Free Rat by Lesley Choyce Page A

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.
    â€œJust get away,” he screamed. “Leave me alone.”
    â€œI 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 from Mr. Miller.
    Just like I was now.
    â€œSo, Colin, I’m sad to say your egregious behavior rather interrupted my lunch.”
    â€œI don’t understand what egregious means.” Just like Miller to use a big word like that.
    â€œEgregious. As in shockingly bad.”
    â€œI don’t understand,” I said.
    â€œYou 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.”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œAppearances can be deceiving,” I said.
    â€œIndeed.”
    â€œAnd 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