Dominic LeClair is ferocious. The reason he’s nicknamed the Toothless Beast is because he’s famously missing three front teeth – and in hockey, just like in a second-grade class picture, the most badass person has the fewest teeth. For Dominic LeClair, hockey is a game of human bumper cars. After he played against us in the championship game last year, three of our players had concussions, and two Zamboni machines were needed to clear all the blood off the ice.

Dominic LeClair was basically on the same level as Satan on our campus. After we lost the championship, a guy in St Francis Hall even made a life-size model of LeClair in a hockey jersey and they all carried it down to the lake, chanting, and set it on fire and threw it in, like one of Mary Shelley’s fever dreams or something.

But now, in October of our junior year, everything changed. It was the start of hockey pre-season, and all across the rapidly chilling tundra of the Midwest, hockey players were beginning practices and 5,000-calorie, protein-packed diets in order to inflict maximum bodily harm on each other. All varsity hockey players, that is, except Dominic LeClair. The Toothless Beast was not practicing with the St Luke’s team. And, according to rumors, it was because he wanted to transfer to another school: St Mary’s.

All of a sudden, the switch flipped. Everyone loved Dominic LeClair. And, everywhere you went, someone was talking about him.

‘I hear the Toothless Beast drinks a raw-egg milkshake every morning to build muscle,’ I overheard one guy tell another in the line in the cafeteria.

‘I hear the Toothless Beast dislocated his shoulder during a game and snapped it back into place himself in the penalty box,’ a girl hissed to a guy behind me in detention.

‘I hear the Toothless Beast’s left elbow is registered as an assault weapon in Hennepin County,’ a girl informed her friend as they jogged past me on the track in gym class.

‘You know what should be registered?’ her friend said. ‘His butt. I love hockey butts.’

Mary Kate and I, picking our way across the muddy quad on the first sunny day after a big rain, were not discussing the Toothless Beast. We were coming back from a meeting about the play, and she was blaming me for the failure of her boyfriend plan.

‘If I wasn’t spending so much time on YOUR semester goal, I would have achieved mine by now,’ she said.

‘Mary Kate, this is a worthy cause,’ I reminded her. ‘And you of all people should be into this!’

‘Me?’ she squeaked. ‘Into the Monologues? Why?’

‘Because this is literature, Mary Kate. You love books, and reading, and all that crap! We are about to bring an award-winning piece of literature to life.’