My room-mate shook her head and refused to look at me. All around us on the quad, rosy-cheeked students in green fleeces were playing freeze tag and football and kicking soccer balls through piles of wet autumn leaves.

‘You know,’ I said casually, ‘we’re not the only creative people to be the victims of censorship. The word vagina has played an important role in literature for centuries now. Do you know the original version of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnet? Shall I compare thee to a summer’s vagina? Thou art more lovely …’

Mary Kate just shook her head again, but I could see the corner of her mouth twitch.

‘Or Hemingway! Good old Hem’s first drafts were littered with vaginas.’ Putting on a deep, manly voice, I began to narrate: ‘My vagina was warm and wet. It ate good bread and hard cheese and sour wine. The mountains were far from my vagina, and tall …’

Mary Kate smiled in spite of herself. She still hated the word vagina and refused to say it no matter how much I tickled her or bribed her with Oreos, but she couldn’t resist anything to do with classic literature.

‘Jane Austen?’ she suggested.

My hoity-toity English voice, with a pinkie sticking out: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a vagina.’

Mary Kate was having fun. She was walking backwards, facing me, like a tour guide, throwing out names –

‘Faulkner!’

‘My vagina is a fish, my vagina is a fish, my vagina is a fish …’

Suddenly, as we were strolling along the bright quad, an object came hurtling through the air towards us. I looked up. Mary Kate looked up, too, but the sun blinded her and the next second it was already too late – a football smacked her in the forehead, and she crumpled to the ground.

‘Oh my God!’ I gasped, throwing myself down on the wet grass next to her. For a split second, I thought – and hated myself for thinking – that this was some kind of punishment from God for trying to put on The Vagina Monologues at St Mary’s. It seemed fitting for such a jocky school that the punishment should come in the form of a football instead of, like, locusts or a hurricane of virgin blood.

‘Oh crap, oh crap!’ came a voice from above me.

Someone else had rushed over – a really tall, tan senior with big biceps bulging through the sleeves of his uniform polo shirt and a shaved head that emphasized his bright blue eyes. He squatted in the mud next to me and asked Mary Kate, ‘Crap, are you okay?’