Eric contemplates a way to put Wolf’s bully in his place. By Monday, he still doesn’t have a solution and feels no better about what happened. He follows a wave of students to Wolf’s locker—now painted bright blue and covered with sticky notes that overlap “like links of chain-mail armor” (339). Every note is a compliment or kind word about Wolf, and as Eric watches, more and more students add their notes. Eric adds a note with Wolf’s own aphorism about words being ghosts that he wrote in English class. From behind, he hears the bullies who defaced Wolf’s locker snickering. Eric goes to the principal’s office to report them, but Bench is already there because he did the deed himself.

That night, Eric goes to Wolf’s house. Without its models, his room looks hollowed out, as if “part of Wolf had been carved out of him and scattered all over the backyard” (343). The locker incident is the last in a long line of offenses from his bullies, and Wolf plans to go to a new school so he can get away from them and start over.

The next day, Eric, Deedee, and Rose accompany Wolf to clean out his locker.