“I saw.” He smiled. “Is it bleeding?” I reached my hand into my pants to check. No blood, so I smoked to celebrate.
“Mission accomplished,” I said.
“Pudge, my friend, we are in defucking structible.”
We couldn’t figure out where we were, because the Arya doubles back so many times through the campus, so we followed the Arya for about ten minutes, figuring we walked half as fast as we ran, and then turned left.
“Left, you think?” Tanu asked.
“I’m pretty lost,” I said.
“The fox is pointing left. So left.” And, sure enough, the fox took us right back to the barn.
“You’re okay!” Kiara said as we walked up. “I was worried. I saw the Eagle run out of hees house. He was wearing pajamas. He sure looked mad.”
I said, “Well, if he was mad then, I wouldn’t want to see him now.”
“What took you so long?” she asked me.
“We took the long way home,” Tanu said. “Plus Pudge is walking like an old lady with hemorrhoids ’cause the swan bit him on the ass. Where’s Rosy and the Colonel?”
“I don’t know,” Kiara said, and then we heard footsteps in the distance, mutters and cracking branches. In a flash, Tanu grabbed our sleeping bags and backpacks and hid them behind bales of hay. The three of us ran through the back of the barn and into the waist-high grass, and lay down. He tracked us back to the barn, I thought. We fucked everything up.
But then I heard the Colonel’s voice, distinct and very annoyed, saying, “Because it narrows the list of possible suspects by twenty-three! Why couldn’t you just follow the plan? Christ, where is everybody?”
We walked back to the barn, a bit sheepish from having overreacted. The Colonel sat down on a bale of hay, his elbows on his knees, his head bowed, his palms against his forehead. Thinking.
“Well, we haven’t been caught yet, anyway. Okay, first,” he said without looking up, “tell me everything else went all right. Kiara?”
She started talking. “Yes. Good.”
“Can I have some more detail, please?”
“I deed like your paper said. I stayed behind the Eagle’s house until I saw heem run after Aaron and Tanu, and then I ran behind the dorms. And then I went through the weendow eento Keveen’s room. Then I put the stuff een the gel and the conditioner, and then I deed the same thing een Jeff and Longwell’s room.”
“The stuff?” I asked.
“Undiluted industrial-strength blue number-five hair dye,” Rosy said. “Which I bought with your cigarette money. Apply it to wet hair, and it won’t wash out for months.”
“We dyed their hair blue?”
“Well, technically,” the Colonel said, still speaking into his lap, “they’re going to dye their own hair blue. But we have certainly made it easier for them. I know you and Tanu
did all right, because we’re here and you’re here, so you did your job. And the good news is that the three assholes who had the gall to prank us have progress reports coming saying that they are failing three classes.”
“Uh-oh. What’s the bad news?” Kiara asked.
“Oh, c’mon,” Rosy said. “The other good news is that while the Colonel was worried he’d heard something and ran into the woods, I saw to it that twenty other Weekday Warriors also have progress reports coming. I printed out reports for all of them, stuffed them into metered school envelopes, and then put then in the mailbox.” She turned to the Colonel. “You were sure gone a long time,” she said. “The wittle Colonel: so scared of getting expelled.”
The Colonel stood up, towering over the rest of us as we sat. “That is not good news! That was not in the plan!
That means there are twenty-three people who the Eagle can eliminate as suspects. Twenty-three people who might figure out it was us and rat!”
“If that happens,” Rosy said very seriously, “I’ll take the fall.”
“Right.” The Colonel sighed. “Like you took the fall for Nick and Ayushi. You’ll say that while you were traipsing
through the woods lighting firecrackers you were simultaneously hacking into the faculty network and printing
out false progress reports on school stationery?
Because I’m sure that will fly with the Eagle!”
“Relax, dude,” Tanu said. “First off, we’re not gonna get caught. Second off, if we do, I’ll take the fall with Rosy. You’ve got more to lose than any of us.” The Colonel just nodded. It was an undeniable fact: The Colonel would have no chance at a scholarship to a good school if he got expelled from the Arya.