At home after school, Michael Amorosa realizes he forgot his cellphone in his locker and takes the long bike ride back to retrieve it. He is surprised to find the door to the boy’s locker room unlocked (5). He had expected to need to call the custodian, Mr. Kennedy.

After retrieving his phone, Michael turns around and is shocked to see a red swastika spray-painted on the atrium wall above a staircase. He drops his phone, cracking the screen. At that moment, Mr. Kennedy appears and asks Michael if he is responsible. Michael asks the reader rhetorically why “the only Dominican kid in the whole school” would “draw a racist symbol” (7). Mr. Kennedy calls the police.

Seventh-grader Lincoln “Link” Rowley and his friends, Jordie Duros and Clayton Pouncey, are pulling a prank with their friends, Sophie Tavener and Pamela Bynes. They are depositing 80 pounds of fertilizer in the remote paleontology office of Wexford-Smythe University, a university in Massachusetts. The paleontologists are in Chokecherry to research locally discovered “dinosaur poop” that has been fossilized (8). As the boys tip the manure through a mail slot, car headlights shine on them. All the kids run away except Link, who is “literally holding the bag” (10).