Dr Cartwright turned her stern gaze pointedly towards me and the shrill St Mary’s bell rang.

On that cheerful and welcoming note, so ended the first day of classes of our junior year.

‘Ugh, this is gonna be a bitch,’ I grumbled to Mary Kate, who was still scribbling detailed notes in the margins of her syllabus. US history was my only advanced class this year, which meant it was the only one I had with my room-mate.

‘I think it’s gonna be great!’ she said, filing her syllabus neatly away. ‘Dr Cartwright is supposed to be super smart – did you know she has a PhD in colonial history?’

We stood up from our creaky two-seater wooden desk. Not only were we back in class – we were back in uniform. Mary Kate looked picture-perfect in hers: two neat braids streaming down her back, her crisp white shirt buttoned up to the Peter Pan collar and the hem of her green-plaid skort right at her kneecaps where the school rulebook said it should be.

Yes, that’s right, I said SKORT. Those mutant skirt-shorts hybrids your mother used to make you wear so there was no chance of a boy seeing your Dora the Explorer underpants. St Mary’s forces us to wear skorts for a similar reason: to keep us non-sexual and vaguely Scottish, like the ginger chick from Brave. The actual result? Wedgies. Constant, creeping, Catholic wedgies.

No wonder I’ve been in such a bad mood all day, I thought, yanking ineffectually at my skort as we started walking.

‘AP lit is going to be amazing this year, too,’ gushed Mary Kate. ‘Sister Carroll and I have the exact same taste in books. I’m pretty sure everything we’re reading has a secret wife in the attic of a sinister English mansion. Oh, AND!’ She interrupted her own babbling to pull out the syllabus. ‘Look at this! We’re reading North and South this year! How long have I been telling people that North and South is better than Pride and Prejudice?! I mean, of course I love P&P, but …’

‘But what’s more romantic than a violent labor dispute?’ I finished for her, fishing an old piece of gum out of my messenger bag and popping it into my mouth. Oops. Maybe that was actually an eraser. Oh well …

Mary Kate didn’t seem to be bothered by her wedgie or my sarcasm. She was practically skipping as we went out into the sunshine of Academic Quad, where senior guys were playing Frisbee and senior girls were sprawled on the grass with their knee socks rolled down and their new textbooks flung aside, tanning their legs. She was so pumped about the first day of classes that she even seemed to have forgotten my little tampon tantrum in the school store last night.