Nearly Averted Spoiler: No. 1

I bought my copy of Deathly Hallows yesterday at Costco.

(Have you heard of this book? Very obscure author has written seven much underpublicized books about young wizards, the power of love, and its struggle against imminent evil?)

I bought it at 2:30 p.m. I know, that makes me so much less of fan than I purported to be, but I have a young child, who [whisper] doesn't get Harry Potter [/whisper]. So my begging and pleading and whining and tantrums lost out to his dire and unquenchable and, really, much louder expression of need to visit the hippos at the zoo. (Yes, page taken. I will not be so easily thwarted next time . . .)

So after the hippos, we headed to Costco for the grocery classics: high-fiber bread, Omega-3 eggs, organic milk, and Harry Potter.

I was worried they would sell out. Really, I'm serious. I panicked the whole way past the leopards, the gorillas, the alligators, the rhino, and the hippos--who I'm not sure we actually saw because I was in full neurosis by then. But when I saw the heaping table of Potters, with nary a swarm, I felt much relieved. And quite excited. And, maybe, just a little, ashamed.

I sauntered up to another woman who seemed to be gingerly selecting her copy. She picked up a book, flipped for a page count, then, incomprehensibly, Put the Book Down.

What?

"Not that much into Harry Potter?" I asked as I wheeled Finn and the cart closer to Potter mountain. When I get giddy (or drunk, sometimes it's hard to tell), I get social.

She looked up and smiled. "I just read the last page. Everyone's wondering about whether Harry lives or dies. I figured that would be on the last page."

Just the last page?

I felt bad for her--that she didn't have a connection to these characters that so many other folks do. That she would carelessly jump to the final resolution without any emotional investment.

I plan to read Potter as slowly as I can. I mean, this is the last book. This could be the last moments I get to spend with these people. You know, I have a longer relationship with them than I do many other real people who have too easily come and gone from my life.

(And, of course, I also remember how distraught I was when I put down Return of the King only to find out the Tolkien had died. Like 10 years before I picked it up.)

I'm really not all that eager to give them up and push them out the door.

How could she start and stop at the last page? Did she even read the ot. . .

And then I got scared. It hit me. She has information. She knows. And then the panic that I thought I had left with the hippos came screaming after me.

I grabbed my Hallows, and I mean this literally, put my hands over my ears and started chanting, "I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear it" as I rolled Finn as fast and far away as I could.

Mental, to be sure. But I couldn't take the chance that she might suck the very soul out of the Potterverse and just throw it out there like some kind of talking Patronus. She could ruin it, all seven books, the lives that I have welcomed into my home and heart, the dreams that I have for Harry, Hermoine, and Ron, and their dreams, too, as yet unrealized by all the throngs who have not yet turned that page, and with no more thought than she gives to her choice of blueberry or strawberry yogurt sample.

So I ran. Earmuffed and howling.

It's not like I had a choice. I mean, people can't, like, disapparate, you know. C'mon, people, ever heard of fiction? It is just a book.