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school that day, but he was there the next day. Although he tried to act as if nothing was wrong, that burned-rubbery smell of skunk surrounded him like killer BO, no matter how many demusking baths he took. And as for that minivan, it couldn't have been more totaled if it had fallen off a cliff.
    Although Alec didn't accuse me to my face, the accusation was there all the same. It was in the way he looked at me—or refused to look at me. The second day after the skunking he came up to me as we were leaving English class, one of the few classes we had together. He didn't just bump into me—he made a point of coming up to me, and, although he hadn't said a word to me in two days, he looked at me, grinning in a way that I couldn't quite read, and said, "Nice shirt."
    I figured he was just trying to bother me, you know, the way you say "nice socks" to someone whose socks are perfectly fine, making him wonder for the rest of the day what the heck is wrong with his socks. I just stored it away in my brain.
    The weird thing Alec said wasn't the only thing bothering me. In fact, he didn't bother me as much as the looks I got from other kids—suspicious glances that were more obvious than ever before.
    As I pulled books from my locker the next day, someone behind me said, "Good one, Jared!"
    I spun on my heel, but when I looked at the kids around me, I couldn't tell who it had been. It could have been any of them. All of them. A hallway full of faces convinced that the Shadow Club and I had been responsible for the skunk as well as the hair ball.
    That afternoon I slipped messages into six different lockers—messages that called the Shadow Club back from the dead.

 
     
     
    The
Ghosties
    SOME PLACES, LIKE some people, age well, and others don't. They fall into disrepair and disrespect. That's how it was with the old marina. The old marina was on the north end of town, about a mile past the lighthouse ruin. The place wasn't exactly a picture postcard. The water was slick with a perpetual oily scum, and speckled with bits of trash. The wooden piles that held up the fishing pier had been eaten away, making the pier a use-at-your-own-risk kind of place. Of course, there were still die-hard fishermen—old-timers mostly—who set out from the marina every morning before dawn, but otherwise the place was a desolate relic of another time.
    At the far bank of the inlet sat the half-submerged skeleton of a ferry that had been washed up during a storm, ten years back. On the south side of the inlet was a seawall made of eroding concrete, dripping rust from the reinforcing iron bars that now lay exposed to the sea. Just above that seawall, overlooking the marina, was the Ghosties.
    The Ghosties was a graveyard of sorts—a boatyard of thedamned. Fishing boats, sailboats, cabin cruisers, you name it, they eventually found their way up to the Ghosties. Of course, few people would admit that when they towed their boat there, they were bringing their vessel to its eternal rest. The boats were brought here for repairs, or for storage. They sat in rusted trailers with flat tires, or cradled in scaffolding, waiting for their owners to return. But those owners would die of old age, or move on to other hobbies, leaving the forlorn boats to haunt the Ghosties, tortured by a beautiful view of the ocean that they would never set keel in again.
    The sight of the old boats had always impressed me. They looked so much larger on dry land than in the sea— vessels that seemed so natural when bobbing with the tide, and so awkward and alien when dragged up on dry land.
    The Ghosties had always been a great place for hide- and-seek when I was younger. Kids used to play it all the time here, until some kid fell off the seawall and drowned. After that the Ghosties had been fenced off . . . but when you live near the ocean, it doesn't take long for the salt air to rust through a chain-link fence.
    "So what do you think?" Tyson asked as we meandered through the