A sickly sweet odor creeps up our nostrils; the type you whiff when driving past a crushed dog or pulpy raccoon on the side of the road, flies buzzing all over the bloated fur and gore. The larger locker-room area usually smells bad but not this bad. We have it all to ourselves since our team works longer and harder than any of the other sports and by the time we finish, everyone else has gone home. Coach Nelson made the right call, leaving through the front of the gym and sparing himself the whiff of death. As we head toward our team locker room, built off from the main room locker room, the stench only gets stronger.

“Damn, Paul.” Fisher coughs. “You wanna start using deodorant or showering or something? You’re killing me here.”

“Whatever it is, Fish,” Paul answers, “it must’ve crawled out your ass.”

“It’s worse than that practice when Fisher ate only CornNuts for breakfast and lunch,” Gradley says, waving his hand in front of his face. “Fisher, you been eating CornNuts again?”

Ronnie Gunderson, unlucky enough to reach our team locker room first, flicks the light switch and squeals—yeah, squeals—as he reels backward out of the room.

“Yuck!”

Ronnie—not to overstate things—is a tad sensitive, being a youth-camp Christian and all. One more reason I’m not jazzed about being mistaken for him, which happens a lot. I mean, besides being even smaller than me, Ronnie is, like, fragile—almost dainty. He never swears, either, which I don’t trust. None of it would bug me that much if people didn’t accidentally call me by his name and vice versa. Then, again, he bugs Fisher way more than he does me and no one confuses them.

“What’s your problem, fairy?” Vance Fisher snaps as Ronnie backs into him. Fisher’s face, like the rest of ours, is scrunched up against the smell. Vance pushes Ronnie out of the way and then stops in the middle of the team-room doorway like he’s hit a glass wall. Curiosity drives the rest of us to push in past Fisher.

A dead squirrel, its belly split open and its guts hanging out, is nailed into the center of Bruce’s locker. A scrawled note, smudged with crimson streaks and pasted below the body, reads WAIT ROOM IS OURS!!!

The squirrel’s head is cut off and wedged into the middle air vent of Bruce’s locker. Someone’s also taken the trouble to smear squirrel guts across all of our lockers, making sure to wipe the goo over our locker dials so we’ll have to touch it while spinning our combinations.

“Gross.” Paul sighs, then spits into the wastebasket.

“Is there a waiting room in the school I didn’t know about?” Vance snickers. “Dumb fucks can’t even spell.”

“Gee, I wonder who did this?” Bruce grumbles. He looks grim, as if he’s just been told his shiny, new senior year is going to suck.

“Just a little varmint, fellas,” Fisher says. He walks over to the squirrel and with his bare hands yanks the thing off the nail. It sounds like a shirt tearing. Then he pinches the decapitated head with his fingers and pries it out of the locker vent. He goes over to the wastebasket and tosses in the remains, surprising me with how he handles the situation. “That the best those goons can do?” he asks. “Shoot, this ain’t nothin’ compared to deer season. You field-dress a twelve-point buck sometime and that makes this look like someone sneezed on your sleeve.” Fisher gives us his goofiest grin. “Ronnie,” he says, “go make your frosh ass useful and get a heap of paper towels, wet them, and pump the hand soap on them. We’ll have these lockers cleaned up in two minutes.”

Ronnie does as he’s told while the rest of us just stand there scratching ourselves, stuck until the locker dials get cleaned up. Bruce starts pacing a small circle in front of the bench, softly bumping his fisted knuckles against each other. “We ain’t letting ’em get away with this,” Bruce says. Something’s churning inside him. The muscles of his neck, arms, and back clench into a hard shell. “No way I’m letting these wads think they can get away with this.”

“Damn straight,” Gradley agrees.

“We got to tell someone,” Pete Delray, the other freshman, says. Bruce turns to him with a look of disgust.

“You go ahead and tell someone, Pete, and get back to me when they decide to do something,” Bruce grouses. “School ain’t gonna do shit to those guys.”

“But—”

“No, we take care of this by ourselves,” Bruce speaks over Pete’s protest. “They think they’re untouchable—especially Miller, Jankowski, and Studblatz. Well, we ain’t a bunch of pansy cross-country runners. They’re going to find that out.”

“I’m liking what I hear,” Fisher says, the only one of us who seems to be enjoying himself at the moment.

Ronnie Gunderson looks like he wants to disagree but Bruce holds a finger up to him, signaling not now.

“Okay, guys,” Bruce says. “It’s payback time.” He reaches into his gym bag and pulls out his almost empty water bottle, upends it into his mouth, glugs down its remnants, and then slams it down onto the bench. “Who’s got to piss?” he asks, his eyes burning with a fevered look I’ve never seen on him. He rattles the empty bottle. “Well, fill’er up.”

Because we’ve been sweating our asses off for the last three hours, no one’s got a lot to contribute to Bruce’s bottle until it’s Fisher’s turn. Vance Fisher takes Bruce’s bottle into the toilet stall and tops it off. Then he calls for another.

“Come on, guys. I’m flowing here,” Fisher yells from the stall. “Hook me up!”

“Where’s he put it?” Larry Menderson asks.

“It’s all that soda he drinks,” Bruce says. “You’re gonna rot your teeth, Fisher.”

“This isn’t right,” Ronnie protests.

“Relax, frosh,” Fisher says over the sounds of his stream. “Baby Jesus ain’t gonna cry just because we’re pissing in a water bottle. Check your Bible. It’s not like we’re breaking a commandment. You ain’t gonna burn in hell.”

“Pete, give Fisher your water bottle,” Bruce says.

“Hurry, guys,” Vance calls again.

“Why mine?” Pete whines.

“ ’ Cause you’re a freshman.”

“So is Ronnie,” Pete answers.

“Ronnie’s too busy saying prayers for all our lost souls,” Bruce says, then slaps Pete’s shoulder. “Come on, man. Do it for the team.”

Pete finally sacrifices his water bottle for the good of the counterstrike. By the time we clean up our lockers, dress, pee, and walk down the long basement hall toward the varsity football locker room, it’s real late and nobody should be around except maybe a janitor.

Since they’re freshmen, we let Ronnie and Pete stay outside in the hallway as lookouts. Bruce tells them to whistle real loud if they see anyone approaching and then hightail it out of there. Bruce leads the way in to the enemy lockers, shaking the pee bottle like it’s a protein drink needing mixing.

“Okay, dickheads,” he whispers to the empty locker room. “Time for a little justice.”

We move in a clump, afraid and excited. If anyone catches us in here, we’re dead. Bruce makes a V with his index and middle finger, and brings it up to his eyeballs, then points the V out to the surrounding locker room. Fisher, the deer hunter in our group, nods his understanding.

“Fan out, guys,” Fisher translates. “Keep your eyes open for the captains’ lockers.” The skinny junior, lanky as a scarecrow, with a gap-toothed grin and crooked nose, devours the whole experience like candy. Usually I think of Fisher as a screw-off, with no plans after graduation other than opening a bait-and-tackle shop or maybe joining the marines like his older brother, on the condition they let him get high and sleep late. But right now, hunting down lockers with bottles of piss, Fisher impresses me.

Unlike Fisher, Bruce doesn’t look excited or pleased, just angry. He’s been fuming ever since we found the squirrel. No one’s talking to him other than Fisher, his mission cocommander.

The lockers in the varsity room are triple size and each has a glossy label with a player’s name and jersey number stenciled across it. This makes our mission easier. Me and Paul, too scared to wander off alone, stay together and find Jankowski’s locker at the same time.

“Over here,” I stage-whisper. Paul punches me in the shoulder.

“Shhhhhh,” he says, and puts a finger to his lips. Bruce rounds the corner, shaking his bottle like mad, practically walking over me to reach the target. He hops up on the long bench running between the rows of lockers. He pulls open the spout on his squeeze bottle. Without a second’s hesitation, he aims the spout up into the top vent of the locker and crunches hard on the plastic with both hands.

Phhhhthththththththththt . . . The bottle sprays up into the locker vent, its contents disappearing on the other side, unseen.

“See how you like it now, bastard,” Bruce hisses. He seems to be getting angrier and angrier as he does it. The bottle gurgles and he tips it at a steeper angle, squeezing again.

Phhhhthththththththththt . . .

“Studblatz’s is over here,” Gradley calls softly from the next row. Bruce hops down off the bench and moves like a minitank, pushing past us to get to the next locker. He steps up on the bench and presses the spout up into Studblatz’s vent.

Phhhththththththththt . . . shake, shake, shake ... Phhhththththththththth.

“Refill,” Bruce calls out. Fisher is there, handing over Pete’s water bottle like it’s an ammunition clip for a depleted machine gun.

Phhhthththththhtthth . . .

“Found Miller’s,” Menderson calls out.

Bruce finishes the rest of the second bottle, upending it, through the vent slit in Scott Miller’s locker. It feels good watching piss spray into the quarterback’s locker. I bet that cross-country runner he’d been harassing would love to be here watching. I think we’re done but Bruce pulls out a baggie from his pocket.

“The gift that keeps on giving.” Bruce smirks as he pulls the mushy squirrel guts and pelt out of the baggie and squeezes it as best he can through the vent. It smells bad and I lift my forearm to press against my nose.

“Shit, dude,” Gradley hisses. “Now they’ll know for sure it’s us.”

“What are they gonna do?” Bruce asks him, and I see he’s challenging all of us. “They gonna cry that we didn’t play fair? That we used their own squirrel guts against them? They gonna cry to their coach? Screw ’em.”

“You just shafted us,” Paul says, and shakes his head.

“Relax,” Bruce says, stubborn. No way he’s admitting he went too far.

We hear a high piercing whistle. It’s either Pete or Ronnie.

“Go, go, go . . .”

We scramble around the benches, banging shins on the planks of pine and slamming shoulders on the thin metal corners of the lockers.

“Come on, come on.... Go, go, go.”

Paul leads the way, shoving the door open, and we pile out into the basement hallway, expecting ... the whole football team? A group of teachers? Cops?

Pete and Ronnie stand in the deserted hallway, eyes big as a baby Pokémon’s.

“What?!” Gradley asks.

“Janitor down at the end of the hall, but he went into the boiler room,” Pete whispers. That’s enough for us. We sprint down the hall in the opposite direction, our sneakers squeaking against the smooth cement floors and the thighs of our jeans vvvrrrping with each stride.

Upstairs, Bruce stops us.

“Okay, guys. Wait!” he says. “We can’t all leave in a big group. Too suspicious. Go to your lockers or hang out for a sec.”

“Yeah, smart,” Fisher declares.

“And not a word of this to anyone. I mean, anyone,” Bruce cautions. “No matter what, just play stupid.”

“Paul’s got that covered,” Fisher says. Paul shoves him.

“The squirrel’s fair game,” Bruce continues, still pleading his case, “but the piss will send them over, so don’t say anything.”

We’re all breathing hard, partly from the run, partly from striking back and having a great secret that’ll get us creamed if anyone finds out.

“Pete,” Bruce says, “here’s your water bottle back.” He presses the empty bottle into the freshman’s chest. Pete looks down at it, slowly grabs the bottle while his lips curl and his nose crinkles.

“You can’t throw it out right away because someone might find it,” Bruce warns, deadly serious. “This mission isn’t over yet. You’ve got to hold on to it, rinse it out, and it should be good as new. I want to see you drinking out of it tomorrow in practice, you got it?”

“Wh-what?” Pete asks, his voice rising. I look at Bruce, thinking he lost his mind downstairs. “Bu-but you can’t be ... You’re kidding.”

“Yes, I am, freshman.” Bruce clasps Pete’s shoulder. “Throw that thing away off school grounds first chance you get.”

Bruce looks at the rest of us, his eyes twinkling with victory. “Okay, not a word, guys. See you tomorrow. Good practice today.”