Opening the door, I saw a blonde chick who lives on the third floor of our dorm. She also happened to be one of Katie Casey’s Save Your Heart girls. For obvious reasons, she and I weren’t friends. But this wasn’t the first time a girl in this dorm had shown up at my door in the middle of the night with a crisis. Homesick chicks, chicks who were drunk for the first time, once a girl who thought she’d lost a baggie of Ritalin between her butt cheeks. Like Preeti, everyone in St Theresa Hall knows I’m the one to go to for the stuff you can’t say to a nun or your room-mate.

Which is why, as soon as I opened the door, this girl blurted out: ‘I just had sex.’

‘Congratulations,’ I grumbled, yawning.

What was this girl’s name again? Maggie? Meggy? Whoever She Was was still in her uniform, but her pea coat was open, her blouse was unbuttoned, and she was turning her pink rubber Save Your Heart bracelet around and around on her wrist.

‘I think I did it wrong,’ she whispered.

‘I had Kama Sutra Ken and Barbie. Trust me, any way you did it is fine.’

‘But what if I get pregnant?’

‘Wait.’ I blinked and rubbed the crust out of my eyes, trying to register what she was saying. ‘Did you not use a condom?’

‘No.’ Maggie-Meggy’s anxious mouth was smeared with lipgloss. ‘We didn’t have one.’

Oh Jesus, I thought.

This whole midnight emergency thing was getting old. Staff at St Mary’s are paid full-time to supposedly look after our physical and emotional well-being – meanwhile, here I am, the black-sheep fairy godmother of the dorm, saving girls from all kinds of real shit and all I got was a cake once from a hungover freshman with SORRY ABOUT THE VOM spelled out in M&M’s.

‘So you had unprotected sex,’ I said.

‘No, not exactly.’ The girl hesitated. ‘We did use … something.’

‘What? Pill? Diaphragm? Sponge?’

‘A balloon.’

‘A BALLOON?’

‘One of those long, skinny balloons you make balloon animals with,’ she continued in her hushed, anxious whisper. ‘He’s a volunteer clown at the children’s hospital.’

I couldn’t help myself; I had to ask. ‘Did it FIT?’

‘Well, he did keep saying it was tight,’ she admitted. ‘But I thought he was talking about my … you know …’

‘Vagina? You can say it. You had a balloon animal knocking on your cervix tonight, so you can say the word vagina.’

The girl was gnawing anxiously on the silver cross around her neck.

‘Okay, okay,’ I said, trying to pull myself together. This was important. ‘We need to take action. Balloons are not condoms. You need Plan B. You need an STD test …’

She looked horrified. ‘He doesn’t have STDs! He’s a volunteer clown at the children’s hospital!’