‘Come on, dude, it’s freezing out there, and there’s a bunch of priests and ghosts and stuff. We gotta get you inside. If you catch pneumonia before you even play hockey for us, everyone will be really pissed.’

The Toothless Beast said, ‘I don’t think I can fit.’

‘C’mon, just climb up.’

‘I don’t know.’ The Toothless Beast had a soft voice, and he sounded nervous. ‘I’ve seen Winnie the Pooh. I don’t know if climbing through a window is such a good idea.’

Meanwhile, Mary Kate was trying to gently remove the boot from her injured ankle. ‘Do we have any ice?’ she asked me, wincing.

As Pat was suggesting, ‘What if you dive? Just grab the windowsill!’ I hurried over to our minifridge. Ice? Ice? No ice. Nothing but half-empty cans of iced coffee and a bag of Milky Way minis … wait! A distorted, crusted-in-ice Pepsi can on the brink of explosion! Triumph! I thought, Everything is going to be A-okay …

And I looked up just in time to see the Toothless Beast launch himself head first through our window. He careened across my desk, scattering shards of ice, pencils and bobby pins everywhere, and crash-landed in the center of our floor with an enormous, 200-pound man-thud that rattled the bunk beds and dressers, that at its worst would alert Sister Hellda and at its best knock out the last of his badass baby teeth.

‘SHHH!’ I hissed furiously. ‘Be quiet!’

‘Sorry,’ the Toothless Beast mumbled, standing up and brushing off his snowy jeans. In a corner of my hyped-up mind, I noticed that he was actually pretty cute. I mean, he was so enormous he took up sixty percent of the space in our tiny dorm room and his curly brown head practically touched our ceiling, but he had a baby face, and – if you weren’t too distracted by the two-inch gap in his mouth to notice – cute dimples when he smiled apologetically.

But there was no time to ogle him right now.

‘It’s fine, it’s fine,’ I said hurriedly, standing in the center of the room, gripping the frozen Pepsi. ‘We just need to be quiet so our dorm nun doesn’t catch you guys in here!’

Mary Kate looked up from propping her bare foot on a pillow to frown at me, and then I frowned, too – what was wrong with me? My heart was pounding, I was all jittery, and I couldn’t stop shooting anxious glances at the wall we shared with Sister Hellda. Why did I feel so weird? What was it about boys in the dorm that was making me so uneasy? Was this two and a half years of ignored Catholic guilt finally catching up with me?

‘It’s fine,’ I repeated, trying to calm myself mostly, going over to shut the window before handing the Pepsi to Mary Kate for her swollen ankle.