Dahlia never wore a sundress to school again. It was a defeat even though she’d won the round. The thought of how it would feel to be exposed like that . . . Everyone had a cell phone, every cell phone had a camera. One photo would kill her, and she knew it. So she took her small victory and let them win that war.

So, it was like that.

But over time, had anyone actually been paying attention and keeping score, they’d have realized that there were very few repeat offenders.

Sadly, a lot of kids seem to have “insult the fat girl” on their bucket list. It’s right there, just above “insult the ugly girl.” So they kept at it.

And she kept getting her revenge.

Today it was going to be Tucker Anderson’s car. Dahlia had filched one of her dad’s knives. Dad had a lot of knives. It probably wasn’t because he was surrounded by so many large, fierce women, but Dahlia couldn’t rule it out. Dad liked to hunt. Every once in a while he’d take off so he could kill something. Over the last five years he’d killed five deer, all of them females. Dahlia tried not to read anything into that.

She did wish her dad would have tried to be a little cooler about it. When they watched The Walking Dead together, Dahlia asked him if he ever considered using a crossbow, like that cute redneck, Daryl. Dad said no. He’d never even touched a crossbow. He said guns were easier. Ah well.

The knife she took was a Buck hunting knife with a bone handle and a four-inch blade. The kind of knife that would get her expelled and maybe arrested if anyone found it. She kept it hidden, and in a few minutes she planned to slip out to the parking lot and slash all four of Tucker’s tires. Why? He’d Photoshopped her face onto a bunch of downloaded porn of really fat women having ugly kinds of sex. Bizarre stuff that Dahlia, who considered herself open-minded and worldly, couldn’t quite grasp. And then he glued them to the outside of the first-floor girl’s bathroom.

Tucker didn’t get caught because guys like Tucker don’t get caught. Word got around, though. Tucker was tight with Chuck, Dault, and Marcy. This was the latest battle in the war. Her enemies were persistent and effortlessly cruel. Dahlia was clever and careful.

Then, as we know, the world ended.

— 4 —

Here’s how it happened as far as Dahlia was concerned.

She didn’t watch the news that morning, hadn’t read the papers—because who reads newspapers?—and hadn’t cruised the top stories on Twitter. The first she knew about anything going wrong was when good old Marcy Van Der Poop came screaming into the girls’ room.

Dahlia was in a stall and she tensed. Not because Marcy was screaming—girls scream all the time; they have the lungs for it, so why not?—but because it was an inconvenient time. Dahlia hated using the bathroom for anything more elaborate than taking a pee. Last night’s Taco Thursday at the Allgood house was messing with that agenda in some pretty horrific ways. Dahlia had waited until the middle of a class period to slip out and visit the most remote girls’ room in the entire school for just this purpose.