Bra-burning has a long history in feminism. Back in the sixties, all the most badass hippies got together and set their bras on fire in trash cans. Bras were basically metal cages constructed by sadistic male engineers to trap our boobs and make our lives sweaty and miserable. Also, they thought that the slightest glimpse of an erect nipple through a cotton T-shirt would send Very Important Men into distracted paroxysms and inadvertently cause nuclear war. Lock those boobs away, they declared! But the hippies weren’t having it. They wanted freedom and, if it took destruction to get freedom, they were gonna destroy some shit.

And so was I. Friday night, when the Toothless Beast came to visit, I was going to burn my bra on Academic Quad. That would give the school a big wake-up call that SOMEONE existed on this campus – in fact, a whole GENDER of people – outside their hockey and jockstraps and spitty mouthguards. WOMEN were here, and we had a voice!

Obviously, the patriarchy would not take it well, and the school administration would not take it at all. If I set a fire in the center of campus, I would definitely be violating at least thirty-five different rules in the student handbook and endangering the safety of pretty much everyone at St Mary’s. There was no way my dad was talking Father Hughes into keeping me here after that, even if he gave the Church his Tesla. But I’d been here way too long anyway.

It was time for me to go.

On Friday night, after sunset, I marched out to the center of Academic Quad. I was wearing my aviator hat with the earflaps pulled down low and I was armed with my cigarette lighter, three bras – two of my own, plus a random one I found behind the dorm dryer – and some old failed physics pop quizzes for kindling.

All day long, steel-grey clouds had hung ominously overhead. Black trees with bare branches clawed at the sky above the dorms whose windows rattled with the terrible gusts howling across the wind-tunnel vortex that is Academic Quad, and there was a bitter chill in the air. But I didn’t care. I threw my quizzes dramatically down on the quad, cast my bras on top of them and squatted in the grass to set the whole thing on fire.

I could already picture it – my big showdown with Father Hughes. I would stand my ground before a blazing wall of flame, looking like I’d strode straight out of the hell where he always thought I’d end up, look him straight in his disapproving eyes and shout:

‘FUCK THE PATRIARCHY!’