Free Responsible by Darlene Ryan Page A

and the guys like Nick. It wasn’t like I’d wanted to hang out with Nick and those guys. It just sort of happened. I learned a long time ago that to survive you had to keep your head down, keep your mouth shut and not make trouble.
    But not Erin. She just wouldn’t shut up. I don’t know why all of a sudden everything Nick did bugged her. They’d gone to the same schools since kindergarten. They had both lived in Ellerton their whole lives.
    I heard someone say the whole thing between Nick and Erin was because she wouldn’t go out with him. That made sense to me. Nick didn’t take no for an answer very well.
    So when he
accidentally
knocked her down, it was in the cafeteria and she had a tray full of stuff. There was macaroni in her hair, and butterscotch pudding all down the front of her shirt. Erin got up, and one of her friends started picking macaroni tubes out of her hair. Erin pushed the girl’s arm away and moved right in Nick’s face. I thought she was going to spit at him. But she just stared at him. Then she turned and walked out of the cafeteria. She never said anything. Of course she went right to Mr. Harris’s office. We got a week of detention—Nick because he was the one who’d bumped her, and me, Brendan and Zach because we’d blocked the aisle with our chairs so she’d have to go past Nick in the first place. It was no big deal. My dad was never around after school anyway. All I had to do was sign the note they sent home. That was easy. I could sign my dad’s name just as well as he could. I’d been doing it since I was eleven.
    Nick made this big deal about being punished for an accident, but Mr. Harris said there’d been too many accidents latelyand maybe Nick needed to practice walking around with his math textbook on his head to improve his balance. I thought that was kind of funny, especially coming from Mr. Harris, but Nick was pissed.
    On Monday morning there was a chain of tampons hanging down the front of Erin’s locker. Nick was in the clear. He always hung out at the Burger Doodle parking lot before school. Probably twenty people or more had seen him there.
    On Tuesday, everything disappeared out of Erin’s locker at the end of the day.
    The day after that she turned on her computer in the tech lab and it started playing “Three Blind Mice” and wouldn’t stop. Even Mrs. Woodward couldn’t figure out what to do.
    I was headed back to my locker at lunch that same day when Nick suddenly came up beside me. “Hey, man, I need you to do something for me,” he said.
    Crap. My mouth suddenly got all dry. Whatever it was he wanted, I knew I couldn’t say no. “What is it?” I asked.
    Nick leaned on the wall by the water fountain. “I can count on you, Frasier, right?” he said.
    â€œYeah,” I said. I wasn’t stupid enough to get into a pissing contest with Nick. He pulled a Styrofoam hamburger box out from under his jacket.
    â€œHere,” he said. I took the box and started to open the cover. “Don’t open it,” Nick hissed. “Just put it away.”
    I shoved the box in my backpack. I didn’t know what was in it, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t Nick’s leftover lunch.
    â€œRemember that Erin chick?” Nick said.
    I nodded. a burning feeling started in my stomach.
    â€œShe thinks she’s better than us, yuh know? Going around with her nose in the air and trying to get people in trouble all the time. You do that and stuff’s gonna happen.”
    The burning filled my stomach.
    Nick grinned. It wasn’t nice. He looked at my pack. “That’s just a little pet forMiss Perfect. All you gotta do is wait till no one’s around after school and put it in her locker. You know how to pop a lock, right?”
    I knew. The locks were so old they’d probably been using them back in the days when Mr. Harris had gone to the