Preeti had been right: everyone knew. Maybe it had begun with the guys at the recruit party who saw them leave together, maybe later. But everyone had found out that our new star hockey player had spent his first night at St Mary’s breaking curfew with my best friend.

And they wanted to know more.

People were poking each other, swiveling their beanie-clad heads around to stare at Mary Kate and wriggle their eyebrows suggestively. Then we heard the first audible whispers: ‘That’s her!’

Between bursts of cheering or booing, we could hear:

‘That’s the girl who got him to come to St Mary’s!’

‘I heard it was love at first sight!’

‘I heard he gave her his championship ring – is she wearing his championship ring?’

‘I can’t see – she’s wearing mittens!’

At first, Mary Kate bravely ignored it – just as she had been bravely ignoring me for days. She kept her eyes straight ahead, pretending to be deeply absorbed in checks and hat tricks and other hockey-ish things. But soon it got harder to ignore.

It was a close game. The other team were killers: seven-foot-tall, fully bearded dudes with rage problems from a school in the northern Minnesota woods. The action on the ice was aggressive and violent, and the energy in the arena was tense.

When the refs made a questionable call, the whole crowd booed and hissed and threw stuff. And, when the Toothless Beast made a good play, the whole student section turned to Mary Kate and burst into ecstatic cheering, like she was the queen reigning over a gladiator battle and Russell Crowe had just stabbed another man homoerotically through the thigh.

The rumor mill was still churning, and by the second half it was turning out some pretty juicy stuff.

‘How do you think she really convinced him to come to St Mary’s?’

‘I heard she did that frozen-grape trick from Cosmo.’

‘I never really understood that one …’

‘I heard another hockey player walked in on them.’

‘I heard Father Callahan walked in on them – and, when he saw what they were doing, he started performing an exorcism. That’s how dirty it was.’

‘No wonder the Toothless Beast wanted to come to St Mary’s!’

It was too much. Mary Kate’s right eye started to twitch. Then her left eye, too. Her cheeks were burning. And, after one particularly filthy comment about what she and the Toothless Beast had supposedly done on a St Ambrose Hall bathroom sink, she refused to take it anymore.

She sat down.