“Oh. Just an email to deal with.”
“Ah. Gotcha. The students are on their way down.”
He looked back at his computer. “Buzz me when they’re all here.”
“Juliette’s been told,” she called over her shoulder as she continued down to the second conference room.
When she heard the first resource aide calling out to Juliette as he passed her, she grabbed the remote, hit play to start the footage on the screen, and waited, her back to the door, face to the screen, and her butt on the edge of the table.
The boy who arrived first was quiet. The hum of the fluorescent lights and his fidgeting in the seat were the only sounds in the room until the second hand on the clock hit twelve, and then there was an audible click.
Within the next seven minutes, four more boys and two girls were brought into the room and seated around the table. Still, she kept her back to all of them, watching the video footage.
The door opened, the handle’s ka-thunk obscenely loud in the silence.
Principal Vaughn had arrived. She worried he would forget their plan and go into an immediate chastisement of the students, but he restrained himself. The security mirror in the corner of the room showed that it was difficult for him, based on his fists tightly clenched at his sides.
The video footage continued through yet another loop. Occasionally, she switched camera angles, and one of thethumbnails would increase in size, but all of them kept running through their view of the scene. After one complete cycle, she passed through each video, pausing the screens one at a time, an action clear in each of the thumbnails, which matched the social media post video. Then, and only then, did she turn around and sit.
“Do you know how a homecoming raid works?” she asked. Her eyes took in each student one at a time.
They said nothing. Most of them were staring at the wall across from them, between their friends’ heads. One of the girls, Kennedy Dixon, was picking the polish off her nails. A boy was fiddling with the ties of his school hoodie.
The only one looking at her was Ryker, and his eyes were hot with anger. “Obviously, we do. You have the video to prove it,” he said.
“In history class, did you ever learn about counting coup?”
Silence.
“Counting coup is when one Native American tribe would sneak into the village of another tribe, or even an individual enemy, and take something. Whatever that something was had value to the individual or tribe they stole it from. Sometimes it was a horse. It might even be a woman. It could even be something as insignificant as a knife or a cooking utensil. But the ultimate goal was to take whatever the item was and not get caught. If the brave could do that, then he was the winner, and the enemy had to admit defeat.”
By now, all of the students were focused on her, the soft voice with no anger, no frustration, no sadness, pulling them into her web.
“The homecoming raid,” she continued, as if lecturing a class, “is a delicate operation, and taken from this same Native American concept. The point is to get in, get out, and show your enemy that they’ve been bested. The TPing, the washablepaint on the windows, no one is upset by those. I participated myself as a student. We raided our opponent’s school when their homecoming was taking place, and they raided ours on our homecoming. But what confuses me is, why did you raid your own school? Since when is Tejeda Springsyourenemy?”
The students, with the exception of Ryker, looked at her with stunned expressions.
Finally, one of them spoke up. “It’s always been a senior tradition here.”
“To vandalize your school?” she asked. She kept her tone confused. She didn’t want to appear like a threat to them. Ironically, she was playing good cop in this scene. Lucas would play bad cop shortly.
“It’s been this way for years, lady,” Ryker said. “That’s how it’s done here.”
She shook her head. “I dunno. That’s not what happened at any of the schools that I had in my precinct in Louisiana. And it wasn’t how we did things when I was a student here at Tejeda Springs.”
The boy’s jaw began to twitch, and he was turning red in the face.
“Well, we can discuss the finer points of homecoming raids in the future. That is, if you want to do them correctly. But we can’t do that until we discuss the issue of the vandalism committed. Remember, counting coup is about besting your opponent, not damaging them.”
Lucas’ deep baritone voice from the other end of the room spoke up. “So? What do you have to say for yourselves?”
No surprise, the students said nothing.
He held up a piece of paper with a number at the bottom in large, bold font, circled in red marker. “You caused over ten thousand dollars in damage last night that had nothing to do with sidewalk chalk, washable glass paint, or toilet paper. Worseyet, you did it to your own school. Do you realize that your parents and your classmates’ parents will be paying for your vandalism with their tax dollars? Do you understand how poorly we look to the community?”
The questions he was asking might make the two fidgeters feel slightly upset, but it wouldn’t make them talk. It wasn’t like they needed to. She had clear and indisputable evidence that they’d participated in the early morning antics. Were they the only ones? No. But if they did this right, it would set an appropriate example for the rest of the student body and might curtail their peers’ plans for future nights, or future homecoming sabotage in the next few years. That’s why they had agreed on a more teachable moment.
When the students still said nothing, he let loose with the bad-cop role he was to play. “Each of you is going to serve the rest of today as an in-school suspension where you will be supervised by the custodians as you remove the toilet paper from the trees, powerwash the sidewalks and parking lots free of the graffiti there, and then wash the windows free of all paint. Tomorrow and Wednesday will be served as out-of-school suspensions. In addition, you will not be allowed to attend any of the homecoming festivities, including the game on Friday or the dance on Saturday. If you are part of the band or an activity, you will not be allowed to participate in the parade. I cannot forbid you from going to that as a spectator because it is off school grounds, but I can’t imagine that would be a suitable replacement for being a part of it.”
