I merely shrugged and turned my attention back to the stack of copies of Back to the Future I was supposed to be sorting out. I could feel her eyes on me, tension ringing in the air as she slurped on her drink. “Maybe she’s just tired of people talking about it.”

Orla snorted. “Talking about it? We both know she hasn’t said a single bleedin’ word to anyone.”

It had been a slow summer. Very few people came to the shop in the morning or afternoon and I did a good job at avoiding the evening shifts, and those who infrequently popped in didn’t spend very long. Without the old distractions I had grown used to over the summer months, time passed by at a snail’s pace, spiritless and uneventful. There was nothing reminiscent of the summers from before, of adventures and exploits beneath a dreary Irish sun or of an inexperienced imitation of love, innocent and naïve. Old friends and classmates would come in from time to time and do everything they could muster to engage with me in casual and friendly conversation. They asked about my summer, my exams, my plans for next year, all as a very unsubtle segue into the most popular controversy of the times, and I said nothing. I smiled as I served them and kept my mouth shut completely. I often wondered why nobody just came in and unreservedly asked me exactly what they wanted to know, but they didn’t. I liked to think that perhaps I intimidated them but in actuality, they probably knew they would get nothing but unwavering silence from me. If Connie wasn’t saying anything, I hardly would.

Orla was the only real friend I retained from what I came to consider as my Old Life. Early in June she began to ring our landline every evening and called to the house every weekend before she eventually remembered I had a job nearby where I couldn’t continue to ignore or deflect her concern if I was simply ambushed. Molly became a close acquaintance for lack of a better term; she would never have sought me out, nor I her, but when I saw her, I was content enough to stop and make idle chat.

I knew the secrecy of it all bugged her to no end. According to Orla’s somewhat disjointed stories, Connie hadn’t said a single word concerning me or the rather instantaneous end to our friendship to anyone, and it was the biggest scandal our wider social circles had seen in years. When asked about it, Connie would merely shrug and tell her interrogator to take a long walk off a short cliff. She ignored Molly for almost a week the first time she pestered her for an explanation as to my disappearance from her life, and few dared to ask her since.

I saw her for the first time in three months just a few days after my birthday through the window of Blockbusters under the arm of Jim Lewis. He had taken a stretch over the summer, buff and muscular where he had once been gangly and thin, side-swept black hair and a pretty white smile. They were walking almost joined at the hip passed the shop, her head resting on his shoulder and her step light and cheery. I watched them walk by in silence, the stack of videos at my feet forgotten, and spent the remainder of my shift stumbling through my mind and my memories.