‘Well, you shouldn’t be,’ I told her. ‘Body shame affects all of us – especially you. Think about all your anxiety about your growling stomach and your sweaty armpits, and making your mom send you boxes of tampons. Remember the freshman swim test when you thought you had a camel toe in your one-piece so you made me walk in front of you and do a nip slip to distract everyone? I wouldn’t have had to do that if society hadn’t ingrained body shame into you.’

‘I know you now,’ Mary Kate said darkly. ‘You would have nip-slipped anyway. You would nip-slip at the Vatican.’

When we arrived at his office, the vice-principal was standing in the doorway, waiting for us, nervously rubbing his dry palms together. As soon as he saw us, he tensed up and began awkwardly nodding and bowing like a socially inept scientist greeting his robot girlfriend.

‘Hello, Ms Reagan!’ he said, then cleared his throat (ehem). ‘Hello, Ms Heck! How is our semester? Is our semester all right?’

Twitching anxiously, he jerked out a mechanical hand to invite us into his office. We sat down, and he coughed and cleared his throat and sat down, then stood back up to pull in his chair, then sat back down and coughed and rubbed his dry palms together again.

‘Well – ehem – I suppose we should discuss the … ehem, project … you’ve come here to … discuss.’

No way was this guy saying vagina. He didn’t even like using his own job title because it had the word vice in it. Like, you got the idea that if you said bra strap in front of him, he’d just melt into a pile of mortified goo.

So of course I had printed out our edited version of the play with VAGINA in size-1,000 bold font on the front. When I handed it over, he blinked rapidly and cleared his throat about six times. He continued clearing his throat at regular ten-second intervals as he read, with Mary Kate literally on the edge of her seat, her own copy of our edit trembling in her hands, and me also on the edge of my seat, my copy clenched in my fist, ready for a fight.