Getting REVENGE on Lauren Wood Read Free

moment, but no one came into the bathroom. I took a few steps toward the sinks, and the voices and laughter got louder. There was a door leading to the pool, bolted from the locker room side. I pressed my ear against the door. The voices were coming from there for certain.
    I slipped the bolt open, the click sounding very loud in the empty bathroom, but the voices on the other side didn’t change. They hadn’t heard anything. I pulled the door open slowly and peered through the crack.
    Holy. Shit.
    There were soap bubbles everywhere; bubbles spreading like a foamy blob across the tile floor. The swimming pool was covered in a frothy concoction, like a giant latte. At the back of the room near the diving board a group of seniors stood pouring bottles of lemon yellow dish soap into the water. They were laughing, and Matt Ryan, who I knew from the local paper as the school’s star athlete, was standing back trying to capture the whole thing on his camera phone. He was the one who saw me. He winked at me then pressed his finger to his mouth, in the universal symbol for shhh , and I knew I should pretend I never saw a thing. I shut the door quietly and slid the bolt closed.
    “What are you doing?”
    I jumped and whirled around to face Lauren.
    “There are a bunch of seniors dumping soap into the pool.”
    “Get out!” Lauren walked past me and slid the bolt back on the door.
    “I don’t think we’re supposed to know about it.”
    “Duh.” Lauren pulled the door open and peered through the crack. She gave a tiny squeal and shut the door. “It must be the senior prank.”
    Senior prank was a long-standing Lincoln High tradition.Each class tried to come up with a way to outdo the class before. I figured by the time we were seniors we would have to come up with something worthy of making CNN, like kidnapping the prime minister of Canada.
    “They must have dumped at least a dozen bottles of soap into the pool,” I said.
    “We should go. The assembly is almost over, and we don’t want to be caught down here.” Lauren took off. Once we were in the hall I looked behind me. There was a wall of bubbles pressing against the frosted glass window in the door that led directly to the pool. I jogged after Lauren.
    The whole thing seemed funny. It was a prank after all, a joke. Just good clean soapy fun. I thought I was pretty cool to be in on it, especially considering I wasn’t even officially a freshman yet.
    The school administration took a dimmer view of the situation. Apparently dish soap and pool filters are a bad combination. Then there was the fact that one of the school janitors slipped on the soapy pool deck and fell, pulling his knee all out of whack. Rumor had it he was suing the school in some kind of worker’s compensation case for millions of dollars, but that part might not have been true. What was a fact was that the school administration was on a mission to find out who was behind the whole thing.
    The day after my birthday party an article appeared in the Sunday paper saying the seniors responsible had been caught.The paper showed a photo of Principal LaPoint looking stern with his arms crossed over his chest. He was quoted as calling those caught the “ringleaders,” like it was a major crime versus a senior prank. He was forbidding those four students from attending either prom or graduation. He wanted to withhold their diplomas altogether, but apparently the school board wasn’t willing to go that far. There were quotes in the paper from people around town, most of whom thought the punishment was too severe, although there were a few who seemed to think the death penalty might be in order.
    The first hint I had that anything was wrong, that the story would involve me at all, was on Monday morning. I was wearing a new soft white short sleeve sweater that I had gotten for my birthday. I was in a good mood until I got to my locker. snitch was written in black marker across the door. It was underlined