you hear? About Dominic? “I mean, yeah, I was shocked. He didn’t seem like the type, at all. But everyone knew he hadn’t got the course he wanted, like for college? He wanted to do Business, I think, but he didn’t get the points in the Leaving Cert. And he was pretty upset about that. So he’d been kind of off, that summer.”
“Depressed?”
“Not really. More like angry, a lot of the time. Like he was taking it out on the rest of us who’d got into the courses we wanted.”
“Angry,” Rafferty repeated thoughtfully. “That cause any problems?”
“Like what?”
“Dominic get into any fights? Piss anyone off?”
“Not exactly. Mostly he was just kind of a bollix, like getting nasty with people out of nowhere? But nobody held it against him. We all got it.”
“That’s pretty understanding,” Rafferty said. “For a bunch of teenage boys.”
I did some kind of shrug. The truth was that I at least hadn’t thought very much about Dominic, that summer, except for the odd moment of pity tinged with smugness. My mind had been on college, freedom, a week in Mykonos with Sean and Dec; Dominic’s strops (pinning Darragh O’Rourke against the wall and shouting in his face, after some harmless comment, then storming off when the rest of us broke it up) had been low on my priority list.
“Looking back, do you think he might have been in worse shape than you realized? Teenagers, they don’t always know how to spot the signs that someone’s in real trouble. They’re all half mental anyway; even when someone’s falling apart, they just figure it’s more of the same.”
“I guess he could have been,” I said, after a moment. “He was definitely . . .” I couldn’t come up with the right way to describe it, the raw, splintered, unpredictable energy that had made me start avoiding Dominic that summer. “He was off.”
“Put it this way. If one of your friends right now started acting the way Dominic was that summer, would you be worried?”
“I guess. Yeah. I would be.”
“Right,” Rafferty said. He was leaning forwards, hands clasped between his knees, gazing at me like I was making some valuable contribution to the investigation. “When did he start acting out of character? Ballpark, even.”
“I don’t . . .” It had been years since I’d thought about any of this. “I mean, I wouldn’t swear to this. At all.” Rafferty nodded understandingly. “But I think it sort of started around the Leaving Cert orals, so April? And then it got way worse in June, with the written exams. He knew he’d fucked up. Like, most of us? we were all stressing about how we’d done, except a few nerds who knew they’d got a million points; one day we’d be all ‘Yeah, I should be fine’ and the next we’d be like ‘Oh shit, what if . . .’ But Dominic was like, ‘I’m fucked.’ End of. And it was obviously wrecking his head. And when the results came out in August and yeah, he actually had done as badly as he thought, then he got even worse.”
“Why’d he do so badly? You said he wasn’t thick.”
“He wasn’t. He just hadn’t studied. He”—hard to explain—“Dominic’s parents were rich. They kind of, I guess they spoiled him? Like he always had everything, cool phones and cool holidays and designer gear, and before sixth year they bought him a BMW?” Sudden vague memory of resentment, my dad had laughed in my face, Better start saving— “I think it just, like, genuinely never occurred to him that he might not get something he wanted. Including whatever course he wanted. So he didn’t bother studying. And by the time it hit him, it was too late.”
“Did he ever do drugs?” And, wryly, when I hesitated: “Toby. It’s been ten years. Even if I was looking to bang people up for a bit of hash or a few pills, which I’m not, the statute of limitations ran out years back. And I haven’t cautioned you; anything you say wouldn’t be admissible in evidence. I just need to get a feel for what was going on in Dominic’s life.”
“Yeah,” I said, after a moment. “He did drugs sometimes.”
“What kinds?”
“I know he did hash, and E. And coke, sometimes.” Dominic had liked coke, a lot. It hadn’t been all that common, back in school, but when there was some around it had been his more often than not, and he had been good about sharing with the host: