‘No, not Mary Kate!’ I said. ‘Everyone loves her! They hate me! If Sister Hellda comes in here and catches me with Pepsi all over the floor and two hockey players in my dorm room, one with condoms in his pocket and one with no molars, she’s gonna think I’m hosting some kind of kinky diabetic Canadian Tooth Fairy pyromaniac orgy in here while St Mary’s burns to the ground, and I am gonna be in deep shit!’

Slowly, I raised my head and looked at each of them in turn: at Mary Kate, her Bambi eyes big and her wet, tangled hair streaming down her snow-dusted sweater; at the bewildered Toothless Beast, looking from side to side as if he expected someone to burst through the bookcase and check him into the bunk beds; at Pat, frozen and alert like a freeze-tag player. The fire alarm was wailing, Sister Hellda was pounding on doors and, what’s more, I thought I could smell smoke …

It was then – that exact moment – that the realization hit me. And, when it hit me, it broke over me again and again like waves of foaming Pepsi, shouting inside my head like an anal-retentive nun, deafening as a fire alarm, impossible to ignore.

‘I don’t want to get kicked out!’ I wailed, shocked by my own words. ‘I don’t want to leave St Mary’s!’

These past two days had been my weirdest days yet at boarding school – and that included the misogynist Labradoodle. But they had changed the way I saw everything. Maybe it had been the unexpected thrill of racing around the quad with Katie Casey, throwing things in the fire and watching sparks fly; maybe it had been kissing Pat, breathless, in the freshly fallen snow; maybe it had been seeing Mary Kate’s face at the window after my heart-racing panic, after two days of not speaking to her. The fear of losing something, then the deep, warm hug feeling of finding it again. And now I was going to lose it all …

‘Okay, stop. Wait,’ Mary Kate said. Taking a deep breath, she took hold of the bunk-bed ladder and pulled herself up. Even balancing on her one good leg in the Pepsi flood, she looked stronger somehow, taller, and when she spoke her clear, strong voice projected over the screeching fire alarm.

‘It’s going to be fine,’ she told us. ‘Pat and Dom will just go out the way they came in. They came in the window – they’ll go out the window. Simple!’

‘It wasn’t so simple for Winnie the Pooh,’ the Toothless Beast said doubtfully.