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Author: Bronte Story: Dudley's Redemption Rating: Everyone Setting: DH-interview Status: WIP Reviews: 8 Words: 18,441
He had chores around the house too. Daddy was still oddly calm, holing himself up in the Master sitting room and Mummy did the kitchen and most of the garden. Mostly, he had to take the rubbish out to the gate, do the heavy work in the garden, and feed the cats. Hestia and Dedalus each had a cat. He often found one or the both in his room after school, napping in a sunbeam. Flake liked to nap on this bed, and Polka had claimed one of his jumpers on the floor at the foot of his bed. Dudley washed his hands and left the bathroom. He had homework to do. He had got behind. At Smeltings, they had had designated prep time. He’d never had to plan any time for it and so had not left himself enough time to finish his assignments. He’d taken to sitting in his room with a book. He’d finished the Horrible Histories and now just pulled books off the shelf at random before reading the blurb on the back and either cracking the spine or putting it back. It hadn’t helped his schoolwork when he’d been caught on those Sharpe books. He’s watched the TV series with Sean Bean but there were so many stories. After the Sharpe episode, as he thought of it, Dudley figured he had to be a bit better about his homework. At Smeltings, they’d had prep from 7.30 each night after dinner. Now, each night after dinner, Dudley came upstairs and did his homework until Mummy brought up a mug of low-fat hot chocolate and a Rich Tea Biscuit or something she’d made during the day. Her baking had improved a lot since she had let Hestia do the beating. His work had been getting easier. The librarian, Mrs Forrester, had said it was because he had been doing all the prep and it is easier to build on when you know something already. She’d started to help him with his essays; Dudley kept forgetting to use his apostrophes correctly. Mrs Forrester had said he should draw up a plan on what he wanted to achieve that week. Hestia had brought him some chalk that he used on the blackboard, which he had found behind the desks. He had set up a corner of the room like an office. He had the two desks against each other and both pushed up against the wall with the blackboard blocking the view of the rest of the room from the desks. One desk was for his school work: notes for essays, the next book for his English class, the next assignments. The other desk had the stuff he liked: the books he’d picked out at the library. Dudley sat down at his school desk, looked at the blackboard, and pulled out an essay he was working on. He was having to do everything by hand since he hadn’t been able to bring his computer with him. He discovered he quite liked the feel of pencil on paper though. Hestia only had pencils and quills in the house so he had used pencils to begin with until he had stopped in town to buy some biros. Quills were messy and awkward and he kept spilling ink on himself. Pencils were tidier and he could fix his mistakes. He still used pen for his final draft though. Mummy was in rhapsodies about his studying. She’d only seen him in the holidays for years, and Smeltings didn’t give homework over the holidays. Not like Harry’s school. He’d always told Daddy that he had feet of essays to write. Dudley didn’t know what he meant by “feet”, but it sounded like a lot of work. Mummy kept saying how proud she was. Had she always gone on and on like that? It had never seemed so bad in the past, but he was used to being away during most of the year. Daddy was better; he seemed to be in his own happy world. He never yelled at anything anymore. He didn’t say anything about Dudley being a nancy-boy swot if he didn’t stop reading so much. Dudley didn’t do anything to hide it, either. But there was nothing else to do. He’d looked for that telly Hestia had said was in the playroom in storage. It had been covered by a dust sheet. It was a really old boxy thing that sat straight on the floor and was older than Dudley. It was so old you couldn’t sit any closer than six feet to it or you’d get radiation poisoning or square eyes or whatever that old myth was. Dedalus had levitated it downstairs to the living room. Dudley had managed to tune it in but only for three channels. Even when there was something decent to watch, it meant sitting downstairs with his parents and that would be weird even if Dad wasn’t acting so strangely. Dudley was finding he didn’t mind school, not the school parts of it anyway. He still didn’t like the mid-morning break, lunchtime wasn’t so bad if he stayed in the library, and that wasn’t so bad now that he was reading faster. He found he was reading more difficult books as well, since he had started reading in his lunch hours three months ago. Dudley had re-entered the sixth-form year. Hestia had said it was something to do with not drawing attention to him leaving and to have no link between his old school and his new. Changing the year would make it harder to find him as well. It meant that, in theory, he was repeating a year, but he was still finding it tough work in class. At Smeltings, no one cared if he didn’t say anything in class, but at the comp they made it part of the grade and called on him if he didn’t volunteer any information to the discussion. The first time the teacher had called on him he had umm-ed and ahh-ed his way to an “I don’t know”. After that, he had attempted to keep track of the conversation, but he hadn’t made any real progress until he had done the homework properly beforehand. Then he at least knew what was going on. It still taken weeks before he had voluntarily entered the discussion. School was a lot more interesting if he prepared the way the teachers asked. After English had worked out so well and become interesting, he had started doing a proper job for the rest of his classes. Except General Studies, but no one bothered to do anything for General Studies. It’s not like he had anything else to do at home, so he may as well prepare. Dudley looked over his notes for his English essay. They had been reading short stories, which he found easy as he could read it over before having to take notes. He didn’t understand most of the stuff they read in class they first time around. He had been working harder than ever before. The essay he was currently working on was to examine the motif of the story and suggest situations where the same point could be made. This one would be tricky. Dudley rushed through his breakfast (poached egg on toast), grabbed his lunch, and raced out the door. He’d slept in, which meant his mother had made his lunch without his input. At least she had stopped giving him salad only sandwiches but he still didn’t get his choice of flavours for his yoghurt or crisps. It was all he got now. He might get cake or scones with his hot chocolate in the evening but the Smeltings nurse still held sway with his mother when it came to his lunches. He made it to his first class with a minute to spare, collapsing into his seat. The morning went relatively quickly. At lunchtime, he made his way as usual to the library. He pulled out the book he had nearly finished, and flopped onto the waiting reading sofa. He finished it and looked at his watch; ten minutes to the first bell, fifteen to get to his next class; time enough to find a new book. He stopped to say hello to Sarah on the way. Since she had rescued him from the bullies, they had been on speaking terms, saying hi from time to time. He’d been in the playground a few times since then and managed to avoid them, but still spent time in the library. She spent a lot of time in the library too; she wanted to get into Oxbridge and was hoping for a scholarship. He didn’t talk to anyone much, since that would require telling them where he had come from, and he didn’t know how much he was allowed to say. He headed over to start looking at the new arrivals on the new book rack. There was a couple of textbooks and a few of the subscription magazines and a new Asterix. He grabbed that one, he didn’t need the pictures to make a book interesting to him anymore but he still liked Obelix and Dogmatix. Turning to leave for the checkout desk something caught his eye. There was a book on the shelf with a picture of a man in grey robes carrying a big stick, and sporting a very, very long grey beard and a pointy hat. It reminded Dudley of the wizard who had collected Harry last year and then brought in that weird little hairless man and made their glasses hit them on the head. Dudley picked it up: The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien. He turned it over; "the book of the century", it claimed, and “The English-speaking world is divided into those who have read The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and those who are going to read them” He turned it over again. It did look like that old guy who came for Harry. The bell rang and Dudley put the book back down and picked up Asterix and his school bag and turned to go get it checked out. He took two steps, then without really knowing why, turned again grabbed The Lord of the Rings and carried on to the check-out desk.
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