Little faith, sure. But as we switched off our phone lights and walked side by side, bumping shoulders in the velvety dark deep under the school, feeling our way along the walls, inhaling the sweet, rich smell of the earth, I did feel something. Amazement. Wonder. Shock maybe that there was anything cool on the St Mary’s campus, even if it was something we had to shimmy down a sewer drain to access. Shock that my dad hadn’t been bullshitting me. I mean, how are you ever supposed to trust parents after all those lies they feed you about the Tooth Fairy and watermelons growing in your stomach? But he had been telling the truth …

And there was some part of him down here, carved here, permanently, part of St Mary’s forever. Some part of him and – kind of, by extension, if you thought about all that Mendelian genetics crap I slept through in freshman biology – some part of me. That had been here before I was even born. That would be here long after I graduated.

We Brought It Home.

‘You know,’ Pat said, ‘I have my own theory about where these tunnels came from.’

‘Oh yeah? Underground nuclear-missile silo from the Cold War? Secret superhero lab for the biology department to breed a she-hulk for the impending apocalypse? Wait, that would explain the Rowers!’

Pat ignored me. ‘I think,’ he continued, ‘back in the 1930s, a St Mary’s student fell in love with one of the novices in the convent by the lake – they were the only girls on campus then. So he started digging a tunnel, and every night he would sneak out and dig a few feet. And eventually he got all the way down to the lake. And they would meet in secret, here –’

Before he could finish, I reached out for him in the dark, steered him into the soft earth wall and began to kiss him.

November

15

It was friggin’ cold. Outside, wind howled in the quad. Bare branches clawed at the frost on our windowpanes. We sprinted from class to class with our hoods up, and athletes rode their bikes with their hands jammed in their coat pockets, racing dangerously into the wind without touching the icy handlebars. Inside, Uggs smelling like damp dog lined the dorm hallways. Radiators clanked and hissed and steamed.