"The last years of my childhood were happy ones - as happy as childhood can possibly be, and as only childhood can be. After the summer we spent together Abraxas never teased Tom again about the orphanage or his Muggle background, and the three of us became inseparable. We did our homework together every night, ate every meal at the Great Hall side by side, and spent Christmases and the one week we were allowed each summer Flooing back and forth between the Malfoy Manor and 12 Grimmauld Place. Our friendship slowly pulled the other Slytherin boys into its orbit, and as we grew older, the girls followed.

Abraxas, who was most excited by this development, was soon disappointed to realize that the girls had come not for him but for Tom. He professed an inability to understand why - "That git has no sense of humour," he'd grumble - but I knew he could see it as clearly as anyone. It was blindingly obvious. By the age of fifteen, Tom had acquired the kind of beauty you aren't meant to encounter in day to day life. It was high fashion beauty, it was movie star beauty; it was a genetic blessing to such a degree that it took your breath away, and each time you looked at him you were as powerless against it as the first time. As for Tom, he couldn't have been less flattered by the attention. He ignored his admirers entirely except, in the occasional case where the admiration interfered with his reading and studying, to threaten to use his newly acquired prefect powers to send anyone who insisted upon giggling loudly in his vicinity at the library straight to detention.


In all of Hogwarts there was one person who liked me. His name was Jimmy Leigh and he played seeker for Ravenclaw. He was a year older than me but smaller, built like a seeker. He had blue eyes and blond hair that curled merrily around his ears, a very pleasing combination that evoked the indigo-gold of past summers spent in Cornwall. When he first approached me on the pitch after losing to Slytherin in a match I thought he was about to hex me, but it turned out not everyone thought the same way as my fellow Slytherins. Jimmy Leigh just shook my hand and smiled and congratulated me on a good game. Then he asked if I'd already made plans to go to Hogsmeade with anyone the next day, and if not, would I like to go with him?

I don't know why I lied to my friends about Jimmy Leigh, but I felt instinctively that I had to. When it came time to head out to the Three Broomsticks to celebrate Slytherin's quidditch win with the rest of the house, I told them I'd decided to sleep in and that I'd catch them later. Tom frowned and seemed ready to begin an interrogation, but Abraxas just threw a pillow at my head, called me a Dementor for sucking the life out of his party, and sauntered out of the room.

"You're late," said Jimmy Leigh when I showed up an hour later at the hillside by the train tracks where we'd agreed to meet. Then he broke into a disarming grin. "Frankly I'm glad you even came. Do you want to get a drink at the Three Broomsticks?"

"I would," I said, "but the entire Slytherin quidditch team is celebrating in there right now."

"Ah," said Jimmy. "I understand - it's too soon to meet the family." He reached into his robes and pulled out a small box that read Lucky Strike. "Do you want to smoke these instead?"

We sat on the breezy hillside and smoked Jimmy Leigh's Lucky Strikes, counting the trains as they went by. I had never encountered cigarettes before but appreciated the way the long white stems looked poised between Jimmy's slender fingers. I liked that there was calm to be found at the end of each exhale. I couldn't help but draw the inevitable comparison between Muggle-born Jimmy and Tom, who'd come from the same world but almost never spoke of it. I wondered if Tom had ever smoked cigarettes when he was in London. It was lovely, I thought, that Jimmy Leigh wasn't afraid to smoke his muggle cigarettes in a town full of wizards, and that through him, his two worlds could coexist peacefully on this hillside underneath the bluest of skies.


After that day in Hogsmeade Jimmy and I smoked cigarettes again by the lake, behind the greenhouses, and up in the astronomy tower on nights when the moon was bright enough to blot out the stars. We always met up at times when it was easiest to slip away from my friends without telling them where I was going, like after Quidditch practice, or after meals, or after curfew, once everyone else had gone to bed.

"We're going through these very fast," commented Jimmy at three a.m. on one full moon night at the astronomy tower. He stamped out a cigarette with his boot and lit another. "I'll have to make a trip to that Muggle town next to Hogsmeade to get more."

"There's a Muggle town next to Hogsmeade?" I asked.

Jimmy laughed. "You purebloods know nothing," he teased. "It's called Fort William. It's a two hour walk South."

"I'll come with you," I said. "We don't have to wait for the next Hogsmeade weekend to go - I know a secret passageway."

Jimmy said nothing for a while. He flicked embers off the tip of his cigarette and watched their downward drift. They glowed for a few seconds then went dark somewhere between the tower and the trees. Then Jimmy said, "I don't know of any other Slytherins who'd smoke cigarettes and go to muggle towns with me. I knew you were special, Alphard Black." Before I could respond, he reached up and kissed me on the mouth. And even though I hadn't kissed anyone before, when I leaned in to kiss him back, I found that it came naturally to me, like treading water or like flying. After a few seconds of fumbling, we were very quickly up in the air.