I swipe the card through the reader, just as a dog in a nearby yard starts barking like mad, jangling my nerves. I slip inside. The bright lights surprise me, coming on with a hum. The Makers’ Space is empty. I throw my backpack on a table and slide into a chair at a computer, scooting it forward while it warms up. This shouldn’t take long, what I have planned. I putter around for a bit, scanning, working with Photoshop, digging up pictures, and I am feeling stronger and stronger. This is the right thing to do. My body thrums with justice and the knowledge that I am so balls-out in my actions, my fingers flying across the keyboard. Before long, the printer is booted up, buzzing with dangerous vengeance, and soon it’s spitting out copy after copy of our next job. Dee calls them “jobs,” what has been happening, what we’ve been doing, these vigilante acts of revenge, like she’s in Oceans 11 or something. It’s over the top, but I love it.

I lay all the printouts in front of me and get started.

Chapter 18

18

There seem to be hundreds of posters, all with the same image: Paige, grinning and cute and pretty as a stock photo of a cheerleader, her face glowing in the Polaroid we took together months ago—except there is a KKK hood drawn over her face and RACIST written across the top of the poster, all in red lipstick. In another, I cut her out and put her in the middle of a group of hillbillies I found online, blacking out her front teeth. They are plastered on the doors to the bathrooms, on bulletin boards, and all across the hallway of ninth-grade lockers.

People take pics with their phones before the teachers and janitors can tear them down, so the fire shoots across social media, moving from person to person, from page to group to message until everyone’s phone is burning hot. A video appears on YouTube within an hour, a shaky, amateur pan of the posters, people laughing, Paige herself turning from the camera with tears in her eyes. The title of the video is “Racist Girl Gets Schooled” and it’s seen hundreds of times by lunch, comments ranging from questions about what she did to emojis of brown hands clapping to suggestions that this is bullying.

Dee slides into our table with her lunch tray, joining me and Ava. She’s grinning. I hide behind my sandwich, hardly tasting it. My heart is beating hard.

“This is amazing!” she says. “That bitch will think twice about saying any of that shit now!” She reaches for my hand and gives me a little squeeze.

Ava looks sideways, and I see that Antar is sitting a bit further down the table with a few other kids. I follow her gaze. “Why’s he over there?” I ask.