Because her sister and her good-for-nothing husband were as unDursleyish as it was possible to be.
"What they're saying," she pressed on, "is that last night Voldemort turned up in Godric's Hollow. He went to find the Potters. The rumour is that Lily and James Potter are - are - that they're - dead."
"Lily and James ... I can't believe it ... I didn't want to believe it ... Oh, Albus ..."
"But I c-c-can't stand it - Lily an' James dead - an' poor little Harry off ter live with Muggles -"
"an' a thumpin' good'un, I'd say, once yeh've been trained up a bit. With a mum an' dad like yours, what else would yeh be?"
"Knew! Of course we knew! How could you not be, my dratted sister being what she was? Oh, she got a letter just like that and disappeared off to that - that school - and came home every holiday with her pockets full of frog-spawn, turing teacups into rats. I was the only one who saw her for what she was - a freak! But for my mother and father, oh no, it was Lily this and Lily that, they were proud of having a witch in the family!"
"Then she met that Potter at school and they left and got married and had you, and of course I knew you be just the same, just strange, just as - as - abnormal - and then, if you please, she went and got herself blown up and we got landed with you!"
"How could a car crash kill Lily an' James Potter> It's an outrage! A scandal!"
"Now, yer mum an' dad were as good a witch an' wizard as I ever knew. Head boy an' girl at Hogwarts in their day! Suppose the myst'ry is why You-Know-Who never tried to get 'em on his side before ... probably new they were too close ter Dumbledore ter want anythin' ter do with the Darkside.
"Maybe he thought he could persuade 'em ... maybe he just wanted 'em outta the way. All anyone knows is, he turned up in the village where you was all living, on Hallowe'en ten years ago. You was just a years old. He came ter yer hous an' - an' -"
Hagrid suddenly pulled out a very dirty, spotted hankerchief and blew his nose with a sound like a foghorn.
"Sorry," he said. "But it's that sad - knew yer mum an' dad, an' niver people yeh couldn't find - anyway -"
"- and as for all this about your parents, well, they were weirdos, no denying it, and the world's better off without them in my opinion - asked for all they got, getting mixed up with these wizarding types - just what I expected, always knew they'd come to a sticky end -"
"D'yeh think yer parents didn't leave yeh anything?"
"They were a witch and wizard, if that's what you mean."
"Yer not from a Muggle family. If he'd known who yeh were - he's grown up knowin' yer name if his parents are wizardin' folk - you saw 'em in the Leaky Cauldron. Anyway, what does he know about it, some o' the best I ever saw were the only ones with magic in 'em in a long line of Muggles - look at yet mum! Look what she had fer a sister!"
"You have your mother's eyes. It seems only yesterday she was in here herself, buying her first wand. Ten and a quarter inches long, swishy, made of willow. Nice for charm work."
She was a very pretty woman. She had dark red hair and her eyes - her eyes are just like mine, Harry thought, edging a little closer to the glass. Bright green - exactly the same shape, but then he noticed that she was crying; smiling, but crying at the same time.
They just looked at him, smiling. And slowly, Harry looked into the faces of the other people in the mirror and saw other pairs of green eyes like his, other noses like his, even a little old man who looked as though he had Harry's knobbly knees - Harry was looking at his family for the first time in his life.
The Potters smiled and waved at Harry and he stared hungrily back at them, his hands pressed flat against the glass as though he was hoping to fall right through it and reach them. He had a powerful kind of ache inside him, half joy, half terrible sadness.
There they were. His mother and father beamed at the sight of him.
It seemed to be a handsome, leather covered book. Harry open it curiously. It was full of wizard photographs. Smiling and waving at him from every page were his mother and father.
"Sent owls off ter all yer parents' old school friends, askin' fer photos ... Knew yeh didn' have any ... D'yeh like it?"
And then, from far away, he heard screaming, terrible, terrified, pleading screams.
And then he heard it again ... someone was screaming, screaming inside his head ... a woman ...
"Not Harry, not Harry, please not Harry!"
"Stand aside, you silly girl ... stand aside, now ..."
"Not Harry, please no, take me, kill me instead-"
Numbing, swirling white mist was filling Harry's brain ... What was he doing? Why was he flying? He needed to help her ... she was going to die ... she was going to be murdered ...
He was falling, falling through the icy misty.
"Not Harry! Please ... have mercy ... have mercy ..."
A shrill voice was laughing, the woman was screaming, and Harry knew no more.
For Harry knew who that screaming voice belonged to now. He had heard her words, heard them over and over again during the night hours in the hospital wing while he lay awake, staring at the strips of moonlight on the ceiling. When the Dementors approached him, he heard the last moments of his mother's life, her attempts to protect him, Harry, from Lord Voldemort, and Voldemort's laughter before he murdered her ... Harry dozed fitfully, sinking into dreams full of clammy, rotted hands and petrified pleading, jerking awake only to dwell on the sound of him mother's voice.
"One of them tipped him off, he alerted James and Lily at once. He advised them to go into hiding."
"As long as the Secret-Keeper refused to speak, You-Know-Who could search the village where Lily and James were staying for years and never find them, not even if he had his nose pressed against their sitting-room window!"
"It was me what rescued Harry from Lily an' James' house after they was killed! Jus' got him outta the ruins, poor little thing, with a great slash accross his forehead, an' his parents dead ... an' Sirius Black turns up, on that flyin' moterbike he used ter ride. Never occured to me what he was doin' there. I didn' know he'd bin Lily an' James' Secret-Keeper. Thought he'd jus' heard the news o' You-Know-Who's attack an' come ter see what he could do. White an' shakin', he was. An' yeh know what I did? I COMFORTED THE MURDERIN' TRAITOR!"
"How was I ter know he wasn' upset abou' Lily an' James?"
"They say he was sobbing. "Lily and James, Sirius! How could you!"
He pushed his books aside and quickly found what he was looking for - the leather-bound photo album Hagrid had given him two years ago, which was full of wizard pictures of his mother and father. He sat down on his bed, drew the hangings around him, and started turning the pages, searching, until ...
He stopped on a picture of his parents' wedding day. There was his father waving up at him, beaming, the untidy black hair Harry had inherited standing up in all directions. There was his mother, alight with happiness, arm in arm with his Dad.
But the dementors don't affect him, Harry thought, staring into the handsome, luaghing face. He doesn't have to hear my Mum screaming if they get too close -
"I can hear my mum screaming and pleading with Voldemort. And if you'd heard your mum screaming like that, just about to be killed, you wouldn't forget it in a hurry. And if you found out someone who was supposed to be a friend of hers betrayed her and sent Voldemort after her -"
"Your mum and dad wouldn't want you to get hurt, would they? They'd never want you to go looking for Black!"
"I'll never know what they'd have wanted because, thanks to Black, I've never spoken to them," said Harry shortly.
and his mother's voice was louder than ever, echoing inside his head - "Not Harry! Not Harry! Please - I'll do anything -"
"Lily, take Harry and go! It's Him! Go! Run! I'll hold him off -"
Terrible though it was to hear his parents' last moments replayed inside his head, these were the only times Harry had heard their voices since he was a very small child. But he'd never be able to produce a proper Patronus if he half-wanted to hear his parents again ...
"Your parents gave their lives to keep you alive, Harry. A poor way to repay them - gambling their sacrifice for a bag of magic tricks."
"You never heard her, did you? My mum ... trying to stop Voldemort killing me ... and you did that ... you did it ..."
"Harry ... I as good as killed them," he croaked. "I persuaded Lily and James to change to Peter at the last moment, persuaded them to use him as Secret-Heeper instead of me ... I'm to blame, I know it ... the night they died, I'd arranged to check on Peter, make sure he was still safe, but when I arrived at his hiding place, he'd gone. Yet there was no sign on a struggle. It didn't feel right. I was scared. I set out for your parents' house straight away. And when I saw their house, destroyed, and their bodies - I realised what Peter must have done. What I'd done."
Lily and James only made you Secret-Keeper because I suggested it."
"Believe me," croaked Black. "Believe me. I never betrayed James and Lily. I would have died before I betrayed them."
... his mother screaming in his ears ... she was going to be the last thing he ever heard -
"Your mother's coming ..." he said quietly. "She wants to see you ... it will be all right ... hold on ..."
And she came ... first her head, then her body ... a young woman with long hair, the smoky, shadowy form of Lily Potter blossomed from the end of Voldemort's wand, fell to the ground, and straightened like her husband. She walked close to Harry, looking down at him, and spoke in the same distant, echoing voice as the others, but quietly, so that Voldemort, his face now livid with fear as his victims prowled around him, could not hear ...
"When the connection is broken, we will linger for only moments ... but we will give you time ... you must get to the Portkey, it will return you to Hogwarts ... do you understand, Harry?"
"Original Order of the Phoenix," growled Moody. ... Harry's heart turned over. His mother and father were beeming up at him, sitting on either eide of a small, watery-eyed man whom Harry recognised as once as Wormtail, the one who hat betrayed his parents' whereabouts to Voldemort and so helped to bring about their deaths.
Harry stared at Wormtail for a moment, then back at James, who was now doodling on a bit of scrap parchment. He had drawn a Snitch and was now tracing the letters 'L.E.'. What did they stand for?
Harry noticed that his father had a habit of rumpling up his hair as though to keep it from getting too tidy, and he also kept looking over at the girls by the water's edge.
"Leave him ALONE!"
James and Sirius looked round. James's free hand immediately jumped to his hair.
It was one of the girls from the lake edge. She had thick, dark red hair that fell to her shoulders, and startlingly green almond-shaped eyes - Harry's eyes.
Harry's mother.
"All right, Evans?" said James, and the tone of his voice was suddenly pleasant, deeper, more mature.
"Leave him alone," Lily repeated. She was looking at James with every sign of great dislike. "What's he done to you?"
"Well," said James, appearing to deliberate the point, "it's more the fact that he exists, if you know what I mean ..."
Many of the surrounding students laughed, Sirius and Wormtail included, but Lupin, still apparently intent on his book, didn't, and nor did Lily.
"You think you're funny," she said coldly. "But you're just an arrogant, bulling toerag, Potter. Leave him alone."
"I will if you go out with me, Evans," said James quickly. "Go on ... go out with me and I'll never lay a wand on old Snivelly again."
Behind him, the Imprediment Jinx was wearing off. Snape was beginning to inch towards his fallen wand, spitting out soapsuds as he crawled.
"I wouldn't go out with you if it was achoice between you and the giant squid," said Lily.
"Bad luck, Prongs," said Sirius briskly, and turned back to Snape. "OI!"
But too late; Snape had directed his wand straight at James; there was a flash of light and a gash appeared on the side of James's face, spattering his robes with blood. James whirled about: a second flash of light later, Snape was hanging upside-down in the air, his robes falling over his head to reveal skinny, pallid legs and a pair of greying underpants.
Many people in the small crowd cheered; Sirius, James and Wormtail roared with laughter.
Lily, whose furious expression had twitched for an instant as though she was going to smile, said, "Let him down!"
"Certainly," said James and he jerked his wand upwards; Snape fell into a crumpled heap on the ground. Disentangling himself from his robes he got quickly to his feet, wand up, but Sirius said, "Petrificus Totalus!" and Snape keeled over again, rigid as a board.
"LEAVE HIM ALONE!" Lily shouted. She had her own wand out. James and Sirius eyed it warily.
"A, Evans, don't make me hex you," said James earnestly.
"Take the curse off him, then!"
James sighed deeply, then turned to Snape and muttered the counter-curse.
"There you go," he said, as Snape struggled to his feet. "You're lucky Evans was here, Snivellus -"
"I don't need help from filthy little Mudbloods like her!"
Lily Blinked.
"Fine," she said coolly. "I won't bother in future. And I'd wash those pants if I were you, Snivellus."
"Apologise to Evans!" James roared at Snape, his wand pointed threateningly at him.
"I don't want you to make him apologise," Lily shouted. "You're as bad as he is."
"What?" yelped James. "I'd NEVER call you a - you-know-what!"
"Messing up your hair because you think it looks cool to look like you've just got off your broomstick, showing off with that stupid Snitch, walking down corridors and hexing anyone who annoys you just because you can - I'm surprised your broomstick can get off the ground with that fat head on it. You make me SICK."
She turned on her heel and hurried away.
"Evans!" James shouted after her. "Hey, EVANS!"
But she didn't look back.
Harry kept reminding himself that Lily had intervened; his mother had been decent. Yet, the memory of the look on her face as she had shouted at James disturbed him quite as much as anything else; she had clearly loathed James, and Harry simply could not understand how they could've ended up married. Once or twice he even wondered if James had forced her into it...
"And," said Harry doggedly, determined to say everything that was on his mind now he was here, "he kept looking over at the girls by the lake, hoping they were watching him!"
"Oh, well, he always made a fool of himself whenever Lily was around," said Sirius, shrugging, "he couldn't stop showing off whenever he got near her."
"How come she married him?" Harry asked miserably. "She hated him!"
"Nah, she didn't," said Sirius.
"She started going out with him in seventh year," said Lupin.
"Once James had deflated his head a bit," said Sirius.
"And stopped hexing people just for the fun of it," said Lupin.
"Even Snape?" said Harry.
"Well," said Lupin slowly, "Snape was a special case. I mean, he never lost an opportunity to curse James so you couldn't really expect James to take that lying down, could you?"
"And my mum was OK with that?"
"She didn't know too much about it, to tell you the truth," said Sirius. "I mean, James didn't take Snape on dates with her and jinx him in front of her, did he?"
"It meant," said Dumbledore, "that the person who has the only chance of conquering Lord Voldemort for good was born at the end of July, nearly sixteen years ago. This boy would be born to parents who had already defied Voldemort three times."