And then Natalie’s storming from the stage and off the field, a “Fuck all of you!” flying behind her as Principal Morris sputters at the mic. Luke, Morgan, and Caleb tear off after her, group photo be damned.

“Should we go after them?” I ask Bronte and Amber, but they’re as shell-shocked as I am.

“Uh, no,” Amber says after a few seconds. “There’s enough of them.”

Plus I see Natalie’s dad making a hasty exit from the stands.

With teeth gritted, Principal Morris yells for the marching band to “Play, dammit,” making for an abrupt and uncomfortable start to the rest of halftime.

The energy in the crowd shifts. The drama is over, and there are only fifteen minutes left for bathroom breaks, grabbing snacks, and so on. All that coffee shared with Amber hits me at once, so I excuse myself to find a bathroom. But then she and Bronte join me, saying they need to grab something from Bronte’s locker. It takes forever to crawl along the bottlenecked corridor into the parking lot behind the field, and then I leave them at the athletic center. Natalie and co are long gone.

I check my phone. Nearly half my bathroom-break time has been eaten up by pure human traffic. And the line for the ladies’ restroom snakes around the back of the stadium. It’ll be ages. I will not pee myself at a new school at the big homecoming game, I tell myself. I will find a bathroom. It’s a big-ass school.

I make a dash for the main building to beat the lines. But I’m foiled at the doors abutting the cafeteria; they’re locked—likely to keep riffraff like me out after hours. Shit. Briefly I debate the Weston Annex, but I can see that the soaring glass windows in the distance are dark. I dance on the balls of my feet, getting more desperate by the second. Then I remember the pool isn’t far. Maybe the doors are still unlocked from this afternoon’s murder tour. Luke had bragged earlier about making over fifty dollars in tips. And a chlorine-filled bathroom is better than no bathroom at all.

I race down the field, and…success! I find the door to the pool not simply unlocked, but ajar. Cerulean lights refract onto the cinder-block walls. I squint in the dim wattage, the room nowhere near as bright as it was when Morgan and Luke put on their performance. Like a spy on a clandestine mission, I turn on my phone flashlight and use its narrow beam to guide my tiptoes alongside the pool and root out the blissfully line-free bathrooms within.