"I nominate Cheryl Gannett," he said.
"I second that," shouted someone else.
"I accept," said Cheryl as if there would be any doubt.
I observed as the nominations went around the auditorium. In all there were about a dozen, but when push came to shove, few of them were seconded, and so those kids names never made the list. In the end it was Cheryl, Tommy Nickols, who was expected to be the school's valedictorian, and Katrina Mendelson, who had been trying to get elected since fourth grade. As the principal called for final nominations, one more hand went up. The hand belonged to Calvin Horner—a snivelly kid with a bit of a speech impediment and teeth almost as yellow as his hair. I wondered what on earth would possess him to stand up and speak in front of a crowd when it was always such a chore for him to answer a simple question in class.
"I would like to nominate Alec Smartz for class president," Calvin said.
There were more seconds than I could count, followed by a low afterburn of grumbles from those who were not pleased. I turned to see Alec shrug innocently at a gaping Cheryl as he said loudly, "I guess I accept."
That's when I saw Calvin Horner give a little nod to Alec, making it very clear that this was not a spontaneous act.
On Monday I came to school with a shoe box under my arm and approached Cheryl at her locker. Holding it like a waiter with a tray, I pulled off the lid.
"Canvas or leather," I said. "Your choice."
Inside, of course, were one of my dress shoes and a sneaker so grungy it could be considered hazardous waste.
"Oh, shut up."
I had to admit I felt bad for her, and guilty for having rubbed her nose in it. I shoved the shoe box under my arm.
"Sorry," I said. "I mean . . . I'm sorry Alec wasn't really behind you. It would have been great if you could have worked together."
"Actually," said Cheryl, "things will still work out. Chances are that one of us will win, and the other will take second place, which means we'd be each other's vice president."
"I don't think so," I said. "Two possibilities—assuming Katrina or Tommy don't pull it out—either (A) he'll win and you'll be his vice president; or (B) you'll win, and he will melt like the Wicked Witch of the West."
"Well, now you're just being nasty."
"No, I'm serious. Alec is not a vice presidential kind of guy. He might say so now, but that's just because he doesn't believe it will ever happen."
She slammed her locker, incredibly angry about how sure I was, and maybe a bit bothered by the knowledge that I was right. "That's your opinion," she said, "and if I didn't want your vote, I would tell you exactly where you could put that opinion."
There was a commotion farther down the hall. I didn't take much note of it until we both heard the name AlecSmartz mumbled more than once. We went over to find out what was going on.
"Did you hear what happened to Alec?" said a kid who was anxious to tell anyone who would listen.
"What?" asked Cheryl apprehensively.
"He got skunked," the kid said. "Him and his whole family."
Cheryl's first reaction was relief that it hadn't been anything really bad, but that relief was quickly overshadowed by suspicion. "Wait a second . . . skunks aren't out this time ofyear—"
"Maybe he went poking in a hole where it was hibernating, or something," I suggested.
"Nope," said the kid, "it happened in their van. They got in it this morning, the skunk popped out from under a seat, and the rest is history."
Suddenly I got that same sense of looming doom I felt when I first heard about the hair ball in his soda. Unless skunks had acquired the ability to teleport, it was clear that it had been intentionally slipped into the Smartzes' family van.
Alec didn't show up for school that day, but he was there the next day. Although he tried to act as if nothing was wrong, that burned-rubbery smell of skunk surrounded him like killer BO, no matter how many demusking baths he took. And as for that minivan, it couldn't have been more totaled if it had fallen off a cliff.
Although Alec didn't accuse me to my face, the accusation was there all the same. It was in the way he looked at me—or refused to look at me. The second day after the skunking he came up to me as we were leaving English class, one of the few classes we had together. He didn't just bump into me—he made a point of coming up to me, and, although he hadn't said a word to me in two days, he looked at me, grinning in a way that I couldn't quite read, and said, "Nice shirt."
I figured he was just trying to bother me, you know, the way you say "nice socks" to someone whose socks are perfectly fine, making him wonder for the rest of the day what the heck is wrong with his socks. I just stored it away in my brain.
The weird thing Alec said wasn't the only thing bothering me. In fact, he didn't bother me as much as the looks I got from other kids—suspicious glances that were more obvious than ever before.
As I pulled books from my locker the next day, someone behind me said, "Good one, Jared!"
I spun on my heel, but when I looked at the kids around me, I couldn't tell who it had been. It could have been any of them. All of them. A hallway full of faces convinced that the Shadow Club and I had been responsible for the skunk as well as the hair ball.
That afternoon I slipped messages into six different lockers—messages that called the Shadow Club back from the dead.
The
Ghosties
SOME PLACES, LIKE some people, age well, and others don't. They fall into disrepair and disrespect. That's how it was with the old marina. The old marina was on the north end of town, about a mile past the lighthouse ruin. The place wasn't exactly a picture postcard. The water was slick with a perpetual oily scum, and speckled with bits of trash. The wooden piles that held up the fishing pier had been eaten away, making the pier a use-at-your-own-risk kind of place. Of course, there were still die-hard fishermen—old-timers mostly—who set out from the marina every morning before dawn, but otherwise the place was a desolate relic of another time.
At the far bank of the inlet sat the half-submerged skeleton of a ferry that had been washed up during a storm, ten years back. On the south side of the inlet was a seawall made of eroding concrete, dripping rust from the reinforcing iron bars that now lay exposed to the sea. Just above that seawall, overlooking the marina, was the Ghosties.
The Ghosties was a graveyard of sorts—a boatyard of thedamned. Fishing boats, sailboats, cabin cruisers, you name it, they eventually found their way up to the Ghosties. Of course, few people would admit that when they towed their boat there, they were bringing their vessel to its eternal rest. The boats were brought here for repairs, or for storage. They sat in rusted trailers with flat tires, or cradled in scaffolding, waiting for their owners to return. But those owners would die of old age, or move on to other hobbies, leaving the forlorn boats to haunt the Ghosties, tortured by a beautiful view of the ocean that they would never set keel in again.
The sight of the old boats had always impressed me. They looked so much larger on dry land than in the sea— vessels that seemed so natural when bobbing with the tide, and so awkward and alien when dragged up on dry land.
The Ghosties had always been a great place for hide- and-seek when I was younger. Kids used to play it all the time here, until some kid fell off the seawall and drowned. After that the Ghosties had been fenced off . . . but when you live near the ocean, it doesn't take long for the salt air to rust through a chain-link fence.
"So what do you think?" Tyson asked as we meandered through the maze of abandoned boats.
"It'll do," I told him.
It had been his idea to meet here rather than at the Shadow Club's old meeting place—that old foundation in the woods we had called "Stonehenge." Too many bad memories there—and besides, if people were starting to suspect us, that would be the first place they'd look. This secret meeting required a new secret place.
"This way," said Tyson, leading me between the peeling hulls, until we came to the remain
s of a tugboat left to rot within a steel cradle barely large enough to hold it. It was clearly the largest boat in the Ghosties, and it sat there like a monument, just by the edge of the seawall, overlooking the ocean.
A swell smashed against the seawall some ten feet below, sending salt spray across the old boat's hull. "Someone bought it for salvage, I think," Tyson said. "They gutted it and left its shell up here."
On its lower hull was a hole about two feet wide. No doubt this tug had an interesting story to tell, but I suspected it never would.
"I used to come here when things got real bad," Tyson said, poking his head up through the hole in the hull. "Great place to go when you don't want to be found. Have a look."
I leaned into the hole in the hull. The space smelled of mildew and diesel fuel, but I couldn't see a thing.
Then I heard the far-off rattle of the rusty fence, which meant either our meeting was about to begin, or we were being chased away. I hurried off toward the sound, but found myself lost in the maze of boats. It was Jason Perez who found me, rather than the other way around.
"Hey," he said. I turned around to see him keeping his distance. "So, like, where are the others?"
"You're the first."
"Oh." He didn't seem to like the idea of being first. "I hope you know, I ditched band practice for this." He took a few steps closer, and so did I, hoping the discomfort between us would fade with each step. It didn't. "Are you sure the others are coming?"
"No."
"Well, if they don't show," he said, "I'm bailing. I don't even know why I came in the first place."
"I'm glad you did." I reached out my hand to him, and he looked at it for a long moment. Finally he accepted it, shaking halfheartedly, but then he tensed as he saw someone over my shoulder. I turned to see Tyson coming up behind us.
"It's okay," I told Jason. "I invited him."
"Oh . . . uh . . . nice to see you, Tyson."
"Yeah, yeah." said Tyson. I guess you couldn't expect any more from the two of them. I mean, the last time they were this close to each other, Jason and the others were trying to drown him with their bare hands.
"So . . . like, you're a member of the club now, Tyson?" Jason asked.
"No . . . I'm kind of an independent observer."
"There is no club!" said a voice behind us. We turned to see Darren Collins coming out from behind a broken catamaran. "The Shadow Club doesn't exist, and I'm guessing we're here to make sure of it."
"You guessed right," I told him. I have to admit I was surprised he had come at all. Of all the members of the club, he was the one who had pulled the farthest away from the rest of us. He wouldn't talk to us, wouldn't acknowledge us in class. It wasn't so much a cold shoulder, as a "no shoulder." It was as if the only way he could get past it was simply to cut the Shadow Club out of his life. He played basketball the same way—blocking out everything but his teammates, the ball, and the basket. That's what made him so good.
Abbie showed up next, looking as beautiful as ever, dressed one week ahead of the fashions. "OK," she said, "I'm dying to find out what possible reason you have for getting us all together."
Karin "O. P." Han showed up with Randall. She didn't say much, but as with the others, her eyes darted to Tyson, and looked away, ashamed.
"My sister chickened out," Randall said. "Cheryl's not coming."
"Big surprise," said Darren.
"Too bad," I said, trying to hide how disappointed I really felt. "But we can do this without her."
"Do what?" asked Abbie.
"Duh," said Randall, his same old obnoxious self, "figure out which one of us is pranking on Alec Smartz."
Everyone glanced at one another with the same suspicion that the other kids in school heaped on us.
"What makes you so sure it was one of us?" I asked him.
He looked at the others, one by one, and then his thoughts seemed to turn in on himself. "I don't know," he said. "I just figured . . ."
And that was half the problem right there. If even the members of the Shadow Club believed it was one of our own, how would we ever gain one another's trust again?
Tyson and I led them up to the old tugboat and through the hole in the hull. When our eyes had adjusted to the light spilling in from the hole below, and the dozens of little separations in the old boat's wooden planks, we found ourselves in a strange and very private world. The empty shell of the tugboat's keel was like an upside-down attic. Although the space was about thirty feet long, and seven feet high, it still felt claustrophobic. I didn't like it. Rats hide in forgotten places like this, I thought. And I'm not a rat. The fact that we had to hide at all made me regret having even called them together. I mean, was Alec Smartz really worth all this trouble? And if my heart really was in the right place, then why was my spirit confined to the moldering shell of an abandoned boat?
"We didn't do anything to Alec Smartz," I said, once everyone was up inside our new meeting place. I didn't ask them, I told them. If there was one thing in this world thatI knew, it was that all of us—even Randall—had come through the ordeal better than when we started. None of us would pull that sort of mean-spirited prank on anyone ever again. Although it was dim in the shell of the old boat, I could see enough of their faces to know I was right.
"So, like, we're supposed to prove our innocence before the whole world blames us, right?" said Jason.
"It's not about proving our innocence," I told him. "It's about stopping the pranks."
"How are we supposed to stop the pranks if we don't know who's pulling them?" asked Darren.
"We do some detective work," I said. "We find out."
"Why should we care a rat's butt about Alec Smartz, anyway?" asked Randall.
"Because we started it. None of this would be happening if we didn't start the pranks last fall."
"Statistics show," said O. P, "that the most notorious of criminals often have copycats—and sometimes those copycats are worse than the ones they're copying."
"Oh, come on," said Abbie, tossing back her hair, "we're not exactly serial killers."
"No," said Tyson, "but you came pretty close to killing me."
Tyson had been so quiet, sitting all the way up toward the bow, that we had almost forgotten he was there. It sobered us up a little bit.
"We set the pattern," I told them. "We were the ones who put the idea in people's heads, and now they're picking up where we left off. I don't know who it is, but I do know that the pranks are going to get worse and worse, just like they did the first time. When we formed the Shadow Club, it's like we let something loose in this town that didn't die when we burned the charter."
"You mean like a demon or something?" asked Randall.
"Now you're getting me all spooked," said Jason with a nervous chuckle.
"Call it what you want," I told them. "A demon—or just a bad idea—but either way it's not going away until we find a way to shoot it with a silver bullet."
"I thought that was for a werewolf," said Jason.
"Get a clue," said Abbie.
I let the thought sit with them for a few long moments. The wind blew across the hole in the hull, like someone breathing across the mouth of a bottle, and the whole tugboat began to resonate with a faint deep moan.
That's when Darren said, "I'm outta here." He stood up, balancing himself on the slanted floor beneath him. "I've got better things to do than start dreaming up problems that don't exist."
I was too stunned to say a thing.
Abbie stood up next. "I mean, really, Jared, you've got yourself all worked up into a panic for no reason."
"What a waste of an afternoon," said Randall.
"Wait a second," I said, just beginning to see how totally I had misread them. "Don't you care at all about what's happening?"
Jason shrugged. "People were pulling pranks long beforethe Shadow Club existed," he said. "Just because they're doing it now doesn't mean we, like, inspired them or something. It probably has nothing to do with
us."
"Yeah," agreed Abbie. "Alec Smartz has made as many enemies as he has made friends."
I looked to O. P., who had seemed to be more on my side than any of the others, but now she looked away. "I think maybe you're being too paranoid, Jared."
I stood there watching them leave, not sure what to say that could convince them they were wrong. That, yeah, maybe I was paranoid, but sometimes that cleared your vision more than it clouded it.
"The Shadow Club's dead," said Darren. "Let it stay that way." Then he slipped out through the hull, leaving Tyson and me alone. Tyson didn't move from his little perch way up at the bow. He must have sat in that spot when he used to come here by himself.
"That went well," he said.
"Oh, shut up."
I thought the meeting was over, but when Tyson and I slipped out through the hole, we were met by an unexpected guest.
"I could have told you they wouldn't go for it," saidCheryl. I turned to see her standing just a few yards away. I wondered whether she had been there all along, listening, or if she had just arrived in time to see everyone else desert.
"Easy for you to say, now that they've all gone." I was a bit angry that she hadn't done anything to help, but also grateful that she decided to come after all.
"They've got nothing to gain by helping you find the new prankster. The further away from it they stay, the better for them."
"That's what they think, but they're wrong. It's going to come back in their faces, the way it's come back in mine."
A wave broke on the seawall below us and sent up a burst of foam that soaked Tyson.
"Oh, man . . . " Tyson used it as an excuse to leave, but I knew he felt uncomfortable being there—a kind of third wheel between Cheryl and me. When Tyson was gone, she took a step closer.
"Alec thinks there ought to be a new club—one that will cancel out the Shadow Club."