‘Everything makes you sad you don’t have a boyfriend,’ I reminded her. ‘March of the Penguins made you sad you don’t have a boyfriend.’

She nodded wistfully. ‘Those boy penguins were so nice to those girl penguins.’

Fireflies flickered along our path as we crossed Girls’ Quad. In the old stone buildings, lights were on, windows were open and snatches of conversation drifted into the air. We turned onto Academic Quad, and that’s when we began to notice the couples. Two by two, hand in hand, their sappy asses were strolling through the summer dusk, all headed in the same direction.

‘They’re gonna walk around the lake,’ Mary Kate said. ‘And you know what walking around the lake means.’

‘They’re in the Mafia and they need someplace dark to dump a body?’ I suggested. But, unfortunately, I did know what walking around the lake at St Mary’s meant.

St Mary’s Catholic School is a strange place, full of bizarro superstitions and silly traditions. We even have a campus ghost (more on him later). And, because the school is always trying to brainwash us with all this heteronormative, high-school-sweetheart bullshit, lots of those traditions revolve around love and romance. One of them is that if a guy and a girl (the only kind of couple St Mary’s can conceive of) walk all the way around the campus lake, holding hands – without letting go – they’re officially boyfriend and girlfriend. But you can’t let go – not even for a second. If you do, your relationship is doomed.

I think the whole thing is stupid.

‘I mean, the lake is the one dark and romantic place where you could actually feel someone up at this school,’ I said. ‘And you have to keep one hand out of commission holding the other person’s hand?’

‘It’s tradition!’ Mary Kate said. ‘Sarah Jane Kelly’s great-grandparents walked around the lake before her great-grandpa went off to war! I think it’s romantic.’

Cutting across the path of the couples, we climbed the steps of the student center.

‘It didn’t really bother me last year,’ Mary Kate continued. ‘But we came back to school and boom, it’s like everyone’s paired off all of a sudden. Everyone’s found their soulmate, and I didn’t even meet a cute lifeguard this summer!’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said, holding the door open for her. ‘First of all, you don’t want to date a lifeguard – checking someone’s suspicious back mole for melanoma is not sexy. And, second of all, no one is paired off. It’s all in your little romcom-addled head.’