A lanky guy in a PSV football shirt, his hair stiff from the gel, answers the door. I feel like my stomach is sinking, because Broodje used to live here with two girls, who he was constantly trying to sleep with and without success, and a skinny guy named Ivo. But then the boy's eyes widen with a flash of recognition and I realize it's Henk, one of Broodje's friends from Utrecht University. "Is that you, Willem?" he asks, and before I can answer he's calling the house, “Brodje, Willem's back.
I hear scrambling and the creak of weathered wooden boards and then there he is, a head shorter and a shoulder broader than me, a disparity that used to prompt the old man on the houseboat next door to call us Spaghetti and Meatball, a He rather liked the nickname Broodje, because wasn't a meatball m
