I ended up leaving that night before watching them kiss for a third time, without a word to Connie. I supposed it terrified me that she might look me in the eyes and see, up close, all that I felt bubbling up beneath the surface. I was embarrassed and ashamed of all the things that I felt, the guilt most of all. Three days later it was Molly’s birthday and I watched her kiss Brendan Keane in the kitchen, drunk and dizzy on white wine. At the next party it was Thomas Mulroney. The next time after that it was Aidan, again.

After a while it became easier to pretend that none of it was happening. The Connie who snuck off with boys at parties and the Connie I knew seemed irreconcilable in my head. And I swore to myself that I wouldn’t let it get to me, or affect me, any more than was normal. I didn’t fancy her, after all. I wasn’t jealous. I just didn’t like to think that she might be taken advantage of, or that she might be used. It was merely a desire to protect her, I told myself. Besides—I knew she didn’t care about them. I knew she kissed them for the fun of it, to maintain the image that she had built up of herself. So long as that was all there was to it, I knew we would be fine.

Chapter 3

November 1993

We were sitting together on the pier sometime in November the first time Connie met the people I once considered my friends.

Friendship never came easily to me. I knew I wasn’t a dislikeable person. I was funny and kind, even if I was also awkward and stiff. I had a general tendency toward shyness and introversion as a child and it took me a longer time than most to shake off that juvenile urge to hide away alone when faced with any kind of social activity. That wasn’t to say that I didn’t have a lot of friends growing up; I did. Every girl in my Primary School class considered themselves to be my friend, but I never had a best friend. I was the third wheel my entire childhood, an unenviable position at any age. I latched on to other friendships as a tag-along, someone to invite when one person in a duo got bored. I didn’t mind it, really. I didn’t mind that Niamh and Lauren had sleepovers without me, or that they had known each other since birth. I came to accept that I would always be a friend but never a best friend, and it seemed better that way. I didn’t mind being alone. I was never short of friends to play with in the schoolyard and my summers were spent mixing with plenty of different groups from my class. When it came to secondary school I certainly didn’t mourn losing all of those girls to other schools and it didn’t bother me as it should have. I found acquaintances to sit with at lunch, and what more could I have needed? I wasn’t going out of my way to make friends when it was something I never learned to do.