Sunday morning – Post-Mass Doughnut Decorating. That was Katie Casey’s – although I was definitely gonna eat a doughnut.

I had ONE thing on the whole schedule, ONE thing: Performance by the St Mary’s Feminist Club: An Extract from the Works of Eve Ensler. The one thing on there that was mine, and I didn’t even get to do it the way I wanted.

When rehearsal was done and everyone else had left, Pat came backstage to join me.

‘I’m sorry about your stirrups,’ he said, hopping up on the Round Table next to me. ‘I felt like I had to step in. I mean, I’m stage manager here. It would be my job to scrub Katie Casey’s blood out of the floorboards, so I wanted to prevent violence if possible.’

‘Yeah, whatever.’

His voice softened. ‘But I am sorry about the stirrups. I know they were important to you.’

‘Yeah, they ARE important to me,’ I said. ‘Do you know how scary and weird it is the first time you go to the gynecologist? Especially when you’re totally clueless going into it and the whole place looks like a torture chamber from a Japanese horror movie and your DAD is out in the waiting room, reading an article in Shape magazine about how to Get Your Best Butt Ever.’

Pat raised his eyebrows under his messy hair. ‘Your dad took you to the gynecologist?’

‘Yeah. I was living with him at the time. My parents had just gotten divorced, so –’

‘How old were you?’

‘Thirteen.’

He whistled softly. ‘Not a fun age to start with. Why did your parents get divorced?’

‘My dad made all this money on some tech stock thing, and he was really amped about it and wanted to buy this big new house and this mid-life-crisis car … at the exact same time my mom decided we should embrace “anti-materialism”. In fact, she was so anti-materialistic that she dematerialized completely in a puff of patchouli-scented air and a postcard three times a year from a Buddhist meditation retreat.’

Pat had found one of the leftover beards from Fiddler on the Roof and he put it on, hooking the elastic over his ears. He stroked it wisely and said, ‘Ah, so that explains it.’

‘Explains what?’

‘Why you care about this play. Why you ditch school to take freshmen to Planned Parenthood.’ He stroked the beard again, putting on a terrible Austrian accent: ‘It all stems from zee traumatic experience of your fah-zer and zee stirrups and zee Shape magazine, ja?’

‘Thank you, Dr Freud.’ I rolled my eyes. Then, after a minute, I said, ‘You know, the weird thing is, my dad and I actually got along pretty well when I was living with him. I mean, he had a pool so that helped. But then, as soon as the divorce was final, he shipped me off to St Mary’s.’