What Next for Harry Potter? Laura Knows

It’s out!

And it’s sitting on a coffee table in Fairfax, Va.

As if by magic, a copy of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”--the much ballyhooed and eagerly anticipated children’s tome that’s being kept under lock and key until its official release next weekend--has fallen into the hands of one 8-year-old Laura Cantwell.

Just how a muggle (a non-wizard, in Potter-ese) like Laura got her hands on the most hyped book in publishing history since, well, since the last Harry Potter book, is a mystery young Harry himself might have difficulty unraveling.

Considering that the publisher, Scholastic Inc., has bullied bookstores and libraries nationwide into keeping mum about what’s tucked inside the 752-page book until next Saturday, you’d have thought such a leak would be impossible.

In Washington? Hah.

As Laura’s dad, Tim, tells it, a friend of the family stumbled onto eight copies of J.K. Rowling’s newest book at a Northern Virginia bookstore this week. The friend said she went to the counter--where the clerk didn’t even blink--and walked out with two copies.

It was the literary equivalent of walking out of the Smithsonian having just bought the Hope Diamond.

Neither Cantwell nor his friend, who wouldn’t give her name Friday, would identify the store where the books were bought.

Close to 4 million copies of the Potter book, the fourth volume in the best-selling children’s series, will go on sale at 12:01 a.m. next Saturday. Until then, Laura will have a major leg up on her third-grade friends about the latest adventures at the Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Like who dies, for instance. And who Harry’s girlfriend at Hogwart’s is. And who wins the next fast-paced round of Quidditch, a game Harry and his friends play in the sky while riding broomsticks.

“I’ve been waiting for, like, three to four months,” Laura said Friday, echoing the desires of young children--and more than a few adults who’ve become Potter-heads--everywhere.

Arthur Levine, a vice president at Scholastic, said Friday that he was not prepared to comment on the book’s premature release because he had no way of confirming it.