The Shadow Club Rising (6 page)

"No."

"Well, if they don't show," he said, "I'm bailing. I don't even know why I came in the first place."

"I'm glad you did." I reached out my hand to him, and he looked at it for a long moment. Finally he accepted it, shaking halfheartedly, but then he tensed as he saw someone over my shoulder. I turned to see Tyson coming up behind us.

"It's okay," I told Jason. "I invited him."

"Oh . . . uh . . . nice to see you, Tyson."

"Yeah, yeah." said Tyson. I guess you couldn't expect any more from the two of them. I mean, the last time they were this close to each other, Jason and the others were trying to drown him with their bare hands.

"So . . . like, you're a member of the club now, Tyson?" Jason asked.

"No . . . I'm kind of an independent observer."

"There is no club!" said a voice behind us. We turned to see Darren Collins coming out from behind a broken catamaran. "The Shadow Club doesn't exist, and I'm guessing we're here to make sure of it."

"You guessed right," I told him. I have to admit I was surprised he had come at all. Of all the members of the club, he was the one who had pulled the farthest away from the rest of us. He wouldn't talk to us, wouldn't acknowledge us in class. It wasn't so much a cold shoulder, as a "no shoulder." It was as if the only way he could get past it was simply to cut the Shadow Club out of his life. He played basketball the same way—blocking out everything but his teammates, the ball, and the basket. That's what made him so good.

Abbie showed up next, looking as beautiful as ever, dressed one week ahead of the fashions. "OK," she said, "I'm dying to find out what possible reason you have for getting us all together."

Karin "O. P." Han showed up with Randall. She didn
't
say much, but as with the others, her eyes darted to Tyson, and looked away, ashamed.

"My sister chickened out," Randall said. "Cheryl's not coming."

"Big surprise," said Darren.

"Too bad," I said, trying to hide how disappointed I really felt. "But we can do this without her."

"Do what?" asked Abbie.

"Duh," said Randall, his same old obnoxious self, "figure out which one of us is pranking on Alec Smartz."

Everyone glanced at one another with the same suspicion that the other kids in school heaped on us.

"What makes you so sure it was one of us?" I asked him.

He looked at the others, one by one, and then his thoughts seemed to turn in on himself. "I don't know," he said. "I just figured . . ."

And that was half the problem right there. If even the members of the Shadow Club believed it was one of our own, how would we ever gain one another's trust again?

Tyson and I led them up to the old tugboat and through the hole in the hull. When our eyes had adjusted to the light spilling in from the hole below, and the dozens of little separations in the old boat's wooden planks, we found ourselves in a strange and very private world. The empty shell of the tugboat's keel was like an upside-down attic. Although the space was about thirty feet long, and seven feet high, it still felt claustrophobic. I didn't like it. Rats hide in forgotten places like this, I thought. And I'm not a rat. The fact that we had to hide at all made me regret having even called them together. I mean, was Alec Smartz really worth all this trouble? And if my heart really was in the right place, then why was my spirit confined to the moldering shell of an abandoned boat?

"We didn't do anything to Alec Smartz," I said, once everyone was up inside our new meeting place. I didn't ask them, I told them. If there was one thing in this world thatI knew, it was that all of us—even Randall—had come through the ordeal better than when we started. None of us would pull that sort of mean-spirited prank on anyone ever again. Although it was dim in the shell of the old boat, I could see enough of their faces to know I was right.

"So, like, we're supposed to prove our innocence before the whole world blames us, right?" said Jason.

"It's not about proving our innocence," I told him. "It's about stopping the pranks."

"How are we supposed to stop the pranks if we don't know who's pulling them?" asked Darren.

"We do some detective work," I said. "We find out."

"Why should we care a rat's butt about Alec Smartz, anyway?" asked Randall.

"Because we started it. None of this would be happening if we didn't start the pranks last fall."

"Statistics show," said O. P, "that the most notorious of criminals often have copycats—and sometimes those copycats are worse than the ones they're copying."

"Oh, come on," said Abbie, tossing back her hair, "we're not exactly serial killers."

"No," said Tyson, "but you came pretty close to killing me."

Tyson had been so quiet, sitting all the way up toward the bow, that we had almost forgotten he was there. It sobered us up a little bit.

"We set the pattern," I told them. "We were the ones who put the idea in people's heads, and now they're picking up where we left off. I don't know who it is, but I do know that the pranks are going to get worse and worse, just like they did the first time. When we formed the Shadow Club, it's like we let something loose in this town that didn't die when we burned the charter."

"You mean like a demon or something?" asked Randall.

"Now you're getting me all spooked," said Jason with a nervous chuckle.

"Call it what you want," I told them. "A demon—or just a bad idea—but either way it's not going away until we find a way to shoot it with a silver bullet."

"I thought that was for a werewolf," said Jason.

"Get a clue," said Abbie.

I let the thought sit with them for a few long moments. The wind blew across the hole in the hull, like someone breathing across the mouth of a bottle, and the whole tugboat began to resonate with a faint deep moan.

That's when Darren said, "I'm outta here." He stood up, balancing himself on the slanted floor beneath him. "I've got better things to do than start dreaming up problems that don't exist."

I was too stunned to say a thing.

Abbie stood up next. "I mean, really, Jared, you've got yourself all worked up into a panic for no reason."

"What a waste of an afternoon," said Randall.

"Wait a second," I said, just beginning to see how totally I had misread them. "Don't you care at all about what's happening?"

Jason shrugged. "People were pulling pranks long beforethe Shadow Club existed," he said. "Just because they're doing it now doesn't mean we, like,
inspired
them or something. It probably has nothing to do with us."

"Yeah," agreed Abbie. "Alec Smartz has made as many enemies as he has made friends."

I looked to O. P., who had seemed to be more on my side than any of the others, but now she looked away. "I think maybe you're being too paranoid, Jared."

I stood there watching them leave, not sure what to say that could convince them they were wrong. That, yeah, maybe I was paranoid, but sometimes that cleared your vision more than it clouded it.

"The Shadow Club's dead," said Darren. "Let it stay that way." Then he slipped out through the hull, leaving Tyson and me alone. Tyson didn't move from his little perch way up at the bow. He must have sat in that spot when he used to come here by himself.

"That went well," he said.

"Oh, shut up."

I thought the meeting was over, but when Tyson and I slipped out through the hole, we were met by an unexpected guest.

"I could have told you they wouldn't go for it," saidCheryl. I turned to see her standing just a few yards away. I wondered whether she had been there all along, listening, or if she had just arrived in time to see everyone else desert.

"Easy for you to say, now that they've all gone." I was a bit angry that she hadn't done anything to help, but also grateful that she decided to come after all.

"They've got nothing to gain by helping you find the new prankster. The further away from it they stay, the better for them."

"That's what they think, but they're wrong. It's going to come back in their faces, the way it's come back in mine."

A wave broke on the seawall below us and sent up a burst of foam that soaked Tyson.

"Oh, man . . . " Tyson used it as an excuse to leave, but I knew he felt uncomfortable being there—a kind of third wheel between Cheryl and me. When Tyson was gone, she took a step closer.

"Alec thinks there ought to be a new club—one that will cancel out the Shadow Club."

"One that
he's
in charge of?"

"It could be a good thing. All right, I'll admit he's a little bit conceited, but his heart's in the right place."

Hearing that made me suddenly feel the chill of the ocean breeze.

"Does he know how much you stand up for him?"

"No," answered Cheryl, "but he knows how much I stand up for
you."

That shut me up real quick. On the one hand it felt good to know that she would still stick up for me. On the other hand, Cheryl always knew the exact words to say to win a conversation with me. Lately reading her had been like looking into a one-way mirror. I could only tell what was behind her words in a certain rare light, which wasn't shining today.

I couldn't look her in the eye, so I turned and stepped over to the ledge, where the seawall rose from below and met the flat mesa of the Ghosties. It was an unguarded precipice, and I marveled at how stupid we all were to play here when we were little. I longed for that kind of stupidity again, when I didn't know enough to see danger around me. Far off I heard the fence rattle as Tyson made his way out of the Ghosties. The sound brought me back to the here and now.

"Maybe we'd better go," I told Cheryl.

Another wave sprayed up over the ledge, dousing us, as if the sea itself was trying to chase us away. I heard the fence rattle again, and figured it must have just been the wind. We turned away from the tugboat, and left together, but it was painfully obvious to both of us that we were very much apart.

The next afternoon, I went with Tyson down to the community pool. One of my many New Year's resolutions had been to teach Tyson to swim. I figured it was one small way to try and make up for the part I played in almost drowning him last fall.

At first I took him to the pool several times a week, but, like all New Year's resolutions, my resolve faded pretty quickly. I hadn't given him a lesson for more than three weeks. But now, with so many things squirming around in my brain, I welcomed the chance to focus my thoughts on something else. I dragged Tyson down to the pool, with him resisting all the way.

"It's cold." "I'm tired." "I got too much homework." "I think I got an earache."

Tyson was never an eager learner when it came to anything, but today I wasn't taking no for an answer.

Our local pool had a personality all its own. First of all it wasn't even called a pool, it was called a "natatorium," which I guess was a gymnasium for swimming. With a fancy name like that, they could charge two bucks to get in. The natatorium had an Olympic-sized pool, and huge windows that were always so fogged it defeated the purpose of having windows in the first place. As for the pool itself, well, it was about as clouded as the windows. I used to wear goggles when I swam, but stopped because I got tired of looking at all those unidentifiable bits of floating organic matter. There are just some things I'd rather not know about.

Tyson had managed to master the dog paddle pretty early on in our lessons, and now he proudly huffed and puffed his way through six laps like a Labrador, while I swam a fairly lame, but effective crawl.

"Listen, do you want to learn to swim or not?" I snapped us he tried to climb out of the pool.

"What do you call what I just did? That was six laps!"

I pulled him back into the water. "Six dog laps," I corrected. "That's not even one human lap, Fido."

In the lane beside us, which was reserved for the more serious swimmers, someone did a quick flip turn and splashed super-chlorinated water up my nose.

"Ughh!" I sneezed and tried to clear my burning sinuses.

"Serves you right," Tyson said.

When I looked up to see who had splashed me, I caught sight of Drew Landers, our school's number one swimmer, peering out at me from beneath his armpit for an instant, as he stroked forward, toward the deep end of the pool.

"He did that on purpose!" I said.

"What, is like everyone out to get you now?" Tyson said. "You're starting to sound like me. That's scary."

"Tell me about it."

Drew Landers, however, did have a reason to hold a grudge against me—after all, the Shadow Club had pranked him exceptionally well during that first round of pranks, when it all still felt like fun, before it started getting dangerous. We had paid Drew a midnight visit, and peeled back the grungy socks from his feet as he slept. Then we painted his toenails red and put the socks back on. He didn't take them off again until swim practice the next day, and, let me tell you, it made quite an impression on the swim team—not to mention the coach, who scheduled him an immediate visit to Mr. Greene for tender guidance. I had to admit, though, Drew did manage to turn the whole situation around. Rather than clean off his toes, he painted every other toenail white, so his feet proudly displayed our school colors of red and white. He said it was a sign of school spirit. Since he was the team captain, and one of the cool-defining personalities of our school, the entire swim team followed his lead and went the rest of the season with red-and-white-painted toenails. I think this is how really stupid traditions are born.

"C'mon," I told Tyson, trying to forget about Drew. "I'll teach you the crawl."

"Tyson McGaw never crawls."

"Then Tyson McGaw drowns."

"Have you ever known a dog that drowned?"

He had a point, but he wasn't getting out of it so fast. "Would you like it better if I called it 'freestyle'?"

"Yeah. I could get into freestyle."

I tried to work with him on the rhythm of his breathing, but then took another blast of water in the face. It gagged me, and I coughed up like half a lung. When my eyes cleared, I saw Drew Landers standing in the pool beside us, doing some sort of swimmer's stretch with his arm behind his head like a contortionist.