Rat (2 page)

“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.

I smiled the most genuine grin I could muster. “Don't worry, dude. I'm good with it. All in fun, right?”

“Yeah,” he said as Craig just kind of scrunched up his brow and didn't understand why I wasn't more pissed.

“Truth is, I found it rather flattering. I'm much skinnier than that guy's bod. But you're not doing this because you're gay, are you?”

Liam spit some of his pizza onto the paper plate and then looked me in the eye. “We could up the ante,” Liam said. “You know that, don't you? We're still pretty disappointed in your intrusion yesterday.”

“Hey, you can post whatever you want. I won't be offended.”

Puzzlement again, this time on the part of both Cave and Lump.

“But I did take some flak yesterday from Miller,” I added. “He thinks it was me roughing up the old guy.”

“So you ratted on us instead, right?” Craig asked.

“What would have been the point?” I shot back. “He wouldn't believe anything I said. I'm not exactly on Miller's good list.”

Craig gave me a smile. “Sweet,” was all he said.

“But now that we've had this little talk,” I continued, sounding a bit too much like a parody of myself, “I do have a favor to ask.”

Both of them just stared at me like I was about to ask for a date with their mothers.

“Would you mind,” I said as tactfully as I could, “going easy on Amanda and Marissa?”

Liam's eyes widened a bit, and then he smiled at me and spoke in a tone that suggested we were friends, buddies, old allies who understood each other. “Colin, dude, hey, it's a way to get a girl to do what you want. I'm thinking that if I promise to take down those photos, one or the other might be willing to pay me back for my kindness.”

I knew I wasn't about to change his mind on this. I gave him a small laugh—a fake one for sure, but he didn't know that. I said, “See you guys later,” and I walked away.

Chapter Four

I half expected to get called into Miller's office over the photo thing, but that didn't happen. But what Liam had said was really bugging me. I arranged to meet Emily downtown at the Brown Bean Coffee House that night, and she showed up looking a bit tired and worried. I told her about my meeting with Cave and Lump. I tried to make the scene sound funny, but she wasn't taking it that way.

“I don't know, Colin. Things are just getting so creepy at school.”

“Hasn't it always been that way?” I always expected things at school to suck, but Emily was more the sensitive, idealistic type. I think she expected stuff to get better, not worse.

“Not really,” she said. “In the last year, it's gotten worse. The Internet stuff is just part of it. There's more drugs moving through the school than ever before, more kids stoned in class. More knives in lockers. And guns. I haven't seen any, but I hear some of the girls talk. I don't know how much is true, but if Mr. Miller or the principal knew the truth, they'd be freaking.”

“Come on, it can't be that bad.” Listen to me, Mr. Smiley Face.

“Colin, you sometimes have your head in the clouds. You must be able to see how mean some people can be. It's been that way since elementary school, but now the nasty ones are selling drugs.”

“You know, it's not worth getting worked up over a little weed.”

“I'm not talking about weed. It's the other stuff. And it's getting ugly. Dealers trying to stake out territory. In the halls, even. And weapons in the lockers.”

I'd heard rumors, but I guess I was just shutting most of it out. I still didn't want to believe her. “Why isn't somebody doing something to stop it?”

She gave me an icy look. “Because no one wants to get involved. No one wants to speak the truth or point a finger.”

I sipped my coffee and watched her. She was visibly shaken. “Look at Liam and Craig, what they get away with, and that's just the tip of the iceberg,” she said.

Just then I had an image in my head of a real iceberg. Big, white, magnificent. And I wished Emily and I were somewhere on a sunny shoreline in the Arctic looking at that iceberg instead of here in a downtown coffee shop talking about how screwed up our world was.

“I'm worried about Amanda,” she continued. “She's not returning my texts. I can't get her on her home phone. She's been away from school all week.”

“Let's go talk to her,” I said. I hated the feeling of sitting there doing nothing. If Amanda was hurting, we should go help her.

“Now?”

“Now,” I said. I took Emily's hand as I stood up. She smiled. She seemed a little shocked at me touching her, but it was my way of trying to take charge. Something had to be done.

We walked through the cool dark night, and it felt good to be outside, even in this dingy part of the city. “I used to spend a lot of time walking around alone down here at night,” I told Emily. “That was back when I was a smoker.”

“You smoked cigarettes?” Emily seemed both surprised and appalled.

“Yeah. I used to smoke. How stupid is that? I have no excuses. Young and stupid, I guess.”

“How'd you stop?”

“Cold turkey. That, and avoiding all smokers. When I used to walk around, I'd run into other kids smoking, and I'd stop and bum a cigarette or offer one to somebody I met. All very social. We'd stand around on the street and talk about one of two things. We always talked about smoking or how screwed up the world was. Sometimes both.”

“Sounds like tons of fun.”

I shrugged. “Sort of. But bad habits die hard.”

“But you did it.”

“One night I stayed home and read first-person accounts of lung cancer from smoking—hundreds of them on the Internet—for three straight hours. Then I looked in the mirror. Then I flushed my last pack—one at a time.”

Em gave me one of her funny vegan looks. “Not very enviro-friendly. Kind of a waste of water.” She was messing with me.

“It was a ritual. A necessary one. I promise to make it up to the environment.”

Amanda's house looked dark except for one light on the second floor. There was no car in the driveway. Emily sent her a text telling her we were here. There was no response. So she called Amanda's cell phone. Once. Twice. Three times. On the fourth time, she answered.

“We need to talk,” Emily insisted. “Colin is with me.”

I could hear Amanda protesting, saying she was sleeping and telling us to leave.

“No,” Emily insisted. “Let us in.”

Amanda said something and then hung up.

“What,” I asked.

“She said the door is unlocked. Let's go. I don't like the way she sounded.”

So we walked in, turned a light on and found our way upstairs. I felt a little like a thief, a home invader. Her parents must have been out. Emily knew her way to Amanda's bedroom. When we opened the door, Amanda was sitting up in bed. At first I thought she was just really sleepy, but then I smelled the booze. Amanda was drunk.

“Amanda,” Emily said, “what's going on? How come you haven't been in school?”

“I've been sick,” she said.