The next day at school Dudley finally cornered Harry for the first time in days. He knocked Harry down from behind, spilling all of his school stuff out of his bag. "Watch where you're going Potter!"
He laughed, stepping forward to break several of Harry's pencils as he walked through the clutter, reaching down quickly to pick up a book. He frowned however when he noticed that it had the school stamp on it and with a huff threw it down again. Ms. Hicks was hell on anyone who damaged her priceless books, and Dudley had learned that she was one of the teachers that actually listened to the freak for some wouldn't be worth it to do anything to a school book.
Just then one of his friends shouted at him from the cafeteria entrance. "They've got pizza Dudley, come on!"
Dudley raced off as fast as his pudgy legs could carry him, while behind him Harry breathed a sigh of relief. He picked up his notebook, the cover and spine of which he had changed to look like a book from the school, a picture bookthe class had been reading lately.
Harry bent down to pick up his stuff while all around him the other students of the school moved around him with the ease of long practice, some of them even snickering while others simply shook their heads. Harry however allowed himself a small smile. It worked!
Over the next few weeks Harry began to experiment, doing small little things to see what was possible and what wasn't. Of course when he noted what wasn't he simply put down 'yet'. The books he'd read that all dealt with magic were so wide and varied he was unwilling to say that anything was impossible with it. He also got far better at changing his hair color, though he still couldn't do anything about its normal scruffy appearance.
Eventually he even could do things with his clothes, though that was much harder. After the first time where he had changed how his clothes looked, their colors and the shape of them, he almost collapsed from exhaustion. That was an important learning experience: that magic took something out of him. His change of clothes and hair however was worth it because they allowed Harry to move around the neighborhood in relative safety for the first time since Dudley and his friends wouldn't mess with a child they didn't know.
That kind of thing brought trouble, as it had the one time they tried it with an exchange student, who did not only fight back, but blabbed to his parents. Those were good few days, Harry thought to himself as he remembered them. Dudley, Vernon and Petunia were all walking on egg shells, because apparently the transfer student was the son of some army man who'd just gotten medically discharged. But it faded after a while when that family moved away to a better area, and things went back to normal.
With his new looks Harry explored areas where he hadn't dared to go before for fear of Dudley and his gang, in particular the nearby park, which backed a small but overgrown national park. In there Harry found an area where no one could see him, and he began to use that place for some of his experiments, continuing to keep his notes as he went as well as he could.
From changing how things looked or their size he moved on to levitating things, which was surprisingly much easier. Harry reasoned that changing something was much harder than simply moving its place in the world. He started with one small pebble, then graduated from that into four small pebbles, holding them up at the same time, then moving them around each in a different way. It was hard, and it really strained his mental muscles, but even so afterwards Harry felt elated, somewhat tired, but not as much as that first time he'd changed the way his clothes looked.
Over the next few months after that, Harry's experiments got more and more varied. He learned that emotions powered the spells somewhat at one point when he began his experiments after a particularly ugly bout of teasing from Dudley and Vernon when he hadn't been allowed to escape into his cupboard after fixing them dinner. When Harry, entering his cupboard saw his little stones piled into a corner he scowled angrily at them, and then waved his hand hard, not expecting anything to really happen because he wasn't concentrating very much.
When the stones zoomed off away from that corner into the other one with small 'spang' sounded as they hit the wall he gasped in shock. The sight also calmed down somewhat, and he frowned. "Emotions," he mused to himself, then moved over to sit down. From that point he decided to experiment a bit with the emotions, though not much.
That was because when he tried to use anger again, he found it more difficult to control himself afterwards, and decided that that experiment was one area he didn't want to go got angry all the time at the smallest of things from Harry's point of view, and he always took that anger out on Harry. Harry did not want to be like Vernon in any way, shape or form.
On the other hand, happiness also seemed to be able to power certain spells, though the effect was weird. When he was levitating his pebbles, gesturing with one hand as he sometimes did because that helped him concentrate, he brought to mind the feelings of joy that he'd felt when he first realized that the notes about magic in his notebook were real. Instead of powering the spell however, making the task easier or perhaps even making the stones fly up higher, a silvery sheen began to appear around him, but it only lasted for a few moments before Harry collapsed into exhaustion.
When he came to a few moments later he shook his head groggily. "All right, so anger is easier, but harder to control, and happiness, maybe good feelings in general, are harder to use but their effect is weird." He grinned to himself for a moment then pulled out his trusty notebook. "You learn new things every day."