A scrawny, wide-eyed freshman girl, whose backpack was bigger than her, stopped in front of our booths. She looked up at me and took in my purple hair, my righteous fury and the neon vagina sign. She looked at Katie Casey and took in her welcoming smile, her glitter and her cupcakes.

She signed up for Save Your Heart.

The freshman throng had arrived at the Club Fair. This was their second week on campus. For the first few days, they had been paraded around en masse by perky leaders – among them Katie Casey – who took them on campus tours and taught them the school fight song and indoctrinated them into all the green-plaid bullshit that surrounds us.

For the next week, the freshmen had stayed clumped in one big, scared herd like gazelles, all wide eyes and skinny legs, bolting in terror across the quad at the sound of church bells, terrified of missing curfew.

Two weeks in, they had evolved from gazelles into meerkats: still nervous, but starting to break off into little cliques, venturing out beyond their holes and sniffing around. And, for the meerkats, today’s Club Fair was a big step forward. Today was the day each one had to look inside and ask: Who am I going to be? An uber-competitive brainiac demolishing fellow brainiacs in the Debate Club? A sports masochist rowing across the lake until they puked blue Powerade? A goody-goody sweating desperate enthusiasm on the cheerleading team?

Or, just possibly … a feminist rebel fighting for the right to stage The Vagina Monologues at St Mary’s?

Or … not.

It didn’t seem very likely, at least at the start of the Club Fair. My vagina sign definitely attracted attention, but not the good kind. Well-behaved girls with their white shirts buttoned all the way up were scared of it and didn’t know where to look; they cried out in relief when their eyes fell on Katie Casey. ‘Oh look, cupcakes!’ And, just like that, they hurried past.

Baby-faced freshman boys spotted my sign, blushed bright red and scurried away to see if the rumors of a Video Game Club were true. And mid-pubescent assholes with gelled hair nudged each other, pointed and snickered.

My only hope lay with the bolder girls: the groups who prowled with their plaid skorts already rolled up around the waist to make them shorter. ‘Hey!’ one of them pointed. ‘Feminist Club! Emma Watson’s a feminist. I love Emma Watson.’

‘Yeah, but when she became a feminist she chopped her hair off. I can’t do that. I have my dad’s ears.’

‘You don’t have to!’ I protested, jumping into their conversation. ‘Feminists don’t always chop all their hair off!’

The girls stared at my purple fauxhawk.