The Shadow Club tsc-1

by Нил Шустерман

  * * *

  There are lots of good jokes you could pull on somebody’s locker. You could hide in it, and scare the daylights out of them when they opened it. You could put a rotten egg in it; that’s always good for a laugh. You could set up a bucket of water that would pour on their head when they opened it; that was always good for a laugh, too.

  But what Eric Kilfoil, the star basketball player, found when he opened his locker was not funny at all. It was no joke; it was downright nasty. Everything was there, just where he had left it before basketball practice, but things were definitely not the same. Someone had gone into his locker and drenched everything, his clothes, his new sweats, even his books, with black paint. And not the kind that comes out, either. This was thick stuff that could never wash out. He was so mad, he began to kick all the lockers. I could hear it all the way out on the track.

  His clothes were ruined, his books were ruined, even his science project was ruined, and you know what?

  The Shadow Club didn’t do it!

  There are tricks and there are tricks. This was just plain mean, and Darren, who saw the locker, had no idea who would do such a thing, or why.

  Eric Kilfoil became the first mysterious victim in a wave of unexplained crimes.

  * * *

  There was a locker search next Monday. Everyone knows that locker searches are illegal, but that doesn’t matter much when someone steals the principal’s eight-hundred-dollar camera.

  Mr. Diller, the principal, was the kind of guy who thought that the kids in our school were to blame for all of Earth’s problems, and he was sure one of us must have stolen his camera. He had us all line up by our lockers, one class at a time, and one by one he searched each locker, leaving no stone unturned. You see, that camera was his life, and any kid caught with it was going to see trouble like no one had ever seen before. I’d never seen Diller this mad. Ralphy Sherman said that he had seen a bum walking away with it, which just made Diller more certain it was still in school.

  My row of lockers was the last one to be checked.

  One by one Mr. Diller had us open our lockers, to prove to him we didn’t have his camera, and one by one we cleared ourselves of blame.

  Then he came to Tommy Nickols, O.P.’s archenemy. Tommy opened his locker, just like the rest of us. It was a mess: papers everywhere, old library books that were way overdue, and a black strap sticking out from beneath them. Tommy looked up at Diller, then back down at his locker, and Diller reached in, pulling on the strap. Out came his eight-hundred-dollar camera.

  “I didn’t do it!” was all Tommy could say. “It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me!” But the evidence was staring us all in the face.

  Tommy began to cry, even harder than he did when Octavia got stomped on. “I didn’t do it!” he wailed, over and over again.

  I looked across at O.P., Cheryl, and Darren. I could tell by the looks on their faces that they had nothing to do with this. This was not a Shadow Club prank, and I believed Tommy Nickols. Tommy was a good kid, and this stank of sabotage. Someone had planted that camera, I knew it, but I couldn’t figure out who would do such a thing.

  Mr. Diller, on the other hand, believed what he saw. Tommy Nickols, the ninth grade’s best student, was suspended for three days.

  * * *

  David Berger, in spite of the sliming event, was still chosen to play a solo with the high school band, and as usual, he made everyone in the junior high band feel lousy about it.

  One afternoon, as the buses were loading up to go home, David came running out of his bus like a maniac. It was just before track practice, and I was talking with Cheryl—which I was doing quite a lot of lately—when he came bursting between us and asked, “Hey, has anybody seen my trumpet?”

  “Why would we have seen your trumpet?” answered Cheryl.

  He ran to another group of kids, desperately asking, “Has anybody seen my trumpet? I think it’s been stolen!”

  He asked every kid who came out of school, ran into the school, then came out a few minutes later. He was near tears. “I checked all the classrooms. I know I had it with me. Somebody stole it!”

  None of us thought much of it until about thirty seconds later, when the buses began to pull out, and a horrible crunching noise sounded from the back tires of bus number five.

  When David saw it, he nearly dove beneath the wheels to save his trumpet, but it was too late. By the time the bus driver realized what was going on and stopped the bus, David Berger’s silver trumpet had been crushed flat, never to play, or slime anyone ever again. He held it up and tried to push down on one of the valves, but it didn’t move. He tried a bit harder, and the valve fell off; the thing might as well have been flattened by a steamroller. David sort of wandered off in shock, holding his trumpet as if it were a baby.

  A minute later, Jason Perez ran up to Cheryl and me.

  “I didn’t do it,” he said. “I didn’t, honestly, I didn’t!” and I knew he was telling the truth. It seemed that someone else had picked up the pranks where we had left off. It was as if all the hatred built up by the Shadow Club became an invisible monster that went around pulling its own horrible pranks. I knew there had to be a more logical explanation, though.

  “Well, maybe all these kids have other enemies, too,” said Cheryl. “Maybe it’s all just coincidence.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “or maybe someone’s trying to frame us.”

  Greene’s Eye

  “Tell me about the Shadow Club, Jared.”

  Mr. Greene sat in his tiny office, with the Venetian blinds open. I could barely see his face, because the sky behind him was so bright. All I could see was his silhouette. My heart seemed to stop for at least five seconds when he asked me the question.

  “The Shadow Club? What’s that?” I said. It was a stupid thing to say, but he had caught me off guard.

  “Something you know about,” said Mr. Greene. I had gotten a note during third period that said he wanted to see me during lunch. It didn’t take me long to figure out that Tyson had told him about the club.

  “Oh, oh that,” I said. This wasn’t going to be easy. “It’s just a group of kids. We get together, go to the movies, play board games, you know.”

  “Why do you call it the Shadow Club?” he asked, twiddling his thumbs and sitting in his big chair, behind his big desk, in that small room.

  “Because we meet late in the afternoon,” I said. “When there’s lots of shadows. Can I go now?”

  “Not yet. I’d like to know a little more about the club first.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like who’s in it.”

  “Is it all right if I eat my lunch in here?” I asked. He nodded. I began to chow down my sandwich, and shut up real quick. I ate my sandwich, my chips, and Greene waited until I was down to the core of my apple before he spoke again.

  “You never answered my question.”

  “Which one?”

  “Who’s in the Shadow Club?”

  “Me!” I said, smiling.

  “Who else?” asked Greene.

  “Hard to remember. Like I said, there’s lots of shadows. I don’t see their faces. Can I go now?”

  “No, not yet.”

  I sighed and looked at my wrist, pretending I had a watch. Be calm, I thought to myself. Don’t sweat. If I sweat, he’ll know I’m scared. I couldn’t let him know that. I looked up at him, but all I could see was the dark blob of his big head.

  “Could you close the blinds?” I asked. “The sun’s in my eyes.”

  “Certainly.” He turned around, and shut the blinds. Now I could see his face; his eyes watched me from behind those thick glasses. I decided that I liked it better when I couldn’t see him.

  “Why won’t you tell me who’s in the club, Jared?” he asked.

  I sighed. “Because it’s a secret club,” I said. “I’m sworn to secrecy.”

  Greene didn’t seem to react at all. He just sat there, staring out at me from behind his bug-eyed glasse
s. “Secret club?”

  “Yeah, weren’t you ever in a secret club when you were a kid? Is there something wrong with that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s what I want to find out.”

  I stood up. It was very intimidating, the way Greene sat there staring at me, and it was so hard not to tell him everything he wanted to know. But if I did, I knew he would put two and two together. He would figure out about all the tricks we did—and worse, we would end up getting the blame for David’s trumpet, and the other nasty tricks that we had nothing to do with. I couldn’t tell him a thing. I began to pace around the room, looking at things: the books on his shelf, a diploma on the wall, a filing cabinet with a lock on it. This office made me nervous. I felt like I was in jail, getting the third degree.

  “Who told you about the club, anyway?” I asked, knowing full well who did.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “It was Tyson McGaw, wasn’t it?”

  Then Greene leaned forward and took off his glasses. Without his glasses, his eyes seemed a lot smaller. “Leave Tyson out of this.”

  “I’ll bet it was him!”

  “Give Tyson a break,” said Greene. “He’s got enough problems without you making things worse, believe me.”

  “What kind of problems?” I asked, sitting down again.

  Greene waited for a while, as if he was going to tell me something, but instead he said, “It doesn’t matter.” He thought for a moment, then said, “You know, Tyson thinks an awful lot of you.”

  I looked away from Greene’s small eyes. He looked funny without glasses. He looked more like a person, and less like a vice principal.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I guess because you’re a good kid.” He smiled. That made me feel a little uncomfortable. I don’t know why. That cold feeling in my hands came back, along with that sick feeling I had at our last meeting at Stonehenge.

  “I barely even know him,” I said.

  “Why don’t you get to know him?”

  I shrugged. “I have my own friends. I have the track team. I don’t have time for that.”

  “I see.” Mr. Greene nodded, and looked at me for a long time, as vice principals like to do, and then he asked, “Is the Shadow Club a gang, Jared?”

  I couldn’t believe he actually thought that! I just sat there, dumbfounded.

  “You know, we’ve never had trouble with gangs here.”

  “The Shadow Club isn’t a gang!” I said.

  “How can I believe that?”

  “You have to believe it! It’s just a bunch of good kids having a good time, that’s all.”

  “All by yourselves, without any adult supervision?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  By now that little room he called his office felt like a cage. I sunk deeper into the hard wood chair, figuring Greene would just keep picking on the club. He didn’t. Instead he started talking about something else I didn’t want to think about.

  “Aren’t the District Olympics coming up, Jared?” he asked.

  “Yeah, in about a month.” I squirmed in my seat, trying to get comfortable. There was no way to get comfortable in that chair.

  “I hear you could be running for our school,” he said.

  “Me or Austin Pace. It depends on who has a faster time,” I said through clenched teeth, because I knew Austin’s time was still better than mine.

  Mr. Greene nodded. “You know, Jared, I’d hate to see you disqualified because you’ve done something stupid.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean that if this ’club’ of yours gets you into trouble, you could be suspended from the team.”

  “Mr. Greene,” I said, “our club has nothing to do with school—we don’t even meet at school. Can’t you just leave us alone?”

  “It’s my job to make sure our kids don’t get into trouble!”

  “C’mon, Mr. Greene, what kind of trouble could kids like us get into?”

  “Kids like who?”

  “Like me, and Cheryl, and Jason Perez, and O.P. Han, and ...” I stopped as soon as I realized what I was doing. He’d tricked me! He’d tricked me into leaking out information about the club! If I said one word too many, I could have been signing the Shadow Club’s death warrant.

  “Jason and O.P. are in this club?”

  I didn’t say a word.

  Greene leaned back in his chair, and rocked a bit, like he had the whole world in the palms of his hands. Until that day, I sort of liked Mr. Greene; of course he never talked to me much, but he seemed like a nice guy. Now, sitting there at that desk, he seemed mean. He seemed nasty. He seemed like the one person who could destroy the Shadow Club just because we were having a good time. I suddenly realized that I hated Mr. Greene. I wished he had never been born.

  “I’ll tell you what, Jared,” he said, “you don’t have to tell me anything else about your club. You’ve never gotten into trouble before, and your teachers always have good things to say about you, so I’ll trust you . . . but there’s one condition.”

  “What?”

  Mr. Greene leaned a bit closer. “I want you to let Tyson join your club.”

  I backed away as if I had been slapped in the face. “No!” I said straight out. “No way! He can’t!”

  “Jared, I’m asking you a favor. It would mean a lot to him.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “He can’t because ...”

  “Because what?”

  “Because he can’t!” I said. “It’s a special club, and only certain kids are allowed in it!”

  “I can’t accept that. If your club is just a social club, like you say it is, then you can let Tyson in. Or is there something about your club you’d rather I didn’t know?”

  “No!”

  “Then let Tyson join.”

  “No!”

  “But, Jared . . .”

  “No! No! No!” I said. “No!” Period. The end. “No!”

  I stood up, and nearly smashed my fist on the desk, I was so angry. Mr. Greene, on the other hand, couldn’t have been calmer. He just leaned back in his chair, twiddling his thumbs again. He stared at me for a long time, like vice principals do. This time, I didn’t look back at him.

  “Can I go now?” I asked.

  “Close the door on your way out, Jared” was all he said.

  I stood there for a moment longer, but he didn’t say anything else, so I turned and went to the door. Just as my hand touched the doorknob I heard him speak.

  “Answer me one question, Jared,” he said. I didn’t look at him; I kept my eyes fixed on the doorknob. “Has the Shadow Club done anything wrong?”

  I still looked down at the doorknob. “No,” I said.

  “OK, fine . . . but I want you to know, Jared, that I’m keeping my eye on you. I don’t like this club of yours; there’s something about it that smells. I’m going to be watching you like a hawk, and if you’re lying to me, Jared, you’ll be in a lot of trouble.”

  I left, closing the door behind me as quickly as I could, and ran down the hall to get far, far away from that horrible little man in his horrible little office.

  What Ralphy Said

  When things get bad, boy, do they get bad. I thought that maybe—maybe—if the Shadow Club laid low for a while and didn’t play any tricks, then Greene might leave us alone; maybe everything would be all right. But things weren’t all right.

  I had hoped that David Berger’s flattened trumpet would be the last of the mysterious pranks, but it was not. Someone was terrorizing the unbeatables; someone who didn’t care how much the unbeatables got hurt, or how much property was destroyed, and this person, whoever it was, thought they could get away with it by blaming the Shadow Club. There was only one person who knew enough about the Shadow Club to do that: Tyson McGaw.

  “I say we give him what he deserves,” said Randall, as we sat around Stoneheng
e at our next meeting.

  “Yeah,” said Darren. “We should beat the daylights out of him, and force him to confess!”

  “And then get him expelled from school for it,” added Jason. Everyone else agreed.

  “No!” I said. “We have no proof—we can’t do anything like that yet.”

  “What other proof do we need?” asked Abbie. “He’s the only other one who knows about the club. It has to be him!”

  “We can’t do anything yet, though,” I said. “Not until we can prove he’s doing the pranks.”

  “He’s innocent until proven guilty,” added Cheryl, “even though we know he’s guilty.”

  “So what do we do?” asked O.P. “Sit around and wait to be blamed for everything? What if something really bad happens?”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “Tyson’s crazy, but not that crazy. Nothing really bad is going to happen.”

  Boy, was I wrong.

  * * *

  That next week, the entire club vowed to look out for the unbeatables; watching them as well as watching Tyson, to make sure that no more pranks were pulled. We must have done a lousy job of it though, because on Thursday, during lunch, Drew Landers became the next victim.

  Drew, as I’ve told you, is a swimmer, and very much into it; in fact, he had this obsession with anything that had to do with swimming. It only made sense, then, that Drew had a thing for fish. For as long as I knew Drew, he had always had a fish tank—it was the one thing in his room that he kept clean—and he had a second tank in school, in Mr. Milburn’s room. I guess because he considered himself a human fish, he had a weird sort of affection for his “cousins” in the tank.

  Anyway, that sixty-gallon tank had sat in Mr. Milburn’s classroom since Drew started seventh grade, and now, a year later, it was still there, filled with starfish, sea anemones, and brightly colored saltwater fish. They were pretty, they were expensive, and Drew loved those fish like most normal people might love a pet dog.

  Every once in a while, some bozo would drop something stupid into the tank: a bar of soap or maybe the shavings from the classroom pencil sharpener. Once, someone put red food coloring in the tank. After Mr. Milburn changed the water, the fish seemed fine, although they were sort of pink for a while. No matter what dumb things kids did to that tank, those fish always seemed to come out of their ordeals all right. But not this time.