Turns out we didn’t have to wait long for Kinko to make her first move. The very next day at school a third of the kids were absent for the first few hours of the day. Turns out someone had slashed the tires of every single school bus earlier that morning in the dark. And it didn’t end with just that one act, though I definitely wish it had.

Later in the morning somehow a whole section of the eighth-grade locker bay had red dye sprayed inside all of the lockers. How Kinko’s crew had managed to pull that off without being seen by anyone is still a mystery to me. Luckily my locker wasn’t affected, but it didn’t mean I didn’t still feel horrible for the kids whose lockers were. Backpacks, gym clothes, jackets, sweatshirts, homework, textbooks, all ruined. You’d have thought that the school mascot died that day or something when walking by that locker bay since so many kids were crying. It had been a pretty cruel and ruthless attack, but if that was the worst she was going to do, then maybe this wouldn’t turn out so bad, after all. I mean, at the very least all of these attacks had diverted some of the attention away from my marked face. I was still getting ribbed pretty good by kids, but it would have been much, much worse without all of the other distractions.

But anyways, as you might suspect by now, those two things weren’t even close to the worst things Kinko had planned for me and the school.

Later that day, around one o’clock or so, I was sitting in science class, listening to these two kids behind me argue quietly over who was going to carry whose backpack that day. They were Kate and Kiah, best friends since I could remember and the two nicest kids in the whole school. Nice to a fault, actually.

“No, I’ll carry your backpack today,” Kiah whispered. “I mean, your back has been sore since you hurt it at tennis practice last week.”

“Kiah, don’t worry about my back. I’ll carry your bag. I mean, you’re the one who broke his foot playing football this year!” Kate insisted.

“Ah, that’s nothing. It’s just a scratch,” he said.

“A scratch? You have crutches!”

“Hey, well, okay. Why don’t we carry our own bags this time, if you’re going to be so stubborn? But at least let me buy you lunch today.”

“But I was going to buy you lunch today! I’ve been planning on it all week,” Kate said, her voice rising.

Luckily for them our science teacher, Mrs. Lavine, was all but deaf. One time a kid mixed together some chemicals he shouldn’t have and the resulting explosion actually shattered three of the classroom windows, and Mrs. Lavine didn’t even turn around. She just kept on writing stuff on the board.

“Shoot, what are we going to do?” Kiah said.

“We can vote?” suggested Kate. “That’s the most diplomatic way.”

Kiah laughed quietly. “But our votes always end in a one-to-one tie!”

“Maybe this time will be different?” Kate said.

I tried not to barf all over myself. Of all the people I ended up sitting next to, why did it have to be them? Everybody usually got pretty annoyed with them. We all kept saying that they should just stop messing around and get married already, since it was obvious that’s what was going to happen eventually. Except they’d probably argue more than any married couple on the planet, despite also being the nicest to each other. Well, this was mostly based on my own parents and movies, but whatever.

Around the time they were about to start counting their votes and would inevitably reach another one to one stalemate, they stopped talking. The whole class did. Instead we listened to the trickling sound that was growing louder and louder, the same sound the creek had made the night it mercilessly swallowed up four thousand dollars of hard-earned cash.

Then kids in the front row started leaping from their desks. Mrs. Lavine was still involved in grading some quizzes and hadn’t yet realized that something was happening. Those of us near the back never had the luxury of being able to react in time to avoid damage because all of the kids jumping around on their chairs and desks in front of us blocked our view and distracted us.

I didn’t figure out what the deal was until I felt my feet were suddenly engulfed in cold liquid. The other kids in the back started leaping from their desks, only making the splashing worse. I, however, just sat there and let the water gushing in from under the classroom door swirl around my ankles.

By the time Mrs. Lavine had figured out that her feet were in eight inches of water, the flowing had stopped and now the water just pooled there, cold and smelly and slightly yellowish, obviously the act of a master saboteur.

They dismissed us from the school for the rest of the day while they investigated what exactly had happened to cause the whole school to flood and also to start the clean-up process. Vince and I walked home that day together, and while we both agreed that it was likely Kinko who was responsible, what we couldn’t figure out was why.

I mean, all the incident had done was ruin some shoes and get all of our students a free half day off from school, maybe even more. What was her angle?

By the next day—on which school was canceled again—we found out. And it cemented Kinko, in my mind at least, as the most diabolical and genius saboteur in history. The act, which had seemed subtly good at first, ended up being the ultimate sucker-punch. Which I’m sure was exactly the intent.

School was canceled for the next three days while they tried to clean the place up, fix the pipes, and test for mold. Which, like I said, seemed awesome. But it wasn’t. There are state laws that require all students get a certain amount of school hours every year. So we now had to make up the time missed either at the end of the year or during winter break.

So just like that, she’d cost us three days of our already limited precious holiday break. And the rumor was that the incident had caused so much damage and would be so expensive to fix that the school was basically flat-out broke now and might have to cut a few programs, including several spring sports and over a dozen school clubs.

If our school had been a living, breathing person, then Kinko had basically just shot it in the gut with a shotgun with a debilitating disease all over the ammo. Okay, that’s kind of morbid, sure, but so was an entire school having to tromp through our own sewer water for half a day.

Furthermore, Ears, my best informant, told me he heard that Dickerson knew it was an act of sabotage. But he assumed it was an inside job. And that I was at the top of the suspect list. The word was that Dickerson would be gunning for me when school resumed that Thursday.

And that’s when I realized exactly what Kinko’s game was. She was going to destroy me and my school in a single diabolical move. This wasn’t business, this was personal.