The crowd swept us across campus to the sports center, into the frosty arena and up into the hot crush of the bleachers. We teetered trying to balance standing up on the four-inch wooden benches, a group of screaming girls with spray-dyed green hair behind us and, in front, a line of shirtless dudes body-painted with big letters: G-O-S-T-M-A-R-Y-S-! The exclamation point was the worst part. This super-hairy senior had actually shaved an exclamation point into his chest hair AND his back hair. How does a high-school guy even get that hairy? Clearly, this dude does not need ancestry.com to know his great-grandma was getting down and dirty with a grizzly bear.

So there Mary Kate and I were, swallowed up by this mass of freaks, and every time the feral fangirls went wild cheering – which was every five seconds – we were shoved face first into the Exclamation Point’s back hair.

How the hell am I gonna get it out of her HERE? I thought.

No, this was not the place to have a sensitive and nuanced discussion about Mary Kate’s nascent sexuality. I would just have to creepily stare at her and use the skills I’d picked up from three seasons of Sherlock to figure out what had happened by her reactions.

So, while everyone else was cheering and chanting, I was watching my best friend, who was balanced on her crutches on the narrow bleachers. Other than glancing down when Pat was introduced, to see him race out onto the ice and stop short with a showy flourish sending up a spray of ice that would have made a killer snow cone, I was intensely studying Mary Kate.

‘AND NOW,’ the announcer thundered, ‘MAKING HIS ST MARY’S VARSITY ICE HOCKEY DEBUT, NUMBER SIXTY-SIX, RIGHT WING … DOMINIC LECLAIR!’

It was pandemonium. The whole arena was on its feet. The band was going berserk. The entire student section was shouting, cheering, roaring, stamping, whistling. The guys in front of us were pounding their bare chests like Tarzan, the girls behind us screaming. Any second now, they would pull their bras out from under fifteen layers of thermal long johns and throw them onto the ice.

And beside me, right in the middle of it all, Mary Kate, balanced calmly on her crutches, was clapping a polite little clap like she was Princess Friggin’ Kate watching a polo match with her shiny-ass hair. Her lips were once again glued together in that neutral, inscrutable, infuriating line.

But she wouldn’t be able to stay neutral much longer. It started with a whisper here, a knowing look there. Then, slowly and surely, gossip began to spread through the crowd. Rumors. Rumors about the Toothless Beast … and Mary Kate.