The Shadow Club Rising (14 page)

"That was one heck of an act," Mr. Greene said. "You had me believing it."

"So what happens now?" asked Darren. "Now that we are EXPELLED." He laughed at the word.

"We wait," I told them.

"For what?" asked Jason.

"For someone to crack—right, Mr. Greene?"

Mr. Greene nodded. "The person who did this will crack one way or another. Either by cracking under the guilt at having gotten you all expelled or by bragging to friends, frustrated that you got all the credit."

I took off my TSC hat and looked at it, laughing.

"These things sure came in handy, didn't they?"

"Yeah," said Abbie. "Good thing for the Tennis and Squash Center."

And that's when Principal Diller stuck a pin in our swelled little balloon of a plan.

"What Tennis and Squash Center?" he asked.

"You know,
the
Tennis and Squash Center."

Principal Diller laughed. "I play squash—there's no Tennis and Squash Center in town. We've been trying to get one for years, but the nearest courts are twenty miles away."

The room fell silent, and I felt the way Alec must have felt when he peered into that cup and saw the hair ball. "Then . . . what does TSC stand for?" I kept looking at my hat, like it might answer me, then it finally began to dawn on me how wrong we'd been—all of us—about so many things. "Oh no . . ."

"How many of these hats have you seen around school ?" Greene asked.

"I don't know," said Cheryl. "Ten . . . maybe twenty . . . maybe more."

And for one absurd little instant, a cartoon image of Mickey Mouse came to me. I saw him hacking apart an enchanted broom, only to find that when he wasn't looking, each splinter had grown arms and a will of its own. But instead of buckets in their hands, each of ours wore a hat on its head with the unmistakable insignia of "The Shadow Club."

Weekend
Warriors

WHEN A STORM system is about to move through town, you can usually tell it's coming. The wind picks up, and the ocean starts churning. A storm came to town that long Presidents' Day weekend, but it didn't come by way of land or sea. It came by foot.

It began with Solerno's. Patrons sat there at lunchtime on Saturday, hoping against hope that their pizza might have a little less salt and garlic, when someone found something crunchy underneath the cheese. The story, which rumbled through town like thunder, hit me after who knows how many ears. Cheryl told me about it. "It wasn't exactly a sausage in the pizza," she said, "but you can say it was full of protein."

It was, in fact, a cockroach. Industrial-sized. As the story goes, Solerno then opened his storeroom to find everything from the flour to the Parmesan cheese infested with hundreds upon hundreds of roaches. It was too late to stop some of them from being baked into the pizza and lasagna. AlthoughI can't be sure, I had a sneaking suspicion that one or more of his various part-time pizza makers wore a TSC hat.

I know tales get exaggerated in the telling, but I believe the part about Old Man Solerno bursting into tears, and swearing he'd never open his doors again.

Victim number two: Mrs. Hilda McBroom. More commonly known, even to our parents, as Broom Hilda, the Witch Widowed since before I was born, it seemed her one remaining goal in life was to keep kids from getting anywhere near her beautiful rose garden. In the spring and summer, that garden was beautiful indeed. Her yard was full of trellises that sprouted roses in every color of the spectrum. She had recently cut them back in preparation for the growing season, but on this particular Sunday, she awoke to find that her rosebushes had been cut back a bit further. Like all the way to the roots. Every single rosebush had been beheaded like Marie Antoinette, never again to sprout another rose. Rumor was that she just stood outside in the middle of the thorny debris for an hour, until a neighbor led her back into her house.

Victim number three: Garson Underwood, a computer programmer who seemed to have been targeted for no other reason than the fact that he was amazingly fat. Me, I never had a problem with fat people unless they sat next to me on an airplane—but then, it's not their fault that airplane seats are too small—and it's not Garson's fault that his own body decided to be his enemy, refusing to burn off his fat. I knew he tried to slim down, because I often saw him running desperately. Anyway, Garson emerged from his house that Sunday morning to find his car had been spammed. I mean completely—there had to have been a dozen industrial-sized cans of Spam spread over every inch of his brand-new Caddy—but that was only the icing on the cake. After he cleaned off the Spam, and he tried to start the engine, it kept coughing and dying. What he didn't know was that the gas tank had been filled to the brim with molten Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey ice cream, the radiator was loaded with Mountain Dew, and several pounds of butter had been spread over the engine block.

After several attempts to start the engine, the spark plugs set the butter on fire, the car was soon engulfed in flames, and Mr. Underwood could do nothing but watch from the sidewalk as his new Cadillac went up in flames.

Victim number four: Ms. Regina Pfeiffer, children's librarian at our public library. She had become a friend of mine a few years back when she taught me, much to my surprise, that there were tons of books I'd actually enjoy—even ones by dead writers. The attack on her began with a broken window in the library on Saturday night. In the morning the police found that almost all the books were gone from the kids' section. The only one left, right on a middle shelf, was
The Chocolate War,
which made sickeningly perfect sense, since the rest of the library was doused in Hershey's syrup. As forall the other books, they came washing up on the beach that day, the way jellyfish did in the summer.

More tales drifted in all weekend long, and what made itmore frightening was that these stories all made the rounds by Sunday afternoon, which meant the culprits were actually bragging about what they had done. They couldn't wait for the stories to work their way down the grapevine.

Cheryl and I tried to track down the originators of the stories, knowing that the first person to tell the tale was probably involved in the crime, but by now everyone was suspect. Everyone
except
the original members of the Shadow Club.

We had gathered at Cheryl's house, and each member of the club was assigned the task of tracking down the person who had given them their TSC hat.

"What do we do when we find them?" O. P. asked. "Make a citizen's arrest?"

Jason chuckled nervously. "You want me to try to arrest Arliss Booth? He's not called the 'Pile Driver' for nothing. Even the football team's afraid of him."

"Besides, it's not like we have any proof," Abbie said.

"All we need is one confession," I told them.

"Yeah, right," said Randall. "They're just gonna swing open their door and spill their guts to us."

"Maybe so. Somebody's got to be feeling guilty."

"Don't be so sure," said Darren. "The more kids involved, the less guilty each one feels. We all know about that, don't we?"

Yes, we did know, and it made the situation that much graver. They left, leaving Cheryl and me alone.

"Do you remember who else was wearing those hats?" Cheryl asked.

I shook my head. I remembered the hats, but not a single face beneath them. "I'd better just start with Jodi."

"Do you know where she lives?"

"No, but I can find out."

Cheryl paused for a second. "Maybe you should ask Tyson. He'll know."

"I don't like the idea of bringing this up to Tyson. He'll think I'm accusing him."

"What if he's involved?"

"No—he's not violent like that."

"You don't call setting fires violent?"

"Yeah, but it was always a reaction to something someone else had done to him. It's like he's allergic to abuse from other kids and has a violent reaction to it. He wouldn't just go out and trash people's lives."

"But his girlfriend would."

"So did mine." It came out before I had the chance to hold back. Cheryl reeled as if I had slugged her in the face. "I'm sorry I said that."

"No," she said. "Never be sorry for telling the truth."

The next few moments were awkward and uncertain. Cheryl and I had never discussed Austin's broken ankle and the rocks she had spread out in the field. Although she made a full confession, I was the one who took the brunt of the blame. I didn't realize how much I had resented that, until now.

"I'm sorry about what happened to Austin," she said. "I still can't believe I could do something so horrible."

I took her hand and gently squeezed it. "You're not doing anything horrible now. But there are others who are."

She nodded, then she slipped her hand out from mine, and we got back to work.

"Did you hear about what happened down at the Gazilliaplex?" Jodi asked me when she answered her door not half an hour later. The Gazilliaplex was our local movie theater. It claimed the capacity to show more movies than were actually in release on any given day, but they usually just showed four or five movies on a gazillion different screens.

"When they opened today," she continued, "they found cows in the projection rooms chewing up the film and smashing all the equipment. Weird, huh?" Well, maybe not so weird, considering the fact that the owner of the Gazilliaplex was hated by kids because he ejected anyone who got caught trying to theater-surf and was fond of calling the people waiting in line "cattle."

"Tell me, Jodi, how could you know what happened when the theater only opened fifteen minutes ago?"

"Well, I just heard."

I paced a little bit on her porch, a bit unnerved by howcalm she was.

"So why are you here?" she asked. "It's not like you can ask me to the movies now." She giggled. "Not unless they're showing
Steer
Wars
."

I turned to her sharply. "I want names," I demanded. "I want to know who it is—every last one of them, and how many there are."

She twisted her lip in a disgusted snarl. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Yeah, sure you don't. You're just as innocent as can be."

"You're acting too weird, Jared." The honesty in her expression was the most unnerving thing of all. How could she lie and lie and still not show it in her eyes? As for me, I couldn't imagine what my eyes must have been like by now.

"You're involved, and we both know it."

"I'm not involved in anything. I was at a sleepover with my friends last night."

"Swear it," I blurted.

"I swear."

"Still not good enough."

"OK, I swear on my grandmother's grave."

"Not good enough."

"Do you want me to put my hand on a Bible?"

"Yes," I said. "Yes, I do."

And she said without any hesitation, "Fine, I'll go get one." But before she went inside, she thought for a moment,and said, "Just because there're some people in town who are finally getting what they deserve, that doesn't mean me, or any of my friends are involved." Then she added, "Nobody wanted to see you expelled, Jared, but when you think about it, isn't it more likely that you and
your
friends did it?"

That left me speechless. "But . . . but the hats."

"They're just hats," she said, shrugging the whole thing off. "What does a hat prove?" Then she smiled at me. "I'll go get that Bible."

She went inside, but I left before she came back, because I knew that no matter what she had done, she
would
put her hand on that Bible, look me in the eye, and swear.

I went home after that. My mind was trying to roll into self- preservation mode by now, trying to convince me of all the things I'd rather be doing. Watching videos, playing computer games, net surfing, I'd even be happy to do homework now. But when I got home I couldn't bring myself to do much of anything at all. Tyson was gone, my parents were out, and I found myself just staring at the blinking light on the answering machine. I didn't want to hear any more bad news, so I just sat there, tossing that seashell of mine up and down, putting it to my ear, wishing I could hear a voice in there that might magically solve all my problems.

Finally I went to the answering machine and hit the button.

"Hi, Jared . . . this is Darren." I took a deep breath. Of all the ex-members of the Shadow Club, I figured Darren would be the least likely to call me. His voice sounded shaky. Scared. I hit the pause button, took a few deep breaths, then let the message continue.

"You gotta get down here," he said "It's Mr. Greene. See, I live on his block and . . . well . . . just get down here." And the message ended.

I left the house and made the long run alone to find out what had happened to Mr. Greene.

Silver
Bullet
Theory

IF THE OTHER things had been mean-spirited, what they did to Mr. Greene was downright evil, Darren was nowhere to be found when I got to his house. The curtains were drawn; no one answered the door. Clearly the only part he wanted in this was to be the messenger. He expected me to be the one to do something about it. Giving up on Darren, I made my way down the street toward Mr. Greene's home.

Sometimes houses are eerie. Their windows can be eyes, their door a mouth. Today Mr. Greene's house didn't just resemble a face; it looked like a corpse. The police had already come and gone, leaving behind the paint-splattered house, with broken windows. When I saw it I wanted to leave, but I knew I couldn't. I knew I had to go in there and see it for myself. Not the way you have to see an accident by the side of the road, but the way you sometimes have to sift through the wreckage of a storm to see if some part of your own life is lying there, too.

He was inside, slowly picking through the wreckage.