She was okay, luckily. Her eyes were open, and she had already reached down to make sure the flap of her plaid skort was covering the weird granny-panty shorts underneath. She was okay, but she was muddy, she was shaken and – most of all – she was mad.

Pushing herself up off the ground, ignoring the hand I held out to help her, mud-splattered and trembling all over, she stood and drew herself up to her full height.

‘I’m so sorry, seriously,’ Football Dude said, reaching out tentatively to brush some mud off her skort. She slapped his hand away, so I have no idea why he decided it was a good time to make a dumb little joke.

‘At least it wasn’t your nose, right?’ he said, then laughed this dumb-jock stuttering laugh: ‘Heh-heh-heh-heh.’

When she looked up, her face, which had been pale with shock a second ago, was furiously red. Tears of rage gave her eyes an evil gleam like she was the Predator or something, and she blew up completely.

‘My NOSE?’ she shouted. ‘At least it wasn’t my NOSE? What am I, some beauty-pageant contestant who thinks Hiroshima is something you eat with miso soup? My NOSE? You hit me in the HEAD! Do you know how much my brain is worth? I can factor a quadratic equation in the time it takes you to sniff-check your armpits! I speak Latin, JERK!’

It was pretty entertaining to watch this six-foot-two jock back away in fear, his hands up in surrender, almost tripping over an errant Frisbee as Mary Kate shouted at him and poked her finger into his chest. My only small note of criticism: it would have been way better if she’d said, I speak Latin, BITCH! But this was Mary Kate after all.

‘Sorry! Really! I’m sorry!’ Football Dude stuttered, terrified. ‘I didn’t mean to!’

Mary Kate backed off, fuming, but it was almost a full minute before he dared to ask, gesturing cautiously from a distance, ‘Uh … could I maybe have my … uh, football, please?’

‘Oh, you want your football?’ Mary Kate said. ‘You want your FOOTBALL?’

Huffing angrily, she snatched the ball up off the ground and Football Dude immediately raised his hands to protect his face, sure she was about to beat him over the head with it. Instead, she took a step back, raised her arm and hurled it with all her might. All of us looked up in wonder, as if Amelia Earhart had just taken to the sky, and shielded our eyes to watch Mary Kate’s football arc miraculously across the quad in a shaft of sunlight.

‘Holy crap!’ Football Dude breathed, his blue eyes bright with astonishment. ‘That was a perfect spiral!’

Then he turned to my room-mate, who hadn’t even looked to see where the football had gone. She’d just hurled it and forgotten about it, and was now brushing mud off her skort.