“Not this specific prank, but pranks in general. Small stuff,” I said, even though that wasn’t quite true—what we’d done to Dana, Jae’s ex-girlfriend, wasn’t small.

“What are we doing?” I asked her in the car.

“You’ll see,” she said with a sly smile. Elise had a flair for the dramatic and liked saving her plans for a big last-minute reveal.

Back at the Pink Mansion, we met up with Julie and opened the large cans of tuna suspended in oil, cautiously draining them into Tupperware, tossing out the fish before we left again. A little before midnight, we arrived at Lara’s house, parking near her car. We went up to Lara’s car, a black Corolla. Everyone stood still in anticipation, staring at Elise for direction.

“When you turn on the heat or AC, when you have the fan on and even when you don’t, air from the outside comes into the car through tiny vents located underneath the windshield wipers,” Elise explained. “We’re going to pour the tuna oil into those vents.” Jack looked at me in sharp surprise, but Evan seemed excited.

“Are you serious?” Jack asked. I was shocked too, by both the genius and simplicity of it. She always knew how to accomplish a lot with very little—a ruined car with a can of tuna fish. But Jack didn’t seem to be balking at her genius, and underneath my awe, I was worried, too. We’d never destroyed someone’s car. We’d never done anything so permanent.

Elise tilted her head slightly, as if pausing to consider an answer. “Yes,” she said. “I’m dead serious.” Then she turned to Evan. “You should do the honors.”

“Don’t do this,” Jack said.

“Why not?” Evan said. He was getting keyed up, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet.

“Come on, it’s not worth it,” he said. “Let’s just go home.”

“Go ahead,” Elise encouraged him, ignoring Jack.

Evan looked between them but nodded at Elise. Then he carefully popped open the Tupperware and began to pour slowly. From now until the day the car would be flattened at a junkyard, the pervasive smell of rotting fish would haunt Lara. She’d have to take the entire car apart to clean it but even then, the scent of bad tuna would linger. “The scent of justice,” Elise called it.

“Where’d you get the idea?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “I considered it for Christian but then realized your parents might just get him a new car.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know how to respond. Maybe she had considered it for Christian, or at least thought of it then, but she never told me, never seriously entertained the idea. I couldn’t see her doing something so extreme then, but now here she was, charging ahead with it.

“Okay, that’s it,” Evan said, tapping the container empty against the windshield. Elise and Evan stood there for a while admiring their work as Jack shifted his weight between his feet in obvious discomfort. I turned away, trying hard to not think too much about what we’d just done.