Geography Club by Brent Hartinger Read Free Book Online

I generally like libraries anyway—I love the clean, heady musk of ink and paper and carpet glue. But I’d never been exhilarated in a library before. I was even glad to see Ike.
    We all nodded our hellos, but I didn’t look at Kevin, because I was thinking about what Min had said two days earlier, about him maybe liking me.
    “Sorry about yesterday at lunch,” Terese said, whispering.
    Kevin and Ike mumbled their apologies too.
    “It wasn’t you guys’ fault,” I whispered back, and Min nodded. “It was no one’s fault.”
    “Did your friends say anything?” Min asked Terese.
    “Yeah,” she said. “They wondered what was up.”
    “What’d you tell them?”
    “That we were thinking about starting a club.” She shrugged. “I’m a pretty good liar.”
    “What kind of club?” I said.
    “I didn’t say. I just changed the subject.” So I wasn’t the only one who avoided questions by changing the subject. Maybe this was another thing we all had in common.
    “This is so stupid!” Ike said. “We shouldn’t have to hide like this, like political dissidents or whatever. Why can’t we be seen together like normal people?”
    As if in answer, Candy Moon walked by the end of the aisle. I thought I saw her slowing down ever so slightly. Suddenly, this didn’t seem like such a good meeting place after all. Five people in the same aisle was a pretty big coincidence.
    “Damn,” Kevin said, whispering again. “I think I had a bad idea, our coming here.”
    This meeting had been Kevin’s idea? But why hadn’t he E-mailed me directly? Did it mean Min was wrong, and Kevin didn’t like me after all? Or did it mean just the opposite, that Min was right and he did like me, but that he was too shy to do anything about it? (Kevin Land shy? That was a laugh.)
    “What we need,” Min spoke softly, “is someplace to meet where no one’ll see us.”
    “We could go back to the pizza place,” Ike said. “We could meet there after school.”
    “No,” Terese said. “Sooner or later, someone’ll see us. It’s too close to school. The team goes there for pizza.”
    “Then some other restaurant,” I said.
    “I don’t know,” Kevin said. “Most nights, I got practice. It’d have to be close by. But like Terese said, if it’s close to campus, we’re gonna run into someone.”
    “The woods?” Terese said. There was this big forested area on the other side of the track field.
    “Too cold and wet,” Ike said.
    “Wait a minute,” Min said suddenly. “What Terese said. Why not start a real club?”
    “Huh?” I said.
    “You know,” she said. “An after-school club. Don’t they let you use a classroom? I mean, if you fill out the right forms?”
    “What kind of club?” Terese said. She sounded suspicious. “You mean like a gay-straight alliance?” I’d heard about gay-straight alliances at other schools. Other big-city schools, that is. There were no gay-straight alliances in our town, maybe not even in our entire state, and there weren’t going to be any anytime soon. If Reverend Blowhard could get so worked up over something as innocent as a teacher talking about contraceptives in a health class, it wasn’t hard to imagine what he and his cadre of concerned parents would do over the existence of a gay-straight alliance at the local high school. The mushroom cloud would be visible for miles around.
    “Well,” Min said, “we don’t need to tell anyone that’s what kind of club it is. We’ll just say it’s a club.”
    “You have to,” Ike said. “You have to say exactly what you are. They can’t deny any club, not as long as you follow all the rules. My friends and me were going to start an Earth First! chapter, and Rall wasn’t going to let us.” (Remember, Mr. Rall was the school principal.) “But then Gladstein—he was our faculty advisor—he told Rall we’d sue if he didn’t let us. Oh yeah, and you have to have a faculty advisor too.”
    No one said anything. We just