Geography Club by Brent Hartinger Read Free Book Online Page A

thought about all the new information.
    “Well, the first part is easy,” I said. “We just make something up. We’ll tell them it’s a chess club when it’s really just us.”
    “But what about the faculty advisor?” Ike said. “I mean, they’d be right there with us.”
    “Mr. Kephart,” Min said.
    We all looked at her.
    “He’s the most uninvolved teacher in the whole school! Two fifty-one in the afternoon, he’s gone. If we ask him to be our advisor, the last we’ll see of him is when he signs our application form.”
    “You think he’ll do it?” Terese said.
    “He will if I tell him he doesn’t have to come to any of the meetings.”
    I felt a smile breaking out on my face. But at the same time, I saw movement at the end of the aisle. I turned to see Heather Chen staring right at us. Terese, Min, and I all snatched books from the shelves. It looked incredibly phony and probably made us look even more suspicious in Heather’s eyes. When I looked back, she was gone.
    “It’s time to wrap this thing up,” Min whispered, quieter than ever. “Are we all agreed about starting a club?”
    “Hold on.” Ike was barely whispering too. “There’s still one more problem. If we start a club, it has to be open to every student in the school. That’s the policy.”
    “Too bad we can’t say it’s a gay club,” Terese said. “That’d keep everyone away.” It was a joke, but it didn’t sound like one, because she sounded so bitter.
    Kevin hadn’t said anything in a while, and I figured it was because he’d changed his mind and now he didn’t want anything to do with this club thing. Or me.
    So I was surprised when his face suddenly lit up, and he whispered, “I got it! We just choose a club that’s so boring, nobody would ever in a million years join it!” He thought for a second. “We could call it the Geography Club!”
    We all considered this. This time, I saw smiles break out all around.
    The Geography Club, I thought. No high school students in their right minds would ever join that.
    In other words, it was perfect!
     
     
    “Trish Baskin’s hot for you,” Gunnar said to me.
    It was the following Saturday, and Gunnar and I were playing racquetball on a court at the Y. I didn’t completely suck at racquetball (that’s my modest way of saying I was really pretty good). But Gunnar had said what he’d said about Trish Baskin right before his serve, so I had to wait until we finished the rally to ask him what the hell he meant. Of course, he won the point, but only because I was distracted.
    “What?” I said.
    “What what?” he said.
    “What about Trish Baskin?” Our voices were echoing in the close confines of the brightly lit court.
    “She does,” Gunnar said. “I heard it from someone who knows. You like her?”
    Like her? I thought. I barely even knew her. Oh, and then there was the small matter of my being queer as a three-dollar bill.
    “She’s okay,” I said. She’d been in my geometry class the year before. She was sort of the mousy type, with this whispery voice and narrow shoulders and a streaked haircut that she’d probably had to be talked into getting. “Go ahead and serve.”
    “Well, she really likes you,” Gunnar said, right before hitting the ball again. But I wasn’t distracted this time, so I pounded it right past him and took back the serve.
    We kept playing, and I noticed that Gunnar seemed quiet. Unlike Min, he wasn’t particularly competitive, so I doubted he was thinking about the game. No, something else was going on here.
    “Hey,” he said a few minutes later, when he won back the serve.
    I faced him, wiping my face with the sweat towel that had been hanging from my pocket.
    He said, “Remember what we talked about a couple of weeks ago?”
    I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. “What do you mean?”
    “You know. About my getting a girlfriend?”
    Now I remembered. But he’d talked about that a zillion times before, so I