She wasn’t into that, either. ‘I’m going to be a wealthy matriarch managing my literary legacy, donating all my letters to universities and things like that. I’m gonna be way too busy to move to the moon with you.’

‘C’mon, let me be your moon Blanche!’

The sun was in its final fiery orange blaze above the fringe of pine trees, and we were more than halfway around the lake, still holding hands.

‘You know,’ I said, ‘you never told me what you ACTUALLY said to the Toothless Beast to get him to come to St Mary’s.’

‘Well,’ Mary Kate began, ‘first of all, you were right. The recruit party was horrible.’

My room-mate had found herself in a sweaty, crowded common room, surrounded by drunk dudes slapping each other, burping, and – in one case – doing a graphic reenactment of the time he tore his kneecap off playing street hockey. Mary Kate went to hide in a corner and fill a red Solo Cup with ginger ale to pretend she was drinking beer, when she found the Toothless Beast – Dom – hiding in a corner and doing the same thing.

‘So we decided to leave together,’ Mary Kate said. ‘Of course, all the hockey guys noticed, and they started cheering and making dirty jokes.’

‘They’re fucking medieval,’ I said. ‘I’m surprised they didn’t come banging on the door afterwards asking to see the bloody sheet.’

‘Well, they wouldn’t have gotten one,’ Mary Kate said. ‘This school may think the only possible reason you could be in a room with a guy after eleven p.m. is if you’re boning each other, but we were just drinking tea and talking. We ended up having this whole heart-to-heart. I asked him if he didn’t like any of the girls at the party, and he ended up telling me he didn’t like girls, and was having all these problems at St Luke’s. And I told him the problems I was having dating at St Mary’s. Speaking of which …’

She looked around at the bench by the lake, and the trees and bushes covered in snow.

‘I think this is where I got puked on.’

‘Ew!’ I said, looking down at my feet like there’d still be puke there. But everything was covered in a clean, fresh white layer of snow.

‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘You told him some doofus puked on you in the woods, and that made him want to come to school here?’