The sun crept into the room, spilling its warmth across my face, dragging my eyes open. But my head was still stuck on the same damn lyrics looping like a curse: “The killer in me is the killer in you—what’s a boy supposed to do?” They’ve haunted me for months. I still don’t understand why he didn’t take me with him. I loved him. He asked me to marry him. What the hell changed overnight? I thought he was it—the love of my life. I was dressed. Ready. Packed to leave this life behind.

It was the summer before senior year, and I’d decided everything about me had to change. The pink bottle-cap glasses had to go. My hair needed to be cut short and dyed blonde. I started skipping meals, taking weight-loss pills—anything to shrink myself into someone worth noticing. And it worked. People began to see me. I wasn’t just the quiet girl in the corner anymore; suddenly, I mattered. That’s what I wanted—to be cool, to be noticed, to stop feeling invisible. Working the night shift, I’d listen to everyone talk about the parties they were headed to after closing. I had never been to one. Not yet.

Before that summer, I was predictable—every day followed the same rhythm, every shift the same faces. Then Mary started working with me. She ran the front, handling the registers or drive-through, while I stayed in the kitchen. It took a while before we actually talked, but once we did, everything changed. I didn’t know it then, but nothing about my days—or me—would stay the same.

Mary was unlike any of my other friends. She was this little Italian girl with a boisterous attitude—gorgeous, petite, and with a figure to match. Her thick, curly, midnight-black hair was absolutely beautiful. She was the complete opposite of me in every way. The more we talked, the closer we became, until I was spending nearly every weekend at her house.

One of our favorite hangouts was a place called Roller Rinks—a roller-skating joint that turned into a mini dance club on weekends when the DJ played all the latest pop hits. Whenever Mary worked a shift there, three guys would always show up at the restaurant afterward to pick her up. They were quite the group—loud, confident, and impossible not to notice. And honestly, they were easy on the eyes.

But one of them caught my attention differently. The only problem? The friend code. You know the one: never date your girlfriend’s brother or anyone in her family. You don’t want her thinking you’re only hanging around to get close to him. And what if things went south? It could ruin everything between us. So, I knew I’d have to take baby steps—first to ask her about them, and then, maybe, to confess that I had a crush on one of them. It was going to take courage—real courage—on my part to approach her. I kept telling myself, What’s the worst that could happen? Just ask his name. But then, almost as if fate had a sense of humor, things shifted. One of the boys from her group started working alongside me in the kitchen. Not the one I’d been quietly crushing on, yet still… a small, tantalizing step in the right direction.

His name was Patrick. Tall, lean, with a quiet strength that made him seem effortless. His eyes—the color of storm-tossed ocean, they looked like they were holding secrets. His hair, deep and black as midnight, long enough to have to be pulled back at work. When we worked the same shift he was mysterious, reserved, almost scary. Admittedly he sparked my interest, however I knew I would never be his type, and I had to keep my focus on the other boy. Not long after Patrick started working and Mary and I had hung out several times I decided the timing was right. “Who are those two boys that come in at the end of your shift?”To which she responded and let me know that one of them was her brother Ralph, and the other her cousin from Florida named Steve. Step one, complete. Now I knew what his name was, where he came from, and that he was Mary’s cousin. I was relieved to know that he was not one of her brothers. I was going to have to figure out if Steve was just visiting or was permanently living in New York, Marion to be exact. I decided it was best to push that thought to the back of my head for now, maybe that was none of my business.

It did not take long before I finally got the courage up to ask Mary to introduce me to Steve. I worried he might think I was creepy because everytime he came in the restaurant I could not keep my eyes off from him. And just like that, the next time Mary worked she introduced me to him. My heart was beating out of my chest, so much so I thought everyone could hear it.