“Runners and a skirt, Alex? Really?”

Connie smacked me on the back of the head. “I tried to tell her but she wouldn’t fucking listen.”

“I don’t know about you but I, for one, could do without walking on stilts impersonating Bambi on ice for the night.”

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. You motherfuckers ready to go?”

I groaned, rolling my eyes. “She hasn’t stopped saying that word all day,” I explained. “We watched Pulp Fiction last night and it appears to have stuck.”

“It’s a motherfucking cool word, Al. You’re just jealous you didn’t claim it first. What do you two motherfuckers have to drink?”

“Bacardi,” Molly grinned. Her nose scrunched up in a way that was far from flattering when she smiled like that, and it never seemed to reach her eyes. Even when she laughed at the most trivial and innocent of things there was always a sharp edge to it, like she was aware of a cruel, mean joke the rest of us remained oblivious to.

“Vodka,” Orla began. “I got it off Mam because she said she’d rather know I was drinking that than going off and drinking all those mixed drinks the way everyone else does. Of course, she doesn’t know that I’m gonna mix it with other drink anyway—”

As I had a tendency to do, I stopped listening almost as soon as Orla began to ramble. It wasn’t that I didn’t like her—I adored her. There weren’t many girls in our school who still clung on to hearts that were as kind as Orla’s, even if she was, for lack of a better term, a bit of a dope. Most of her opinions and thoughts were ones that Molly gave her, but even still she failed to understand why there were just people in school that we could not, and would not, be friends with. Orla wanted to like everyone and wanted everyone to like her, and it had been a constant source of conflict between Orla and Connie until Molly had insisted that Connie lay off her best friend. Naturally, that resulted in Molly’s temporary exile before Connie so generously forgave her, and since then Orla had been free to befriend whoever she fancied—so long as her allegiance would always lie with us.

It was stupid, and it was childish, and it was immature, but it was teenage politics. It was just the way things were.

Aidan’s brother opened the door to us, his hand reaching down to squeeze Molly’s arse as she passed. She squealed, mockingly slapping him on the arm. Christ, he was almost as bad as his brother. I followed them into the sitting room where everyone that had been packed in greeted us with a cheer. We were fashionably late, of course, and it seemed almost everyone was already well on their way to getting drunk.

As soon as Connie entered a room, and it didn’t matter what room it was, every eye was promptly on her. The volume increased, and I suppose the brightness, the very atmosphere, surged too. That every room suddenly became charged with energy upon her entrance was not simply the hopeless observation of my inexplicably smitten self; it was a fact. People spoke a little louder in the hope that she might overhear, put a little more heart into their laughter, a touch of eccentricity into their gesticulations. Peacocks. They reminded me of peacocks fluffing up their feathers in the presence of a peahen. And I watched them primp and preen in the hope of snatching her notice with a silently smug satisfaction that such efforts were beneath me. I didn’t need to vie for her attention. I already had it.