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“You are a coward if you don’t stand up here with me,” he howls, and I swear he’s looking straight at me. “You are a coward just like the cowards who didn’t say no to Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun or Alexander the Runt or that nasty little tramp Adolf Hitler-Schmitler. Cowards, cowards, one and all!”

A coward! Nobody calls me a coward and gets away with
it. I have never been afraid of anything! Bobby taught me how to kick butt, and he was the best this town’s ever seen. And maybe the captain is including Bobby in with the cowards too. Like he should have just run away instead of going to war. It’s ridiculous.

I yell at the captain to shut up and that if he doesn’t lay that guitar down now, I’m going to wade straight into his business. “Don’t be fooled because I’m a girl,” I holler. “I’ve beat on guys bigger than me all my life.”

No chance to prove it, though. The cops show up just as I’m getting started. Officer Larry and Officer Dave. After what they did to Bobby back in the day, I hate the sight of these two bastards, but for right now I’m on their side. I’m thinking, Here it comes. Let Captain Crazy get smart-ass with these two mutants, and they won’t think twice about pulling their batons.

The captain howls his chorus again, his face red, spit glinting in his beard. “That’ll be enough, Carl,” says Officer Dave in his matter-of-fact cop voice. The captain’s real name is Carl Monroe, and the police have gotten to know him very well since he took over the farmhouse.

“You know the drill,” says Officer Larry. “Disturbing the peace.”

But the captain keeps singing, so the cops, trading tired expressions, go right to work, Officer Larry taking the captain’s right arm and Officer Dave clamping down on the neck of the guitar.

“Show’s over,” says Officer Dave.

“This is a peaceful protest, man,” sputters the captain. “You can’t halt a peaceful protest. This is the United States of America.”

“You have to have a permit,” Officer Larry tells him. “You know that.”

“A permit to speak the truth?” The captain’s eyes bulge. Actually, they always bulge some, but now they look like they could pop out and go rolling down the courthouse steps. “What are you, storm troopers of the Nogo Gotu?”

“Come on, Carl,” says Officer Dave. “No one in this town wants to hear this crap. Either you pack up and go home or we’re hauling you in.”

The captain just throws back his head and starts in singing again.

Jesus. I could spit on him. But with the captain still wailing, the cops drag him to the squad car and shove him inside. Officer Dave goes back to pick up the drum while stupid Larry gathers the protest signs.

“What are you gonna do to that douche this time?” Gillis shouts to Officer Dave.

“Same as usual, I guess.”

“You heard what he was yelling, didn’t you?” I say, still really heated.

“I heard.”

“Well, you didn’t hear the part about soldiers getting their faces blown off. That’s bullshit. What if my mom or my little sister had been here?”

He gives me his squinty cop stare. “Go home, Ceejay.” Then he looks around at the rest of the crowd. “Everybody go about your business.”

“You need to get him out of town,” I say. “He shouldn’t even be around normal people.”

Officer Dave stops right in front of me, the conga drum tucked under his arm. “I’m not gonna tell you again, Ceejay. You don’t listen and you’re gonna be sitting in that car next to the captain.”

I stare back at him, my skin on fire. My brother’s been out
there putting his life on the line. The way I figure it, I wouldn’t be worth much if I wasn’t one hundred percent ready to stand up for him here.

Officer Dave seems to read my mind. Maybe he feels guilty for what he helped do to Bobby after all. His eyes turn sympathetic, and he puts his free hand on my shoulder. “Look, Ceejay, I understand why you’re mad. But don’t worry, we’re gonna take him down to the station. He won’t be doing any more protesting. Okay?”

I keep my stare going full blast. “Okay. But I don’t even want to see that asshole in town anymore.”

The officers return to the squad car, and as they get in, I hear the captain yelling, “Kiss the fish mouth! Kiss the fish mouth!”

The car pulls away, heading for the jailhouse, but I know what will happen, the same sick thing that always happens. The captain’s brother will show up at the station and bail him out before dinner.

But this time I’m not going to let him off so easy. I have a plan. Revenge is for the mighty. Time to dust off my armor.

If the captain wasn’t crazy, I’d just gather my crew, kick his butt, and be done with it. But you know how it is—you can’t really go around kicking crazy guys’ butts. It isn’t sporting. People come to expect certain things of you when you’re the little sister of a legend like my brother Bobby. Back in his high school days, he was wild and he was B-A-D-D,
BADD
. People all over the county told stories about him. But he was never a bully. He had ethics. He took up for the weak, and he told me to do the same. It didn’t matter that I was a girl, he said. I was the same as him. My big sister isn’t, my little sister isn’t, and my little brother—he’s too young to tell yet how he’ll be.

I was never too young, though. I got into my first fight with a boy the summer before third grade. It was on the playground
of our elementary school, not long after the Fourth of July. I was still little enough then and had such pretty blond hair—before it turned dingy brown—that you might have thought I still had a chance to turn into a girly-girl one day like my sisters. But I knew different.

Jared Jones and a couple of littler kids were squatting in the dirt behind the backstop. They were mean kids with mean parents. Jared had a string of Black Cat firecrackers—that’s the kind of parents he had, letting him run around the neighborhood with his own firecrackers—and he and the others were using them to blow up an anthill.

Did you ever watch ants when you were little? I’m sure you did. I’m sure you sympathized with them like I did. They’re so small that a hard wind can pick them up and blow them a million ant-miles away from home, but still they just buckle down to business and make the trek back through mighty forests of grass blades with all sorts of trouble lurking to take them down. And you’ll see them with these huge, boulder-like crumbs on their backs, hauling them back to the hill, where all of them are working together, making this pyramid, this colossal wonder of the world, to keep them safe from sand lions and grasshoppers and toads. They’re amazing.

And Jared Jones was stuffing Black Cats down the door to their pyramid and blasting it to pieces.

“Yeah!” they all yelled as another firecracker exploded. “Kill those little suckers.”

There wasn’t any question in my mind what I had to do. I walked right up to those boys and slapped Jared hard across the back of his fat head and told him to stop it if he didn’t want to end up eating a handful of dirt.

He rose up with this look in his eyes like he was ready for
World War III, but when he saw me, the fierceness pulled up short. “You’re lucky you’re a girl,” he said. “I’d feed you one of these Black Cats if you weren’t.”

I just stared him down and said, “You’re gonna stop blowing up those ants.” It wasn’t a question.

“I doubt that,” he said.

I put out my hand. “Give me those firecrackers.”

“Why don’t you stick one up her butt,” said one of his buddies.

I left my hand where it was.

“What are you gonna do?” Jared asked, sizing me up. “Go tell your big brother on us?”

“I don’t need to tell my brother,” I said, and before I even finished, I whipped my hand over and grabbed the string of firecrackers away.

Of course, he wanted them back, said he’d forget I was a girl if I didn’t hand them over. I didn’t say anything. I just turned around and started to walk away. I knew what would happen, though. I’d seen the same situation with Bobby. He had some words with this guy Ally Taylor, and just when Bobby turned around to leave peacefully, Ally rushed him from behind. I learned something important from Bobby that day. Movie fighting is crap. You don’t need spinning kicks and fancy karate fists of fury. You just need to get the other guy on the ground as quick as possible and don’t let him up till he knows he’s beat.

So I did just what I saw Bobby do. As soon as I sensed Jared coming at me from behind, I whirled around low, under any punches that might be coming, and tackled him at the waist. In the next second, he was on the ground and I was sitting on his chest, slapping his face. His friends just laughed.

Fat tears boiled out of Jared’s eyes, and as much as I despised
him, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. Beat up by a girl. His friends would spread the word around like a bad case of the bird flu. But I guarantee you, they didn’t want any piece of me either.

After that, I wasn’t just the badass’s little sister anymore. I was a badass in my own right. That’s a lot different from a bully. Bullies start things. Badasses finish them. And as the baddest girl in Knowles, there are certain things I’m bound to do.

Dealing with Captain Crazy is one of them. He started something, and I’m going to finish it.

It’s me and my two main boys, Gillis Kilmer and Tillman Grant. Gillis and I grew up two houses apart. Tillman joined up with us as soon as we hit first grade. Whereas Gillis is stocky and hard, Tillman’s tall and lean and twice as hard. Black-haired, brown-eyed, dark-skinned. He looks Italian, but he’s not. From that Adam’s apple of his, you’d think he got a hand grenade stuck in his throat. He’s the kind of kid who never has you over to his house and doesn’t hang around there much himself if he can help it. It’s a dump. His dad’s long gone, and his mom’s kind of a tramp. Tillman would probably be in reform school by now if it wasn’t for us. Who knows, our whole group may still make it. I’d probably fit in better there than in this town anyway.

I don’t ask my girl Brianna along. She’s too big and clumsy, and for someone who tries hard to look scary, she gets too
nervous to drag along on a mission like this. Anyway, she’s the worst paintballer in town.

That’s the plan—to wreak paintball devastation all over Casa Crazy. Gillis is an okay paintballer, but Tillman and I are heroes. Not that we have an official paintball field in Knowles, but that’s all right. It’s probably better in the woods anyway. We play a couple of times a month with two teams of five. Our team is me, Gillis, Tillman, Brianna, and either Charles Lyman or Kelli Sundy, depending on what day it is. Tillman keeps trying to get me to kick Brianna off our team because she always gets tagged in about thirty seconds, but I say no way. She’s a friend and we’re sticking. Besides, I’m good enough for two people.

At dusk, all decked out in our camo, we load our gear into Gillis’s car and head off on our mission. On the way to the edge of town, I lay down the strategy. We already know the basic layout of Captain Crazy’s place, a crumbly old ex-farmhouse on the outskirts of town. Just about everybody within fifty miles stops by there now and then so they can look at the sculptures the captain makes out of junk—the fat boy, the giant robot, the two-headed lady, the twenty-foot-tall winged giraffe, all constructed of old tires, washers and dryers, car fenders, rusted farm equipment, aluminum guardrails, paint cans, and warped shingles. They’re not bad for something made by a lunatic.

“First,” I explain, “we’ll park in the woods on the other side of the captain’s place, about a hundred yards away. Then we’ll split up and each take a different line of attack. Wait till I give a whistle, then we’ll come screaming in from three sides.”

“We gonna light this dude up?” asks Tillman, grinning maliciously.

“No,” I tell him. “No body shots, just property. Hit the house hard. And that old lime-green pickup.”

“How about the sculptures?” asks Gillis.

“Hit as many of them as you can.”

“Hell, Ceejay,” says Tillman. “We need to put some bruises on this dude. What good’s marking his property gonna do? He’ll just wash that off.”

I’m like, “That’s the point. While he’s washing up, he’ll have plenty of time to think about things.”

Once we get parked in the woods, we pull out our rifles and helmets and put on our fingerless gloves. Since real Spider rifles are too expensive, we have semiautomatic Spider clones with ported barrels for quieter firing. You might think we wouldn’t really need the helmets since we’re not shooting at each other, but they’re important for getting into the warrior spirit.

Gillis heads for the right flank, and Tillman takes the left. Me, I want to come roaring straight down the middle of the yard, just like Bobby would do if he was here. The sky is mostly dark by now, but the stars are coming out and the moon hangs over the trees. It’s eerie. I’ve never looked at the captain’s sculptures at night, but as I sneak up to the far edge of his yard, they seem like dark, intergalactic demons standing guard.

Off to the right, something crashes in the brush and then Gillis lets out a
goddamn
. I freeze. Stupid Gillis, tripping around and making noise. He’s sure to give us away. Silence is key. We need to get a lot closer before letting the hellhounds loose.

I study the dark windows, checking for any sign of movement, but everything remains still. Lucky for Gillis. I’ll blast him in the butt if he screws up this mission.

The captain’s weathered old lime-green truck sits about thirty yards from his front porch. I crouch behind it and check my rifle to make sure it’s ready to shoot. Captain Crazy deserves our fiery wrath. I have no doubt of that. He sinned against us.
And really, we’re doing it for Bobby, who’s halfway around the world and can’t do it for himself. Still, I hesitate. I can’t help wondering if maybe I should try to talk to the captain first. Isn’t that what Bobby would do?

But I’m here. And Gillis and Tillman are out in the woods waiting, expecting things from me. I can’t cut and run.

The dark shapes of the sculptures gaze down on me, giving off this feeling like the captain is judging me through them. I stare back hard, determined, and the captain’s song bursts back into my brain—
War is the coward’s way
. Well, my brother’s no coward and neither am I.