Anyway, after Mr. Lynch voted the way he did about Huckleberry Finn, Marian made a big show of avoiding him in the hallways, flattening herself against the lockers when he walked by, making the sign of the cross behind his back. She was like a bad vampire movie. Once, after a big snowstorm, she spent half an hour in the parking lot carving some crazy footprints in the snow by his car. It was classic Marian. She said she was sculpting the footprints of Huck Finn’s murderous father. "In the book, the left boot heel had a cross in it," she said. "To ward off the devil." She’s a real stickler for accuracy.

Mr. Lynch was supposed to recognize the footprints and interpret them as a threat. When I asked, "What kind of threat?" Marian rolled her eyes at me, the way she does whenever she thinks someone’s being hopelessly thick, which in my case is fairly often. "The Vengeful Cry of the Oppressed," she said. "Duh!"

Carving the footprints was a lot harder than she originally thought, because it’s not exactly easy to avoid leaving your own footprints in the snow, not to mention the occasional handprint when you lose your balance. In the end, it looked to me as if a big hairy dog had jumped out of Mr. Lynch’s car and rolled around, but Marian was satisfied that the Oppressor was in for a real scare. I was glad to hear that because, by then, I thought I was going to chip a tooth from shivering so hard.