–the familiarity of the first sip of coffee in the morning and the hum of caffeine in your veins; delicately manicured hands stained with ink; the cacophony of infamy and adoration.
WE GIVE AND TAKE A LITTLE MORE
i’M GONNA MAKE YOU F A L L
CHILDHOOD & HOGWARTS
It had all begun with a diary. Though perhaps ‘journal’ was a more fitting term, as not a single entry began “Dear Diary’. Besides, Rita always thought the word diary sounded so frivolous, but a journal? A journal had purpose.
At first, it had just been filled with her feelings and thoughts — “Aoife treats me differently because I’m not her real kid and she’s still jealous of the fact that my mum exists” or “Everyone thinks I cut Penny Stark’s hair, but all I did was say it looked pretty, I never even touched a pair of scissors” or “If I’m forced to go to one more rugby match to watch my brothers play, I’m going to scream at the top of my lungs”. The writings had been the worries, confusions, frustrations and petty jealousies of a nine-year-old who didn’t match the rest of their family. Her older brothers had their mother’s stature: stocky and strong and athletic (their Uncle Finlay had played rugby for Ireland in his youth and they simply had to follow in his footsteps). But she had acquired her mother’s stature, and therefore was tall, willowy, and hopelessly uncoordinated. And stuck out like a sore thumb.
The journal had been the first dictation of something a bit… odd about the youngest of the Skeeters; Hairgate had only been the first of the strange incidents that just happened to follow Rita. There had been the time Tina Belfry had been trying to read her beloved journal and the cage of hissing cockroaches just so happened to be unlocked and the insects fell all over the nosy girl; or the way Lillian Hightower’s lip gloss had just appeared in her book bag at the end of the day, but really, she didn’t take it, honest.
But it evolved into observations of those around her, particularly her step-mother and half-brothers, or on occasion, her father – “I saw that dad still keeps a box of old postcards, they’re all from mum. When Aoife saw me looking at them yesterday, she burned them. I don’t think dad’s going to be too thrilled, or, more likely, he’ll just ignore it altogether. ” and “I think Ryan has been sneaking out, I keep seeing headlights in the middle of the night, and he always seems to break something on his way back in”.
She rarely wrote about her mother because she rarely saw her mother, who, until Rita received her Hogwarts letter, was believed to be a wildlife photographer and was always in one place or another. However, once that sealed letter in shimmering green ink arrived in the Skeeters’ postbox, the jig was up.
It wasn’t a Hogwarts professor that told her of magic, of Hogwarts, of being a witch, but her mother. She had been traveling the world for years, and her brief tryst in England had led to Rita being born (and very confusing relationship with Jack Skeeter who, then, had been separated from his wife). Alana Fletcher, whose studies of magizoology (that was a thing, apparently!) led her to a permanent residence near Inverness and a certain famed loch, had told her everything.
Rita spent the summer after she’d turned eleven with just her mother in Scotland; no bothersome brothers, no skulking step-mother, no foolish father, but just a magical mother, who’d take Rita with her on her travels, and who read over her very precise and not at all childish journalistic observations as if they meant something. From then on, summers always seemed to be spent in Scotland, milling about by the lake and hoping to get a glimpse of the famed monster.
Hogwarts snuck up on her with astounding stealth, as the magical bubble of her mother was suddenly popped on September first. A quick bout of a potion her mother had concocted, with plenty to last her the term, as well as a healthy bit of transfiguration, and she was ready for that scarlet steam-engine (the irony was doing side-along apparition, which made Rita’s stomach lurch, to London just to take a train back to Scotland).
The sorting ceremony, at least for her, was quick and painless. The Sorting Hat had barely touched her head, growled “The ambitionnnnnn” and promptly sorted her into Slytherin in the blink of an eye.
Many people that Rita encountered, at least in Slytherin, wanted power or status, and she, quite honestly, couldn’t blame them. But, what Rita wanted more than anything was a voice. Perhaps some would have called her selfish, that she didn’t particularly want to lament the woes of house-elves, but instead, make sure everyone knew that the Gryffindor prefect who’d used a trip jinx on her in the corridors just because was really failing Charms and she thought he should be put on probation, or that the three Ravenclaw chasers were in an exhaustingly complicated love triangle and that was why Ravenclaw was losing the Quidditch cup.
While she wasn’t meek by anyone’s standards, at least not by the time she’d gotten to be in fourth year and was confident in her abilities and knew her self-worth, she found that a more worthy way of revenge, a more entertaining and fun way to keep herself occupied was the spreading of secrets. She would never have gone so far as to call it gossip; gossip was lowbrow, simplistic, trivial, underwhelming, and altogether false. Rita dealt with nothing less than cold, hard facts (with a bit of embellishment and flair here and there).
Rita Skeeter was not a stellar student. She found Herbology and History of Magic exhausting; truly, the only classes she extended any effort towards were Charms (a Disillusionment Charm tended to allow her to overhear many a private conversation), Transfiguration (the idea being able to transform other things and other people into interesting objects excited her) and Potions (a necessity in the personal variety). She wasn’t planning to become an Auror, or a Healer, or a Curse-Breaker – all of those required intense studying, intense training, and intensely impressive OWL and NEWT scores. All she wanted to do was get on with the Daily Prophet, and luckily, they didn’t base all that much on test scores.
DAILY PROPHET & BEETLE BEGINNINGS
Sure enough, Rita, fresh out of Hogwarts and almost worryingly enthusiastic, managed to secure a place at The Daily Prophet… as a secretary. Why she was being sent to The Leaky Cauldron on a daily basis when the editors-in-chiefs, journalists and publishers could magic up whatever their hearts desired in a trace, she didn’t know. She was stuck answering mountains of owls (because apparently people still found birth announcements and obituaries important to put in the Prophet), and hand-delivering bylines (was “Accio” not good enough for these people?) Even more frustrating than the menial duties of being a secretary was the lack of recognition. Rita had always had an ear for importance and was light on her feet, so it had been her quiet observations that had gotten the Head Editor fired and had caused massive uproar among the Quidditch community when England’s star Keeper had been found taking unauthorized potions to ensure better playing performance.
It had been five years of drudgery when Rita decided to take matters into her own hands. Though her mother, tucked away in the highlands, hadn’t known a thing about animagi, she had very helpful (and even more discrete) friends who knew a thing or two about Transfiguration. The long, painful, and exhilarating process had begun. Her delicately decorated shoebox apartment had become her haven, and her quill her salvation–it was rather difficult to speak with a mandrake leaf in your mouth for a month. Owls flew in and owls flew out, dew was kept in a phial in Scotland, guarded by her mother’s both disapproving and impressed hands. The waiting had been agonizing, but not nearly as agonizing as the form of a human woman shrinking down to the size of a beetle. It took years before the transformation was nothing more than familiar vibrations and ease.
She’d had her big break at twenty-four (after months and months of parchment filled with green ink and heavily guarded secrets showed up on her boss’s desk). After all, it was so easy to make it into closed meetings and eavesdrop on private conversations when you were an inch big and could blend easily into your surroundings. The rest, truly, had been history, and Rita Skeeter’s name was one that would surely go down in infamy.
