Starr the Slytherin and Bianca the Gryffindor

This is a shot from the 2007 launch of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Starr, a good friend of mine since the sixth grade, worked for the Buensalido PR firm and made sure that I got an invite to the event, where they transformed the bookstore into the Great Hall. They even had ‘floating’ candles and a live snake contained inside a glass cage (I refused to go near it). I lost the trivia game because I couldn’t remember the address of Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes—93 Diagon Alley, I had put in 91—but I had a pretty good time. I got to keep the robe too, so it’s somewhere in my cabinet.

This was also the night that my boyfriend James first brought me home. Of course, he wasn’t my boyfriend back then; I was single at that time, and I could barely remember his name because for several months, I was calling him Sam for some reason. My siblings and I hitched a ride with a friend, who met up with him at the mall and asked him to take the wheel. He thought I was a geek for being nuts about the Harry Potter series, but a couple of years ago, I managed to get him to enjoy reading all the books. In return, I do my best to pay attention to basketball games and literature. I’m still working on that last aspect.

10 days to New York, and I’m wondering if I should get an iPad just so I could read more ebooks as I can’t haul hard copies in my luggage. Not just Harry Potter, mind you. I do try to read whatever I can get my hands on because I rarely watch TV; I still remember those book-deprived months in Berlin when I had nothing but Lonely Planet Central Europe and a battered copy of Pygmalion to read! I had a laptop and plenty of literary websites at my disposal, but articles just aren’t the same as an interesting book. Once a bookworm, always a bookworm.