The transformation was in process: Mary Kate was on her way to becoming an eyelash-curling, pheromone-emitting, conversation-manipulating virtuoso of flirting and seduction. More importantly, she had cultivated the obsessive and nearly psychotic mindset of ruthless determination that teenage boys find so attractive in a girl.

Oh wait. Well, anyway.

I was worried about her. I mean, I also thought she was an idiot, but I was worried about her nonetheless. She barely left the dorm. She just sat on our futon, wrapped in a furry blanket with her bandaged face buried in book after book. Even for Halloween last month, she refused to go out to either the lame school-sponsored dance where freshmen guys threw candy corn at everyone or the after-party in Pat’s dorm that got busted by the dorm priest.

‘Come on!’ I’d urged her. ‘This is the perfect chance to go out! It doesn’t matter that you look freaky! Everyone looks freaky tonight!’

Somehow that didn’t convince her, although she didn’t even remark on my freaky comment. Instead, gravely serious, she quoted poetry:

‘At my back I always hear, Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.’

I rolled my eyes. Leave it to my room-mate to take life advice from a poem where a creep in linen breeches tries to convince a virgin to bone him before they both die of plague.

And, while I had barely noticed the cold, Mary Kate was all too aware of it and what it meant: the first snow was coming. With a full week left of her masked face, and the temperature dropping and ominous grey clouds gathering over the lake, a sense of desperate urgency fueled her to the brink of hysteria. One night, when we heard a rapping sound at our window, she jumped off the futon as if someone had shoved an icicle down her pants.

‘Is that hail?’ she asked frantically. ‘Hail doesn’t count! Hail is NOT snow! I still have time!’

‘Relax,’ I told her, leaning across my desk to open the window. ‘It’s just Pat. He’s bringing me his old physics report to copy. And a Snickers, if he knows what’s good for him.’

Relieved, Mary Kate sat back down and returned to her latest creepy task: identifying potential targets. With our school yearbook open in her lap and a red Sharpie in her hand, she was combing painstakingly through the male population of St Mary’s, labeling them ‘Girlfriend’, ‘Too Young’ or ‘Too Mean’ based on information she’d gathered via gossip in our dorm laundry room, online and from her own female intuition.