Нил Шустерман - The Shadow Club

“That’s a lie,” he snarled, like a caged animal would snarl.

“I saw, Tyson. I watched you change your sheets. I saw the stains on them. I saw the rubber sheet. I know all about you, Tyson.”

“It’s not true!” he growled.

I didn’t say anything.

“I hate you!” he yelled. Then, softer: “You better not tell anyone, because if you do ...”

“Quiet!” I said. “All right, I’ll make a deal with you. If you don’t tell anyone about the Shadow Club, I won’t tell anyone about your rubber sheets. Is it a deal? C’mon, is it?”

Tyson stared at me, unable to speak. His frightening, empty eyes got deeper, then suddenly it was like the bottom dropped out of his mind. He bared his teeth, snarled, and lunged at me, grabbing my hair and my throat, fighting like no normal kid fights. In a second, dozens of kids were all around watching—most laughing at Tyson, like they always laughed.

“I’ll kill you if you tell,” he screamed. “Killyou-killyou- killyou-killyou!” I pushed him away, but he came right back at me. Maybe I should have been punching him back, I don’t know. I guess I felt it was unfair to hit him, so I just kept pushing him off me, and he kept lunging, with tears in those wolf eyes.

Finally, Vice Principal Greene came running down the hall and grabbed Tyson, shaking him and talking to him as if he were trying to shake someone out of a bad nightmare. Eventually Tyson snapped back into sanity.

“What is this all about?” Mr. Greene asked me. I shrugged. “Nothing,” I said. “He just came at me. I think I must have bumped into his locker.”

And Mr. Greene believed me, because I was always such a good kid who never caused anyone any problems. It scared me to think what I could get away with if I really wanted to. It scared me and bothered me to think of how I was toying with poor Tyson’s head, so I tried not to think about it.

“All right, Tyson, why don’t you tell me why you went after him?”

Tyson just looked at him, then at me, with his jaw open, as if he would spill out the whole story. Then finally he looked down.

“He bumped into my locker,” said Tyson.

“Fine. Let’s have a talk in my office, Tyson,” said Mr. Greene. He looked at the crowd in the hallway. “Didn’t I just hear the homeroom bell? Don’t you all have somewhere to go?”

The crowd began to break up, and Greene walked with Tyson down the hall. Tyson turned back to look at me, both of us realizing that I had him over a barrel, and there was nothing he could do about it. I winked at him, and he threw back at me that stone-turning gaze of his.

I guess in some ways I had turned to stone, but it wasn’t by Tyson. It was by the Shadow Club.

As usual, most of us pretended not to know each other at school that week. Sure, Cheryl and I hung around together, but as far as the rest of the club went, well, we just winked at each other in the halls. The secrecy of our friendships made the meetings at Stonehenge very special.

By next Friday’s meeting, however, I was feeling awfully strange about things. Tyson hadn’t spilled the beans to anyone, as far as I knew, and none of us had gotten caught for any of the practical jokes we had played, but still something didn’t sit quite right. Maybe it was the feeling I’d got when I told Tyson I knew he was a bed wetter. Maybe it was the fact that I had to spy on him like a Peeping Tom. Or maybe it was the fact that Tyson had called us a gang. Whatever it was, I took the feeling to the meeting with me, and I couldn’t shake it. I held my hands close to the fire. It seemed that for the past few meetings nothing I could do would keep my hands warm.

“You know,” said Darren, “I never thought this thing would work. I mean, I never thought we’d all actually . . . you know, like each other.”

“I’ll say,” said Abbie. “Look at this group: we’ve got a jock, a brain, a nerd, a sosh, a brat, a lawyer, and the Gopher! Who’d have thought we’d all get along!”

I smiled, but down inside I cringed. The kids in the Shadow Club were the only ones in school left who didn’t call me the Gopher.

“I’m not a jock!” said Darren.

“And I’m not a nerd!” said Jason.

“Yeah, but you know what I mean,” said Abbie.

I knew what she meant. Except for Randall, Cheryl, and me, none of us had really known each other before the club.

“I guess when you have something in common,” said O.R, “it’s easy to be friends.” Oh, yeah, sure, we really had a lot in common, I thought.

“We all hate somebody,” I said.

O.P. turned to me. “What?”

“We hate somebody. That’s all we have in common. A little bit sick, huh?”

“Naah,” said Darren. “It’s like war. Common enemies bring people close, you know?”

“But we’re not at war,” I said.

“Yeah, we are,” said Jason. “We’re fighting for our right not to be humiliated by the unbeatables.”

“I say we nuke ’em!” said Randall.

“And I say that’s not funny!” I yelled. I wondered which was worse, wanting to nuke somebody, or wishing someone was never born. There were seven of us, all wishing that seven other people in the world had never been brought into it. That’s the kind of hatred you read about in war books; the kind of hate that kills millions of people.

Everyone around the circle looked at me as if I had cussed Randall out.

“I think you’re taking this all too seriously, Jared,” said Cheryl. “It’s just for fun.”

“I think he’s feeling guilty,” said Abbie.

“What for?” said Darren. “Our jokes didn’t hurt anybody, did they? I mean, sure a spider got killed, but I kill spiders every day. Do you see me crying about it?”

He had a good point, but it didn’t make me feel any better. I took my hands away from the fire. Almost immediately, they began to get cold again, but when I put my hands down, Cheryl grabbed one of them and held it gently, out of everyone’s view. That’s when I began to feel a bit better about everything.

“I think I know what it is,” said O.P. “I think he’s worried about Tyson talking.”

“No! That’s not it,” I said, and took a deep breath.

“You want out of the club? Is that it?” asked Darren.

“No, of course not. I like the club—I love the club . . . but...”

“But what?” said Darren. “Get to the point.”

“Maybe we should stop the tricks,” I said.

Cheryl turned to me. “Jared, our charter is based on revenge.”

“Yeah,” said Randall. “The tricks were your idea. Don’t wimp out on us, Jared.”

“Yeah, Jared,” echoed Jason.

“Hasn’t it been great fun so far?” asked Abbie. I thought about it. It had been great fun.

“And didn’t everyone deserve what they got?” asked O.P. She was right. They all deserved what they got.

“And don’t you enjoy being president of the club?” asked Cheryl. She hooked me with that one, and that’s when any guilt or doubt I had inside switched off completely. Until that moment, I had never thought of myself as president, but as I looked around the fire, I saw that everyone was looking at me—not just looking at me, but looking up to me— me, the Generic Kid, who never stood out in a crowd, and whose face nobody could remember.

What an idiot I had been! Here I was, the leader of this club, and I was on the verge of throwing it all away. I wasn’t about to do that.

“Maybe what we need is a slight change of club policy,” said Cheryl. I knew what she meant; I picked right up on it. Keep my voice firm; no more wishy-washiness. If I was the president, then I was going to tell them how the club was going to work.