Нил Шустерман - The Shadow Club

“Isn’t this clear enough?”

I turned around. Sure enough, the field was clear enough to race. Austin had come over with about ten kids, and more kids were joining us, because everyone knew what he was up to, and everyone knew about our rivalry.

“Maybe we should wait until your legs grow some more,” he said. Everyone laughed. I laughed, too; better to be laughed with than laughed at, right? Inside I wasn’t laughing, though.

“Fine, then,” I said. “Right now.”

Austin smiled that crocodile smile. “Greg, go about sixty yards, and judge us.” Greg Miller, one of the new seventh graders on the team, obeyed, as if he had been given an order by God.

So this is where it begins, I thought, this year’s competition. This year’s war. I felt strong, I felt ready to run, I felt like I always felt when I raced with Austin—that maybe this time I would beat him.

We got down into starting position, then Austin got up.

“Wait,” he said, and took off his precious shoes, then his socks. He was going to run barefoot. “OK.” He got back down. “Ready to lose?” he asked.

I didn’t answer.

Martin Bricker got ready to start us, as more and more kids turned to watch. Even teachers were watching. So this is where it begins.

“On your mark . . . get set . . . go.’”

I took off like a bullet, cutting through the wind and pounding the grass with every last bit of my strength. I didn’t turn to look, but I could see in the corner of my eye that we were neck and neck.

Ten yards were gone.

I looked toward Greg, down the field, and concentrated on turning everything I had into power.

This is for every time you beat me in races as a kid!

I pushed harder.

And this is for when you came back to do it again last year!

I pushed harder.

And this is for how you made me feel this morning!

I pushed harder.

We were still neck and neck.

Thirty yards were gone. Thirty to go.

The cheers faded away behind us.

And this is for challenging me in front of the whole school, and this is for everything you’ll ever try to do to me for the rest of our lives, and this is for those stupid running shoes you wear!

Forty yards gone.

I was ahead of him by a foot! I was beating him! I pushed harder.

Fifteen yards to go! Fifteen to go!

And then, like he’d been holding it all back, he flew out in front of me. He didn’t inch out, he flew out, like I was standing still. He moved like a machine in fast forward; a ship blasting into hyperspace. He was a foot in front of me. Two feet. Three feet. He turned to look at me, and smiled that awful smile of his.

I lunged. I dove forward in a wild attempt to reach the finish line before he did, but he was there before I hit the ground. I was moving so fast that I skidded along the grass, skinning my elbows and ruining my pants.

The Agony of Defeat.

I felt like that skier who wipes out on the ski jump every Sunday on Wide World of Sports. The Agony of Defeat: skinned elbows and ruined pants and a laughing LAustin Space.

By now kids were crowding around Austin.

“Wow, did you see Austin take off?”

“Wow, he really beat him bad!”

“Wow, Austin’s so fast!”

Wow this, and wow that. Austin was loving every last bit of it. They crowded around him and left me there on the ground to examine my elbows.

“You shouldn’t race Austin, kid,” said a seventh grader. “Austin beats everybody.”

Austin looked down at me. He was barely winded. “You ran pretty good . . . for a gopher!” he said, and everyone laughed.

“Gopher!” they all said. “Gopher, Gopher, Gopher!” Austin raised his hands to conduct them as they all chanted in unison: “Go-PHER! Go-PHER! Go-PHER!” over and over again.

I could have killed him! I could have ripped him limb from limb, but then I thought about Tyson McGaw. No. I wasn’t Tyson. I was civilized, and I wasn’t going to attack Austin. Instead I stood up, brushed myself off, and waited till the gopher-chanting stopped. Then I looked Austin straight in the face, and put out my hand.

“Nice race, Austin.” I shook his hand. Let me tell you, it took all my strength to do it, too.

“Yeah,” he said. “See ya around, Gopher.” I turned and left while everyone crowded around Austin. My elbows had just begun hurting.

Cheryl was there waiting for me. That’s one thing about her; she was always there, and she never laughed at me either.

“Are you OK?” she asked.

I looked back toward Austin, then turned to Cheryl and asked, “So, what are we going to call our club?”

I don’t think anyone knew what used to be there, but whatever it had been, only the old stone foundation remained, in a clearing in the woods. The stones were worn and covered with moss. Inside the rectangular stone foundation was a pit about six feet deep and twenty feet across, filled with bushes and trees. It could have been there for a hundred years—nobody knew.

Cheryl, Randall, and I had found it years ago, exploring as kids, but it seemed too eerie to play in, so we had left it alone, filing it away in our heads for future reference. The old foundation sat there in the thick woods between Cheryl’s house and the ocean, waiting. I had always thought of the foundation as waiting—waiting for someone to use it again, I guess, or maybe just waiting to disappear into the earth, like the building that once stood above it had.

It was waiting, all right, and on the second Friday of ninth grade, I had this certain exciting feeling that it was waiting for us.

As Cheryl and I stood on the outer edge of the deep stone foundation, looking into the pit, Cheryl said, “This is great! I couldn’t think of a better place to have our meetings!”

I walked around the edge until I came to a place where the foundation had given way, and the earth sloped down into the pit. I climbed down into the center, and Cheryl followed.

“It looks like it could almost be magical,” she said.

“Maybe it’s haunted or something.”

“Well, don’t go and make it all spooky,” she said. But it was spooky already; spooky in a fun sort of way, like the mummy cases in the museum, or a ghost town. There was a feeling to the place that made anything we could possibly do there seem very, very important. It would give our club meetings a hint of mystery.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Four-fifteen. They’ll be here in fifteen minutes.”

As I looked around, I began to see things you couldn’t see from up on the ledge. There were old green Coke bottles, and aluminum cans with the old-fashioned pull-off tabs that they stopped making years ago. There were designs on the cans that I didn’t even recognize. For all I knew they could have been here since the building came down. All around us were little bits of the past that no one had touched for years and years. It was magical—like that Stonehenge place in England, mysterious rocks with a hidden history.

“Let’s call this place Stonehenge,” I said to Cheryl.

“Great!” she said. “I like that.” She climbed back up to the edge and sat on a moss-covered cinder block at the lip of the pit. The edge of Stonehenge.

“I feel like . . . a witch,” she said.

“You look like one!” I said. She had stepped right into that one!

“Shut up! You know what I mean. It’s like we could conjure up ghosts here!”

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Four-twenty,” said Cheryl.

At first, I had felt funny talking to kids about this club; I was afraid they would laugh in my face—but no one did. Picking out the kids for the club became like a game. Cheryl and I would keep our eyes open, watching for kids in our exact situation; kids who were second-best, were miserable about it, and had to live under the shadow of some nasty “unbeatable” person, who rubbed their noses in it every day.