Free Rat by Lesley Choyce Page B

some mice and rats. I took out my latest sketchbook and began to draw images of the animals in my head. Sketching always made me feel better. They never looked much like the real animals. More like some crazy fantasy-world version of animals. Big eyes, exaggerated features. My creatures. My animals.
    That night, my friend Emily called. Like me, she’s not very popular because she’s different. She’s vegan, and for some reason people find vegans annoying—maybe it’s because they don’t eat cheese. And she dresses funny—layers of anything, as long as it doesn’t have a designer label. And hair in dreads that she almost never washes. But I still call her a friend, and outcasts need to stick together in high school.
    â€œYou didn’t really post a photo of yourself naked, did you?” she blurted out.
    â€œWhat?” I asked.
    â€œOn GoofFace. There’s a photo of you without clothes on and your name right under it. It looks like you posted it yourself. Tell me you didn’t do this.”
    â€œI didn’t do this. It’s somebody trying to make me look like an idiot.” I flipped my book closed and turned to my computer. I hated sites like Goof Face, where anyone could put up lies or pictures or…anything. I went to the site and keyed in my own name. Yep. There it was. “It’s my face—from last year’s yearbook, I’d say. But it’s definitely not my body.”
    â€œPretty good Photoshop job, then,” Emily said.
    â€œHow 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…”
    â€œSo I guess just about everybody and anybody.”
    â€œYep. 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.”
    â€œGuess you could say that. Sorry, Colin. You don’t deserve this. What are you going to do?”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œToo 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,