‘What are you talking about?’ Mary Kate looked glum, but not suicidal. She tugged off her wet pompon hat and tilted her head to shake the water out of her ears, then pulled her loose wet hair out of her coat collar and twisted it back into a bun. ‘I wasn’t DROWNING myself.’

Immediately, I was unbuttoning her sopping wool pea coat and tearing it off, unlacing her sodden heavy boots and talking furiously. ‘What did Theology John do to you? Did he try something weird? I’m telling you, it’s always the shy guys who have secret, twisted fetishes. They’re the ones who put on a Kermit the Frog mask, force you to recite the multiplication tables and pinch your nipples when you get the eights wrong. I KNEW there was something wrong with him! I mean, who wears boat shoes without socks in NOVEMBER? I am gonna KILL that kid. I am gonna make him so miserable –’

‘You don’t need to.’ Mary Kate sighed, pulling her legs up to her chest. She finished unlacing her other boot and let it drop to the grass with a sad squish. ‘I’m pretty sure he’s miserable already.’

And then she told me what had happened. Because she refused to go inside – sticking to the fountain’s marble ledge like a stubborn piece of pigeon crap – she told it to me right there, sitting on the Memorial Fountain, soaking wet, her bun drip-drip-dripping into the grass.

‘I should have known something was wrong right away,’ she began. ‘When we met up, we hugged. And I did actually notice that he smelled like alcohol. But I remembered that Pat said John is super shy around girls, so I just thought maybe his friends gave him a beer because he was nervous about meeting me. Which I thought was cute!’

I was rubbing Mary Kate’s shoulder, trying to keep the blood flowing from her broken heart around her frozen little body, but she was barely aware of how cold it was getting. And that it was almost curfew. Her sad-panda, mascara-smeared eyes were shining in the moonlight now as she remembered the most romantic part.

‘You could see the full moon in the water, and “Moon River” from Breakfast at Tiffany’s was playing in my head when he reached for my hand. We were holding hands! This is it, I told myself. This isn’t like Caleb. This time, we’re making it all the way around the lake.