Нил Шустерман: The Shadow Club

Well, I was dedicated, too, but I didn’t flaunt it in public.

Austin is good at a large number of things. Good enough for people to notice, but not enough to be labeled “a brain,” or “a jock,” or “a nerd,” or anything. In short, he’s what every kid wants to be, or at least what I always wanted to be. He is, in his own way, perfection on two feet, and he knows it. I hated him. He didn’t know that. To him I was just one of his many friends. If he had been a year or two older than me, he might have been someone I looked up to, can you believe that? He loves it when younger kids look up to him. I’m not younger, though; I’m three months older than him. And he never really treated me like a friend—or even like an equal. He kind of treated me like a worm—or at least tried to make me feel like one.

I used to think it was because I was the one who started up that now infamous nickname that still plagued his existence:

L’Austin Space.

The name stuck to him like Velcro, and he could never peel it off. Yeah, I used to think that was why he treated me like he did, but that wasn’t it. It ran deeper and stronger than that. You see, unlike everyone else, I was the only one who came close to being a threat to him.

Like I said, Austin’s good in everything, but there was only one thing that he was out-and-out great at. He could run. As a kid everyone knew he was fast. He beat everyone he ever challenged—even kids older than him—for as long as I can remember.

And, for as long as I can remember, I was second fastest; always the second-best runner. It wouldn’t have been so bad being second-best, but you see, it was what I did best out of everything—just like Cheryl and her singing. I wasn’t outstanding in any of my classes, and I wasn’t the most popular guy in school. Whatever it was, I was always somewhere in the middle. I was the guy you would never notice. They used to call me the Generic Kid when I was ten, because at day camp none of the counselors could remember my name. I just didn’t stand out.

But I could run, and when you’re a fast runner there’s nothing like that feeling as you pick up speed, actually feel your body accelerate, and you realize that the wind isn’t a wind at all, it’s just you cutting through the still air like a bullet. There’s nothing like that feeling when you know that this is what you do well, and nobody can take it away.

Nobody but L’Austin Space.

He took it away real good—and not so much by beating me, but by purposely making me feel like I wasn’t worth a thing. He knew exactly what to say to squash me beneath his big toe. Things like, “Maybe it’s your running shoes that make you slow,” or “Maybe next year your legs will grow longer and you’ll have a fighting chance,” or maybe he would just look at me with that silent gloat in his smile after beating me in yet another race.

I don’t know why, but it seemed that Coach Shuler always put us in the same races. We would take first and second, but when Austin and I were racing, there were no places, only winner and loser, and I was always, without exception, the loser.

Once I was the best: that one year when Austin’s father, who is a professor, took the whole family traipsing around South America for a whole year. It was in seventh grade— first year on the junior high school team—that I finally got to see that finish-line ribbon, to feel it pull across my chest as I crossed the line. I was hot then, the hero, popular— everything I could have wanted.

Then Austin came back, like I knew he would.

I remember the beginning of eighth grade, before the coach knew him. We were lined up for time trials, and just before Austin was to go, he turned to me and gave me that smile. The smile that said, “You’re nothing, Jared Mercer . . . and I’ll prove it.” The coach yelled go, Austin took off, and blew my sixty-yard time sky-high. He beat it by almost half a second, which might not seem like much, but races are lost by hundredths of seconds.

From that moment on I was a backseater again, the Generic Kid, living in the bigger-than-life shadow of L’Austin Space. But this time it was worse, because I had tasted what it was like to be a winner, and Austin was determined to make sure I would never taste it again.

“You take these things too seriously,” my father would say. “So, he’s faster than you. Big deal. I’ll bet there are things you do better than he does.”

But there weren’t, and my father just didn’t understand. It wasn’t just that he was faster than me, it was that I was second, and nobody on this earth could care less about runners-up.

On that first morning of ninth grade, I watched Austin from the stands. He knew I was there. He had to know; I was the only one in the bleachers. He ran around and around the dirt track in his bright white running shoes that never seemed to get dirty. It looked like he was going to go until the first bell rang, but then he stopped, stepped inside the track, and went to the highest point of the oval. I knew what he was going to do. He did it all the time. His schoolbag sat there at the tip of the oval track. He took his blue digital chronometer—the one the coach gave him after last year’s final meet—and set it to zero. Then he took his running shoes and socks off, and stared at an invisible spot in front of him, straight across the middle of the field, to the other tip of the oval. He took his starting position, clicked the chronometer, and took off in his bare feet.

It hurt to watch his speed. He tore through the grass like a racehorse on turf and was at the other end of the oval much too soon.

He looked at the time his chronometer had logged, then he pretended to notice me for the first time. He waved. I waved back. He stretched out his legs, went to get his shoes, then came by the bleachers.

“What’s up, Jared?” he said. “Have a good summer?”

“Pretty good. What about you?”

“Great!” he said. He put his foot up on the first bench and stretched his calf muscle. “You like my running shoes?” he asked. “They’re Aeropeds. The best running shoe made. Cost almost two hundred bucks.”

I nodded.

“Maybe if you had these shoes,” said L’Austin, “you might be able to come close to giving me some competition this year, huh?”

“Maybe,” I said, which wasn’t what I wanted to say. I won’t tell you what I wanted to say.

“Been workin’ out?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. I had been. Every spare moment I had.

“Good. Me, too. Every day, all summer up at Junior National Running Camp. Hey, guess what?”

“What?”

“I might qualify for the Junior NCAA championships.”

“Really.”

“Uh-huh. Tough competition, but my time now is averaging a quarter of a second faster than last year’s sixty-yard qualifying time, so I’ve been trying to get it even lower. My dad says if I qualify, then next year he’ll find me a private coach and train me for the Olympics.” He smiled that I’m- better-than-you smile at me. “So,” he said, “what have you been up to?”

“Me? Oh, I just went to European Runners Training Camp, where you run cross-country up and down the Alps all day long with famous Olympic athletes.”

“Really?”

I sighed. “No. Actually I just hung around and worked at Burger King making hamburgers. Hard work, that Burger King. Builds muscles in your fingers.”

“I’ll bet,” said Austin.

“You know I was the youngest one they ever had working at that Burger King?”

“Yeah, well that makes sense,” said Austin. “I mean, who else are they gonna get to do the stupid flunky work but a kid, right?”

I didn’t say anything after that.