A few nights ago, I’d called my dad to ask him about this whole lake thing. Since he’d been right about the tunnels, I figured he might know some other St Mary’s stuff, too. And, according to him, the true meaning of the tradition wasn’t being ‘boyfriend-girlfriend’; walking around the lake with someone meant you’d be together forever.

‘This actually means we’ll always be in each other’s lives,’ I explained. ‘We’ll be friends forever.’

‘No way!’ Mary Kate shook her head. ‘In a few years, we’ll be leading totally different lives. You’ll be staging a topless sit-in at Berkeley to protest the government, and I’ll be with Rupert in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, wearing adorable matching hand-knitted scarves and studying Shakespeare’s sonnets.’

‘First of all,’ I began, ‘you’re never going to learn to knit. You’ve tried three times and it’s still a Pinterest pipe dream. And, second of all, we’re still going to be friends. Who else is going to bail me out of prison when my sit-in gets busted?’

‘I’m not coming to bail you out of prison.’

‘One call, Mary Kate! I get one call!’

‘Nope. You made your bed, you lie in it.’ Then, rolling her eyes, she added, ‘Not that you’ve ever made your bed in your life, but maybe prison will teach you.’

‘Will Rupert come bail me out?’

My room-mate gave me a saucy look from under her big bun and wiggled her eyebrows suggestively. ‘I think Rupert will be pretty busy.’

We both cracked up laughing.

‘Uh-oh, watch out! So you’re wearing that hand-knitted scarf and nothing else, huh?’ I clucked my tongue in mock disapproval. ‘You’ve gotten really naughty this semester. I don’t know who or what corrupted you.’

We continued along the snowy path and came to the bend where you could see the seminary. Mary Kate pointed out where Caleb had told her he was going to be a priest. I kept insisting we were going to stay friends.

‘I mean, sure, we might drift apart in college, but we’ll reconnect when we’re adults. You know, after your English professor husband is caught having an affair and you’re a single mother of five freckle-faced kids … oh my God! Maybe our kids will get married!’

Mary Kate shook her head, laughing. ‘No way. My kids are not marrying your kids. My kids are going to the Sorbonne and playing the oboe in the New York Philharmonic; they’re not getting derailed because your kids gave them some new-millennium strain of HPV.’

‘Fine. We’ll reconnect when we’re older. It can be like Golden Girls! But it will be, like, 2064, so it’ll be Golden Girls on the moon! You can be Rose and I can be Blanche!’