Free Friends Like These: My Worldwide Quest to Find My Best Childhood Friends, Knock on Their Doors, and Ask Them to Come Out and Play by Danny Wallace Page A

uncle. Mind you, he hardly looked old enough to be a
nephew.
When I’d seen him in Huddersfield that time, he’d looked every bit the man. He’d shaved his head and he was wearing smart
     clothes, the successful young architect about town. But today—today he looked like the boy I used to know. I’m not saying
     he was wearing tiny velour running shorts and a Ninja Turtles top, like the old days—but there was something in his eyes.
     And something in the fact that here we were, together again. A kind of childish glee.
    “So to what do I owe the plea sure?” asked Anil.
    “I just realized it’d been so long,” I said. “I mean, I know we saw each other that time in Yorkshire, but…”
    “Hey—check it out!” he said, pointing at the coach ahead of us. The sign on the back read WALKER COACHES.
    “Remember Andrew Walker from school?”
    “Yeah?” I said.
    “That’s one of his coaches!”
    Blimey. So Andrew Walker was now Loughborough’s premier coach magnate. He probably had a red leather chair and smoked cigars.
     I still thought of him as the kid whose stink bomb accidentally went off in his pocket during assembly one day. He was also
     the first of us to admit that he got funny feelings when he saw Sue Ellen from
Dallas
in the shower.
    “What about the other guys? Do you know anything about them?” I asked.
    “Remember Richard De Rito?”
    “Yeah. His dad ran the Mazda dealership. He had a different car every month. His dad told us it was because he was in the
     witness protection program.”
    “Well, he’s married now. And Louisa Needham—she’s married too. To Guy.”
    “A guy?”
    “No—Guy. A guy called Guy.”
    “She was the first girl I ever sent a valentine to. She used to be obsessed with Shakin’ Stevens. I wonder if Guy looks like
     Shakin’ Stevens—that would certainly mean Louisa’s life had worked out as planned. I used to hang around her house. I used
     to play Jet Set Willy in her brother’s room.”
    Anil shot me a concerned look.
    “What’s Jet Set Willy?” he said.
    “A game,” I said.
    Another concerned look.
    “What
kind
of game?”
    “A
computer
game.”
    He looked relieved.
    “I never played that. Thank God it’s a
computer
game. You hear
stories
about people’s childhoods… hey, remember Michael Amodio?”
    “Of
course
I remember Michael Amodio!”
    He was, after all, the second name in the Book.
    “He’s still in Loughborough. We should surprise him!”
    I thought about it. Would that be weird?
    Yeah.
    But sod it…
    “We
definitely
should!”
    I was beaming. This would be
fun.
Plus, I’d be updating
two
addresses in my address book. Two for the price of one! Not that that was what this was all about. No, no. This was just
     a today thing. An excuse to do something random and youthful and not at all grown-up.
    We passed a sign saying TOWN CENTER.
    “Let’s drive that way so you can get your bearings…”
    And so we did. We drove past Geoff’s Toys, which amazingly hadn’t shut down yet, despite seemingly
always
having a sale on. We passed Charnwood Music, where my mum had signed me up to an ill-fated series of guitar lessons with
     a man named Roger. Roger had been a lovely teacher, with one bizarrely long thumbnail which was useful for guitar-work but
     absolutely terrifying when you shook his hand. Things had gone well at first, but we’d had an argument one day when it became
     clear he was teaching me “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” instead of “Thriller” as I’d insisted. And there was the Curzon cinema.
     I thought back to my ninth birthday, when my mum had treated me and half a dozen friends to see the new action film in town—
Red Sonja.
Sadly, it wasn’t until the film had started that anyone realized that the Curzon had put the wrong audience rating up. Someone
     had placed a PG where a 15 should have been, and my mum was too embarrassed to move us, as we all just sat there, wide-eyed
     and mildly traumatized, as heads flew