My knees were beginning to hurt, too—we’d been down there on the thin, hard carpet surrounded by Jesus and unidentifiable brown stains older than me for over thirty minutes—but I wasn’t sure I was allowed to complain. If I did, I could picture Brigid bending down to my level greeting me with a placating smile and a power grab, and saying, Jesus was whipped while carrying the cross for our sins. The least we can do is bruise our knees while praying for some of our sinner dormmates. Don’t you agree?

I wouldn’t respond—even in my imagined scenario, Ruthie is braver than I am, and would offer some side-eyed comment about how it was unfair that we were constantly expected to compare ourselves and our behavior to the savior of mankind.

A month ago, after Ruthie and I attended our first pseudo party in the woods, we had barely fallen asleep when we were awoken by the most startling scream. The kind of scream that sent goose bumps up my arms before I even realized what it was. Where my instinct was to jump out of bed and make sure our door was locked, Ruthie’s was to run into the hall and investigate herself.

“Something exciting is happening,” she said, a mischievous smile forming on her face.

I grabbed her arm as she turned toward the door. “We’re too drunk for this. This is a bad idea. Being in public is a bad idea.”

“But what if it’s Catherine or Annie? What if they need us?” She was out the door before I could tell her that they did not need us. They’d been doing fine on their own for the last three months of school. We were the ones who needed them.

Reluctantly, I followed Ruthie and the commotion down the hall. The yelling stopped as we took the stairs two at a time to the lobby, where we were met by easily a dozen other students in pajamas and with bed head, equally as excited as Ruthie to catch something, whatever it was, in the act.

We moved as a pack toward the West Wing until we opened the fire door and saw Brigid outside room 103, drumming her fists on the metal door like a toddler in a time-out. “Open up! Open up now!” she repeated, her high-pitched voice voiding some of the innate intimidation of an RA banging on your door after midnight. So did her pink smiley face slippers and the white robe over her shoulders with Ritz-Carlton Georgetown embroidered on the chest.

If Brigid noticed her audience, she didn’t care because she continued banging on the door until it was opened so quickly by Lucy McCarthy that Lucy almost got two fists straight to the face. One specifically to the perfect button nose that Ruthie was convinced Lucy received as a gift for her sixteenth birthday.