Нил Шустерман - The Shadow Club

“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.

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 Stonehenge 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.

During lunch Mr. Milburn always locked his room and went down to the teachers’ lounge to fall asleep while listening to the rest of the teachers gossip. Well, as everyone knows, school classroom locks are the easiest in the world to pick; all you have to do is slide a hanger into the doorjamb and bingo!

Well, that’s what someone did, and then that same someone dropped a firecracker into Drew’s fish tank.

Now, there are firecrackers and there are firecrackers. There are the kind they call “safe and sane,” and there are the kind that are more like hand grenades. There are cherry bombs and M-80’s that, when put in a strategic location, can do an awful lot of damage, but the worst by far are blockbusters. Packed into the cylinder of a blockbuster is a quarter stick of dynamite, and when one goes off, it can be heard for miles.

I don’t know how they did it, but someone rigged up a blockbuster to go off in that fish tank, and when it blew, nothing in the room was safe. The tank turned into one huge bomb, sending glass and water flying in all directions, shredding plants and tearing paper on the walls. The room became a war zone.

I was out on the field with Cheryl and Randall, consoling Randall from his recent humiliation. It seemed that the day before, after swim practice, Drew threw Randall out of the locker room with no clothes on. Almost the second I had convinced Randall it was better to forget about it for a while, we heard the explosion. BOOM! It was so loud you’d swear the whole school had blown up. The blast echoed from the high school, across the large field, and a strange silence followed. Everyone turned toward the school.

“Not again,” said Cheryl. At first we all thought this was yet another school fire, but in a moment I began to suspect it was another evil prank. I turned to look for Tyson but couldn’t find him, and that sick feeling returned to my stomach, along with the cold feeling to my hands. Meanwhile, several teachers ran into the school to evacuate the remaining students; for all they knew, a gas line could have blown up. Someone pulled the fire alarm, and in minutes the fire trucks arrived. It didn’t take long for the firemen to find out what had happened.

From what I heard, there was nothing left of the fish tank, and that collection of fish that Drew Landers had spent years putting together was gone in a fiery fraction of a second.

“Tell me the truth, Randall,” said a kid after school. Cheryl and I were talking before I went off to track practice, and, as usual, Randall was hanging around with us, making obnoxious comments about the fact that we spent so much time together, when this kid—someone on the swim team, I guess—came up to us and asked Randall a question.