Chapter 8 A-Raiding We Will Go
A-RAIDING WE WILL GO
ELYXANDRE
What she found when she arrived at school this morning made her blood pressure spike.
It was the start of homecoming week, and she probably should have been prepared for the annual “raiding” party, but somehow it had slipped her mind.
The trees in front of the building were flocked in toilet paper, and the windows were heavily painted with washable markers.
But when she got closer, she saw it wasn’t just the windows that had been painted.
In bright-red spray paint, the phrases “Seniors Rule! Freshmen Drool!” were front and center on the theatre load-in door.
Not washable. The door would need to be repainted, and even then, it might not keep the red paint from showing underneath.
She did a quick canvass of the grounds around the building, noting other acts of vandalism. Picnic tables and bike stands overturned. Official road signs spray-painted over, as well as more doors.
Her brow furrowed. Something here wasn’t right. Toilet-papering and window-painting aside, something nagged at the back of her mind.
As she came around to the front entrance, she ran into two custodians attempting to pull the toilet paper out of the trees with long poles as they spoke with Lucas, an insulated coffee tumbler in hand, who’d clearly just arrived.
His son, Ezra, was just entering the building, likely for morning weight lifting with the football team.
“Looks like Riverbend High had quite the party last night,” she commented.
Lucas looked at her oddly. “Riverbend?”
“Yeah. Your homecoming opponent. Surprised they actually used spray paint on the building.”
“This wasn’t done by Riverbend,” the one custodian said. “This was Tejeda Springs kids.”
She felt her eyes go wide. “What?” She couldn’t believe what she just heard. “Why would they trash their own school? And why add vandalism to the raid?”
The second custodian shrugged and got back to work, pulling toilet paper from the tree limbs. “They’ve done this for years” was his only reply.
“The spray painting is new though,” Lucas added.
“And you allow this?” she asked incredulously.
Immediately, she regretted the rash question that sounded more like an accusation.
“My apologies,” she tacked on. “Uncalled for. I’m just surprised that the students here did this.
I’m going to get inside and start looking at camera footage to see if I can identify some of these kids. ”
She got about five steps and turned around, her finger pointed at the custodians.
“Stop working on this. You have more important things to do. I need you and your crew to disperse around campus and take photos of everything they did last night. And I mean everything. Every trash can dumped out, every picnic table turned over, every window broken, every sign they vandalized, absolutely everything! Those are your priorities. I’ll meet with Principal Vaughn and the superintendent about the vandalism issues with the spray paint and broken windows.
As for the mess, the kids who did this are going to clean it up. ”
Lucas raised an eyebrow at her, and at first, she thought he was mad at her for giving orders over him. However, there was a twitch at one corner of his mouth, showing that he was actually amused by her indignation. Apparently, he approved of her response.
“See you in your office shortly, Officer Hookstead. I’ll be able to help you identify the kids you don’t know. Even have a sneaking suspicion who some of them are.”