Free Responsible by Darlene Ryan Page B

school. It was easy to force one open and lock it again.
    â€œWait till everyone is gone and watch out for the janitors,” Nick said. He slugged my shoulder. “She’s gonna freak. Thanks, man.” He took off down the hall.
    I walked to my locker and frigged with the lock, waiting until the hall cleared. I grabbed the burger box and shoved it behind some books on the top shelf. I didn’t look inside. I didn’t want to know what was in there until I had to.

Chapter Two
    At the end of the day I slipped the box back into my backpack and went down to the art room. I knew I could hide out there for a while, pretending that I was working on a sketch of a tree I was doing for my art project. I figured since I had to be there I might as well do a bit more work on the trunk. On paper it didn’t look the way it did in my head.
    Ms. Henderson walked by the door. when she saw me she came over to thetable. She picked my half-open backpack off the chair and set it on the floor so she could sit down. I thought I was going to pass out, but she didn’t notice anything.
    â€œThat’s nice work, Kevin,” she said. “You have real talent.” She smelled like turpentine and oranges. Ordinarily I would have been happy—really happy—to have Ms. Henderson leaning over me with her elbows on the table and her orange-smelling hair about an inch from my face, but all I could think was, Don’t let her look in my backpack. We weren’t allowed to have fast food on the school grounds. If she saw the box, she’d take it, and while I wasn’t exactly sure what was inside, I knew it wasn’t a cheeseburger with extra pickles.
    But she didn’t even look down. She just pointed to a couple of places in the picture that she thought needed more detail, and then she got up. As she walked away I could hear the blood pounding in my ears.
    After half an hour I put everything away and went up the back staircase. The hallway was deserted. I found Erin’slocker. The lock was easy to pop, even with the sleeve of my sweatshirt pulled down over my fingers. I didn’t think Mr. Harris had any way of looking for fingerprints, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I slid the burger box out of my pack.
    There was a mouse inside, gray and black with a long hairless tail and blood, dried brown, on its neck. I looked at it, curled in the bottom of its Styrofoam coffin, and I thought, I could just shut Erin’s locker and tell Nick I hadn’t been able to pop the lock after all. No. No. I could tell him the janitor had been doing the floors and I couldn’t even get to her locker.
    I looked down at the grungy gray and yellow tiles. Nick wouldn’t believe that. No one would believe that.
    I could just shut the locker, throw the box in the garbage and go home. Of course I’d never be able to come to school or go anywhere else ever again. I’d heard rumors about what Nick did to guys who went up against him. I was pretty sure I wouldn’tget a mouse like this stuck in my locker. I’d probably be the mouse, curled up in a ball with blood on the side of my head. It was me or her. What the hell else could I do?
    I hauled my sweatshirt down over my fingers again and picked up the mouse. I had thought it would be stiff, but it was as floppy as a stuffed toy. I set it on Erin’s math book, right at the front of her locker, so she’d at least see it first thing. That way she wouldn’t be feeling around for her books and get a handful of dead rodent instead. She was going to freak no matter what.
    I felt like the mouse was looking at me, sitting there on the middle shelf of the locker. A cold shiver rolled from my shoulders all the way down my back. “Sorry,” I whispered as I closed the locker door. I wasn’t sure if it was for the poor dead mouse or for Erin.
    I couldn’t get going in the morning, so by the time I got to school it was almost first