I threw my cup in a bin on the front steps, took out my Marlboro Reds, and lit a cigarette. I took a long drag before reaching for my phone and texted, “Hi”

It took me a couple of minutes to get a reply.

Hi

Can we talk?

I have class

I know. Donaghy. Can we still talk?

I guess

Our place?

I’m two minutes away

I’ll be there in five

I took a long, deep breath and made my way to the café.

Marcy Stevens was seventeen years old. We met when we were thirteen, at a birthday party I remembered quite well because I almost died choking on a toffee. Liam had been going on for weeks about his new friend, “the coolest girl I’ve ever met.” We all thought he was enamored, but it turned out he’d quickly become best friends with the new girl everyone in school seemed to find too cool and so very intimidating.

Her reputation had always preceded her. Naturally beautiful, short tempered, and with very little tolerance for bullshit, Marcy Stevens was something of a legend. She’d been expelled from her previous school because she’d made herself throw up on a teacher she thoroughly disliked. However, once she got to Magnolia, that story had already been transformed into an attempted arson, a possible affair, and some sort of conspiracy involving a famous student. Truth was, only those who were lucky enough to be her friends got to know the real story, and out of all the people in her life, the only one who could actually claim they knew the real Marcy Stevens was one Liam Hart.

The day she found out about the accident, Marcy went to her room and refused to see or talk to anyone for the week that followed. She appeared at the memorial service, sat at my mother’s side, and never said a word. Weeks later, when I went back to Magnolia, she seemed to have gone back to her normal self, never mentioning Liam’s name ever again but simply referring to him by a pronoun or some demeaning adjective. Even on the rare occasions she did allow herself to bring him up, she never once showed anything other than indifference.

After I was taken to St. Yve’s, following the incident with my mother’s pills, Marcy started to grow more distant, as well as more aggressive (especially toward me). The second time I left the hospital, I received a text from her that simply read, “Stop.” It was the last time I’d had any contact with Marcy Stevens.