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By Root 437 0

know each other as they had attended different primary schools but Penny’s face was familiar – they had grown up in the same small town. Penny had been sad but Mary was excited at the prospect of a new school and a new world, and by the time they had reached Dublin she had managed to infuse that excitement into her new best friend. Penny and Mary were kindred spirits from the start. Mary might have been the child that the townspeople pitied – she was the one they whispered about as she passed, her dead mother never far behind – but Penny suffered from her parents’ rejection and Mary understood that. She had no mother but she did have a father, which was more than Penny had. From the day she sat down beside Penny, Mary would do everything to guarantee that she wouldn’t feel lonely again, including introducing her to one of Ivan’s best friends, Adam. Mary swore he was perfect for her. She was right: Adam and Penny were inseparable from the start.

When Mary nearly died, Penny thought she might just die with her. She returned to an empty house and spoke with Adam on the phone. He told her that her best friend might not live through the night. He was desperate to be with her but his parents wouldn’t let him leave the house, not after his friend had plunged to his death leaving his half-dead girlfriend with child. That night, alone in her big empty house, she opened her parents’ drinks cabinet and poured herself a whiskey. When she’d finished it, she poured herself a second and a third. After the fourth she passed out on the sofa, waking up the next afternoon, still alone.

The first time she’d seen Mary in hospital, she waited until they were alone before she stroked her bandaged head. “You’d better not leave me!”

She wasn’t allowed stay away from school, it being her Leaving Cert year, so she went back to study for a college place she didn’t want. Luckily for her she was clever, and even though she had spent four months without opening a book, she breezed through the exams, as her parents had before her. She wasn’t there on the day that Mary woke, but Adam called to let her know and she cried down the phone. She wasn’t allowed home until the weekend, four days after her best friend had come back to the living. When Penny entered the room Mary burst into tears and Penny’s heart soared because she was so happy to be recognized. That night, to celebrate, she and Adam drank three bottles of her mother’s Christmas wine stash. Penny knew emptiness, but no matter how hard she tried she could never fill it.

Adam was the kind of kid who would never set the intellectual world on fire, but if you put him in a field with a ball or a stick it was like watching genius. He loved his sports and would have been a much more suitable friend for Ivan’s brothers than the sport-shunning Ivan. But there was something about Ivan that drew Adam to him from the first time they met. He liked his calmness and admired his simplicity. Ivan didn’t care about appearances and Adam enjoyed his friend’s lack of ego – his easy ways relaxed him. If Ivan was the easygoing one and Robert the adventurous one, Adam was the funny one. He could make anyone laugh, even the sternest of his teachers, so he often talked his way out of trouble. Of course, his abilities on the field got him a place on the Kerry youth team and with this came a hint of celebrity – his capacity to pick up a cup and make a joke to a local TV crew had further endeared him to the inhabitants of his small town. But his heart belonged only to Penny.

A long time before his friend had introduced them, he had watched a young girl with the prettiest blue shoes sit on the wall that separated the primary school from the road. The school was empty, the bell having rung long before, but there she sat, alone, staring at her pretty blue shoes. He hid behind a bush that separated his friend’s father’s land from the road that lay between him and the girl. He was eleven and had been making his way home across the fields when he’d caught sight of her. Her pretty blonde hair shone in the evening sun, and when