Mam took a puff of her cigarette, and let the smoke stream out slowly. She started smoking around five years earlier, after we left dad. She smoked whenever she got a spare moment, and that wasn't often. She also was always telling me never to start smoking, it was awful, and ruined the lungs.

I didn't want to tell her that I spent nearly all my free time at the libraries, reading books. In the wizarding one I had found, I read a book about myself, and that I would never get lung cancer, no matter how hard I tried.

We had moved very often. People kept finding out what I was in the villages we had lived in. But now we were living in London, and nobody remembered me here, much less believed I might not be human.

And there Mam was, choking on woodbine.

"Go out and play, Remus, while you still can. Enjoy life when you have the time," she said, tiredly. "I have to start dinner anyway."

I went outside, but didn't go play with the other kids in the lane, kicking the can and using make-shift jump ropes. It seemed pointless. Instead, I walked. I knew the slums of London better than anybody, after days of just walking, and I was constantly expanding my horizons. I had started drifting into the richer parts of the city.

It was amazing how one of the corners of the lanes and the boulevards collided and one part of London. Almost mind-boggling.

It was on one of these trips to the boulevards that I first saw him. He looked about my age—maybe a year younger—with dark hair and white, white skin. He was sitting in a window, and our eyes met. He spoke to somebody in the room, and a woman appeared behind him and looked out at me. She then pulled him away from the window.

I was now walking back, wondering if I'd see him again. This time, in the window there was a different boy. He appeared older then the other, but I could still tell they were brothers.

He didn't see me though. He looked behind himself, and walked off. I continued walking.

When I returned to the house, I told Mam about the two boys in the window. She looked up sharply from where she was pounding dough for bread, and she had a calculating look in her eyes.

"I don't want you going back there, Remus," she said. "I don't want you to come into contact with those boys."

This confused me, and I asked why not.

"Because," Mam said. "That's the Black household. They're a very old wizarding family, and they're proud of it. Too proud. They're just not the sort that one takes as friends easily. Especially not the working class."

"Why not the working class?"

"Because we are the working class. They're upper class, we're lower class, and classes don't mix. The middle class is lucky to find themselves in good graces with the upper class. It's just not done."

I could understand that. I had never recognized it as a taboo, that the classes didn't mix, but I wasn't blind. I saw how I was regarded by the middle class, so it would make sense to be seen as even less by those higher. That must have been why the boy's mother had pulled him away so quickly.

It still didn't seem right.


Notes: Anyway, a sort of gift for my birthday! It would be a real gift for a mass updating, wouldn't it? Don't worry.

I want to stop here, because the next chapter will probably be school, or on the way

But…..YAY! Remus sees Sirius and Regulus. But Sirius doesn't see Remus ;; .

And explanation about the lanes and boulevards: I was reading a book that was written by an Irish school teacher, that had moved to New York, and he talked about the difference between the classification of streets. I could see Remus using these terms. Anyway, the order is this: the lowest class lives in the lanes, then streets, roads, avenues, and at the top are the boulevards.