It wasn’t a pleasing topic to ponder over, but I deduced eventually that when the worst things befall us in life it is so much easier to shrug all of the blame off of ourselves and accuse the cards we were dealt, firm in the belief that there was nothing we could have done to escape our personal tragedies. But when luck strikes, we boast that we alone orchestrated our fortune and that our winnings are won by our own hands—no gods, no fate, no predestination.

It would be hard, in years to come, to even remember that there once existed a version of myself before I came to know Connie O’Reilly. I suppose you could quite easily divide my life into two decidedly uneven halves; the Alex before Connie, and Alex after Connie. Two barely reconcilable figures, I suppose, who lived very different lives and embodied very different ideals. A girl who was meek and well-mannered and mundane, compared to she who flirted with trouble and blasted caution and common sense to the wind. The time that came before is hardly memorable to me now. I was plain and unassuming before there was Connie, so much so that I struggle to picture clearly what I must have been like before she catapulted into my world and transformed the very essence of who I was.

Standing on the edges of crowded rooms, blending into the background. Never speaking unless spoken to. Childhood is a time of excitement and freedom, carefree innocence that can never be recaptured. My own childhood was never something I saw as such. I was not an unhappy child; merely forgettable, even to myself. My entire childhood I was holding my breath, awaiting something that would release me from my own prescribed monotony and self-diagnosed gutlessness. That something, as it turned out, just so happened to come in the shape of Connie.

I discovered who she was rather quickly upon starting secondary school in St. Michael’s. Everybody knew her whether they were in our year or not. She usurped her elder sister to become captain of the junior hockey team by Halloween, an impressive feat for a First Year, and the fact that she was both stunningly beautiful and filthy rich ensured that half our classmates were jealous of her, unsure of whether they wanted to be her or befriend her. Sometimes I would find myself staring unabashedly at them when they walked by, invisible on the periphery of the crowd. I couldn’t imagine that they might ever notice me, that they might be aware of anything beyond themselves. That was the aura they gave off, with their boisterous laughter and their elegant gliding, elated above the rest of us.

Connie, of course, was the most beautiful. Her hair fell halfway down her back, strawberry blonde, which she would probably describe as golden. It bounced when she tipped her head back, when she closed her eyes in laughter and wet her bright red lips with the corner of her tongue. Molly Gable and Orla Sheridan, flanking her on either side, were two of the only other girls in our year to come even close to matching Connie’s effortless beauty.