Rat Read online

  Rat

  Lesley Choyce

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  Copyright © 2012 Lesley Choyce

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

  photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now

  known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Choyce, Lesley, 1951-

  Rat [electronic resource] / Lesley Choyce.

  (Orca soundings)

  Electronic monograph.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-4598-0302-2 (PDF).--ISBN 978-1-4598-0303-9 (EPUB)

  I. Title. II. Series: Orca soundings (Online)

  PS8555.H668R38 2012 jC813'.54 C2012-902574-7

  First published in the United States, 2012

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012938207

  Summary: Tired of bullies at school, Colin decides to take a stand. Branded

  a rat, he finds that standing up for what you believe in can be empowering.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing

  programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada

  through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts,

  and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council

  and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Cover photography by Dreamstime.com

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  PO BOX 5626, Stn. B PO BOX 468

  Victoria, BC Canada Custer, WA USA

  V8R 6S4 98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  15 14 13 12 • 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter One

  It’s not like I’ve assigned myself the job of protector of the weak or anything. I just get tired of creeps at school harassing people who don’t deserve it. I mean, a lot of things really piss me off. School in general pisses me off. And that includes the teachers. Most of them see me as a troublemaker, and I wouldn’t want to have it any other way.

  But there are some kids at school who are hard at work practicing to be the true scum of the earth. You know the type I’m talking about. If you’re not the one being worked over in one way or another by these dorks, then you just turn the other way. We all know the drill. Don’t get involved. Don’t rat on anyone.

  I just don’t think it should work that way. Funny thing is, though, whenever I try to bring a little honesty into this crazy, screwed-up world, I’m the one who gets his ass kicked in one form or another.

  Take this for example.

  During lunchtime awhile back, I was walking back to school after eating a not-so-great greasy hamburger and stale French fries. I was reminding myself that my friend Emily was right. I should give up that crap and become a vegetarian. I was almost back to school and anxious to get on with what looked to be a monumentally boring afternoon. That’s when I saw Liam and Craig harassing some old geezer carrying a couple of bags of groceries. The old guy was kind of bent over and walking funny. I don’t know why I even noticed. I was across the street, and there was a lot of traffic, but it was like I had radar or something.

  So I crossed over right away, ignoring the cars honking at me and the one idiot who had to screech to a halt so he didn’t kill me. He shot me the finger, and I thumped smartly on the hood of his Lexus.

  I felt a knot in my stomach (it could have been the greasy burger) as I walked up to Liam and Craig. I heard Liam shouting at the old guy, “C’mon, I’m sure you have some spare cash you can lend us. You look like you have plenty.” You had to be there to hear the real nastiness in the way he said this.

  The old guy just shook his head and tried to keep walking. But just then, Craig walked forward and put himself right in the way. The old man tried to walk around, but Craig had him covered again.

  “Craig, you stupid piece of garbage,” I shouted. “Leave him alone!”

  Craig looked at me like I had punched him in the face.

  “Leave him alone,” I said again.

  Liam gave me the once-over too, but then turned back to Mr. Groceries and said, “Maybe we can just make do with something in the bag. You got anything good in there?” Liam had his hand on the cloth grocery bag and was trying to reach inside. The old man was trying to pull away, and he mumbled something. That’s when I realized that here was an old dude who was a little out of it and probably downright scared of these two grunge mongers. Craig was blocking the man’s path, and Liam was still reaching into the bag. I’d had enough.

  “Get out of his way,” I yelled at Craig. And I grabbed Liam by the shoulder and was spinning him around. Liam looked shocked and angry.

  “Colin,” he said, “this has nothing to do with you. We’re just having a little fun.”

  “Leave him alone,” I insisted. The old man was moving away now as Liam and Craig stood toe-to-toe with me. I wasn’t sure what would happen next. I knew I could outrun them if I had to. But that wouldn’t matter. They’d get me one way or the other. So I just stood my ground.

  I was about to launch into one of my lectures. It was always the wrong thing to do.

  But then I heard the outside bell at school across the street. The end of lunch hour. Liam gave me a dirty look, and he put his index finger in the air in front of my face. That said it all. This isn’t over yet. He tapped Craig on the shoulder, and they sprinted across the street toward school.

  The old man was having a hard time. He was stumbling as he walked away and looked like he couldn’t quite hold on to the bags he was carrying. He was very shaken up. So I ran toward him to see if I could help.

  He half turned when he heard me coming. I slowed down and tried to explain that I wanted to help, but when I reached him, he dropped his bags and started screaming at me. He must have thought I was going to continue to harass him. Then he started smacking me. It didn’t hurt, but it surprised me.

  “Just get away,” he screamed. “Leave me alone.”

  “I was trying to help,” I said. But he kept yelling and hitting, so I backed off. Other people were looking at me. So I ran.

  I was late for math class and feeling pretty crappy about it all, thinking my Good Samaritan days were definitely over. And that’s when I was called down to Mr. Miller’s office.

  Chapter Two

  Mr. Miller is the vice-principal. Our school is a big-city high school with big-city problems, and Miller had been brought in last year as a kind of troubleshooter. Word was that he’d wrestled knives from students and had faced down someone in his school with a gun.

  Miller had a rep as being a hard-ass, and if you had a name as a troublemaker, he was on your case. That would be me. Not that I deserved it. I just had some problems with authority figures. School had a funny set of unwritten laws. It seemed to me that if you were sneaky about your dirty work and no teacher saw what you were up to, you could get away with a hell of a lot. Almost no one in the school was going to snitch on you. But if you were up front with your complaint or defiant in any public way, and honest about it, you found yourself called to the office and sitting across the desk fr
om Mr. Miller.

  Just like I was now.

  “So, Colin, I’m sad to say your egregious behavior rather interrupted my lunch.”

  “I don’t understand what egregious means.” Just like Miller to use a big word like that.

  “Egregious. As in shockingly bad.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “You rarely do. But I was sitting here minding my own business, and I look out across the street and there you are getting bashed on by some little old man. What the hell did you do to him?”

  So Miller saw that scene but not what came before. I let out an exasperated breath. “It was Liam and Craig harassing him, not me.”

  “I didn’t see them anywhere. Just you. Best not to place the blame on someone else. It doesn’t look good on you.” Miller’s eyes were drilling right through me. We’d had run-ins before. Mostly me giving arrogant teachers a hard time or refusing to do assignments that I thought were pointless and stupid.

  I took a deep breath and explained what really happened. I was trying to keep my cool.

  Miller wasn’t buying any of it. “I just know what I saw.”

  “Appearances can be deceiving,” I said.

  “Indeed.”

  “And if you don’t believe me,” I said, “you’d be making an egregious error.”

  He smiled slightly. “At least your vocabulary is improving. But I’ll be watching you.”

  Yeah, he would be watching. And he’d pass on the word to several of his favorite teachers. I didn’t like this a bit. But I kept my mouth shut. The burger felt like lead in my gut as I headed back to math class.

  I kept my head low for the rest of the day and got the hell out of school when the final bell rang. At home, I holed up in my room and read a book about living with gorillas in Africa. Ever since I was a kid, I had a thing about animals—all animals. I still read books about gorillas and tigers, crocodiles and meerkats. Someday I’ll work with wild animals. I like them better than people. But there weren’t many wild animals where I lived in the north end of the city. Just birds, maybe, and some mice and rats. I took out my latest sketchbook and began to draw images of the animals in my head. Sketching always made me feel better. They never looked much like the real animals. More like some crazy fantasy-world version of animals. Big eyes, exaggerated features. My creatures. My animals.

  That night, my friend Emily called. Like me, she’s not very popular because she’s different. She’s vegan, and for some reason people find vegans annoying—maybe it’s because they don’t eat cheese. And she dresses funny—layers of anything, as long as it doesn’t have a designer label. And hair in dreads that she almost never washes. But I still call her a friend, and outcasts need to stick together in high school.

  “You didn’t really post a photo of yourself naked, did you?” she blurted out.

  “What?” I asked.

  “On GoofFace. There’s a photo of you without clothes on and your name right under it. It looks like you posted it yourself. Tell me you didn’t do this.”

  “I didn’t do this. It’s somebody trying to make me look like an idiot.” I flipped my book closed and turned to my computer. I hated sites like Goof Face, where anyone could put up lies or pictures or…anything. I went to the site and keyed in my own name. Yep. There it was. “It’s my face—from last year’s yearbook, I’d say. But it’s definitely not my body.”

  “Pretty good Photoshop job, then,” Emily said.

  “How many people do you think have seen this?” I asked.

  There was a pause. “Well, I got a message from Marissa, and she picked it up from Twitter and…”

  “So I guess just about everybody and anybody.”

  “Yep. Who would do this to you?”

  It didn’t take much brainpower to figure that one out. My current enemies, I was pretty sure, were tech savvy and fearless if they could do their dirty work anonymously.

  I studied the photo again. Yep. My head attached to some other teenage boy’s naked body. “Sucks to be me, I guess.”

  “Guess you could say that. Sorry, Colin. You don’t deserve this. What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, looking at the outrageous photo again. “But thanks for the heads-up. And, no, that is definitely not my body.”

  “Too bad,” she said, trying to lighten things up. “I thought it was kind of cute—weird, but cute.”

  So I was up late that night trying to delete the image from the site, realizing it had probably already been copied and reposted god knows where around the world. We’d had a lecture on this stuff at school. The police had even said it was illegal to post such things. Right. Was I going to get blamed for this too?

  It was getting really late, and I felt like I had to do something. So I rolled with it. I logged onto GoofFace and posted a comment on the fake photo. I wrote, Although this is not a picture of my body, I’m thrilled to see someone took the time to do such a good job of manipulating the image. I can’t say I’m opposed to nudity but question the motivation for such a creative effort. And I left it at that. If I spoke my real thoughts, I figured I’d do more harm than good. Some things you just have to walk away from. Even if it’s a fake image of what most people would believe was your own naked body.

  I knew that Liam and Craig were your classic school bullies who now had new social-media tools and the Internet for their dirty work. Other kids like them had given me a pretty hard time when I was young. It hurt, and I dealt with it badly. But when I got older, something happened. I just stopped taking crap from people like them. I ended up in trouble more often than not. But it was worth it. And, for the most part, jerks like Liam and Craig gave up on me and chose other victims. There were always plenty of new victims. Now, though, with technology, it was easier than ever to nail someone to the cross.

  As I tried to sleep, I couldn’t help but try to come up with some kind of ultra-creative countermeasures to get back at the dorky duo. But I realized that the best revenge was to hold my head high and show the world I didn’t give a rat’s ass how many fake naked photos of me anyone posted on the Internet.

  I wouldn’t break that easily.

  Chapter Three

  Emily was waiting for me when I got to school. I figured half the kids at school had seen the photo. Almost everyone had opinions about me anyway. I was always doing something that got them talking. Protesting against final exams. Organizing a twenty-four-hour fast to end famine. Going to student council meetings and giving lectures to those geeks that they should stop wasting their time on the little things and take a stand and do something about something important. And now this.

  “Do you know who did it?” Emily asked.

  “Of course,” I said confidently. “Yesterday I interrupted Craig and Liam when they were having fun.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Cave Man and Lumpy. I should have guessed. You pissed them off, right? And now they see you as the enemy.”

  “You could say that. But I prefer to think of them as hostile friends.” I liked Emily’s nicknames for them. Yes, Craig looked a tad like he might have had Neanderthal parents, and Liam was, well, a bit on the lumpy side.

  “You don’t seem upset.”

  “What’s to be upset about? It wasn’t my body in those pics. People can believe what they want to believe. But I’m not an exhibitionist. How stupid is that? This isn’t going to get to me. No big deal.”

  Emily got quiet.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You’re not the only one targeted by Cave and Lump.”

  A lightbulb went on in my head. Maybe this wasn’t just about me after all. “What do you mean?”

  “Amanda. And Marissa. They had the same thing happen to them. They can’t prove it, but they are pretty sure it’s them. Craig was hitting on Amanda, and Liam had a thing for Marissa. When the boys got the cold shoulder—well, you can see how it works.”

  “You sure it was them?” I asked.

  Emily nodded. “Pretty
sure. But it’s so easy to do this stuff anonymously these days. Anyone could do it.”

  “Those two turds should be flushed.”

  “Amanda’s feeling so humiliated that she’s been cutting school a lot. You know what she’s like,” said Emily. “Marissa’s trying to tough it out, but they both are getting some nasty postings, and some of the other guys think it’s really them putting up their own pics. As you can imagine, they’re taking some serious flak.”

  In English class, I didn’t pay much attention to the teacher talking about poetry, but I kept thinking about the workings of a big high school like this. Classes are one thing, but in the halls, in the caf, in the bathrooms and everywhere else, things are happening. It’s a circus, and half of what people think is real isn’t. It’s all about what you want to believe—who has done what, who is with whom, who is up and who is down. Everyone’s trying to protect their own image, their own space. And you have people trying to tear you down whenever you look weak. Creeps trying to take advantage of you if you’re a girl. And if someone is a real jerk, you’re not supposed to do anything about it— you’re just supposed to walk away. Just thinking about it all got me pretty worked up.

  I took a deep breath just as English was winding down. Mr. Winger was reading a poem by William Blake called “The Poison Tree.” For some strange reason, it made sense to me. Anger and hate breeds more anger and hate. It actually made me think I needed a fresh approach to the current problem.

  As soon as I left English, I went prowling for Cave and Lump. I noticed other kids in the hall looking at me. Some were laughing. Oh yeah. Big deal. But I couldn’t find who I was looking for.

  It wasn’t until lunch that I caught up with them sitting by themselves near the windows eating gooey slabs of pizza. I sat down as if we were old friends. “Good work with the GoofFace thing,” I told Liam. I was pretty sure it would have been his technical skills. He was a hard-core gamer and had picked up the skills. Craig was probably just along for the ride.

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Liam said, biting down on a wad of pepperoni.