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do.”
    She didn’t say anything, and it suddenly began to dawn on me just how scared she was. Possibly even willing to go along with them in order to make it stop.
    I shook my head. “No way, Emily. You’re my friend. We’ve known each other for a long time. Let’s stick it to them. Go with me to Miller’s office. If he plays dumb again, let’s go to the cops.”
    She had her head down again. “I can’t do it, Colin.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause that would be ratting.”
    â€œSo?” I was getting really pissed.
    â€œYou know what will happen. Liam and Craig will find a way to use that against me. To get people to turn against me. We’ve both seen this before.”
    â€œYour friends won’t turn against you. Your real friends will support you.”
    She shook her head. “I can’t,” she said.
    I had to keep my mouth shut just then. If I said the wrong thing (and I was the king of saying the wrong thing), she’d shut me down. Shut me off. I’ve had a long, unhappy career of speaking my mind, speaking the truth, to people who I considered friends only to have them shut me down for good.
    â€œEmily,” I said, in a low, controlled voice, “somebody has to do something. The code of silence is the code of bullshit.”
    She nodded. Her head was still down, and she couldn’t look at me. She was sniffling, and I think a couple of tears fell from her eyes. “I’ll be okay,” she said. “Just don’t do anything right now, please. Let me handle this.”

Chapter Nine
    Emily worked hard at avoiding me after that. She didn’t answer my calls or my texts. I knew that if I went back to Miller’s office to talk to him, she’d feel betrayed. I knew it was time to think outside the box.
    Jerome was playing it up like he was my new best friend and still asking if I needed any help or any “tools,” as he called it. But I just smiled and told him everything was cool. I didn’t want anything to do with whatever business he had going on. But then he caught me off guard as I was walking home from school through the park. He caught up with me and said he’d had “some good luck,” that he’d scored some great weed. He offered me a little Baggie with several joints. “I got lots,” he said. “This one’s on the house.”
    I was tempted, but I turned him down. I knew it might make things go away for a while, but I also knew that those things would still be there later. I was worried about Emily. And I felt that I hadn’t solved the dilemma of Liam and Craig. It looked like they could just float through life wreaking whatever damage they wanted and not be held accountable. What would they be like once they left the lowly confines of high school and moved out into the big world?
    By the time I got home, I knew what I needed to do.
    Not being the most social animal (unlike the rat on my T-shirt), it took a dozen or so emails to kids I knew to gather even more email addresses until I had at least a hundred contacts from school. Some were kids I knew well, others were a bit more distant. But all were people I thought would be “sensitive” to the issue at hand.
    I didn’t mention Emily. And I didn’t even mention Amanda and Marissa by name, but I did spill the beans on exactly what Craig and Liam were doing to girls at school. It was a straightforward statement of fact. And I signed my name to it. I even put a little signature image of one of my Manga rats by my name. An anonymous email would not work. And I asked all one hundred or so to pass it on.
    I hesitated and then pressed Send . I guess I could have sent a group email, but I wanted to send them one by one so everyone would understand it was a personal message from me.
    Colin. The snitch. The whistle-blower. The stool pigeon. The tattletale. The informer. The rat.
    I was still at the keyboard