‘You know, as an advanced lit student, you should really appreciate the irony of all this!’ I said. ‘I mean, just last week, in the very conversation that set this whole situation in motion, you said you wouldn’t mind breaking your nose! Because your nose isn’t what’s important, your brain is! And now your brain is perfectly fine – which we know because the doctor did all those tests – and your nose …’

I trailed off. Even though Mary Kate’s face wasn’t at its most expressive or mobile right now, somehow she was still managing to shoot me her trademark Demon Anne of Green Gables Death Glare … over the plaster mask of bandages that would be covering her fractured nose for the next few weeks.

I stood with my motorcycle boots planted on the old floorboards of the McLaughlin stage, facing Katie Casey while gripping a long wood-and-metal object and trembling with rage.

‘You are not taking this away from me,’ I warned her. ‘You’ve already taken away my vagina. You are not taking away this. This is a symbol!’

And I thrust it over my head defiantly.

The symbol was, technically, one of Tiny Tim’s crutches from an old production of A Christmas Carol. Pat had found it backstage when I asked him to help me build something for the Monologues. It was an essential element of my directorial vision: Claudia was going to perform her monologue spread-eagled, with her legs up in a set of gynecologist’s stirrups. And Tiny Tim’s crutches were going to become the stirrups.

‘I’m just not sure it’s appropriate onstage,’ Katie explained again.

I rolled my eyes, lowering the crutch and leaning it against my leg. ‘She’s going to be wearing pants!’ Then I looked over at Claudia, who was trying to selfie-video herself doing a yoga sun salute in a sports bra, and added, ‘Probably.’

For two weeks before the fateful football game, we had been putting together The Non-Vagina Monologues. Claudia and I had recruited her Drama Club friends to perform alongside our own Feminist Club members. Robbie Schmidt and I had negotiated his role moving props backstage in a black turtleneck after he almost passed out in the first read-through and refused to perform. Mary Kate and I had – according to the heavy compromise Father Vincent had coughed out of her – painfully cut every vagina out of The Vagina Monologues, and all the best curse words, too. And, for the past week, we had spent every afternoon after classes in McLaughlin Hall with the Save Your Heart army, figuring out the logistics of the event and making decisions about timing, lighting and props.