"What?!"
"I didn't think anyone would actually find it," said Austin, already getting defensive.
"But . . . but how did you get a hold of my button?"
"Dinner at my house, remember?" Austin said. "You lost it then."
"There's more," Mr. Greene said. "Go on, Austin." Austin threw me a quick glance, then looked down.
"I heard some noises outside the night that it happened. Alec lives across the street from me, and I looked out of my bedroom window that night. I saw somebody running away. I couldn't tell who it was, but I knew it wasn't you, because, believe me, I know the way you run, Jared."
He tried to say something else, but it seemed hard in coming. He looked at Mr. Greene, he looked at me, then he looked at his own fidgeting hands. "But even if I hadn't seen it, I would have known it wasn't you, because I knew you wouldn't do something like that again—not after what happened to me."
More than anything else, hearing that from Austin was like a pardon from prison. It suddenly struck me how strange It was that of all the people in school, the one who knew me well enough to know that my heart really was in the right place was my old adversary, Austin Pace.
"Why, Austin?" I asked. "If you knew it wasn't me, then why did you put the button there?"
Then he looked at me, his face twisted in conflicting emotions: guilt, anger, frustration.
"Because I wanted it to be you."
Mr. Greene dismissed Austin, who was happy to get out of there as quickly as possible. Then Mr. Greene sat on the edge of his desk and said, "I owe you an apology, Jared. For the way I've been treating you, for not believing you, for thinking the worst. For all that, I'm sorry."
They were words I thought I would never hear Mr. Greene utter. I had to admit I had him pegged, too, as the type of guy who would weasel out of an apology, even when he knew he was dead wrong. I guess we both had misjudged each other, because it took a lot of guts for someone like him to apologize to a fourteen-year-old kid.
"And my parents?"
"Principal Diller is letting them know that you're off the hook. He doesn't know the details yet, but we'll go down there in a bit to fill them all in."
"Good," I said. "Maybe you can apologize to them, too."
Mr. Greene grinned at that. "Fair enough. I owe you that."
I could literally feel the weight being lifted off my shoulders. My chest didn't feel so tight, and although my legs were sore from all the running I did yesterday, I felt like I could jump up and touch the ceiling. I could have just accepted that sense of vindication and left, but quitting while I was ahead was never one of my strong points.
"There's just one problem," I said. "We still don't know who's been pulling all these pranks."
"It's not your problem anymore," Mr. Greene said.
"Even so," I told him, "I'd like to finish what I've started, and flush out the creep."
Mr. Greene crossed his arms, looking at me no longer as a subject to study and dissect, but more like an equal—someone who had earned his respect. I never thought I would care about that.
"What do you have in mind?" he asked.
It was a fantastic plan if I do say so myself. Everyone would have to work together to pull off the scam of the century— or at least the school year. It would take me, the members of the Shadow Club. It would take Principal Diller and school security, but it would also take Alec. He had the most crucial role to play. Although Alec hated me, I knew once Principal Diller sat him down and talked to him, he would play his part, because it would make him look real good.
I didn't see him, or speak to him about it, but Mr. Greene assured me that Principal Diller was taking care of it, and he'd be much more responsive to the principal than to me.
On Thursday night I wasn't good for much of anything. I was nervous, like an actor before the opening of a play. I sat at my desk staring at that blue denim cap with TSC in bright orange letters across the face.
Tyson came in, and I tried to hide the cap, but I was way too conspicuous about it. I wanted to tell him about our plan to flush out the rat in our school but somehow felt it would be wrong. He didn't need any more complications in his life.
"That's Jodi Lattimer's hat, isn't it?" he said.
I shrugged. "Tennis and Squash Center," I said. "Actually, lots of kids are wearing them now."
"But that one's Jodi's," he said.
"How can you tell?"
"The way the brim is curled. I notice things like that." He started to leave, probably assuming that Jodi and I had something between us. I stopped him.
"It's not what you think," I said.
"Who said I think anything?"
He went back to his room and closed the door. Not with a slam, but hard enough to mean business. I wondered if the morning would bring more of his fire sketches.
Alec was back in school on Friday, in time for the candidate debates. The day off had done wonders for him. There was no sign that he had had the allergic reaction at all. He and his parents supposedly were told by Principal Diller himself that I was not responsible for what happened, but Alec still avoided me that day. He wouldn't even make eye contact with me, and that was fine by me, because I wasn't quite ready to talk to him either.
The candidate debates went on as scheduled. Tommy Nickols tried to change his campaign slogan to "The thinking person's candidate," but no spin doctor could patch up his earlier image. The final blow came when his girlfriend tried to dump him. Apparently she was more important than his quest for power, and he quit, putting his backing behind Katrina Mendelson. Alec's video ploy had rattled some votes away from Cheryl, according to the school poll, and since Katrina Mendelson was giving free, home-baked cookies to anyone who promised to vote for her, she was picking up steam. Still, Alec was way out in the lead. Although half the school couldn't stomach seeing him succeed again, the other half was ready to follow him into victory. And now the sympathy vote, which often went to Katrina in the past, was going to him, because he was the only candidate who had been glued, skunked, hair-balled, and poisoned.
By the time I arrived at school that day, everything was in place for the big show. Not the debate, but my big show. Although I was nervous, I knew I wasn't alone—each member of the Shadow Club was behind me, and so was Mr. Greene—even Principal Diller had a role to play. When I walked into the auditorium, the Shaditude had grown around me. It was no longer just an aura, it moved before me like a compression wave, and I rode the wave for the first time, allowing myself to really enjoy it, knowing it would be the last time I would feel the sense of head-turning power, even if it was just illusion. I could make a very successful creep, I thought, and although that should have bothered me, somehow it didn't. Perhaps because I knew I never would want to be one.
The debate questions were posed by people in the audience—people handpicked by their teachers, of course. I waited, not even hearing the questions or answers, just generating the nerve to do what I was there to do. I do remember one question, though. What qualities make you the best candidate for the job? Alec was asked. His answer was, Because I'm not afraid to fight injustice, and I can tell the truth no matter how well the lies are concealed. His words were directed at me, with that same cold stare he gave me before he knew I wasn't the one tormenting him. But I didn't have time to think about what was going on in Alec's head. I just assumed he was playing his part in the show, and I took it as my cue to stand. Principal Diller, the moderator, acknowledged me, and I came to the microphone to ask my question, feeling that compression wave of the Shaditude pushing around me, bringing me a chorus of whispers, then silencing the auditorium as I approached. It was so quiet you could hear the steam gently hissing through the radiator coils.
"I want to know," I said into the microphone, my voice larger than life, "I want to know how Alec can stand up there and say he has any self-respect whatsoever after Iso completely humiliated him." The gasps and murmurs around the room rose in a wave, then silence fell again.
/> "Mr. Mercer," said Principal Diller, "exactly what are you saying?"
"You know what I'm saying," I answered. "How does it feel, Alec," I said, "to stand up there knowing that I'm out here, the one who glued your hands to your head, the one who skunked you, the one who gave you some chili-cillin and put a clump of my own hair in your soda? How does it feel to look at me and know that you can't do anything about it?"
I could see his face going red and was impressed by his acting ability—he was really playing this one for all that it was worth.
"There's something I can do about it, all right."
"I admit it," I said. "I did all those things. Me and the Shadow Club. So what are you going to do about it?"
"If you want to see the type of guy who'll lead you into the upper grades," he told the audience, "then watch me now."
By now Mr. Greene was heading toward me from the back of the auditorium with a security guard.
"Mr. Diller, it's time that the Shadow Club pays for what it's done. Their time is up." Mr. Diller came out from behind the moderator's podium. Slowly the growing murmur of the crowd became a roar. I felt as though I was in the middle of a courtroom and not a junior high school debate. I half expected Principal Diller to bang a gavel and tell everyone to come to order. Instead he said, "Mr. Greene, will you have Jared Mercer escorted out, along with all the other members of the Shadow Club."
The other members were in the audience as well, spread out in various locations, each of them wearing Tennis and Squash Center hats. It had been easy to get a hat for everyone—there were enough of them around school. It was just a matter of buying or borrowing them from other kids. Even Cheryl as she stood there behind her debate podium pulled out a TSC hat and proudly put it on, to the stunned amazement of everyone gathered. The result was perfect. We had everyone fooled! That's when the security guard, who was in on it, too, took handcuffs out from his back pocket and cuffed me.
"We have zero tolerance for the Shadow Club," Mr. Diller said. "Or for any gang, now or ever. All members of the Shadow Club are expelled from this school, effective immediately." And every last one of us was escorted out, with me in the lead with my hands cuffed behind my back. It was so realistic that for a few moments even I was scared as we walked down the hallway toward the main office.
"Okay," I said to the security guard, who was holding my arm a little too tightly, "you can take these off now."
"I don't think so," he said.
I looked at him in shock, and he looked at me with those hard dark eyes of his.
Then he cracked a smile. "Hah!" he said. "You should have seen the look on your face!"
"Very funny."
We were escorted into the teachers' lounge. Mr. Greene showed up a few minutes later after the bell had rung and kids were passing. The smoked glass on the teachers'-lounge door made it impossible for other kids to see all seven of us relaxing on the sofa, munching on chips, and enjoying the guilty pleasure of being in one of the few places that is completely off-limits to students.
"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 f
rom 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.