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it chewed at the thick lawn, and stalled out every few feet. The first time I heard either of them cuss was during one of their annual yard-grooming adventures. I was shocked at the number of forbidden words they knew.
             
    It was the night before the party. Sharp and I met in the deMichaels’ backyard after dark. He was armed with a large bottle of Dawn dishwashing liquid. “Let’s start here,” Sharp suggested in a whisper, and I followed him to the largest of Elliot’s fountains, the one in whose pool floated the pizza-sized water lilies my mother always admired. The edges of the bright green leaves curled toward the sky to keep pond water from pooling in them. Their creamy white and buttery yellow blossoms seemed to glow in the darkness. Sharp stood at the spillway and poured Dawn into the stream of water. Within seconds bubbles began to form. “Perfect,” he whispered. “It’s gonna be fabulous.”
    We went to a waterfall made from a series of flat stones forming a ragged tower. They were covered in a carpet of fuzzy green moss. I took the liquid from Sharp and squeezed it onto the highest stone. We smiled as the cascading water bubbled and foamed.
    “We still have almost half a bottle,” Sharp said when we’d soaped the last of Elliot’s waterworks. “Might as well finish it off.”
    We emptied Dawn into pools and ponds already foamy and white.
    “Peggy’s gonna love it,” said Sharp. The deMichael kids all called their parents Mom and Dad when addressing them but Peggy and Elliot when referring to them in conversation. “I can’t wait till tomorrow.”
             
    “Elliot’s raging,” said Luke the following morning when he walked into the kitchen with the newspaper. He grabbed an apple from the fruit bowl and polished it on his T-shirt.
    Mom looked up from her coffee. “About what?” Elliot, very even-tempered, seldom raged.
    “Bubbles.” Luke looked at me as he bit into his apple with a loud crunch.
    “How could Elliot be mad about bubbles? Everyone likes bubbles,” said my mother.
    Again Luke stared at me. “
Someone
put soap in all of his ponds. There are bubbles everywhere. It’s like a washateria gone insane. Wait till you see the water lilies. They’re wilted and slimy. What a mess.”
    I went to the window. Elliot squatted in his backyard, siphoning water from a shallow pond with the garden hose. It shocked me to see the waxy flowers all brown and shriveled, half buried in dirty gray foam. Luke stood beside me. “The mosses’ll die, too, and the grasses in the little pond at the back fence. And all the rest. Elliot said the soap will kill everything.”
    “I’m going outside,” I said.
    All the deMichael children except Chord were at work around the property. I cautiously approached Sharp, who was filling the wheelbarrow with dead plants. “Does he know who did it?” I whispered.
    “Yeah, he knows.”
    My stomach lurched. “Who told him? Chord? That rat. Where is he?”
    “I don’t know where he is. You know how he does that disappearing act when we have chores to do.” Sharp sighed. “But it wasn’t Chord. I left my shoes on the patio.”
    “That’s not evidence.”
    “The empty Dawn bottle was with them.”
    “Why’d you do a dumb thing like that?”
    “It wasn’t on purpose,” he said defensively. He heaped one last armload of dead plant matter into the wheelbarrow. “Besides. I didn’t think
this
would happen. I thought it would be beautiful.”
    I followed him across the yard to the compost heap. “My parents are going to barbeque me,” I moaned, imagining how beserk my parents would go when they discovered my role in the destruction of Elliot’s gardens. The lectures and punishments. The restrictions. I hated the idea of summer vacation ending in June. “I’m cooked.”
    Sharp dumped the wheelbarrow load and turned to glare at me. “
Your
shoes weren’t there. No one knows about you,” he said.
    “Yet.”
    “I’m