Free Good Girls Don't by Claire Hennessy

exam?”
    “My Junior Cert, Declan?”
    “Oh, right.” He paused. “You should really get some sleep.”
    “Yeah, I hear that’s a good thing to do.”
    “Goodnight, then.”
    “Night,” I said, throwing the phone across the room and burying my head in my pillow in an attempt to speed up the process of falling asleep.
    ***
    “Everything in life is so futile,” he said. “You’re born, you go to school, you work, you get married, you die. You’re just going through the motions. It’s such a waste.”
    “That’s a pretty pessimistic view, Declan,” I said.
    “It’s realistic,” he said glumly. “Take you and Natasha, for example.”
    “What about me and Natasha?” I said warily.
    “Well, you’ve said yourself that you know it’s not going to last. If that’s the case, then why bother? What’s the point in wasting your time?”
    “It’s fun,” I shrugged. “I like being around her. Even if it’s not going to last forever, it’s what’s making me happy at the moment.”
    “It must be nice to be happy,” he said.
    ***
    I’d known him for a year. I’d seen him happy before. Often it was due to being under the influence of various substances, but other times I’d seen him smile and look content, and then hide it, as if it was afraid someone would see and realise that there was more to him than being depressed.
    It was the attitude that a lot of that crowd shared, this need to be permanently down and dour. Once I’d stepped back from it, I’d started to see them for what they really were. Apart from Lucy, Andrew and Declan I wasn’t really friendly with any of them anymore. I’d made a couple of new friends in school since September. It was Transition Year, which seemed to be consisting mostly of time-wasting and gloriously non-academic activities, so there was plenty of time to get to know people that I hadn’t really talked to before. There was this girl Roisín who I’d always pegged as one of the serious academic types – the sort that I avoided like the plague after having Janet as an older sister – but once we’d got talking, we seemed to agree on a lot of things. She was sort of sheltered, but I thought it was endearing in a way. It certainly made a difference from the cynicism and the jadedness of Lucy’s friends.
    She didn’t strike me as the sort of person who thought the world was such a terrible place that the only way of dealing with it would be to remove yourself from it completely.
    But I couldn’t just ignore Declan. I couldn’t take the risk that one day he’d actually follow through on his promises.
     
     

Chapter Thirty-Two
     
    “Well,” I begin. “I want to strangle him. So the usual, really.”
    “He is a bit of a pain, isn’t he?” Lucy sighs. “The poor guy, though, he’s got so many problems.”
    “He creates them for himself,” I say bluntly.
    “That’s a bit harsh.”
    “And I’m tired of being nice,” I sigh.
    She strokes my hair. “He’ll grow out of it. Eventually.”
    “Is that a guarantee?” I ask.
    “Or your money back.” She laughs.
    I look at her now and she really hasn’t changed much since the first day I met her, two and a half years ago. She’s a little bit prettier, and she’s replaced her cute-sexy-schoolgirl look with a sophisticated-almost-college-student look, but she looks basically the same.
    The real change was inward, although to anyone who really knows her, the change isn’t as drastic as you might think. Lucy at eighteen is still a flirt, still fun to be around, still giggly. A lot more responsible than she used to be, I suppose, but that happens to everyone.
    It was two years ago, during the Easter holidays, so I was allowed out. My schoolbooks had been put aside for the two weeks and I was ready to enjoy myself, only I’d realised that my world had become a lot smaller in the last couple of months. I’d alienated most of the girls in my class during my days of hanging around with Lucy and her