Prologue
‘Pad? What’s that photo album all about?’ My eyes slide over to Cas as he’s holding up an old album titled ‘Road trip’. He must have found it in one of the boxes. The album has a leather cover that at some places already starts to come off. It’s a bit worn out. I don’t know how many times I’ve held this book in my hands.
I smile. Oh what a time that was. The memories start flashing by my inner eye. A pity we’re not like that anymore. Oh what a shame that we had to grow up. We were so amazing back then. Amazing and maybe also a little foolish.
‘It’s from back when I went to college. Uncle Prongs got into some pretty big trouble because he did something very stupid. And you know, being good friends, we obviously had to help him clean the mess up after him and so our solution to that was very mature and I would recommend that to everyone else. We blew off a couple days of college in order to go on a road trip all the way from London to Rome. Aunt Lily was going to college there and let me just say, it got messy.’
Cas comes over to me, the book under his arm. ‘Can you tell me the story,’ he wants to know. All the time I mention James, he’s super curious in an instant. I guess he just wants to know what his fun uncle was like before he got mature and boring. I grin and then slowly open the book. ‘Of course.’ I look at the first picture.
It shows me, Remus, James and Peter together at a party. It was a party worth remembering. Probably, because Pete got so wasted that he made out with one of our teachers. But also because it was the party that made us all go and turn our life upside down. It was the reason why all of us are the way we are now. If that party never happened, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here with Cas right now. I look at the notes under the picture. James wrote something under every picture in the album. He made a copy of it for each one of us.
The caption says: ‘The Time of My Life’. It’s written in James’ unrecognisable ugly handwriting. Well, ugly just because I was never able to read it to copy his notes. I smile at the text. So cheesy. James liked cheesy movies and so captioning pictures with song titles especially from Dirty Dancing was just a thing he occasionally did. Cannot blame him though. That was a pretty good movie.