The principal thought he had won.

The morning of the day Compton High School made national headlines for the second time, every student who walked through the doors was in compliance with the dress code. Fifteen hundred teenagers were clad head to foot in long-sleeved T-shirts, sweatshirts, sweater vests, sweatpants, and tube socks, all in defiance of the Florida sun and the kind of hot breeze from the Gulf that scours the flesh and shreds the nerves until gunfire breaks out on the highways. There was not a short skirt, spaghetti strap, or pair of shorts in sight, nor an inch of skin beyond faces and hands. And yet, as Miss DeLong, our AV specialist, observed, something was off.

“They look like they’re homeless,” she said.

It was as if the students had planned it, which, as things turned out, they had. If their clothing was modest, it was also shabby. Cuffs were frayed, elbows were torn, sweatpants were held up with twine. Their footwear, too, had seen better days: beat up sneakers with holes in the toes and sandals with broken straps, all looking as though they’d been buried in bedroom closets for years. Compton was being overrun by an army of chattering hobos. What disturbed Miss DeLong Roy most, though, was that the girls seemed to be moving a little too freely beneath all the many layers cotton and polyester. In the mob she spotted Kellie Green, the tiny freshman whose cleavage had become a cause célèbre. Miss Green wore a tattered, paint-stained plaid shirt over a school jersey (Go Manatees!), neither of which did a thing to suppress the sprightly wobble underneath. Hundreds of other girls, as well, jiggled or bounced in direct proportion to their endowments.

Principal Sully was unconcerned. He stood at the head of the lobby stairs, surveying his subjects with an air of triumph, and he dismissed the recycle-bin chic as “ironic compliance.”

“They think they’re making a point,” he went on. “They know they have to cover up, so they stick it to us by looking like slobs. I’m impressed they got everyone to go along, but it’s the revenge of the powerless.”

True revenge ­— the revenge of the empowered — had only a short time to wait.

If asked to name the moment when the first cracks appeared in the façade of school discipline, the initial sign of the ultimate collapse, we would have to pick the sundress incident. The dress itself was unobjectionable. The skirt hung well below the knee, the neckline was high, and the straps were wide enough to conceal all of the area above the shoulders — all as required by the dress code. But the material was white, and thin, and when Athena Toles, the poor junior naïve enough to believe her body was her own, passed the row of windows in the lower corridor, the morning sunlight caught her from behind, and the dress all but vanished. The girl’s thin silhouette, wrapped in what seemed like a dazzling patch of fog, made its way obliviously down the hall. She was wearing a bra and panties, certainly, but they were shadows themselves, tight against her skin, and only gave the illusion a more alluring shape. She might as well have been nude.

Her classmates never noticed. Those who walked in front of her were facing away, and those behind saw only the bright sunlight on the opaque dress. But Mr. Sully — he noticed. At first, he said later, he thought the girl was in fact naked, unthinkable as that seemed. His heart leaped in the moment before his eyes adjusted to the sunlight and he discerned the translucent cloud that surrounded her. This was the sort of enforcement he loved: wholly subjective, dependent on his discretion.

“Miss Toles,” he said just as she passed, “don’t you think that dress is more appropriate for the beach?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You’re in violation of the dress code. Come with me, please.”

He led her upstairs to his office. When she emerged fifteen minutes later, she was sheathed an oversized jersey that crushed her skirt to her thighs like a fist clutching a bouquet of crisp dead flowers. She was also in tears.

We didn’t know just what was said to her until the following Tuesday evening, when Mrs. Penelope Toles sat before the school board and defended her daughter’s honor.

“He told her she should be ashamed of herself,” Mrs. Toles said. She spoke into a microphone as a tripod-mounted camera operated by Miss DeLong broadcast her indignation live over the district’s cable channel. “He said she was practically naked. Practically naked. What kind of man says such things to a sixteen-year-old girl? My Athena is a good girl. She’s a modest girl, and her high school principal, a man charged to look after her wellbeing, went out of his way to humiliate her. She has struggled with self-esteem and mental health issues ever since she enrolled here, and for this man to shame her like that undoes everything she has worked so hard to accomplish.”

Athena Toles, who was not present at the meeting, was a stringy girl with olive skin and deep-set, haunted eyes. It was said she had the body of an underfed fashion model. There were rumors of an eating disorder, reinforced by a number of absences the causes of which remained a mystery to everyone outside the main office. If any student at Compton was too fragile for Sully’s methods of enforcing propriety, she was the one.

Now, every school board has one member who makes it his job to argue with everyone, object to everything, and vote down every expenditure. In our district, this self-appointed Taxpayer Advocate was Mr. Tomlinson, who was not satisfied to let Mrs. Toles have her say. Just as the other board members were murmuring in embarrassed sympathy, promising to look into the matter, and almost begging to move on, Tomlinson, for the first time in many terms on the board, stood up for the faculty.

“It’s the responsibility of the principal to enforce the dress code,” he told Mrs. Toles, and, by extension, the viewing public. “We take that very seriously. I don’t know your daughter, but if she had bothered to check herself in the mirror before she went off to school, she would have avoided exposing herself.”

“And how about the boys?” Mrs. Toles retorted. “Should boys check themselves every morning, too?”

“Take it up with the fashion industry,” Tomlinson said. “They don’t sell skimpy outfits to boys. Girls need to be more careful. A little shame might be a good thing.”

The support of the most outspoken member of the board was all the encouragement Mr. Sully needed. Two days after the Toles-Tomlinson faceoff, he, Miss DeLong, the school counselor, and three others went classroom to classroom, hunting for — and finding — more than a dozen violations. Skirts were too short. (No skirt or shorts shall be worn in excess of four inches above the knee, the dress code says.) Too much skin was exposed about the neck. (Tops shall cover the entire shoulder area.) Bras and even panties were apparently lacking — appropriate undergarments shall be worn at all times — although in these cases, no definitive inspections could be carried out, and the team had only their sharp eyes and good judgment to guide them. Students were required to stand as the charges were spoken aloud. Names were taken. Transgressors were handed a flyer reminding them of the rules and told to report to the office the following morning before class, appropriately dressed.

As Mrs. Toles predicted, not one boy was singled out in the raid.

All the more remarkable to us, then, that the first pushback came from the male quarter. While, in the days following the classroom sweep, the girls seemed to close in on themselves, faces and front and eyes down, the boys grew flamboyant in their defiance. First one, then another, showed up in denim shorts cut to the crotch. They walked about on spidery legs, some with their lower moons flashing, in pointed violation of the four-inch rule. When Mr. Sully, with his patriarchal blind spot, failed to take the bait, a senior named Tyler took the protest to extremes. He spent an entire Friday in a pink wig, with a white sundress over his clothes. The sight roused the girls from their fearful passivity: they applauded him wherever he went.

Still, Mr. Sully did nothing. The dress code did not state explicitly that clothing must be gender-appropriate, he told us — an oversight he would address at the next school board meeting. Until then, he would enforce the rules as he saw fit.

It seemed like the right call. The kids lost interest in the uprising, as they lose interest in everything. The girls covered themselves. The boys went back to knee length shorts. For a time, everything returned to normal.

Then the yearbooks came out.

“Wait, what is this?” Kellie Green was heard to say. “What did they do to my chest?”

She was standing at the table in front the main office, where the books were being handed out, in a circle of girlfriends signing their copies for each other. Halfway through her third autograph, she noticed the black bar.

In her formal school portrait — the one she sent copies of to her aunts and grandparents, the one they all said made her like such a mature young lady — she wore a black, scoop-neck top under an open brown sweater. The upper slopes of her breasts, divided by a wisp of shadow, peeked above the neckline. It was just too scandalous, because in the version printed in the yearbook, the scoop was gone, and so were the two padded arches, all blacked out with a digital patch.

“It looks like they taped me up,” Miss Green said. “Why? It’s not like I was flashing.”

Word spread fast, and for days, students buried their noses in the yearbook every chance they got, studying with more determination than they had ever read a history or mathematics text, in a schoolwide tournament to Spot the Hidden Hooters.

Eighty — that was the number of doctored photos reported as the story worked its way up the media food chain. We never learned who made the call, but suddenly one morning camera crews planted themselves around the flag poles, and we got a full minute at six and eleven, tucked between sports and weather. The anchors winked and smirked through the entire segment. The weekly paper followed up, sending a college intern only a year out of high school herself. Her story caught the attention of the wire services, and finally, we were a headline in the New York Times:

Girls’ yearbook photos altered to hide their chests

Miss DeLong, on Mr. Sully’s orders, had devoted countless hours to ensure no girl’s body would be subject to undue scrutiny, and in the end, the girls’ bodies were all anyone could talk about.

“They are shaming our daughters again,” Penelope Toles told every reporter who phoned her. “They are sexualizing them more than if they had just left them alone. We demand they apologize. And throw those books away.”

Once again, Athena Toles was a victim, and of a particularly clumsy attempt to render her sexless. In her formal portrait, she wore a plaid blazer over a sweetheart collar. It was Miss DeLong’s inspiration to copy a piece of the blazer’s lapel and paste it over the girl’s chest. The pictures ran side by side in all the papers and on all the websites, along with the two of Kellie Green. Two of our model students were now nationally famous for their adolescent breasts.