Better be Gryffindor, says the Hat, and we all know how this goes.
But we don’t, not really. We don’t know how Harry, knobby-kneed and sharp-eyed and hungry, really wound up in Gryffindor, which was, after all, the Sorting Hat’s second choice.
Sit down.
Let me tell you a story.
Harry grows up running, always running. Do this, do that says Aunt Petunia. C’mere, freak! says Dudley with a gang at his heels. Hold still says Uncle Vernon with a belt in his hand and Harry disobeys. Harry grows up stealing food and school supplies. Harry grows up the outcast freak cousin on an otherwise perfectly normal street. Harry, when told he’s a wizard, and unlike Tom Riddle, can’t believe it’s true.
Me? Special? No, there must be a mistake.
But he is. Special. He is.
He buys a magic wand, and books and a trunk and an owl and a cauldron. He goes back to 4 Privet Drive with things out of stories and he thinks I never belonged here. He thinks maybe, in this world, I won’t be the freak.
On the train he sees Dudley Dursley in a blond boy’s petty cruelty. Harry rejects Draco Malfoy more out of dislike for him than loyalty to Ron, who, at that point, has done nothing more than not be rude, and Harry’s had people act like his friends before, right up until something (Dudley) scared them off.
Harry wants friends who won’t be scared off.
He goes under the Hat with all this cluttered up in his head, and it takes a peek, and it sees how hungry he is, how eager to make something of himself, how he wants to be known as just Harry instead of the famous icon he never knew he was, and it thinks oh, Salazar would like this one—but Harry’s already met one Slytherin too many.
(A Slytherin, not coincidentally, whose surname comes before P in the alphabet.)
Harry looks instead at the table of gleaming red and gold. Harry wants to be liked. Harry wants to know what it is to be known for doing something good for once in his life.
When he thinks not Slytherin, what he really means is somewhere I’ll be liked.
What he means is he wants to stop running.
Better be GRYFFINDOR!
It doesn’t take long for Harry to learn he doesn’t fit with the lions, not really, not yet. These children are brash and loud and attention-seeking in a way he doesn’t know how to mimic. They stand up again and again, in defense of themselves and their friends, in challenge, in play, fearless, and he admires, but he also wonders how they can open themselves up so easily to punishment.
Harry has never been rewarded for standing up. Harry has survived by ducking, dodging, going around.
They aren’t perfect. He sees Dudley Dursley among the lions too, in Lavender and Parvati’s catty exclusion of Hermione, in Ron’s casual mockery of Neville, in three older Gryffindors cornering a tiny green-tied girl to mockingly dump the contents of her bookbag on the floor. Just a laugh, they say, a prank, and Harry thinks this is what I wanted.
Is this what he wanted?
He wanted to be good. Popular and confident like Lee Jordan, Angelina Johnson, Alicia Spinnet. Brave like going after girls crying in the loo. Fierce and principled like walking alone through the fire certain he’s the only one there to stop something awful from happening. It makes his stomach turn liquid, stepping forward, facing Voldemort, but this is what he wanted, a House that would reward him for standing up.
Then, we know: a new year comes. Now things are different; now there’s a monster in the halls, hunting, something so fearsome the professors can neither find nor fight it. Harry sees the fear behind the Slytherins’ insults and bravado. There is, maybe, bravery in admitting when you can’t win.
Snape throws Lockhart the length of a stage. Malfoy conjures a snake and Harry hesitates a crucial second instead of throwing himself forward to stop it. The snake bites Justin Finch-Fletchley, who spends a night but no more in the hospital wing, and it’s Malfoy who earns censure and suspicion instead of Harry.
Later, Harry asks about people talking to snakes, although he doesn’t say he heard it screaming its pain and fear as it attacked the closest target. He’s told about Parselmouths and Dark wizards and Voldemort and evil, and he thinks this is one time when maybe it’s better not to stand up. Not yet.
If he thinks, quietly miserable, that he hesitated before he knew he might’ve accidentally showed this skill to the whole school, then he doesn’t tell anyone. He turns the memory over and over until it’s polished like a river stone. Until he decides he can live with his hesitation because he does not, actually, want to die.
He has the heart of a lion and the mind of a snake. Even at twelve he’s beginning to appreciate cool calculation as a valuable counterpoint to the courage he’s found in his own breast.
We know how the next bit goes, too—Harry finding a waterlogged diary on the floor. Harry noticing the spilled ink is gone (which, may I just say, is actually rather observant for his age). Harry setting quill to page (though the first thing I’d have done was write in it, before casting any spells).
And we know the diary writes back.
But the lion-hearted snake-eyed boy knows better than to trust that.
Hello, he says, what are you?
A memory, writes what’s left of Tom Riddle, and, I can show you.
And Harry says no thanks.
What he means is: not yet.
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