Sam shrugged and slid down even farther on the couch as we waited outside the teachers’ lounge.

“He said you started it, Sam—what was that about?” Another shrug.

“I thought Lachie was your friend? Didn’t Anika say you should invite him over sometime?”

Sam turned his face away, so I huffed and blew my bangs out of my eyes.

There were still a few minutes left of lunchtime. Mr. Harvey had given the fifth-grade kids trash duty as punishment—and Jed and Aidan, too, just for being there—but none of them wanted to say what the fight had been about, so he’d sent me and Sam to sort it out with Mr. Khouri.

I huffed again. “I swear, if this is a fight over something stupid like Tazos . . .” Those plastic discs that came free in packets of chips had started a craze in all the lower grades.

“It is, isn’t it? You got into a stupid fight over—”

“Shut up,” Sam whispered.

“Excuse me?”

He turned back to me. “I said shut up! You don’t know anything, and you don’t even care, so stop acting like you do!”

I was about to put him in his place when the door to the teachers’ lounge opened wide, and then Mr. Khouri was standing there, clearing his throat and brushing crumbs off his shirt. “Mr. Harvey tells me there’s been an altercation,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.

Mr. Khouri stared at me and then Sam. “Either one of you want to tell me what happened?”

Neither of us said anything.

“Right, well. I am told that you laid hands on a fellow student, Winifred?” I opened my mouth to defend myself, but Mr. Khouri had already turned back to Sam. “Mr. Harvey didn’t see anything directly, but he has his suspicions that Winifred did so in defense of you, Samuel—is that true? Did someone hurt you today?”

Sam didn’t say anything.

Mr. Khouri lifted a hand to rub between his eyes. “We do not condone bullying or intimidation of any kind at this school—you both understand that, don’t you?”

Sam and I nodded.

“Winifred, defending a fellow student is commendable, but physical altercations are not entirely exculpable. I trust you know what that means?”

I nodded. It was another Luca policeman word—meaning to clear from a charge of guilt or fault. If I wasn’t exculpable, it meant I wasn’t about to be free.

“Winifred, every day this week after you’ve finished eating your lunch, you’ll come see me to assign you menial cleanup tasks around the school. You’ll do that for one week instead of playing and hanging out with your friends at lunchtime. Let’s see you give back to your school community as atonement. And Mrs. Watts will be supervising punishment for the fifth graders involved.”