Stand by Me by Sheila O'Flanagan

say things like that to her were surely worth ruining a dress over. All the same . . . she balled it up and shoved it into a plastic bag, which she pushed to the back of her wardrobe . . . it would be an awful waste of money to only get one wear out of it!
     
    She slid between the sheets of her single bed and exhaled slowly. It had been worth it really. She was Brendan’s girl. His lucky charm. His lucky Domino. That was what he’d called her just after his muffled cry of pleasure. My lucky, lucky Domino.
     
     
    It was the sound of Evelyn vacuuming the stairs that woke her the following morning. She groaned softly, because the noise had set off an unwelcome pounding at the back of her head. It was a few minutes before she felt able to open her eyes again, and when she did, she looked at the old-fashioned alarm clock beside her bed, which was showing almost eleven. She blinked a couple of times - eleven was unforgivably late in the Brady household. Evelyn was always up by seven so that she could go to eight o’clock Mass each morning, and Seamus’s idea of a lie-in at the weekends was to get up when he heard Evelyn leaving the house.
     
    Dominique pushed the covers from her bed. She was sore, and her legs ached as she walked over to her small dressing table. She took a deep breath and looked at her face in the oval mirror. She didn’t look any different. Her eyes weren’t brighter, her hair wasn’t shinier, her face didn’t glow. But inside she felt completely different. She’d made love to her boyfriend. She was a grown-up at last.
     
    As Dominique walked out on to the landing, her dressing gown wrapped around her, Evelyn switched off the vacuum cleaner.
     
    ‘You came home very late last night,’ she said.
     
    ‘It was a party,’ said Dominique. ‘It wasn’t over till late.’
     
    ‘I’m sure it was over well before four,’ said Evelyn. ‘Which was the time you got in at.’
     
    ‘It took ages to find a taxi,’ said Dominique. ‘They’re not exactly plentiful in the wilds of Clondalkin, you know.’
     
    Evelyn looked at her sceptically. ‘You mustn’t have been looking very hard.’
     
    ‘I swear to God,’ said Dominique. ‘We were standing at the side of the road for hours!’
     
    Which was almost true. She’d had blisters on her feet by the time Brendan had stopped a passing taxi with a piercing whistle. (That ability had impressed Dominique immensely. She’d never known anyone who could actually whistle loud enough to stop a taxi before.)
     
    ‘You look a wreck,’ said Evelyn.
     
    ‘It was raining,’ Dominique reminded her. ‘We got soaked.’
     
    ‘I told you you should have worn a coat.’
     
    Dominique shrugged impatiently.
     
    ‘I’m doing a wash this afternoon,’ said Evelyn. ‘If you want your dress and jacket done, put them in the laundry basket.’
     
    Dominique had no intention of doing any such thing. She grunted non-committally at her mother and went downstairs to make toast.
     
     
    She washed the dress herself the next morning when both Evelyn and Seamus were at ten o’clock Mass. She’d gone into town after breakfast on Saturday, having retrieved the dress from the wardrobe and hidden it under her mattress, just in case her mother found it. She’d left the jacket - which had a long green streak on the shoulder - on a hanger suspended from the handle of her wardrobe. When she’d come home, Evelyn had asked her about the dress and she said that she’d forgotten to put it in the laundry.
     
    ‘I looked in your room,’ said Evelyn. ‘It wasn’t with the jacket. You didn’t put that in either, and I’m not sure that mark is going to come out.’
     
    ‘Won’t it?’ Dominique was shaking inside. She’d been hoping that the mark on the jacket would distract Evelyn from asking about the dress. She didn’t care that she’d had sex with Brendan but she certainly didn’t want her mother to know. Especially that it had been outdoors in the