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After I broke her collarbone and she bloodied my favorite shirt, the only thing we could do was to become friends. If we were younger or just a bit more immature we would've been rivals, but we were seventeen and the proper thing for nice seventeen-year-old girls to do after breaking each others bones and stabbing each other was to apologize, send gifts of burnt cookies, hug each other, and talk in that awkward, hesitant way you talk to someone who was only a short time ago a stranger, and a b***h of a stranger, too.

I was the nice girl. I didn't mean to break her collarbone. It was in art class. I was hammering the top of an oilpaint can back in place, she leaned over it to grab a pencil, and absently the hammer lifted, fell...

She screamed for several minutes, then stabbed me with the pencil. It went through my sleeve and made a lovely, terribly painful hole in my shoulder.

My first thought when I saw her was that she looked like the kind of kid who'd grow up to be a serial killer, and my first thought upon being stabbed was that I was right, and I was going to be her victim. She was wearing her usual offbeat clothes that day - hiphugging, bellbottom pants that had gone out fashion about thirty years ago, combat boots, and a holey ripped-up net shirt that showed off a sequined bra. The combat boots in particular looked like serial-killer material. They had decorative spikes sharp enough to gash any fool who got in their path.

She always had this look on her face, too. Not murderous or even angry, but just blank and dark. Creepy kind of look. Definitely a future serial-killer.

Except after she stabbed me, she burst into tears, wailing, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," her arms clinging round my neck, mindless of her fractured collarbonee. At which point I fainted and the ambulance took us both to the local hospital.

That was what she was like. Cold and sad and a bit scary on the outside with her black clothes and too much eyeshadow outlining those brilliant green eyes. She wrote stories and poetry but never showed it to anyone. Her art was a frightening abstract. She had no friends. Until the day I broke her collarbone, I'd never heard her speak.

Her name was Adaline. She called herself Adaline, falling star. Apparantly it was the title of some book. She said it described her. Falling star. A meteor you see for about a second, a star detached from the sky and pummelting for a moment before it hits the atmosphere and burns in a quick death. But that was depressing. I just called her Star.