Prologue
The seventies, I have to say, were a wild time. Everyone's teenage years are wild to a certain extent, but that particular decade was simply incomparable. It was a time filled with bright lights and platform shoes, and, at the same time, was filled with dark anxiety and shocking revelations. The light of day was only a filler until night came. Every weekend and after every game of Quidditch, once the sun went down and the Gryffindor Head of House could have her room soundproofed, there would be massive parties--parties in which anything, and I mean literally anything, went. Nothing was barred from us; we were explorers, mapping new territory constantly.
Those seven years at Hogwarts were unlike any the school had ever seen, and we were a generation of students that nobody could ever hope to emulate. School there wasn't school; it was a party, a social event. With the sex and the drugs (and though it sounds clichéd to say, there was also rock and roll in heavy doses) we were constantly in dazes of euphoria in which learning was the least of our thoughts.
If you looked closer at the heart of things, somewhere within the parties there was a sense of maturity about us. When you're living through a war, the loud music is only played to block out the sound of your world collapsing all around you. In situations like this you can choose to exist one of two ways: you can hide, or you can live. Unequivocally, we were too young and bright to hide. Not hiding can get you in trouble, sure, but I can assure you that we never went to sleep with regret.
We were all individualists in Gryffindor; flippant and righteous, we all had roles we played to the best of our abilities. If there was a rule, it was tested. If there was a teacher, we questioned him mercilessly. There was no time for niceties, which we knew without being told.
Every few weeks, Dumbledore would call one of us up to his office to tell us which of our relatives had died, and a couple of hours later, after having been given permission to skip class, we'd find whoever he'd called up either crying in some corner or getting unbelievably smashed. The Marauders had a rule that went unsaid: whenever someone was called up to The Office, they'd get whatever they wanted, however much they wanted, for free. There was, in those times, an unbreakable bond in Gryffindor house. An attack on one was an attack on all. Needless to say, all hell managed to break lose almost every day at the Slytherin table.
The only exception was my best friend, Lily Evans. She was the sort of person you always knew had class. She wasn't supposed to be born in our generation at all; she was all 40's Hollywood. She was prim and smart and had an answer to any question you could possibly ask her. I have to admit that I was wildly jealous of her for the longest time. She was gorgeous, and unlike the rest of us, she knew what she wanted from her life. Though we'd never dare admit it, we were lost souls, clinging to our firewhiskey and gillyweed for comfort. She had something better and stranger. She had goals.
James Potter decided sometime in the middle of fifth year that he'd like nothing more than to loosen Lily up and show her a good time. At least, that's what he said. I think, in reality, he wanted to catch a bit of clarity, because Lily seemed to have it in droves, and I guess he thought it'd rub off. But Lily was a tough cookie, no matter what anybody said about her, it would take romance on every conceivable level, not just that lustful sort that a fifteen year old boy has to offer, to win her over. It took him a few years to get it right, and it took a few fights…
As for me? Things began really setting themselves in motion in sixth year. I was sixteen years old, gaining more and more clarity and learning every day what the world was really about.
But now I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me back up and begin by saying that I'm Alice, and those years were the years in which we lived.