She doesn’t fully understand it. The boys they take to fawning over are eejits; they’re rude, and they smell. It’s not as if there is anyone she can talk to about it, either. The other girls will laugh, she’s sure, and she’d rather drop dead than ask her sister—or, God forbid, her mother. She decides she’s just a bit slow on the uptake, and that all the feelings her friends talk about will come to her in time. And yet…still it niggles at the back of her mind, just why she doesn’t understand all of this—boys, crushes, dates, kisses, discos—and why it’s such a big deal for everyone else.

But then Roisin Murphy sits down next to her in Irish when school starts back after Christmas in First Year, and she figures she might finally be starting to understand.

There’s nothing particularly special about Roisin. She’s not popular, really, and not a part of her circle of friends, but she’s sweet, and she’s smart, and when she offers to help Connie out with her verb conjugations her steadily drumming heart swells up in her chest. And she becomes the focus of Connie’s attention, her favorite thing to talk about. She tells Molly and Orla all about her, eyes twinkling in adoration, every day at lunch, even though neither of them pays her much heed. When she thinks about her, her heart picks up speed and it’s like her mind, always so calm and rational before, goes into overdrive. It’s a new, exciting feeling and Connie loves the thrill it gives her, the rush. Everything the other girls have said—it all starts to make sense.

But then just after Easter Roisin begins to date some loser boy from Belvedere named Brian. Connie no longer wants her help in Irish. She was still failing the stupid class, anyway. She’s sullen and moody at lunch. She doesn’t want to hang out with her friends anymore.

That is, until Jessica Lane asks if she can borrow a pencil one afternoon in French, and the way her lips twitch into a smile, and the way her soft brown eyes pour into Connie’s across her desk—Connie could almost swear it must be love.

Everyone does stupid things to get boys to notice them. Connie joins after school choir even though it clashes with hockey and she hasn’t a note in her head when she finds out Jessica is their best singer. That infatuation lasts until Molly shows up at her house one afternoon in the shortest pair of denim shorts she has ever seen and it takes Connie the rest of the day to pick her jaw up off the floor. Her bizarre interest in Molly only drags on for a week or so, thank Christ. Molly’s pretty, sure, and fun to be around, but Connie can’t imagine a worse person to have feelings for.

Ciara Dowling moves to sit beside her in Art sometime in Second Year, and Connie’s grades fall from an A to a C. She takes to hating her teacher, moaning to her friends how unfair and unjust such a score is, but deep down she knows that she can only blame herself. She knows, deep, deep, down, that her results have plummeted purely because she spends almost every class whispering and giggling with the girl next to her, whatever portrait or painting she’s supposed to be working on thrown to the side and forgotten.