Gimme Everything You Got - Iva-Marie Palmer Page 0,101

crazy.

“Yes, that’s exactly what we need to do,” Marie said.

“Why should they get away with this?” Dawn extended a hand to Tina to slap five. “Even if Bobby gets ahold of their coach, he’ll probably just laugh when he finds out what his players did.”

“What do you have in mind?” Wendy said, slinging an arm over Tina’s shoulder. “Because I’m in.”

Ideas started to fly. “We TP their houses!” “We fuck up their cars!” “We’ll break into their cafeteria and pee in their soda machine!”

“Those are all good suggestions,” I said. Finally, with the team rallying around our revenge plot, my energy had started to return. “But we need a punishment that fits the crime. We need to hit them where it hurts—”

“Their dicks?” Marie said.

“For sure,” Dana said. “They can put them back where they came from.”

“Their moms?” Joanie said.

“No, I mean . . . never mind,” Dana muttered. Tina and I traded an amused look.

“I think she’s trying to say she wants them to put their dicks away forever,” Dawn said.

“Screw that,” Marie said. “I’d like to see them run through here when we’re prepared for their dicks.”

“They’re more than their dicks, guys,” Arlene said, like this was something she’d learned in kindergarten. “They’re bad people no matter what they have between their legs.”

“I think we need to settle on a plan so we can stop saying ‘dick,’” Franchesa said.

“Please,” Tina said.

“And we don’t give their dicks any more attention,” I said. “They think the world revolves around them as it is. But . . .” I pointed at the ground, where one of the pairs of underwear lay. It had a telltale butt-crack-length brown stain up the back of it. So did several of the others lying in view. “I think that even though they’re assholes, they don’t know how to wipe theirs.”

“Disgusting!”

“Do you guys think there’s sideline chalk in that shed?” I said. “Because I have an idea.”

Just as I suspected, the boys had been too stupid to lock up the shed. Inside, there was white chalk and line stripers, for marking off lines on the pitch and the football field. We took everything and returned to the soccer pitch.

“We have to work fast,” I said. “Who knows how long we have!”

It took us about an hour to mark the pitch. We went over every letter with a second coat of chalk, and then a third, ensuring that it wouldn’t be washed away if it rained before next week. Heck, it would take hours to erase it even with firehoses.

“Is this kind of mean?” Joanie said when we were done. “Like, is it beneath us?”

“I think it’s perfect,” Marie said, hoisting her paintbrush in the air. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but nobody whines louder than a man whose ego has been bruised.”

Once we’d put everything away, we all walked to the top of the bleachers to stare down at our work. It reminded me of what I’d told Joe about listening to “Gimme Shelter,” that feeling of going up high to look at my life. In this case, though, I was looking at the St. Mark’s soccer field, where we’d painted, in bright white letters:

EAT SHIT, ST. SKID-MARKS!

We’d then used a pair of pliers we found to pick up the pairs of shit-stained underwear and draped them over orange cones down the length of the field.

I laughed, imagining Ken’s anger mounting in him until his skin was redder than his hair. Joe was going to declare this very punk rock.

“I wish I had a camera,” Marie said.

“I know,” Franchesa said. “We’ll just have to remember it.”

“I might block some of it out,” Tina said. “But this part’s good. I can’t wait until those assholes and all their friends come to school on Monday and see it.”

“I still wish we’d gotten to play the game,” Dawn said.

“What game?”

A male voice yelled up from below and behind us. I spun around and looked down at the ground beneath the bleachers.

Two police officers were standing there, and from the looks on their faces, they didn’t think our work was as good as we did.

Twenty-Eight

After all the blood felt like it had been drained from and then returned to my body at a colder temperature, I shared a moment of “oh shit” panic with my teammates. I had to catch Dana by the arm so she didn’t fall over at the top of the bleachers. The cops summoned us to join them on the ground, where we