“Hey—how about Trap?” says a voice that has not been heard yet. Everybody looks around to see who’s talking. It’s Martin Gerard. Martin Gerard is one of those people you never notice unless you’re forced to be his lab partner. But that never seems to bother him. He makes bad puns and always seems to have a drip of toothpaste lather on his shirt.

“How about what?” Rack asks with as much scorn as she can muster.

“Trap!” says Martin, all happy. “As in—Trap the Cougars! My grandfather was a trapper, up in Canada. Those traps are wicked-looking. Big steel teeth.” He bares his teeth at us and bugs his eyes out behind his glasses.

Junior laughs and claps him on the shoulder. “I like it,” he says.

“And the float—” Marty keeps going. “The float could be this giant trap with big teeth, and we could have someone dressed in a cougar suit—”

“Like their mascot—” Lars gets excited. “Let’s kidnap Minnechaug’s mascot!”

“They don’t have a mascot,” Rack sneers. “Nobody has mascots, you dumb-ass.” But it’s too late—Martin’s idea is taking off. Everyone crowds around him, suddenly excited.

“Isn’t there a football play called the trap, too?”

“And then put the slogan Trap the Cougars over the top of the trap!”

Everybody except Rack goes home happy from that meeting, but one thing’s still on my mind. It’s a delicate matter. I call Rack about it. But when I tell her that I think Grimshaw should be homecoming queen this year, she’s offended.

“Serena, queens are elected,” she says. “Everybody votes. What planet do you live on?”

So a couple of nights later, we get together in Scot’s shop again, to start building a giant trap for the Minnechaug Cougars. Martin has drawn the plans. The boys get out the two-by-fours and start hammering. The girls have collected half-gallon juice containers for the teeth. Then we dip sheets of newspaper in flour paste and drape them around the chicken wire and blow-dry them so that we can spray paint them primer black. Then the boys make a trip to McDonald’s before it closes, and the girls glue the teeth on. The senior float starts to look like a huge pair of dentures.

When Martin comes back from McDonald’s, he has a fit. “That doesn’t look like a bear trap!” he shouts. “It looks like a mouth of a whale! The teeth are supposed to be serrated, you idiots!”

Rack looks at him like he’s so far out of line she can’t even take him personally. “Martin,” she says. “Do you even exist?”

Junior laughs hysterically. Overnight, he seems to have adopted Martin Gerard as his personal mascot.