Нил Шустерман - The Shadow Club

“Classic!”

“Intense!”

“Jared, we could get in lots of trouble,” said Cheryl.

“Naah,” I said. “It’s just for fun. We won’t hurt anyone, we’ll just bug the heck out of ’em!”

Now everyone was walking around thinking about it. “You should be glad,” I whispered to her. “I just saved your club.”

She didn’t say anything back, because she knew it was true.

Darren looked at me and smiled—almost in admiration. “This could be interesting,” he said. “Maybe this is a good idea after all!”

If Cheryl hadn’t been convinced before, that certainly convinced her.

“Of course it’s a good idea!” said Cheryl.

“But wait,” said Abbie. “What kind of tricks are we going to pull?”

“Well,” I said, “let’s sit down and think about it.”

For an hour we brainstormed ideas, all the practical jokes you could think of! We laughed ourselves loony just imagining them. It was incredible! All seven of us working together toward a common goal. A club, a real club.

We all exchanged phone numbers, then everyone got up, climbed out of Stonehenge, and went their separate ways, leaving Cheryl and me alone. I grabbed the bucket of water I had brought to pour over the fire.

“They all had a great time!” said Cheryl. “Yeah! It’s like a real club.”

“It is a real club. I can hardly wait till next week. Little Becky won’t know what hit her!”

“Neither will Austin.” Just imagining it gave me goose bumps all over. I felt so good, I could have gone over and given Cheryl a big hug for thinking of this club. I wanted to, but I didn’t. Like I said, Cheryl and I were just friends.

I poured the bucket over the dying fire. It sizzled, a cloud of steam and smoke came billowing out, and then the fire was gone. That’s when I realized how dark it was getting. I could barely see the walls of Stonehenge around us now.

“We’re gonna have lots of fun, I think. You get some good ideas sometimes, Cheryl.”

“You, too.” And then she gave me a hug. I couldn’t believe she did, but I was glad, so I hugged her back. For that split second, it felt like everything in the universe was perfect, and we were the center of it, down there in Stonehenge.

Then the feeling passed, and she let me go, and looked down. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so I put them in my pockets, and we stood there feeling incredibly dumb, listening to the sizzling of the dying fire.

“Hey,” yelled Randall from the lip of Stonehenge. “Hey, are you coming or what, Cheryl? What are you guys doing down there anyway, making out?”

“Die!” said Cheryl.

“Yeah, sure. I know,” he said. “Well, whatever you’re doing, let’s go or we’ll be late for dinner.”

“I’m coming.”

She climbed out of Stonehenge, and I followed. Before I left, I turned back and watched the last bit of steam rise from the’campfire, and smiled. Monday was going to be the start of a fantastic week!

I can’t say we didn’t have fun. We did. We had lots of fun, and the fact that the members of the club were the only ones in on it made it that much more exciting. They were nasty tricks we pulled—we knew that all along—but we felt the victims deserved whatever they got. Our plans were so clever, so ingenious, that it seemed we could never get caught. You see, we pulled tricks for each other: Darren pulled Cheryl’s trick on Rebecca, I pulled Randall’s trick on Drew, and so on. That way it would be hard to figure out who was responsible; after all, what possible reason would I have for pulling a trick on Drew Landers? I could get away with it because I wasn’t even a suspect! Working as a team made it hard for anyone—even us, sometimes—to figure out just who was doing what to whom. I guess every nightmare has to start somewhere. Ours started here.

Lunchtime. Tuesday. It was raining, so everyone was crammed into the cafeteria, which still had the faint’smell of smoke from the small fire the week before. Cousin Rebecca was getting a present today, but only the members of the Shadow Club knew about it, and we all watched, scattered across the room, so as not to look suspicious, patiently waiting for Rebecca to open that ridiculous lunch box with teddy bears all over it.

Darren had taken care of this particular trick, so the rest of us knew what to expect, but weren’t exactly sure when to expect it. Rebecca was all smiles, singing songs from Annie to herself and friends because she had gotten the lead role. Then she turned to open her lunch box. Nothing happened. I looked around the room. All eyes of the Shadow Club were focused on her. She talked a little bit more, and reached into her lunch box, pulling out the little plastic container that held her sandwich. I grimaced, preparing myself.

Nothing.

She opened the sandwich box, and pulled out a wedge of a gooey-looking peanut butter sandwich. She opened her bag of chips. Nothing. She laughed and sang, and porked out on her peanut butter sandwich—and then she reached for the thermos.

Oh no! I thought to myself. The thermos! Oh, how terrible! How marvelously, wonderfully terrible. I looked over toward Darren, and knew that this had to be it, for a smile had crept over his face.

Rebecca unscrewed the cap to the thermos and tilted its open end toward the cup in her hand. A small green garter snake slithered its way out of the thermos into the cup, and then through sweet-little-Becky’s fingers.

It took Rebecca a few moments to scream. I mean, how often do you expect a snake to come out of your thermos? It took about three seconds, then the thermos went flying, the snake went flying, and Rebecca let out a bloodcurdling scream that sounded five times as loud in the tiled cafeteria as it would have outside.

It didn’t stop there. The snake landed on another table, and everyone there began to scream. Off it went into the air again, landing on some poor guy’s sandwich, and his table began to scream. That poor little snake made it halfway around the cafeteria that day, and before long, people who didn’t even know what was going on were screaming as well.

Rebecca continued to wail with a voice that kind of sounded like the way she sang, then, as she tended to do whenever life got the better of her, she began to suck her thumb—but her eyes went wide when she realized that the particular thumb she was sucking on had touched the snake. Out came the thumb and the screaming began once more.

As the chaos grew in the cafeteria, Cheryl came up to me and whispered to me.

“Isn’t revenge sweet?” she said, and it certainly was. The Shadow Club was off to a flying start.

Vera Donaldson, the most popular girl in school, had a diary that she talked about, but never, ever brought to school. She also had a nine-year-old brother, and, as everyone knows, nine-year-old brothers can be bribed.

With Randall as mastermind, we found ourselves sitting in the middle of Stonehenge, with Vera Donaldson’s diary sitting there with us.

“This is scary,” said Jason. “It’s like we got some sort of bible with us.”

Randall smiled. “Vera’s entire life is in this book.”

“Dare we wreck it?” asked Cheryl, and everyone screamed, “Yes! Yes!”

We handed the diary to Abbie, and she read all about Vera’s little life (which really did sound like a soap opera), until we came across a juicy bit of information that was just the sort of thing we were looking for.

When the meeting was over, Randall and Cheryl took the diary to the nearest copy shop and brought along their collection of dimes. By dinnertime the diary was back in the hands of Vera’s little brother, and she never knew it was missing.