Нил Шустерман - The Shadow Club

And everyone was so confused and dumbfounded by this weird turn of events that the nurse was called immediately.

The most obnoxious of our tricks was a doubleheader. It involved two kids, and one of them was L’Austin Space.

You see, Mr. Milburn, the science teacher, had a collection of animals in his classroom. Animals that ranged from gerbils to lizards. Tommy Nickols, the ninth grade’s foremost brain, kept his pride and joy in Mr. Milburn’s room: Octavia, his beloved pet tarantula. Sometime after lunch, Tommy noticed that Octavia was missing, but try as he might, he could not seem to find her. She was not in her cage, she was not hiding in the bookshelf. It seemed she was nowhere in the room, and nobody could find her.

L’Austin Space found her. Or should I say that she found him?

I was particularly mad at Austin that day, so I couldn’t wait to see the trick pulled off. You see, Austin had called me Gopher so much that everyone had started to call me that. I couldn’t wait to get back at him.

Anyway, it was a rainy day, and so Austin, as well as everyone else, came to school in a hooded jacket. In homeroom, at the end of the day, everyone put on their coats and waited for the bell to ring. Ralphy Sherman saw it first.

“Hey, Austin,” he said, “there’s something in your hood!”

“Yeah, sure,” said Austin, because nobody ever believed a word Ralphy said. “If there was something in my hood, would I do this?” And Austin, thinking himself pretty clever, put his hood on. When he pulled his hood off again, a tarantula was sitting on his head.

“AHHH!” he screamed, running around the room. “Get it off me! Get it off me!”

He wouldn’t touch it. The thing was sitting smack on the middle of his head, but he was too grossed out to actually touch it. Well, just like with the snake, everybody in the room, including Mrs. Marlow, our homeroom teacher, began to scream. Meanwhile, Austin ran around the room with Tommy Nickols running behind him, crying, “Don’t hurt her! Don’t hurt Octavia! She doesn’t bite, she’s a good tarantula.”

However, when a tarantula is doing push-ups on your scalp, you don’t care how good it is; you just want it off. Watching Austin turn white as a ghost was the high point of my day—and then, as if it wasn’t bad enough, Octavia got freaked out and tried to climb off. Unfortunately, the easiest way off of Austin’s head was down the back of his shirt.

Austin fell to the ground, shaking his shirt, but Octavia wouldn’t come out. She’d had enough for one day.

Austin tore off his shirt, ripping out all the buttons, and Octavia went sailing across the room. When she landed she wasted no time in racing across the floor for a place to hide.

“Don’t hurt her!” yelled Tommy Nickols. “She’s tame, really, she’s a domesticated spider!” But no one much cared. While most everyone stood on the tables, Octavia scampered around the room between the table legs, until she finally met an untimely end under the heel of Richard Fergusson’s shoe.

L’Austin Space sat on the floor in a daze, for once actually lost in space. Tommy Nickols had collapsed to his knees in tears, mourning his dearly departed spider, and Richard Fergusson threw his shoe into the wastepaper basket, choosing to walk home barefoot.

It was the third Friday after the signing of the charter, and as usual, we met at Stonehenge. From the very beginning, the place seemed to have some mystical meaning for us; those moss-covered stones around the dark pit. Now there was even more meaning. It was our hideout, our special place—the only place where we could swap stories about who did what to whom, and how well the pranks worked. We celebrated our victories down in Stonehenge.

The rains had passed, the wind had brought down new firewood from the trees, and the sun had dried it off for us, so we had a good fire going by the time the sun fell low in the sky. As we talked, a big bag of marshmallows went around the circle until each marshmallow sat roasted in our stomachs.

“Did you see the look on Vera Donaldson’s face as she went around tearing the copies of her diary down from the classroom doors?” asked Abbie.

“Classic,” said Jason.

“You know, the next day,” Cheryl added, “all the eighth graders started asking her out. I don’t mean the big eighth graders, I mean the puny ones like Martin, that look like seventh graders! They figured that because she liked Martin, she must like younger guys! She nearly died of humiliation!”

“I love it,” said Abbie, as she brushed her hair (which she did a lot).

“Wait, wait, wait!” said Darren. “If you want to talk about the look on someone’s face, how about the second Austin realized there was a spider on his head!”

“Or the second it slipped down his shirt!” cried O.P.

“Classic!” said Jason.

“Intense!” said O.P.

“That spider was great, man,” said Darren. “It’s like the thing knew exactly what we wanted it to do!”

“I wish I could have seen it!” said Jason.

“We should make that spider an honorary member of the club,” I said.

“Yeah. Too bad it’s dead,” said Darren, shoving a marshmallow into his mouth.

“You’re all wrong!” said Randall. “The best—the absolute best thing ever, in the history of the whole world— was the look on Drew Landers’ face as he took off his socks in the locker room, in front of the whole team—and none of you got to see it!” he said, gloating.

“Tell us about it!” said Abbie.

“OK,” said Randall. Everyone in the club was listening. “The whole team was done changing except for Drew, when the coach passed through the locker room on his way to the pool. I started asking the coach questions to keep him there.”

“You mean the coach was there, too?” asked Abbie.

“I’m getting to it!”

“I love it!” said Abbie.

“Anyway, the coach starts telling me that, as usual, I’m In all of Drew’s races, and as usual, I knew he’d take first place. Then, just like I predicted, Drew takes off those filthy dirty socks. Jared—you did such a good job of painting his nails, it was incredible! I could have died! Anyway, Drew didn’t notice it at first—he put his bathing suit on and didn’t even see it—but the coach saw it.”

“Oh, no!” I screamed. This was great!

“Classic!” cried Jason. “Classic. Just classic!”

“Shut up, let me finish. OK, so the coach sees him, toenails and all—they were fire-engine red—you couldn’t miss them, and the coach just says, ’Drew? Your feet!’ and everyone looks down at Drew’s toes. Nobody laughs—everyone thought it was for real, you know, like Drew did it all by himself. Everybody’s saying, ’Wow’ and ’I don’t believe it,’ and stuff like that.

“Finally Drew looks at his feet, then he turns to the coach, his eyebrows and face all wrinkled up like he’s about to sneeze, and he begins stuttering like this, ’I . . . I . . . I.., duh . . . duh . . . duh.’ He tries to hide his feet, and that’s when the team starts to laugh. I swear those painted toes were the most ridiculous thing in the history of the planet!”

“I love it!”

“Classic!”

“Intense!”

“So anyway,” continued Randall, “Drew can’t get a word out he’s so embarrassed, and then—get this—the coach starts laughing, too!”

At that, any of us who were holding back couldn’t hold it any longer. We all began to laugh. Laughing our heads off because we humiliated Drew Landers. Kind of sick, huh?

When Randall regained control of his laughter he finished the story.