Sample Journal Entries - Eleanor Branston (Order of the Phoenix)
I want to write a really happy entry. This is such a stupid school year. It's really stupid. I don't want to be all jaded about learning, like my sister is, but ew. I hate this year, and all I hear from the older students is how much better it used to be here, and gosh. Why did it have to turn rubbish, just for me? I don't like this. Maybe Mum is right, and I should go home.

I don't like being dramatic, but I can't help it. Gen wrote me last week, to say how bomb her new school is. Mum moved her after last term. She got in some trouble with one of the boys at the companion school. Not like sex stuff or anything. Some other kind of trouble that Mum told her not to tell me about. She never did, either, and that's weird, because normally she tells me stuff. I think they sort of vandalized something. He wasn't a very nice boy, my mum said, and he kind of liked to get Gen in trouble, while he was saying he liked her. I don't know. But she moved school this year, and there's no boys' school anywhere around, and she really likes it. I don't really like the sound of it, but she said since there's no boys, Mum won't suspect her of getting into anything.

I don't know, though. Mum suspects everybody of getting into things all the time. Or Nana does, and she tells Mum to, because Mum believes everything she says. I don't. I don't even know if I think Gen really did anything all that bad. I guess she did, since they moved her out and everything, but I don't know. I just don't know about anything, this year. I wish I hadn't been born magic, and I could have been like her. It was so much better, when we went to the same primary school. Gen is three years up from me, but she never pretended like she wasn't my big sister or anything. It was really nice. She's never been a mean girl.

Wouldn't it be fun to be a mean girl? I could tell people to go off when they're mean to me (but nobody ever is mean to me, so I don't really have an excuse), and wear coloured stockings, and make my hair all funny, and go out late to films nobody wants me to see. That would be really...It would be spectacular, and if I wasn't magic, maybe I would be that way.

I'm sorry. I'm being really ungrateful. I have a nice family who loves me, and a sister who doesn't think I'm a stupid idiot. I have a couple of friends, and I suspect I'll have more when I get older and people take me seriously. I have enough to eat, and a good education, I suspect. Defense Against the Dark Arts isn't everything, right? We have other grown-ups who know things about it, and I guess if you want to learn more after you leave school, you can, so maybe it isn't anything to worry about. I have clean clothes, and new shoes, and my dog at home, and lots of safe, open, green land to run around on. I should be so, so happy, but...I still don't know. I wish I was my sister right now. I should be so happy, but I wish I was my sister right now.