Heads.
We had spent many a moment in this house, devising various plans and ideas, testing out theories. But it wasn't like that, it wasn't always like that.
When I had first came here, sent by my going-overseas parents, I wasn't pleased. I was old enough to stay in the house by myself, old enough to make my own meals, old enough to clean up after myself; and old enough to hold my own parties it seemed. They made arrangements the night before and before I knew it, I was pushed out of the door and unceremoniously dumped at the front of the door with only my luggage and a threat that if I ran away, I would be grounded for an indefinite amount of days.
The threat worked.
But they didn't leave me without anything though. Armed with the technological marvels of the twentieth century, I had planned to surf my way through the holidays.
However, my laptop crashed on startup, leaving me largely unconnected to the rest of the online world. I had my phone however, but it couldn't compensate for a working laptop. I didn't sleep well that night, listening through four albums of Nine Inch Nails twice and listening to the night sounds of the estate around me. A cat yowing and the cymbal crash of the dustbins echoed the yelling of voices somewhere out in the night as a stale smell of refuse seeped into the room; I huddled tighter, wishing I was someplace else.
I awoke to daylight and the dancing dust. Blinked a little, then registered the strangely familiar shape at the doorway. It said, "Good morning. Up for a bike hike?" before I had fully recognized it for what it was. That was the most significant memory of the first night of I had ever stayed here, the rest blurring into a mixed concoction of various activities, both insane or dangerous and sometimes a mixture of both.
A coin flip.
Tails.
I, under the blanket and in the soft light of my LED torch, opened the tattered cover of the book.
I had found it two days back, jam-hidden in the midst of some other annual reports of companies long gone and forgotten. It had my father's name on it on the bottom left corner, nearly faded, nearly invisible, but I caught sight of it as I jerked the book up from its dusty hiding spot in the attic. The handwriting too, a scrawling of wavy lines, affirmed this. With some pre-flipping, I apparently had discovered my father's journal of his travels; him in his younger days being an avid adventurer.
Paying only the slightest of attention to the soft murmurings of the late-night television outside, I began to read.
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