‘At least my goals mean something. All you want is a boyfriend!’

‘All I want?’ she spat in disbelief. ‘ALL I WANT?’

Her uncombed hair was a wild mane, and she came at me like a jungle cat, backing me into my desk.

‘Are you kidding? Clearly, I haven’t shown you my Excel document called LIFE GOALS, because I want way more than that. I want to be valedictorian. I want to get a master’s degree and a PhD, and figure out if Shakespeare was actually a woman. I want to travel. I want to see the Seven Wonders of the World and that castle where they filmed Downton Abbey. But you know what, Alex?’

She took a deep breath and stood up straighter, and suddenly she seemed as tall as the Rowers.

‘It doesn’t matter if I want all those things, or none of those things, because who are you to judge what I want? You go on and on about being a feminist and how you’re not supposed to judge people’s bodies or choices or sex lives. And, if someone is, like, a polyamorous unicorn with a butthole ring, that’s just fine by you. But you judge Katie Casey and the Save Your Heart girls for THEIR choices and you judge me for mine, because the things I want are different from the things you want. You –’

Now she narrowed her eyes, those Bambi eyes, into predator’s eyes, savage, her face still flushed with fever.

‘You are a bad feminist.’

Her words rang in the silent dorm room. I was speechless. For once in my life, I couldn’t think of anything sassy to say to defend myself.

‘So go ahead, judge me,’ Mary Kate continued. ‘But I won’t sit around being judged. I have a life to live, and cough drops to buy from the vending machine!’

Then we heard it, of course – inevitably – because we’d been yelling for several minutes: that anal-retentive rat-tat-tat knock on the door.

But Mary Kate just whirled around and yelled at the door, ‘We’re fine, Sister Hilda!’

And, amazingly, Sister Hellda went away.

Then Mary Kate, her face flushed, her wild mane still uncombed, grabbed her ID keychain and stormed out of our room in a huff, leaving me with a weird, hot, tangled ball of rage in my stomach.

That hot, tangled ball of rage didn’t go away overnight. And when I woke up early and saw that Mary Kate had already left for the day – her empty bed was neatly made, her backpack and pea coat gone – it spurred me into action. I threw my parka on over my pajamas, tugged my Amelia Earhart leather aviator hat on my head and stormed out into the freezing-ass wind to find Pat.