Harry Potter, to everyone’s bemusement and confusement, is Lulu’s trombone teacher’s actual name, which forces him to have to reply, whenever he meets someone new, “Sorry. No. Not Harry Potter, boy wizard. The other Harry Potter, trombone teacher.” He also, much too often, has to put up with all kinds of incredibly stupid jokes about spells and potions and wands and flying broomsticks. It makes me kind of wonder, since I am the person writing this story, if maybe I should have found him a different name. But though I’m the first to admit that this might have saved him a lot of trouble, sometimes a writer has to make tough choices.
By this time, Harry Potter had opened his door and invited Lulu and Ms. Solinsky to come inside and have a seat in the living room. “There’s something I need to take care of,” he told them, “so make yourselves at home. I’ll be ready for you in just a couple of minutes.”
Ms. Solinsky—her posture perfect; her mouth in a stern, straight line—sat down at one end of Harry Potter’s couch. Lulu—chin on the palms of her hands, and elbows on her knees—sat far down on the other end of the couch. A clock ticked loudly in the unfriendly silence.
All of a sudden, Ms. Solinsky leaped up off the couch. She was coughing and sneezing and gasping and wheezing! And coughing and sneezing and gasping and wheezing! Then coughing and sneezing and gasping and wheezing some more!
“Cats! There must be cats in this house!” she said in a croaky voice, rubbing her now bright-pink and watery eyes. And just as she spoke, Harry Potter returned, saying apologetically, “Sorry to keep you waiting, but I really had to feed my hungry cats.”
“To which,” Ms. Solinsky announced, dabbing a handkerchief to her eyes, “I’m sorry to say I am seriously allergic.”
“But,” Lulu asked, displaying (I’m sorry to say) a most unfortunate absence of sympathy, “weren’t you bragging just yesterday that—and I’m quoting directly— ‘I never catch anything?’ ”
“An allergy,” Ms. Solinsky said in the iciest of voices, “is something that you have, not something you catch.” She then explained that in order to keep her allergy from getting much, much worse, she would need to wait for Lulu outside the house.
“But RIGHT outside the house,” she told Harry Potter. “Ready to take charge of her the instant that her trombone lesson is done.”
“We’ll see who’s taking charge here,” Lulu said—but just to herself. And then, but just to herself, she chanted:
And then, but just to herself, she said, “And now I know what to do to get her going!”
