‘Hi! I’m Alex, and this is Mary Kate. There’s an amazing event going on next Friday night, and we wanted to invite you. The St Mary’s Feminist Club is putting on a play called An Extract from the Works of Eve Ensler, who’s the author of The Vagina –’

The word vagina was – as it had been for so many months now – the end of the conversation. The latest in a long string of preppy, freckle-faced boys who had opened his dorm door to us blushed bright red at the sound of the word, stuck his head anxiously out into the hall to check if his dorm priest was around and snatched the flyer quickly from my hand.

‘Thanks,’ he said anxiously, ‘I’ll think about it,’ and slammed the door on us like we were a pair of pornographic Jehovah’s Witnesses.

This was the eighteenth door we had knocked on, and our eighteenth rejection.

Mary Kate didn’t care too much about that – she had her own goods to sell. And, this time around, we weren’t talking Girl Scout cookies.

‘You can bring your girlfriend!’ she would say brightly, making intense eye contact, blinking her eyelashes, and trying to brush her hand subtly against his as she handed him the flyer. ‘That is if you HAVE a girlfriend. DO you have a girlfriend …?’

But, by then, the bright, suggestive shapes of the flyer, my purple hair and the word vagina throbbing like a neon sign in Mary Kate’s hot, desperate hand had usually frightened the guy so much that the door was already slamming in our faces.

As we continued, though, some dudes were pretty interested in a throbbing neon vagina. At St Ambrose Hall, a guy in a sweatshirt with the sleeves ripped off grabbed the flyer, flexing his biceps noticeably. When he saw the word vagina, his eyebrows rose in interest.

‘There gonna be nudity at this thing?’ he asked, looking from me to Mary Kate.

‘No!’ Mary Kate said immediately.

‘Sure!’ I said at the exact same time.

When my room-mate frowned at me, I amended my answer, ‘Well … some. PG-thirteen at least. And it’s free! See ya Friday!’

On the top floor of St James Hall, a senior opened the door to a messy four-guy suite with a bay window obscured by two sets of unmade bunk beds and greeted us with a Twizzler hanging out of his mouth. He snatched the flyer from Mary Kate’s hand and studied it. Seeing the word vagina, he nodded, intrigued. Then he noticed the venue at the bottom.

‘McLaughlin?’ he said. ‘Isn’t that the place with the ghost?’

He snapped off the end of his Twizzler, turned around and called to his room-mate, who was sunk into a giant beanbag chair, frowning at his math textbook, ‘Yo, Paulie, you wanna go to some haunted vagina thing?’