Alexandra Victoria Potter looked around her small bedroom, contemplating powerlessly the devastation that had been brought upon the few things she owned. Apparently, having escaped after the disaster of the zoo had been one of her brighter ideas. She might not have survived the beating Vernon Dursley would have given her. Better to go steal some food and different things around Little Whinging, and then come back when Vernon and the rest of the Dursley family were asleep and (hopefully) calmed. She had no wish to endure the belt beatings again.
To say Alexandra hated her uncle, aunt and cousin with passion would have been a gross understatement. She had been under their roof for ten years, and so far it had been ten miserable, bloody years, with what her trying to survive the trials of living with such loathsome beings seemed to imply. At five years old, her uncle had begun to leave her in a cupboard for uninterrupted weeks without any food, leaving her no choice: she had had to find the means to escape or die. Stealing from the purse of Vernon Dursley had been one of her first illegal actions. But as she was forced to withdraw only small sums not to attract the attention of her uncle and aunt, Alexandra had started stealing from the families of the children tormenting her in Little Whinging, before robbing some of their homes. It was poetic justice in her opinion. They were stealing her happiness. The raven-haired girl would steal their material possessions.
But the Dursleys had not stopped there. When she had been seven, her cousin Dudley had tried to drown her in a swimming pool. At nine, her uncle had given her such a beating it was a miracle she was even alive. In fact, on both occasions her memories of the aftermath were fuzzy and vague. But the deep look of loathing her relatives had sent her months after were proof the events had definitely happened.
When she had been younger, she had dreamed of some unknown relative coming and taking her away, but it had never happened. For some sad and unfair reason, the Dursleys were the only persons she had blood ties with, Aunt Petunia being the only sister of her mother. Sometimes, she wondered how her maternal grandparents had done such a bad job in educating their daughter.
Alexandra had never been treated as part of this family for as long as she remembered. In the first five years she had spent there, she had been more often called "freak" than her name. Before she managed to get them into trouble for Dudley's eighth birthday, she had been sleeping in a cupboard under the stairs. She was never in any photograph inside the house. Neither were her parents for that matter. She was constantly forced to do dozens of chores to deserve any food or right to use the bathroom. She had never received any presents from them. Everything she was given was Dudley's old things. The room she was in was a prime example of this: small, with an even smaller bed and an old armoire, it had been and was still used by Dudley to store all his toys and junk which were still unbroken but that her cousin wanted to keep for some reason or another. That Alexandra slept in said room was absolutely of no importance.
Given that today had been Dudley's birthday, she supposed it was not surprising to find some already broken toys. If she remembered right, Dudley had received thirty-nine presents today. Thirty-nine. Including a brand-new computer, a second television, a video-camera, a remote-control aeroplane, a racing bike, and a multitude of other things she thought Dudley would break at the earliest opportunity. Assuming he even used some of them once; she was particularly dubious concerning the matter of the racing bike, for example.
Not that her cousin's intelligence had ever impressed her. From the start of his scholarship at Saint Gregory's primary school, Dudley had never managed to beat her once in class, and she had decided long ago that it would never happen. Completely out of the question to lower her mark to her cousin's level (which was, if someone asked her opinion, dreadful). She had paid for it, of course. The first time she brought home a school report, she had been beaten to dare having better marks than the precious "Diddykins". As if something more intelligent than a pigeon could not do better than her fat cousin.
The only refuge she had at school was the library, where a bully like Dudley never set a foot in (or only under a teacher's order). It had been her only refuge, which had given her the opportunity to read dozens of books, including the Lord of the Rings by Tolkien. A world of elves, dwarves, humans and hobbits had become one of her best hobbies to escape this dreadful reality for an hour or two. Tolkien had become her favourite author, although she had also liked learning quotes from several politicians of the past to take courage from (and find a good retort to enrage Vernon). It was all she had left, after all.
Because in the rest of the school, Dudley and his friends Malcolm, Piers, Dennis and Gordon were quite content to terrorize the children who had the temerity to cross their paths. Headmistress Roemmelle was a friend of Uncle Vernon, and as a result, order was never quickly restored when the guilty party was Dudley and his band. This band of bullies had often wanted to use her as a punching bag; unfortunately for them and fortunately for her, she was in a much better physical condition than them, not passing her evenings in a couch eating hamburgers, chips and other junk food. She had also practised jogging twice a week which had (mostly) ended their attempts at their Alexandra-hunting games by the time she was ten years old. Though the Dursleys had not become nicer.