Colene had planned on skipping the rally anyway, but she acted properly outraged. "The nerve of the nerd! Why?" "Too many Bumper Stinkers in the parking lot." Colene remembered: there had been a rash of bad-taste stickers, using four-letter words and concepts. Principal Brown had laid down the law: no more of them on the school grounds. Evidently some of the stupid high school boys had tried it anyway. The principal wasn't satisfied to punish the errant boys; he had to punish the whole school too. Actually there was reason for this: those stickers would keep reap --

pearing until there was a climate of rejection among the stu -- dents, and that would come only if all of them paid the pen -- alty. Colene understood, but it would be traitorous to argue the case.

"What will we do with Brown?" Julie demanded rhetori -- cally. It was a matter of definition: no matter what happened, the principal was always wrong. That was one of the unifying principles of the student body.

Colene glanced around, saw that the teacher in charge was not paying attention while nearby students were, and launched into one of her clever little stories. She was good at this sort of thing, and she enjoyed it in her fashion.

"Why, we should hold a benefit for him," she said brightly.

"A benefit?" Julie asked blankly, playing the straight man to Colene's act.

"Yes. When he drives up in his Datsun with the tags saying OBITCH -- " She paused, giving them time to put that to -- gether: DATSUN OBITCH. An expanding circle of sniggers indicated that the joke had registered. "Then we should stage a gala fund-raising extravaganza, a dunk-the-idiot benefit, with Principal Brown as the main event. Three balls for a dollar, and whoever scores on the target makes Brown fall on the biggest, loudest, smelliest whoopee cushion ever put out by the Ack-Mee Novelty Company!" She put the back of a hand to her mouth and blew the whoopee noise.

It came out too loud. The teacher glanced quickly over at them, and they all had to stifle their laughter. Then the bell rang, saving them. That reminded Colene of a recording she had once heard at a party she wasn't supposed to attend: a "crepitation" championship match, in which the contestants broke wind in novel ways, each effort appropriately named, such as the sonorous

"Follow-up Blooper" and cute little "Freeps," and the end of the round was signaled not by a bell but a flatulent horn. The school buzzer was actually more like that than a church bell.

JULIE and Colene got off the bus and walked home. It was a pleasant neighborhood, with neat lawns, trees, and even some overgrown lots that were almost like little jungles. Drainage ditches were forming into the beginning of a stream that wound on out of the city. Colene had explored the re --