A raucous outburst of dude-laughter rang out – the hockey players were right behind us. They were biting the heads off gummy worms and cracking up. The Ginger Viking had the beginnings of a beer belly that jiggled like Santa Claus’s when he laughed, the Blond Eighties Villain had a nasty snigger that made me want to hire Molly Ringwald to slap him in the face, and the Shaggy One was looking straight at me, his dark eyes crinkling with amusement.

Mary Kate looked mortified. I just rolled my eyes and turned my back to them.

That’s when I heard it. A breathy, barely audible whisper. At first, I wasn’t even sure – I was like Harry Potter in the zoo, trying to figure out if he could really talk to snakes or if he’d accidentally eaten a pot brownie. But no, I had heard it:

‘Vagina.’

The second one was throaty, a little louder:

‘Vagina.’

You know this game, right? The vagina game? I definitely do. In fact, I won this game on the bus on my eighth-grade field trip to Alcatraz. It’s pretty gutsy to shout about genitalia on a teacher-chaperoned visit to a maximum-security prison, but hey, I like to live on the edge. When I played it back then, it was the penis game, but the basic idea’s the same. You say vagina, someone else says vagina a little louder and the person brave enough to shout it the loudest wins. Super mature, right?

‘Vagina!’ the Shaggy One declared cheerfully.

‘VaGINa!’ the Ginger Viking boomed in his deep voice.

They were getting louder. The line was still as slow as ever. Mary Kate was cringing into herself desperately – now, instead of using the bag of chips to shield my tampons, she was using it to hide her face.

But me? I was cool, calm and collected. I was choosing to ignore them. Yes, I could have confronted them about their childishness and sexism, but I probably would have just gotten a fart noise in return, so what was the point? Trying to educate a Neanderthal-brained hockey jock is like trying to get your guinea pig to play the xylophone. Yes, they do it on YouTube, but, as every so-called ‘beginner’ face-contouring tutorial has taught us, YouTube is a magical alternate universe that has nothing to do with reality.

Plus, I didn’t want to push Mary Kate over the edge. I could already tell from the way she was pasty and shaking that she was having a flashback to the time her mom asked a bra saleslady if there was anything smaller than an A-cup.

Finally my turn came. I stepped up to the register and said, so clearly and loudly I could have won the vagina game, ‘These tampons, please.’