I groaned. ‘Seriously? I thought you were done with that whole thing.’

‘I thought I should give up because I’d never find love,’ she clarified. ‘But maybe my destiny was to meet the love of my life at the recruit party. That’s why my boyfriend search didn’t work until now.’

‘You know why your boyfriend search ACTUALLY isn’t working, Mary Kate?’ I said. ‘Because it’s STUPID!’

A bright red flush colored her face, like I’d slapped her.

But I didn’t care. Never – not even when she said she was anti-The Vagina Monologues, not even when she refused to say vagina – had I doubted that Mary Kate was on my side. We were on the same team, and we had been since the terrifying dodgeball game where we’d met: me ballsy and defiant, Mary Kate proper and reticent and timid sometimes, but the two of us unquestionably united. Her and me facing down everyone else at St Mary’s; Mary Kate and me against the world.

Never had I doubted that – until now.

‘That’s right,’ I repeated. ‘It’s STUPID. I should have said it before now. Maybe, if I had, I could have kept you from getting your nose broken and getting puked on. But you know what? I’m GLAD your nose got broken. I’m GLAD you got puked on. That’s what you get for wasting all your time and all your creepy little mastermind brainpower on nothing but wanting a boyfriend. You know, I am so sick of all this! Ever since the first pea-brained caveman whacked a deer on the head and a bunch of women in badger-skin bikinis clapped for him, women have been obsessing over men and catering to men and bending over backwards for men. For years, we’ve been imprisoned by corsets and property laws and really terrible home-made tampons, and, now that we’re FINALLY starting to break free of all that, we go and imprison ourselves! So you feel bad about yourself because you don’t have some hipster douchebag dedicating his terrible YouTube Ed Sheeran covers to you? You should feel bad that your boy-crazy brain is shriveling away because you’re wasting your intellect!’

‘Oh, I’m wasting my intellect?’ Mary Kate crossed her arms. ‘That’s interesting because I have a 4.0 and YOU are failing physics for the third time!’

I gasped in righteous outrage. ‘I am failing physics for the SECOND time!’

(Okay, that didn’t sound much better.)

‘And at least I aspire to stuff! At least I’m trying to change things around here!’

Mary Kate rolled her eyes. ‘Oh yeah. You’re a real rebel. Watch out, Che Guevara! Here comes Alex, who shaves her legs above the knee and makes merkin jokes in front of a deaf priest. What a revolutionary! What a badass! She really lives life on the edge!’