Perfect, I thought to myself. She always looked so flawlessly perfect. In the mirror, she smiled at me, clearly aware that I was staring unabashedly at her, and I noticed how my own cheeks reddened.

“Are you done yet?” I sighed, shoving aside my embarrassment. “It’s not the bleedin’ Oscars.”

As I came to expect, she didn’t respond. She grabbed her makeup pouch and shoved it into her handbag before motioning for me to follow, and then began the long trek to the front door of her house. It was chilly when we stepped out onto the porch, chillier than it had been when I arrived, and she took her time locking up the front door. She had worn heels, too, for whatever reason, and the stroll down to Orla’s was going to take longer than it ought to.

“We’re already an hour late,” I grumbled, making my way through her driveway.

“Fashionably late.”

“That doesn’t apply here. What’s the point in taking all day to get ready when it’ll be pitch black when we get there?”

Connie sighed dramatically, throwing me a disappointed look. “You never learn, do you, Ryan? Appearance matters.”

“Not on a night like this it doesn’t!”

“Have you ever seen me leave the house without a full face of makeup on?”

I paused in the middle of the pathway. My brow creased. “I—no.”

“Exactly. And believe me—you never will.”

After the disaster of Titanic proportions that was Orla’s sixteenth birthday, before I actually knew her, her parents stubbornly refused to mark her seventeenth with anything that could be considered a party. Someone had found the keys to her father’s most prized possession, his brand-new Mercedes, and driven it right into the garden wall. That might not have been so bad on its own, really, were it not for the fact that the windows of her little brother’s bedroom had been smashed and the kitchen door removed from its hinges. It ended up quite a costly night for the Sheridan family and there was no way in hell they were going to oversee a repeat of it. So, Orla opted instead for a start of summer, end of exams night out in town with just four of us before we would head back to hers for a sleepover. We were assured that so long as nothing was broken and no vomit landed on any surface from which it couldn’t easily be removed, her father, sleeping downstairs in the basement for the night, wasn’t going to bother us.

Molly already seemed at least half-drunk when she opened the door to us, leaning against the frame with one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. “What time do you call this?” she asked, and I scoffed in response.

“Ask Connie,” I muttered, stepping inside. Molly thrust the bottle into my arms and I unscrewed it, taking a hefty gulp before passing it back. I found Orla in the enormous sitting room with a wide spread of treats and alcohol around her, and she jumped up into my arms when I entered.