped the chalk to the floor and it chattered.

The small sound was enough to break the moment, and the tape moved forward again, time unfroze and the baseball hit the floor and rolled lazily under a desk.

Harry Potter quietly took his seat.