The family ended up sitting behind us in the theater, to my pleasure. I turned around to ask her how old she was, and she said she was twelve. “You realize,” I said to her as we waited, “that you have lived your entire life with Harry in it? The books came out thirteen years ago. You’ve never known a day in your life without him.”
She shrugged, her Potter cloak shifting slightly on her shoulders. “Yeah.”
I smiled. “I was your age when I read the first book.”
Her sister leaned closer and her eyes went wide. “Did you really grow up with him?”
“I did. I was fifteen when the fifth book was release,” I told them, and they mouthed, “Woah,” in reply, as if this thought had never occurred to them before. As if a life without Harry was completely foreign, never conceptualized.
“That must have been cool,” she said, leaning back into her chair and tapping her foot impatiently.
I sat forward in my seat and, smiling, said, “It really was.”