YOUNGBLOOD » HARRY STYLES

9

Arlon seemed more than exhausted by the time we finally walked all the way back to my dad's place. He lived in a flat too, and Arlon's tongue lolled out farther with every bound up the stairs until he was home. Then when my dad let us in he sank down to lay on the polished wooden floor straight away, and fell into a deep sleep within minutes.

"Poor boy, I bet he'd love to go for a swim. I was thinking, why haven't you been paddle boarding with your friends recently?," My dad asked when he welcomed us at the front door. "Is it because Marcel's got a new girlfriend?" He wiggled his eyebrows teasingly.

"No, I've just been busy." I sighed and hung up Arlon's leash on the knob of the door.

"Okay well you're never going to guess what I found." He said with a smirk on his face. This whole time he had been talking to me whilst hiding his arms behind his back, which he finally revealed as he held a big photo album in his hand. "Here, let's go sit down."

"Are those baby photos?" I asked as I sat down next to him at his dining table. Arlon followed behind us slowly and sank back down onto the floor underneath the table by our feet.

"Actually, it's an album of your teen years." He replied as he opened it to turn to the first page, the cardboard back of it creaking. The first picture had an orange fade to it that made it look even older than it actually was. It was a picture of a group of kids sitting on a carpet in a classroom, and all of them were looking up at a teacher who was probably explaining something. I squinted and leaned in to get a closer look at the picture only to finally find myself amongst the crowd.

"This was your first day of middle school. Do you remember Mrs. Littlefield? And look, you were sitting next to Harry. Friends from day one." He said as he pointed at a boy sitting next to me on the coloured carpet. He had many brown curls that covered the majority of his forehead and he was listening to the teacher with the most focused face in the world.

I turned to the next page only to get flashbacks from my first school disco as a middle schooler. The school hosted one every year for the year sevens so that the new people could get to know each other, and so that the teachers could trick us into believing middle school was more about enjoying ourselves rather than about working our butts off. I couldn't see myself on the dance floor because it was obviously dark, but all of the spotlights were set on Harry. He was on stage, singing a song passionately in a light blue button-down t-shirt.

"Okay let's be honest. You wanted to slow dance with him to that song but you couldn't because he was singing it on that little stage." My dad said and elbowed me in my side to tease me.

"Dad!" I complained. By then I probably already had developed a crush on him. Not that anyone knew about it though.

The next picture was stuck down underneath the one from the disco. I remember that it was taken the next day, when I was assigned as Harry's buddy which meant that I had to sit next to him in all the classes we had together so that I could help him feel more at home. It was taken in the chemistry labs by our science teacher (whose name I cannot remember for the life of me), who had put it up on the class blog. We were learning how to use all of the 'apparatus' in the science labs and all of the safety precautions.

"Guess we could say you two always had chemistry." My dad said with a light chuckle.

"That is such a dad joke."

I would say that we spent a good hour looking through all of the pictures, with my dad's stupid comments every now and again. I spent most of that hour trying to force all of the embarrassing memories to the back of my head.

Then came the last picture, dated the 7th of August 2009. We would have both been around 15.

"This was taken in our old house. Is that mom's foot in the background?" I asked, pointing to it.