I never cared much for appearances or ranked myself against other girls my age, but I felt a sharp sense of inadequacy whenever they were near. Her small collection of close friends was just as intimidating as she was, each of them both wealthy and attractive in their own right, and girls who weren’t counted among them fought for the right to declare themselves, at the very least, her acquaintance. In many ways, she existed on the fringes of my life at first. Connie was untouchable, someone I, the docile Alex Ryan, with askew glasses and frizzy hair, would never dare interact with. We didn’t even share a class together in First or Second Year and just English in Third Year; the only class she had where she wasn’t surrounded by any of her friends.

She sat at the desk next to me and for the first few weeks of Third Year she was easy to pretend to ignore. I thrived in English, as I did in almost every class, but it fell in the late mid-morning, and so I developed a habit of smuggling in chocolate to stave off my hunger until lunch. After she noticed me nibbling away on a piece of Turkish Delight one afternoon, she took to leaning across the desk every afternoon and asking for some. The first time she asked me caught me completely off guard and left me a veritable mess for the rest of the day. Sister Anna was standing with her back to the class and I was scribbling intently in my notebook, silently chewing. Connie cleared her throat twice, loud enough to catch my attention, and when I glanced in her direction, I saw she was leaning across to me.

“Um—everything okay?” I whispered, blinking twice.

“Peachy,” she replied, and the clipped edge to her voice had me wondering if perhaps I did something to offend her. Nothing before that had ever startled me so much, and my mouth went dry. ”What kind of chocolate is that?”

“Oh, it’s just Turkish Delight,” I answered, unsure.

“Can I have some?”

Nobody at school really tended to notice me most of the time, and no one like Connie O’Reilly had ever actually spoken to me before. I gulped and handed her a square which she practically snatched out of my hand before holding out her palm for another. “Turkish Delight is my favorite,” she whispered again. I looked up quickly to see if there was mockery behind her words but there was none. My mind could not fathom why she might be talking to me other than to mock or jeer. That was something popular girls did, I knew. They put others down to make themselves feel better. And yet, I never heard anything bad about Connie O’Reilly. She barely spoke to anyone outside her circle but when she did, she was rumored to be nothing but polite. I studied her closely for a moment before allowing myself to believe her.

I didn’t bother trying to suppress the smile that burst through, then, when I decided to trust her. “Really? I tried some after reading The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe a few years ago and I’ve been obsessed ever since.”