On Monday morning I woke up before my alarm.
Today was the day to be audacious.
I did my best not to fidget and rush too much. Even still, my mom said, “What’s with you today, girly, you got ants in your pants?”
“I’m just in a hurry to get to school,” I said.
I’d told Mom that I needed to get to school early that morning so I could work on a project with a friend. I think Mom was excited that I was doing something with a friend in the first place, so she didn’t ask too many questions.
Technically what I told her wasn’t a lie, but I still felt sort of guilty about it.
Before we loaded into the car, when Mom wasn’t looking, I swiped the chocolate frosting from the pantry (the store-bought kind I eat with graham crackers, not my mom’s good homemade stuff) and dropped the container into my backpack. Talia was bringing the other supplies.
When we pulled up to the school, I said a quick-as-a-rabbit goodbye to Mom and ran inside.
Talia was already there. Waiting for me by her locker.
By her left foot, she had a big green bucket full of sand and two little green shovels. And wonder of wonders, she grinned when she saw me. That made me grin, too.
“Ready?” she said.
I pulled the chocolate frosting out of my backpack. “Oh yes.”
We’d picked early morning because we knew we’d be alone. The teachers were in meetings or in their classrooms. None of the other kids had come in yet. We were alone in the hallway, which was exactly what we needed to be.
We looked both ways, like we were crossing the street, and when we were absolutely positively certain nobody was there, we dashed to the smelly locker of Dustin Pierce. The big bucket of sand Talia was carrying didn’t even slow her down because she was so strong. She could have arm-wrestled anybody in our class and she would have won. Maybe even Ms. Trepky, although I had a feeling Ms. Trepky was much stronger than she looked.
We both looked around again once we were at Dustin’s locker. It really did smell like gym socks and old Doritos.
Talia looked at me for a moment, one eyebrow raised. Then she smiled again and handed me one of the green shovels. She scooped up a shovelful of sand, then slowly and carefully poured the sand through the slots in Dustin’s locker.
A tiny stream of sand trickled through the crack in the bottom, but not much. Not so much you’d notice.
There was no turning back now.
I shoveled up another batch of sand and poured it through. I wasn’t as neat about it as Talia was, and some fell out onto the floor. Talia glanced around, checking again that we were alone, and spread the fallen sand across the hall with her foot.
We scooped and scooped, looking at each other and glancing around the hall. Nobody came. I didn’t hear a sound except for the shifting sand. (Although Talia would have heard someone coming before I did anyway.) It was almost too easy.
When we’d poured as much sand as we could through the slots, Talia picked up the chocolate frosting. She popped open the lid.
“It’s almost too good to waste on a turd like him,” she said. Then she winked at me and dug out a big glob with her fingers.
PLOP! Straight onto the locker door went the frosting, leaving a mark of Talia’s chocolaty handprint. She held the frosting tub out to me and I took my own big scoop.
PLOP! There was my hand, too.
Talia took another wad of frosting with her finger and started writing on the locker with the chocolate ink. She turned our handprints into two big piles of poop. She smeared more across the bottom of the locker and it stopped some of the sand from drizzling out. Then she wrote a big BB.
Take that, her face said.
I did my best to draw a small Frankenstein in the middle of my chocolate handprint, complete with scarred chin. It wasn’t very good, but I thought the point got across.
Talia and I looked at our artwork. Then she looked at her hand, then at me, and then raised her messy, chocolaty hand. I raised mine. We gave each other a splatting, goopy, chocolaty high five.
We grabbed our stuff and ran into the girls’ bathroom down the hall, laughing like maniacs. Friend maniacs.