They stood on the front steps of our dorm in the warm August evening with their arms wrapped around each other. Above their heads, fluttering moths circled a yellow light. Her hands were clasped behind his back. His face was buried in her hair. Framed in the entryway of the old stone building, they looked so perfect, their picture should have been in the St Mary’s Catholic School brochure: the preppy, clean-cut boy holding the girl with the long brown hair, the crucifixes on their chests pressed together as a symbol of their pure young Catholic love.

Of course, if they did take a picture, they’d have to crop out the braless chick with the purple fauxhawk sticking her head out of the ground-floor window to smoke a clove cigarette.

When I heard the door to my room open, I stubbed the cigarette out on the windowsill and let it drop into the perfectly pruned zinnias.

‘Who are you spying on?’ It was Mary Kate, my room-mate, coming back from the shower. ‘Ooh, are those guys with the southern accents playing glow-in-the-dark Frisbee again?’

She was bundled up in a fluffy white robe with her hair wrapped in a towel. Even though we live in an all-girls’ dorm, she would never dare walk the five-foot stretch of hallway from the bathroom with just a towel wrapped around her, like I do. The guys at St Mary’s probably have all these horndog fantasies about the girls’ dorms after curfew, like we’re all pillow fighting in lace thongs, but they would be sorely disappointed if they saw Mary Kate gussied up like an old lady.

Dropping her toiletry bag and shuffling over eagerly in her fuzzy slippers, she leaned across my desk to stick her head out of the window. Then, sounding disappointed, she said, ‘Oh. The Long Huggers.’

‘I can’t believe them,’ I said. ‘This is only our third night back at school, and they’re already Long Hugging again.’

Mary Kate gave me a look. ‘This is only our third night back at school, and you’ve already fallen out of a window, gone to the principal’s office and gotten another incident report in your file.’

Touché.

‘But, seriously, they’re ridiculous. Look at this!’ I held up my phone, which was on stopwatch mode. ‘They’ve been hugging for seventeen minutes! And I didn’t even start timing right away. They were out there at least five minutes before the lack of making-out sounds distracted me from my Instagramming.’

‘Alex,’ Mary Kate said, ‘don’t be mean. They’re so cute.’

‘But why do they have to be cute right outside our window?’ I asked. ‘Why don’t they go to one of those private study rooms in the library to not-grope each other? Curfew isn’t for another hour.’