The Shadow Club

  "I don't know," he said. "That's what I want to find out."

  I stood up. It was very intimidating, the way Greene sat there staring at me, and it was so hard not to tell him everything he wanted to know. But if I did, I knew he would put two and two together. He would figure out about all the tricks we did—and worse, we would end up getting the blame for David's trumpet, and the other nasty tricks that we had nothing to do with. I couldn't tell him a thing. I began to pace around the room, looking at things: the books on his shelf, a diploma on the wall, a filing cabinet with a lock on it. This office made me nervous. I felt like I was in jail, getting the third degree.

  "Who told you about the club, anyway?" I asked, knowing full well who did.

  "It doesn't matter," he said.

  "It was Tyson McGaw, wasn't it?"

  Then Greene leaned forward and took off his glasses Without his glasses, his eyes seemed a lot smaller. "Leave Tyson out of this."

  "I'll bet it was him!"

  "Give Tyson a break," said Greene. "He's got enough problems without you making things worse, believe me."

  "What kind of problems?" I asked, sitting down again.

  Greene waited for a while, as if he was going to tell me something, but instead he said, "It doesn't matter." He thought for a moment, then said, "You know, Tyson thinks an awful lot of you."

  I looked away from Greene's small eyes. He looked funny without glasses. He looked more like a person, and less like a vice principal.

  "Why?" I asked.

  "I don't know. I guess because you're a good kid." Hesmiled. That made me feel a little uncomfortable. I don't know why. That cold feeling in my hands came back, along with that sick feeling I had at our last meeting at Stonehenge.

  "I barely even know him," I said.

  "Why don't you get to know him?"

  I shrugged. "I have my own friends. I have the track team. I don't have time for that."

  "I see." Mr. Greene nodded, and looked at me for a long time, as vice principals like to do, and then he asked, "Is the Shadow Club a gang, Jared?"

  I couldn't believe he actually thought that! I just sat there, dumbfounded.

  "You know, we've never had trouble with gangs here."

  "The Shadow Club isn't a gang!" I said.

  "How can I believe that?"

  "You have to believe it! It's just a bunch of good kids having a good time, that's all."

  "All by yourselves, without any adult supervision?"

  "Exactly."

  "I don't like the sound of that."

  By now that little room he called his office felt like a cage. I sunk deeper into the hard wood chair, figuring Greene would just keep picking on the club. He didn't. Instead he started talking about something else I didn't want to think about.

  "Aren't the District Olympics coming up, Jared?" he asked.

  "Yeah, in about a month." I squirmed in my seat, trying to get comfortable. There was no way to get comfortable in that chair.

  "I hear you could be running for our school," he said.

  "Me or Austin Pace. It depends on who has a faster time," I said through clenched teeth, because I knew Austin's time was still better than mine.

  Mr. Greene nodded. "You know, Jared, I'd hate to see you disqualified because you've done something stupid."

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  "I mean that if this 'club' of yours gets you into trouble, you could be suspended from the team."

  "Mr. Greene," I said, "our club has nothing to do with school—we don't even meet at school. Can't you just leave us alone?"

  "It's my job to make sure our kids don't get into trouble!"

  "C'mon, Mr. Greene, what kind of trouble could kids like us get into?"

  "Kids like who?"

  "Like me, and Cheryl, and Jason Perez, and O.P. Han, and . . ." I stopped as soon as I realized what I was doing. He'd tricked me! He'd tricked me into leaking out information about the club! If I said one word too many, I could have been signing the Shadow Club's death warrant.

  "Jason and O.P. are in this club?"

  I didn't say a word.

  Greene leaned back in his chair, and rocked a bit, like he had the whole world in the palms of his hands. Until that day, I sort of liked Mr. Greene; of course he never talked to me much, but he seemed like a nice guy. Now, sitting there at that desk, he seemed mean. He seemed nasty. He seemed like the one person who could destroy the Shadow Club just because we were having a good time. I suddenly realized that I hated Mr. Greene. I wished he had never been born.

  "I'll tell you what, Jared," he said, "you don't have to tell me anything else about your club. You've never gotten into trouble before, and your teachers always have good things to say about you, so I'll trust you . . . but there's one condition."

  "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.

  What Ralphy Said

  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'sroom. 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 arethe 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.

  "Tell me the truth," he asked. "Did you blow up Drew's fish tank? Tell me the truth, I won't tell anyone."

  Randall was speechless. He turned to Cheryl. "See? See, what did I tell you? Just because of what he did to me yesterday, everyone's gonna think that I blew up his tank! I'm being framed!" he yelled, then he turned to the kid. "No! I didn't do it, so just get out of here, all right?"

  "Yeah, I'll bet you didn't do it!" said the kid, and ran off.

  "You better keep your mouth shut, because I didn't!" yelled Randall, as the kid ran away. He turned to me and Cheryl. "You know I didn't, right? I was there with you all during lunch, you know I was."

  "I know, and you know, but who's going to believe us?" I said.

  "I see a pattern emerging," said Cheryl. "Have you noticed that these pranks have been pulled soon after the victim has done something really mean to a member of the Shadow Club?"

  "Huh?" said Randall.

  "Think about it, blimp brain," said Cheryl to her brother. "Eric Kilfoil's locker was filled with paint the day after Darren nearly got into a fight with him—Darren told me about that. David Berger's trumpet got run over the day after David was chosen to play for the high school band again, and he'd made Jason feel miserable about it. Tommy Nickols had just beat out O.P. for a place in the district science fair before the camera incident, and now Drew's fish tank explodes the day after he threw you out of the locker room naked!"

  "Then someone is definitely trying to frame us!"

  "Exactly," said Cheryl. "And if anyone finds out about the club, then we're going to be the prime suspects—we're the only ones with motives!"

  "We're already suspects," I said, "because someone already knows about the club." Cheryl and Randall turned to me with that end-of-the-world look in their eyes. "Greene knows. I don't think he knows what we've done, but he knows about the club, and I'm sure he suspects us." Until then, I hadn't told anyone.

  "How?" asked Cheryl.

  "Tyson told him. I'm sure of it."

  "Tyson!" said Randall, with a hiss in his voice that made him sound like a snake. "I told you he was behind all this."

  "It has to be!" said Cheryl.

  "I'll bet we could prove Tyson blew up the fish tank!" said Randall. "Fingerprints or something."

  And then another voice entered the conversation. "I saw Kim do it," said the voice. We all turned around, and standing there, braces, freckles, curly hair, and all, was Ralphy Sherman.

  "You're talking about the fish tank, right?" said Ralphy. "Well, I saw Tyson McGaw blow it up."

  We were all quiet. Ralphy blew a big fat bubble-gum bubble, and it popped in his face, sticking to his eyebrows. He peeled it off and popped it back into his mouth.

  "It's true," he said. "I was in the classroom. I saw."

  "How could you have been in the classroom? You would have been killed by the exploding tank," Cheryl said.

  "Well, not in the classroom, but looking in through the window. I saw Tyson do it. Honest."

  "But I saw you in the field when it went off, Ralphy," said Randall.

  "Darn right," said Ralphy. "I wasn't going to hang around if a blockbuster's about to go off. I left as quickly as I could."

  We all looked at Ralphy—Ralphy Sherman who couldn't pass a true-or-false exam because he didn't know the difference. Should we believe this? Ralphy blew another bubble, this one bigger than his whole head, and when it popped it stuck to his hair. He peeled it away and shoved the gum back into his mouth.

  "You know what?" I said. "I believe him!"

  "Me, too," said Cheryl.

  "So do I," said Randall.


  Ralphy's eyes lit up. "You do? Really, honestly, truly, you believe me?"

  "Yeah," I said.

  Ralphy smiled, and skipped off toward his bus, the happiest boy in the world.

  We didn't get a moment's rest that day, for only thirty seconds after Ralphy went skipping away, we turned to see a commotion at the school's front gate.

  "Hey," yelled Martin Bricker, to anyone who would listen. "Vera can't stop her bike, and she's headed toward Sellar Boulevard!"

  Cheryl, Randall, and I raced toward the front gate, but it was too late. As we looked down the street, we could see Vera flying down the hill, screaming at the top of her lungs.

  Of course, I thought to myself. What an idiot I was! Didn't Abbie have a big argument with Vera today? Didn't Vera call her a slob in front of half the grade, or something like that? Of course Vera would be the next victim, if Tyson were trying to frame the club.

  We watched in horror as she crossed through the first intersection on the way to Sellar Boulevard, which was down at the bottom of the hill. Luckily it was a small intersection, and no cars were there at the time. But Sellar Boulevard would be a different story; it was one of the busiest streets in town and I could see cars and buses racing across it.

  "She's gonna get herself killed!" yelled someone from the crowd, as we all watched Vera fly down the street. "Can't somebody stop her?" If she had half a brain she would have turned and smashed into a fence rather than race across Sellar Boulevard, but as anyone could tell you, Vera Donaldson did not have half a brain.

  In seconds she came up on Sellar Boulevard and went flying out into the middle of traffic. Car horns blared, a van swerved, a car screeched to a halt and was rear-ended.

  Vera sailed across the street, hit the curb, and went bouncing off of her bike, hitting her head on a fire hydrant, while the bike went crashing through Muggleson's Bakery window, laying the window to waste and demolishing a five- layer wedding cake on display.

  Everyone, including Cheryl and Randall, ran down the street to find out how Vera was, but I didn't. There was someone who I had to find, and I had to find him now.

  It didn't take long. He was standing by his locker in the main hallway.