Title: Hermione’s Secret

Author: Venus725

Summary: Hermione, now fifteen, is struggling with the way she looks.  Over the summer her father glances at her eating and say she eats too much junk food.  He really only means it in a dentistry, too much candy way, but Hermione starts to feel fat.  When she gets to Hogwarts, her grades start slipping, she becomes stressed, and she is always bitter.  Who else can help her but Harry, and her longtime crush, Ron?  Or can they get to her at all as she suffers through bulimia? 

Genre: Drama/Action/Adventure

Rating: PG-13 for adult situations and adult language

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, though often wish I did, for I would be a very good author such as the real owner and literary genius in my opinion, Miss Joanne Kathleen Rowling.  But all who may be reading surely agree with me.

Note: Yes, it is a short first chapter.  I am sorry.  This is a different (or at least I’ve never seen it before) idea.  Hope you like it, and please review!

“I didn’t know you could read,” Draco Malfoy, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the film

Chapter 1

Sweet

          Hermione Granger, one very fine young lady indeed, stared into her mirror, looking at her waist.  Was it particularly larger in anyway at all?  This odd behavior, readers, is most unfortunate.  You see, it was a few days before Miss Granger returned to her boarding school, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for her fifth term, but to fully understand this story, we must backtrack and go back to two days ago. 

          Two days ago, Hermione and her mother and father, Muggle dentists, were vacationing in Italy.  That night they were coming back home, and they were enjoying a delightful lunch, that included a large dish of Pamadori Secci, a delectable pasta with sun-dried tomatoes and chicken, and sweet Gelati for dessert.  The pasta, which was delicious indeed, filled up her two parents, Thomas and Emma.  They certainly enjoyed it.  But their daughter, who was curious about the taste of Gelati, only ate a minuscule amount of the pasta (which was rather good, of course) so she would have room for the treat.

          After the waiter brought the chocolate dessert out, Hermione helped herself to a bit of the ice cream, as it was the first invented ice cream (Those Italians, what good chefs).  It was certainly scrumptious, but as her father watched her eat as he had a hand placed on his belly, full, he said four words that would change his daughter’s view of herself.

“You eat too much,” he had said.  At first, she ignored him, too happy with the Gelati.  But when they traveled back to London, England, where they lived, aboard plane, and stopped outside a café for midnight snack because she was hungry again, she began to see something that her father had not meant at all.  Hermione began to see herself as an overweight person, which was certainly not. 

As we go back to the present time, I now warn you that this will not be a pleasant ride.  Far from pleasant.  Do hang on, will you?

          Hermione put her hands around her waist, feeling her now feminine curves that she had not had when she had started out at Hogwarts.  Instead of worrying about her friend Harry Potter, like she had during most of the summer, her mind was set on something else, something that right now, was dangerous yet superficial.  So this was why no boy had ever liked her…well, except for Viktor…yet he, who she had visited over the summer for a few days, had seen her last year, while she still was skinny and almost bodiless, in a sense of hips and buttocks.  Now she had those things.  She had grown quite a bit over the summer, actually.  She would bet that she was as tall as Harry now, although not as tall as Ron, who was long and gangly.  He was also her longtime crush, but no one knew that except for herself and that little voice inside her that told her to go with her instincts. 

          But all thoughts in her head right now were negative.  Now Ron would never notice her…because she was fat.

Was there any known spell that would get rid of all of the excess pudge?  She didn’t think there was.  She could not bear the thought of being seen as fat, especially since it meant…no chance…still alone.  She bit her lip and sucked in her stomach.  It helped a little, but she needed to breathe still, and this certainly wouldn’t help her.  Maybe she could get a corset…but then those barely let you breathe either, and women from the 1800’s suffered short lives from them, because they cut off circulation.  And then a thought of brilliance struck her like all the ones she had did.  Right in the face.  She would eat less.  She wouldn’t be like those girls on Muggle television, who starved themselves, but she would just go on a diet, that’s all, eat less sweets, that was it.  But unfortunately, she was very wrong.

          “Hermione, dear, aren’t you going to eat breakfast?”  Her mother looked at her curiously after she refused the plate of eggs and bacon.

“No thanks, Mom, I’m not that hungry.”

“Okay,” she said, setting the plate on the counter, “Then you’d better help your father with your trunk.”

“Ok.”  It was the morning she was going back to Hogwarts, and they were about to head to King’s Cross.  She ran outside onto the porch, which was in front of her Victorian style home. 

She sighed.  There was nothing to worry about.  Her brilliant idea would work, Ron would notice her, and she’d still have top grades and become the Headmistress of Hogwarts one day.  Life was still good.

Or so she thought.