The Shadow Club Rising (5 page)

"Yeah," I told her. "Yeah, I am, a little . . . but that's not what this is about."

And then, to my amazement, she said something that no one had said to me for a long time.

"I believe you."

I should have shut my mouth then—quit while I was ahead—but of course I didn't.

"Actually, I kinda like Alec," I said. "I mean, he's an okay guy, once you get past his perfection problem."

She looked at me sideways, and that one look told me I was done for.

"Just what do you mean by that?"

"Well, just . . . um . . . that he's weird about being good at everything."

"There is nothing wrong with aiming high."

"There is when you're hunting ducks with a bazooka." By now I was so far into it there was no sense pulling back. "I mean, overkill must be the guy's middle name. It's like he would die if someone else got to be the center of attention."

She crossed her arms in her prosecutor posture.

"If he's so totally into himself," she said, far too calmly, "then why is he helping me run for class president?"

I stumbled over my own thoughts for a moment, wondering when she had decided to run, and why I didn't know about it. There was a time when I would have been first to know.

"That's great," I said. "I'm glad he'll be helping your campaign." And then I added, "Prove me wrong about him— and I'll eat my shoe."

"You're on," she said, shaking my hand. "Only I get to pick which one—I want to make sure it's nice and grungy."

She turned and strode off to class, but I couldn't let her go—not yet, because there was something I had to tell her— something I had been thinking about since the moment I heard about the hair ball.

"I've been thinking of reconvening the Shadow Club."

My words stopped her dead in her tracks, but she didn't turn around. She just stood there for a few seconds, her back still turned.

"I thought maybe we could all get together and stop things from happening to Alec," I told her.

"You won't need to stop it, because nothing else will happen," she said, and continued on to class.

The administrators of our school district haven't quite come to grips with the twenty-first century, or even the twentieth, for that matter. Our desks are the same shellacked, pen- carved relics they used fifty years ago. There are still holes for inkwells in the corner. We're not required to wear uniforms, but every Friday we still have to dress up for assembly. We also have that rare animal called a "junior high school"—seventh, eighth, and ninth grades all together, leaving only three grades for our senior high school. If it were up to our district superintendent I'm sure we would all be in little red schoolhouses that dotted the coastline.

I really didn't mind the junior high school thing. I mean, sure, I wanted to be in high school, but there was something to be said about never having a freshman year. Our town has only one junior high and one senior high—massive buildings across town from each other—built in the days when schools were giant institutions like prisons, which meant that few things would change when I made the move from ninth grade to tenth grade, other than the length of my run every morning. Same basic kids, same basic attitudes—and what you sowed in kindergarten, you were still reaping in twelfth grade.

Since the senior high had only one feeding school, it had been decided some years ago that during the winter lull after Christmas vacation and before the standardized tests, elections would be held for next year's class president. Whoever won the honor in ninth grade would walk right into senior high, master of tenth grade.

Nominations came during the next Friday's assembly. The assembly featured a former state representative who was so old we were afraid he would expire before his parking meter outside. Following him were our official presidential nominations. It was common knowledge by now that Cheryl planned to run. She had weathered the storm of the Shadow Club far better than I had. Rather than earning her the label of "questionable kid," as it did for me, her involvement left an aura of awe around her. It was just the kind of quality that could get a person elected, and she knew it. Of course you couldn't nominate yourself, and so when the call came for nominations I quickly raised my hand to nominate her. Turns out I didn't need to. Alec held his hand high right next to her. He drew the principal's attention as he always drew everyone's attention. He was called on first.

"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 remains 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?"