We allowed ourselves a chance to settle in and began to mingle with the others, relieved that the uncomfortable ambiance that always accompanied the beginning of any party had already died down by the time of our arrival. Connie was downing her rum straight from the bottle but I paid her no real heed. I trusted her to never really drank herself to a point that could be considered dangerous. Sure, she would get hammered and kiss boys that were beneath her, stumble around in her ill-fitting high heels, and proceed to regret all of it the next morning, but nobody ever needed to take care of Connie. She was always in control. It didn’t occur to me, back then, just how potentially dangerous Connie’s drinking could be; although I didn’t know the extent of it, I knew at the very least that her mother had a fondness for alcohol. I had never met the woman but I had heard quite a bit about her to at least be able to piece that much together. Connie’s parents were allusive, to say the least. Nobody knew for certain what Connie’s father did, even Connie herself, but whatever it was it certainly paid the bills. Something involving property and business and a lot of other things none of us gave a shit about. He was away most of the time, in London, Paris, New York. Her mother also strove to be absent from the house as much as was possible, though where she went was yet another unanswered question.

But if Connie thought she could handle downing her drink at a frightening rate, who was I to stop her? Out of the four of us, Orla was by far the messiest when it came to drinking. She threw back spirits without a second thought and wound up dancing on the kitchen counters or eating the face off some hapless boy. Molly was a bit more uptight when it came to drinking; she indulged, of course, but her stomach was weak. A few shots were all it took for her to end up with her head in a toilet bowl. I myself liked to think of myself as her polar opposite, capable of drinking anyone under the table, Connie included, but it wasn’t true. I couldn’t hold my drink all that well and they knew it. It rarely happened that I acted the eejit—not when Connie very often kept an eye on how much I consumed. I never did anything stupid, really; just vomited my innards up uncontrollably and found myself unable to either walk or talk. Sure, I was a fun tipsy drunk, loosening up and letting go, but I was a child, at the end of the day. I was sixteen. I wasn’t meant to be drinking, and it showed.

When Connie headed out for a smoke with Aidan I was left alone in the sitting room. I scanned the room quickly for someone to talk to and that was when I noticed her, walking in through the door from the hall. I was taken aback when I saw her properly for the first time. My first thought was that she looked like she had just been picked up from somewhere far cooler—Camden in London, maybe—and dumped there in the middle of Halford. She wasn’t pretty in the way that my friends were. To sober eyes she might well have appeared rather plain, her jewelry and distinctive clothing serving to give her the edge that she naturally lacked. But in a crowded room full of people I disliked she was certainly pretty enough to make me stand up a little straighter. Blonde hair tied back in a messy ponytail, humored blue eyes. She wasn’t too tall, maybe half a foot taller than I was, and wearing a sleeveless top that showed off a rather impressive farmer’s tan. She wore a nose ring and a lip stud, too, and I found myself wondering where else on her body she might have been pierced. I found myself wondering if I would ever get the chance to find out.