Responsible by Darlene Ryan

Chapter One
    See, the thing was, you had to make it look like it was an accident. You know, in case a teacher was looking. Except of course it wasn’t an accident, and the person knew it wasn’t.
    For instance, a couple of us would be walking down the hall, and we’d be talking, and we wouldn’t even look at the person. In fact, we’d make a point of
not
looking at the person. Whoever was walking on the insidewould bump them—just a little—and we’d keep on going like they weren’t even there. And then someone else would come along and nudge them, a little bit harder, but not much. And then it would be Nick’s turn.
    Nick had a bunch of different moves. The one he liked best was walking down the hall backward, talking real fast to someone, so it really did look like an accident when he banged into the person. But he always hit people hard enough to make them go down. Somehow Nick would end up stepping on their hand or their leg. Once he even stepped on the side of a guy’s head, and you could see the shape of the heel of Nick’s boot on his face.
    Then Nick would go into his big “Oh my God. Jeez, I’m sorry, I didn’t see you” routine. A bunch of kids would gather round, and a couple of teachers would come to see what was going on. The whole time Nick kept doing his “I didn’t see you” bit. Even though I knew it was all a lie, he was so freakin’ good at it that I wanted to believe him.
    Mostly Nick got away with stuff because the teachers thought they had him figured out, but they didn’t know him at all. One time Ms. Henderson sent me down to the office to bring a couple of boxes of paper towels to the art room. While I was waiting for the secretary to unlock the storeroom, I heard Mr. Harris, the vice-principal, talking to some supply teacher about Nick. He said Nick suffered from low self-esteem and didn’t like himself very much.
    Teachers, for the most part, don’t know anything about real life. If they did they’d have much better jobs than teaching geometry and the history of the stupid middle ages to a bunch of kids who aren’t listening anyway. And Mr. Harris knew squat. Nick had low self-esteem? Yeah, right. Nick was the king of cool and he knew it. I’d seen girls checking him out. He even said Ms. Henderson had a thing for him, and I think he might have been right. She did get Nick to pose up on this little platform at the front of the class when we were studying the human form, and she said he had almost perfect proportions.
    Nick pretty much always got what he wanted when he wanted it, and I think that’s how everything with Erin started. She was about the only person, as far as I could tell, who didn’t think Nick was that cool. At least she was the only person who was always in Mr. Harris’s office complaining about him. There were other people who didn’t like Nick, but they were smart enough not to say anything.
    I knew that after the first day in the school. I’d been to a lot of schools— Ellerton was the fourth high school in a year and a half. In my whole life I’d only started and ended the year in the same school twice.
    My dad’s a carpenter. He can do a lot of other things too, like some electrical stuff and even a bit of plumbing. And he’s pretty good, especially for someone who’s learned just from watching other people. That was the problem. He didn’t go to school to study any of it. Even though he was just as good as trades people with papers, he mostly just got hired as a general laborer.That meant he’d be one of the first people let go when a job wound down. He had to move around a lot to keep working. Wherever he went, so did I. That’s why I’d been to so many schools.
    And every school was pretty much the same. There were the brains, the jocks, the techno-geeks in the computer club, the artsy-fartsy types, the drama club kids