‘We all just have to be super quiet,’ I continued in a whisper. ‘It doesn’t sound like Sister Hellda’s in her room; she must still be guarding the front door. So, as soon as we hear her coming for bedchecks, Mary Kate and I will intercept her and show her Mary Kate’s ankle. Then she’ll take us to the infirmary, and you guys can leave. But, for now, we can all just stay here.’

As I sank down on my bunk beside Mary Kate, my pulse began to slow a little. My hands stopped shaking. I took a few deep breaths and told myself, It’s gonna be okay.

Then a shrill, horrible sound rang out through the dorm.

‘Shit!’ I cried, jumping up.

‘Shit!’ Pat cried.

‘Oh no!’ Mary Kate cried, hopping up from my bed in panic. She accidentally put weight on her bad ankle, shrieked in pain and promptly dropped the can of frozen Pepsi, which exploded all over the floor in a foamy, sugary flood.

‘What is that?’ the Toothless Beast asked helplessly, covering his ears with his hands and looking like a giant little boy caught in Willy Wonka’s supersized gumball machine. ‘Is that the fire alarm?’

Right on cue, we heard Sister Hellda’s footsteps of doom down the hallway. Her piercing voice carried even over the wailing alarm: ‘THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. I REPEAT, THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. DO NOT RUN BUT WALK SWIFTLY. EVACUATE THE DORM AT ONCE. I NEED ALL DORM ROOMS CLEARED OUT IMMEDIATELY.’

‘Is there actually a fire?’ The Toothless Beast looked in rapid panic from me to Mary Kate.

‘Yes!’ I said.

‘How do you know?’

‘BECAUSE I STARTED A FIRE!’ I shouted at the top of my lungs. There was no point in being quiet anymore; the alarm was blasting, Sister Hellda was yelling and Mary Kate was whimpering. Pat was racing to button up his pea coat, which made me suddenly aware that the fox-print tights under my jeans were twisted and bunched up, giving me a worse wedgie than my skort. But even worse than the shooting pain in my butthole was a strange, unprecedented shooting pain in my heart.

‘I started a fire on Academic Quad – it must have spread!’ I burst out. ‘And Sister Hellda probably found out I started it and now she’s coming to get me and she’s gonna catch us with boys in our dorm room – which at St Mary’s is, like, basically as bad as arson!’

‘Really?’ The Toothless Beast sounded pretty nervous for a guy who looked like he had eaten five lesser lumberjacks. ‘Mary Kate, are you gonna get in trouble? I’ll tell them it was my fault. It was my fault …’