This time, I accepted the rosary myself. But, as we stepped out of the library into the bright sunshine of the quad, I handed it to Mary Kate, who added it to the growing collection around her neck. She was starting to look like the most chaste chick at Mardi Gras.

‘Friggin’ nuns!’ I growled. ‘How come there are so many on this campus? They’re everywhere! It’s an infestation!’

‘I kinda like it,’ Mary Kate said. ‘It reminds me of Madeline.’

‘Madeline,’ I scoffed. ‘I hated that book! All those girls in that perfectly straight line. Friggin’ fascist propaganda!’

‘Yeah, but how cute were their little hats?’

‘THAT,’ I warned her darkly, ‘is what they said about the Blackshirts.’

As far as Mary Kate was concerned, our search was done. The Vagina Monologues was canceled. Now it was time to go back to the badminton boys … right?

Wrong.

‘There’s one more place,’ I said. ‘One more venue on campus.’

‘What?’ Mary Kate frowned. ‘Where?’

I turned sharply right and she stopped short.

‘Nope.’ She crossed her arms over her rosary beads, planted her little loafers on the pavement and refused to take one more step. ‘No way.’

‘Come on!’ I said. ‘Look at it! It’s beautiful!’

McLaughlin Hall is one of the oldest buildings on campus, with a turret, Gothic stained-glass windows and a wrap-around porch. It had been transformed into a theater almost a hundred years ago.

‘Wouldn’t this be a killer venue?’ I continued. ‘This place was a boys’ dorm back in the day. Think about it: all those years of repressed male virgins huddled together, weeping under cold showers in this building … It’s a total symbol of the patriarchy. Then we come along and turn it on its head by performing a ground-breaking show about the female anatomy on its stage! It’s such a badass rebel move!’

But there was one very important fact about McLaughlin Hall that I was forgetting. And, when I say fact, I mean the kind of ‘fact’ you would find on Wikipedia after a bunch of middle-school boys insert dick jokes into the Frankenstein entry.

‘Alex,’ Mary Kate said seriously. ‘It’s haunted.’

She pointed to the bronze plaque by the stained-glass entry doors. It had a carving of a man’s head on it, like all the bullshit sexist coins in this country except the Susan B. Anthony and Sacajawea ones no one ever uses. Below the head was inscribed:

ICHABOD ‘THE ICEMAN’ WILLIAMS: 1895–1912