The Shadow Club Rising by Neal Shusterman Read Free Book Online Page B

teach Tyson to swim. I figured it was one small way to try and make up for the part I played in almost drowning him last fall.
    At first I took him to the pool several times a week, but, like all New Year's resolutions, my resolve faded pretty quickly. I hadn't given him a lesson for more than three weeks. But now, with so many things squirming around in my brain, I welcomed the chance to focus my thoughts on something else. I dragged Tyson down to the pool, with him resisting all the way.
    "It's cold." "I'm tired." "I got too much homework." "I think I got an earache."
    Tyson was never an eager learner when it came to anything, but today I wasn't taking no for an answer.
    Our local pool had a personality all its own. First of all it wasn't even called a pool, it was called a "natatorium," which I guess was a gymnasium for swimming. With a fancy name like that, they could charge two bucks to get in. The natatorium had an Olympic-sized pool, and huge windows that were always so fogged it defeated the purpose of having windows in the first place. As for the pool itself, well, it was about as clouded as the windows. I used to wear goggles when I swam, but stopped because I got tired of looking at all those unidentifiable bits of floating organic matter. There are just some things I'd rather not know about.
    Tyson had managed to master the dog paddle pretty early on in our lessons, and now he proudly huffed and puffed his way through six laps like a Labrador, while I swam a fairly lame, but effective crawl.
    "Listen, do you want to learn to swim or not?" I snapped us he tried to climb out of the pool.
    "What do you call what I just did? That was six laps!"
    I pulled him back into the water. "Six dog laps," I corrected. "That's not even one human lap, Fido."
    In the lane beside us, which was reserved for the more serious swimmers, someone did a quick flip turn and splashed super-chlorinated water up my nose.
    "Ughh!" I sneezed and tried to clear my burning sinuses.
    "Serves you right," Tyson said.
    When I looked up to see who had splashed me, I caught sight of Drew Landers, our school's number one swimmer, peering out at me from beneath his armpit for an instant, as he stroked forward, toward the deep end of the pool.
    "He did that on purpose!" I said.
    "What, is like everyone out to get you now?" Tyson said. "You're starting to sound like me. That's scary."
    "Tell me about it."
    Drew Landers, however, did have a reason to hold a grudge against me—after all, the Shadow Club had pranked him exceptionally well during that first round of pranks, when it all still felt like fun, before it started getting dangerous. We had paid Drew a midnight visit, and peeled back the grungy socks from his feet as he slept. Then we painted his toenails red and put the socks back on. He didn't take them off again until swim practice the next day, and, let me tell you, it made quite an impression on the swim team—not to mention the coach, who scheduled him an immediate visit to Mr. Greene for tender guidance. I had to admit, though, Drew did manage to turn the whole situation around. Rather than clean off his toes, he painted every other toenail white, so his feet proudly displayed our school colors of red and white. He said it was a sign of school spirit. Since he was the team captain, and one of the cool-defining personalities of our school, the entire swim team followed his lead and went the rest of the season with red-and-white-painted toenails. I think this is how really stupid traditions are born.
    "C'mon," I told Tyson, trying to forget about Drew. "I'll teach you the crawl."
    "Tyson McGaw never crawls."
    "Then Tyson McGaw drowns."
    "Have you ever known a dog that drowned?"
    He had a point, but he wasn't getting out of it so fast. "Would you like it better if I called it 'freestyle'?"
    "Yeah. I could get into freestyle."
    I tried to work with him on the rhythm of his breathing, but then took another blast of water in the face. It gagged me,