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The Daily Herald Vandals deface middle school Vandals struck last night under cover of darkness and rain, leaving large bright green stains on the front wall of the town middle school. The meaning of the green blobs is still unknown, but police suspect it could be gang- related. "Graffiti artists have caused a lot of property damage in the past six months, said Sgt. Peters of the town police force. SEE VANDALS, A2 So now I'm basically a criminal. Believe it or not, this isn't the FIRST time I've been falsely accused of a crime. When I was in the Boy Scouts, I was trying to earn my Service Project merit badge, and I had to do some kind of good deed. Mom said I should go over to Leisure Towers and see if there were any elderly people who needed help carrying groceries or something like that, and she told Rodrick he had to give me a ride. When we got to the parking lot of Leisure Towers,

there was a lady walking around who looked like she was lost. We asked the lady if she needed any help, and she said she was just walking to the supermarket on the other side of the apartment building. But I knew the nearest supermarket was almost five miles away in the opposite direction, so we said we'd give her a ride. The only condition was that she had to ride in the back because I had already called shotgun.

We dropped the woman off at the supermarket, and then we went home. When we walked in the door, I was pretty excited to tell Mom about my good deed. I told her about the lady and how we gave her a ride to the supermarket a few miles from Leisure Towers and saved her a lot of walking. But Mom said there was a brand-new supermarket a block away from Leisure Towers and the woman had probably been heading THERE. So that meant we dropped her off five miles from where she was

trying to go, and now she didn't have a way to get home. Mom said we had to get back in the van and see if we could find the lady, so we went to the supermarket where we dropped her off. But a cashier told us she'd already finished her shopping and left. We eventually found the lady walking along the highway with her groceries. We tried to offer her a ride back to Leisure Towers, but this time she wouldn't get in the van.

I guess she must've called the local TV station to report us once she got home, because that night we were on the news. TEENS ARE KIDNAPPING RESIDENTS OF LEISURE TOWERS. COULD YOUR GRANDMOTHER BE NEXT? This school vandalism thing seems a LOT more serious, though. Luckily the eyewitness sketches in the paper didn't really look like me and Rowley, so I thought maybe we'd be OK. But when I got to school, all anyone wanted to talk about was who was behind

the green blobs. The school had a general assembly in third period, and the topic was the so-called graffiti on the front of the school. Vice Principal Roy said someone had spray-painted the front wall and he was sure the perpetrators were students at our school. He said someone in the auditorium knew who was responsible and that it was terrible to live with a "guilty conscience." Then he said he was gonna put a locked box in the cafeteria to make it easy for someone to leave an anonymous tip. At lunch I could tell Rowley was really freaking out,