At first, I was pissed. I mean, what the hell? Father Hughes thought his priest-splaining wasn’t domineering enough, so he had to fly in my dad to dad-splain, too? Whatever happened to the good old boarding-school phone chain, where your principal calls your parents and then your parents call you for a really unpleasant Skype that lasts forty-five minutes until you pretend the Wi-Fi dropped out in your dorm? That’s how discipline typically goes for boarding-school kids. At least until someone figures out a muggle version of that screaming letter Ron Weasley used to get at Hogwarts.

Then Father Hughes’s phrase echoed in my mind: A serious decision must be made. I sat up. Hope bubbled up inside me like that science experiment with the Diet Coke and Mentos.

I was getting kicked out.

That had to be it! Why else would the principal fly my dad in? Father Hughes was sick of me, and he was kicking me out. I was leaving St Mary’s!

I hurried over to the window and looked down at the bright green quad and the anally retentive flower beds and all the clean-cut little Catholics burning off their sexual frustration with wholesome sports like Frisbee and Wiffle ball. I looked at the grey, prison-like stone walls of the dorms, and the iron doors of the campus chapel, and bid it all farewell. Goodbye, St Mary’s! Goodbye, 7 a.m. classes and dorm mass and curfew! Goodbye, nuns and priests prowling everywhere, watching my every move! Goodbye, freezing Minnesota winters and ass-kissing A-students who look at me like I’m an ax murderer when I drop an F-bomb!

I was leaving it all. When my dad walked out of that door, I was going with him. Back to California. Back to freedom and burritos and high-speed Wi-Fi and public school where the seniors smoked joints in the parking lot. Back to reality where the only place I ever saw nuns was at the Sound of Music singalong at the Castro Theater. Back to the life I was supposed to have, before my parents got divorced and everything got so weird and messed up and off-track.

My dad was gonna walk out of that door, and I was gonna follow him and his golf shorts out of this building and off this campus, and never look back.

I was going home.

The door opened. My dad came out.

‘Well?’ I asked him.

‘Everything’s decided,’ he reassured me. Then he added, ‘By the way, I told your mom I was coming. She said to send her love. Well, actually, she texted to send her love – she’s on a silent yoga retreat in Big Sur.’

‘Wow, the maternal bond is a powerful thing.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘Now I understand how those moms lift cars off their babies.’