Vera stood in the principal’s office along the windowless wall wondering who’d ratted her and Emily out. Mr. Harris’s mouth moved in short twists while his tone remained high-pitched and similar to his voice during the assembly the day before when he’d announced that a student had “crapped” all over a toilet seat in the girl’s bathroom. Vera pushed one of her elbows into the light switch turning the lights off and then on again. She hadn’t held much of an opinion of her school’s principal until he’d mistaken chewed up pumpkin pie for poop.

Now she hated him.

Mr. Harris blinked and moved his mouse back and forth over a stack of blue detention slips on his desk. They’d pulled the trees out at the grade school on Saturday, right after peeing down the slide, but they hadn’t seen anyone on the playground or in the surrounding fields who would have told on them. Mr. Harris brushed the tops of his cabbage-shaped shoulders as he continued to ask Vera why she’d decided to destroy innocent trees and all Vera could picture was Emily sitting at the top of the slide with her pants halfway down, shouting, “Is it coming down straight? Is it making a puddle?”