She did little to hide her distaste of me.

“I’m guessing you’re here for Connie,” she drawled, already sounding bored. “She’s upstairs, obviously.”

Halford was an unusual suburb. Despite most of those living there coming from working-class or lower-middle-class backgrounds it was considered among the people of Dublin to be an affluent area—the southside of the northside, as Molly put it. Claire and I were never rich but we didn’t live paycheck to paycheck and neither did our neighbors. But it was people like the O’Reilly family that gave Halford its reputation. The O’Reilly family, along with the Gable and Gallagher families, lived markedly different lives to the rest of us. Connie’s childhood home was a mansion, to put it in the simplest terms. The four members of her family lived in a preposterously ostentatious residence that they simply did not need. Connie’s room was so far from her parents’ that days could pass and their paths wouldn’t cross. It was not a historic home, either, but a modern and repugnantly show-offish architectural monstrosity that served only to intimidate anyone that passed by. I ought to have been more daunted than I was but I saw through the façade they built up, clear as day.

Connie was lying on her bed when I entered her bedroom, wearing impossibly tight cotton shorts and a crop top. Her bedroom was plain compared to my own, a pale baby blue. Her walls weren’t adorned with band posters or photographs, there was no clutter—very little to actually indicate that this room was occupied and lived in. She kept her hockey gear neatly packed away in one of the giant wardrobes by the wall, and even her desk was bare, all of her books stacked tidily in the corner. The only photographs she did keep hung above her desk. A photograph of Connie and Emily with another smiling blond boy, older than they were, who I took to be a cousin. Connie with Molly and Orla on the beach, the three of them squinting at the camera. Mr. O’Reilly holding a baby Connie in his arms, laughing at something in the distance. The room could have belonged to anyone at all, of any age. Connie smiled in my direction, looking up at me from behind the book she was reading—The Great Gatsby. The record player she got for her birthday—that I insisted she get for her birthday—sat on her desk, filling the room with the gentle croons of Stevie Nicks. Throwing my jacket on the floor, I hopped onto the bed beside her.

“You’re late,” she whined, casting the book down. “I was afraid you weren’t coming.”

“I’m here every weekend. Where else could I possibly have gone?”

“I thought perhaps you’d found a new friend to trifle with,” she said, and she rolled onto her side to face me. I gasped in mock horror.

“Constance O’Reilly! I would never. I had breakfast with Claire, this morning.”

“And?” Connie thrived on gossip, rumors, scandals. I always thought she and Claire would go well together, if not for the fact that Claire often went out of her way to avoid being alone with her. She liked Connie—everyone liked Connie—but she had made it entirely too clear the day they met that she couldn’t trust the other girl; not when she had come sweeping into my life without any apparent cause or reason, uprooting me from the quiet contentedness I had known.