The Shadow Club Rising (10 page)

He strode out, closing the door behind him, leaving me with my thoughts . . . but when I looked at his desk, I realized he had left me alone with
his
thoughts, too. There, on his desk, was my file. For an instant I fought the urge to look at what he had written about me, but in the end, I reached over and flipped open the file with one finger, tilting my head to look at it, afraid he'd notice if I moved it. Although his handwriting was hard to read, one phrase in his latest report leaped out at me like a nasty jack-in-the-box—"deeply troubled," it said, "with sociopathic tendencies."

My first instinct was to laugh. Me? Troubled? I thought. I might have been
in trouble
from time to time. I might have done some pretty stupid things now and then, but it always seemed to me that my troubles were no deeper than a wading pool. My family life was okay, my frustrations were typical, I guess. Troubled? That was absolutely ridiculous. When I rebounded from my laughter, it was the second phrase that hit me hard—
sociopathic.
I wasn't quite certain what the word meant, but I had my suspicions. I found a fat dictionary on Mr. Greene's shelves, and pulled it down to look up the word.

"Sociopath," it said; "a person who lacks conscience, or moral responsibility."

I felt as if someone had just punched me in the stomach. I could feel the air squeeze out of my lungs, and I gasped to breathe it back in. "There's a word for people like you," Brett Whatley had said. Had he been sneaking a peek at my file, too? I sat back down in the Electric Chair, slamming the dictionary closed. Then I closed my eyes and reached down into myself—really deep down—to prove to myself that Greene was wrong, and just because he wrote it, it didn't make it so, I didn't have to go very deep at all to find the conscience Greene thought was so lacking in me. It was alive and well, but it was totally hidden from his view.

What Greene was doing to me was like a witch trial, Hundreds of years ago they used to try witches in a water test. They believed witches were made out of wood, and since wood floats, obviously a witch would float, too. If the person sank and drowned in the well, then obviously that person wasn't a witch. I felt myself sinking into the bottom of that well now—my life and everything I cared about slipping away. I wasn't about to let that happen. I was stronger than that—stronger than Greene—and it dawned on me exactly what I had to do.

Mr. Greene's supposed evidence of my crimes sat in a little plastic bag clipped to my file. The blue shirt button. I slipped it out of the bag and put it in my shirt pocket, then realized that it was easily found there. So, instead, I put it on my tongue and swallowed it. I could feel it going all the way down. The tips of my fingers and toes became numb, as if I had swallowed some pill instead of a button. Then I sat back down in the Electric Chair, just as Mr. Greene came back into the room and took his place across from me. I forced myself to stare him straight in the eye, unwavering, pretending to be in total control of myself, of the situation, and of him.

"I'm ready to listen, if you're ready to talk," he said.

"I have nothing to say to you." I forced a rudeness into my voice that I had never showed anyone before—much less an adult.

Greene was ready for this, as if he had been expecting it all along.

"How much longer do you think you can keep up the lies, Jared? It's only a matter of time before the truth surfaces. We already have your button and—"

"What button?"

He glanced down at the file, and the smug look on his face dissolved.

"All right, give it back."

Although I was feeling queasy—not from the button, but from the course I was choosing—I forced myself to grin.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said very slowly, pretending to be in control, keeping my eyes locked onto his. I don't know, but maybe my own lurking discomfort coupled with that icy stare appeared suitably sociopathic to him, because he changed. He seemed a little bit smaller, and maybe even frightened.

"What are you trying to pull?" he asked.

But I kept that grin painted across my face, and suddenlyI realized that I was no longer
pretending
to be in control of the situation. I was.

"Maybe I did all of those things to Alec," I told Greene, "But you'll never prove it . . . because I'm too smart for you." Then I stood up, and strutted out of his office without looking back. If this was a witch trial, then I was not going to drown with a whimper, I would float in defiance. I would be the witch.

Shaditude

PLAYING THE BAD kid is hard work when it doesn't come naturally, but I was a quick study, and I was motivated. Tyson helped some. He was never really a bad kid himself—he was just kind of creepy—but he did understand what it took far better than I did. He treated it like a joke as he taught me the ins and outs of being unwholesome.

"This is the way you slouch in your chair," he said as we sat at the kitchen table. "You lean way far back from your desk."

I tried it.

"No," he said. "You're still too close. Your hands can still reach your schoolwork. You gotta slouch far enough away— maybe even tip your chair back a little bit—so that there is no way you can get to anything on your desk without major effort."

"Oh, I get it. It's kind of like your textbooks are repelling you."

"Exactly." He walked across the room and watched meagain. "Okay, the slouch is good. Now pretend I'm the teacher. What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to stare at you," I said. "Like I can see through you."

Tyson shook his head. Wrong answer.

"Naah. That might have worked for Greene, because he was trying to see through you first. With a teacher you want to look away."

So I tried looking away.

"No, not out of the window—then it seems like you're just daydreaming. You can't look down either. You have to pick a blank spot on the wall and look at it, so that it's very clear you're not looking at anything. Everyone has to know that you're doing it on purpose."

I took a deep breath and sighed. "Is all this really necessary?"

"Hey, you're the one who wants to look bad."

I went out before dark and bought some new clothes. "Bad" clothes. Shirts and pants that had the ragged and rude look of defiance. When I got home, I modeled them for Tyson. That's when he started to get worried.

"What's the matter?" I asked. "Did I get the wrong clothes?"

"No," Tyson answered. "It's just that . . . I don't know . . . You don't look like yourself, Jared."

I turned to look at the mirror on Tyson's closet door. He was right. I looked like my own evil twin.

"Well, this is how I look now."

He shifted his shoulders uncomfortably. "Why do you want to do this?" he asked.

But I didn't tell him. I had my reasons, but right now I couldn't share them with anyone.

When I left Tyson's room, I ran into my mom in the hallway. Mom, always to the point said, "I don't like when you dress that way, Jared."

I wasn't surprised that she didn't like it. What surprised me was the way she said it—like I had dressed this way before.

"It's what everyone's wearing."

"You're not everyone," she said, then added, "you want to dress like that, you wash those clothes yourself. I won't do it."

I wore the clothes to school the next day, and the effect was instantaneous. I got double takes from everyone in the hallway—kids and teachers alike. I raised eyebrows in every class as I slouched and looked off toward nothing, wearing my attitude like a heavy cologne that filled the air around me.

Shaditude, I called it—the attitude everyone thought the leader of the Shadow Club would have.

It really infuriated Greene—and as much as that scared me, there was some satisfaction in it as well. Suddenly
he
was the paranoid one instead of me. During passing that first day, Jodi Lattimer tried to give me some notes that I had missed while receiving Greene's third degree. Greene seemed to appear out of nowhere, staring at Jodi, like we were doing something illegal. "What's this all about?" he snapped. We both looked at him as if he was from Mars.

"Tell me about that hat, Miss Lattimer."

Jodi was wearing her denim baseball cap—this time it was forward instead of backward. On the front in bright orange were the letters "TSC."

"What's to tell?" she said calmly. "My father belongs to the Tennis and Squash Center. We have a bunch of them."

It took me a second to realize what Greene was thinking, That "TSC" could also stand for The Shadow Club.

"Are you going to expel her because of the hat?" I asked.

He threw me a gaze meant to chill me. I knew he had scheduled me a parent conference for the end of the week. He was making all these noises about suspension and expulsion, and yeah, it bothered me—an expulsion followed you wherever you went—but Greene's X-ray gaze didn't intimidate me anymore, because I knew it wasn't going to see through anything.

There must be some fourth law of thermodynamics. Along with the law of conservation of energy, there must be some kind of conservation of oddity, keeping the world in balance. It only figured that as I began to resemble a mother's worst nightmare, someone else's act began to clean up.

I came home from school during that first week of theShaditude to find some strange kid rummaging through my refrigerator for food. One of Tyson's friends, I figured, which was bizarre, because Tyson never brought home friends. I didn't know he had any. I was about to ask if I could help him find something, then I remembered my Shaditude, and said, "You take something, you pay for it, dude."

The kid turned around to reveal a familiar face in an entirely unfamiliar package.

"Hi, Jared."

It wasn't a friend of Tyson's at all. It was Tyson himself. His hair, which had always been long and stringy, was cut short, with a smooth line along the back of his neck. He had even shaved those goat hairs on his neck that might someday become a beard.

"Uh . . . nice 'do," I said, still reeling from the sight. What's the word for something that's a total logical inconsistency? An oxymoron. Yeah, that's what Tyson was. "Tyson McGaw" and "clean cut" did not go together in the same sentence without causing a major short circuit—like the one I had now as I gaped at him. Actually, oxy-moron was a better description of me at that moment—a
moron
whose brain wasn't getting enough oxygen.

"You like it?" he asked, running his hand through what was left of his hair.

"Yeah, sure," I said, still wading through recovery. "It'll blow everyone away."

"Well," he said, "I figured if you could be your own evil twin, I could be my own un-psycho twin." He grabbed his jacket and headed for the door.

"You're off in a hurry," I said, and laughed. "What, have you got a date or something?" I meant it as a joke, but Tyson wasn't laughing.

"As a matter of fact, I do."

Right about now, the signpost up ahead was beginning toread "The Twilight Zone," but I couldn't exactly say why Yes,
you can say why,
my get-real voice told me.
It's because
Tyson
is Tyson and the earth spins out of orbit if he suddenly has friends and short hair and a girlfriend and—

"Who's the lucky girl?"

"Jodi Lattimer."

"No way."

"Yeah—we're going out to Dairy Queen for some ice cream, and just to hang out, y'know."

"That's not exactly a date," I informed him, even though I knew it technically was.

He shrugged. "Call it whatever you want."

Then I noticed something else about him. He was wearing one of my shirts.

"Who gave you permission to put that on?" This time it wasn't Shaditude—it was all me.

"Well, you're not wearing your old stuff anymore."

"It doesn't fit you anyway, it just hangs on you on account of you don't have any pecs."

Tyson took it as an insult, which I suppose it was. "I got pecs!" he said, pushing out his chest. "I've been working out—I've got pecs up the wazoo!"

The fact that, yes, my shirt actually
did
fit him wasn't really the point. I wasn't exactly sure what the point was, only that I was truly annoyed.

Then something struck me, and suddenly Tyson looked all different to me again.

"How long have you been wearing my shirts?"

He shrugged. "I tried one on yester—" And his face changed again, like he was a regular chameleon, the minute he realized why I was asking. He thought for a moment, his face going granite hard, his lips pursing into a tight little hole in his face. "Well, of course, there was the time last week when I wore your shirt and popped a button on Alec Smartz's driveway. Nobody knew but me and the skunk."

Sometimes—not often, but sometimes my brain turns into Play-Doh, and I find my mouth opening and closing as I try to squeeze an intelligent thought through the doh-matic press.

"Duh . . . Are you serious? You're not serious, right? Are you kidding? Was that a confession? You're kidding, right?"

Tyson shook his head. "If you have to ask, then you don't deserve an answer."

And he left, leaving me on the doorstep to press my Play-Doh.

By the next day I had reached the inevitable conclusion that Tyson was just being Tyson, and probably had nothing to do with the button. At first I wondered how he even knew about it, but by now everyone knew about that button. Still some residual suspicion remained, like the smell of bug spray in the summer. One minute I was suspicious of him, and the next I felt all guilty about feeling that way.

Between classes, I found Jodi Lattimer at her locker. I approached her as though I was just making friendly conversation, but I had a reason for looking for her. Two reasons, actually.

"Hi, Jodi," I said.

"Hi, Jared."

"So . . . I hear you and Tyson went to the Dairy Queen."