Rat (7 page)

But I wouldn't let her do that. I needed to do this on my own.

I had to stop them before they got to Amanda again. And before they got to Marissa. Or to Emily.

It wasn't long before everyone at school knew about my visit to the police. Liam and Craig were questioned but not charged. The pictures of Amanda came down but not mine. I started getting emails from wackos. Worse than that were the nasty emails from other kids. Mostly anonymous. Mostly angry that I would rat on Liam and Craig.

Emily and I honed our Internet skills and figured out how to delete just about any photo or any posting from any site. I guess you might call it hacking. We could have put up pictures of Liam or Craig if we wanted to. We could have made them appear in whatever ridiculous situation we wanted. But we didn't. And I left those pictures of me out there. Just to prove I didn't care.

Amanda was getting counseling. She was even talking about coming back to school. She said she didn't like her new school.

When the heat was off, Jacob must have gone back to his trade.

And got busted.

That wasn't my doing, but I was blamed for it.

I think I must have attracted quite a following of people who had opinions about me who didn't even know me. I started wearing my rat shirt to school again. I had created four of them, each more outrageous than the last. I remembered what was said about someone born in the year of the rat:
quick-witted,
intelligent; can react swiftly to his
environment; someone who is highly
adaptive. A survivor.

Graffiti was starting to appear on the walls of the school.
Colin the Rat
was scrawled, usually alongside a very insulting image. It was just chalk at first. But then spray paint.

Liam and Craig finally caught up with me one night when I was walking home from Emily's by myself. They'd been drinking. Maybe doing something else too. Jacob was with them.

“Hey, Pretty Boy,” Liam said, putting himself directly in front of me.

“Hey,” I said, trying to stay cool.

I wasn't much of a fighter, never was, never will be. I knew I wouldn't stand a chance against the three of them.

I don't know why, but I wasn't scared. I decided to speak my mind to all three and tell them what I thought. I even owned up to going to the police. But they already knew that. After my little speech, I still stood my ground. I should have done what an honest rat would have done. I should have run. But I didn't.

That's when they beat the crap out of me. Craig held my arms. Liam and Jacob took turns. I kept waiting for a knife blade.

But they were kind.

They left me punched up good, bruised and bleeding from the lip and over the eye. I was lying there on the sidewalk until some man out walking his dog came by.

My parents wanted me to go to the police, but I'd done enough of that. I convinced them I was okay.

Instead, the next day I put on my most outrageous rat shirt, and I went back to school. I felt terrible. I was sore and aching. And I looked like shit. I looked exactly like I felt. But I didn't have to explain to anyone what had happened. Anyone who cared already knew. One of the daring threesome had bragged about it. And word spread.

During school, I started getting some text messages with variations of
You got what you deserved.
Idiots. Aside from when we were in class, Emily didn't let me out of her sight. She was there at the door of every one of my classes when the bell rang. She walked me through the halls.

Mr. Miller stopped me as we passed him, gave me a very concerned look and said, “Do you want to talk?”

“No,” I said. “Nothing to talk about.”

I'd talk to him again when I had some important information. Once a rat, always a rat. But this was different.

So the wounds healed nicely, the bruises faded and school got strangely… well, dull again. All except for the fact that Liam and Craig picked on the wrong girl as their next victim. Lauren's father was a lawyer, and he went straight to the cops. He had the evidence and the means, and he nailed them.

But the graffiti was on the increase. On the school walls outside and on some old buildings and construction sites downtown. It used to be just a hasty scrawl with a cheap can of spray paint—
Colin the Rat
, with a crude ugly rodent with an ugly face.

But now it was different. The artwork was better. Much better. It was multicolored, and the script was elegant. The rat in the graffiti was more than a little Manga. The rat sometimes looked a lot like the rat on my T-shirts, the rat that I came up with.

Mr. Miller and the principal were so pissed off about having to sandblast the brick walls that they called me in for a consultation as to how to get the graffiti to stop. Miller even caught on that the artwork was good. “This isn't just vandalism anymore, Colin. This is serious, premeditated art.” He paused. “But it's still a nuisance. And it's costing the school money.”

Maybe he thought I'd rat on whoever it was. But I couldn't.

I started to see variations of the rat image all over town. There were even stenciled versions on sidewalks. There was an article about it in the weekly newspaper,
The Coast
.

It had become clear to me that Colin the Rat had at least as many anonymous admirers as he had detractors.

Emily said, “I think you somehow raised ratting to a whole new level of social acceptance.”

And I guess I could take that as a compliment.

Long live the rat.

Lesley Choyce divides his time between teaching, writing, running Pottersfield Press and surfing the waves of the North Atlantic. He is the author of almost eighty books for youth and adults. Lesley lives in Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia.