When school started back in September, I realized very quickly that the easy routines and wallflower persona I carved out for myself in the past were turned on their head. I sat at her right-hand side at lunch and if we shared a class everybody knew we would be sitting together, desks pushed much closer than was allowed. We walked back to Connie’s house every day after school, even on the days she had hockey training—I sat in a secluded area I found outside the gym where I could wait for her with my headphones in—and every morning it was me she waited for at the school gates. Connie had a general aptitude for tardiness and since I was constantly at her side, I was constantly late to class, too. She managed to worm our way out of detention without fail every week, and her incredible penmanship meant that when she decided we would be taking an afternoon off we always had a note to excuse ourselves.

Mitching became a regular but reluctant activity for me, something I never would have dreamed of doing before—but what Connie wanted, Connie got. I was certain that the school was well aware of the fact that our notes were forgeries and our excuses pathetic, and yet she had each and every person she encountered in her pocket. If one of us called in sick, they knew the other would soon follow. If one of us was caught hiding in the bathrooms mid-class, they knew the other must be lurking behind one of the closed stall doors. People came to know who I was, students and faculty alike, and I wasn’t entirely sure I enjoyed the constant scrutiny even if popularity did have its perks. It was for Connie that I stayed in the limelight. Everything, every word and action and thought, was for Connie.

Chapter 2

September 1993

When I first entered Connie’s circle it was only on nondescript days when there was nothing else to do that we invited the boys to hang out with us. The ones we saw the most went to Christopher’s and were just as wealthy as my new friends; the type that would inherit their fathers’ businesses and who invested more time into playing rugby than anything else, even if they weren’t very good at it. They hardly needed to bother with things as trivial as academics and schooling when everything they wanted would somehow conveniently wind up in their laps. I found most of the boys that we hung around with dull and uninteresting, each of them as loud and attention-seeking as the rest. They stood too close when they talked, wore ill-fitting T-shirts that they must have assumed accentuated their muscles. Their aftershave was far too strong, their hair gel too thick. When they spoke, it was with an air of superiority and a stubborn insistence that they were the smartest of the group, misreading their own arrogance for flirtation. I didn’t like them and I didn’t like to be around them any more than was necessary, but as time went by the Christopher’s boys began to hang around us more and more until our social circles were basically overlapping.