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too.
    "Yeah," he said. "See ya around, Gopher."
    I turned and left while everyone crowded around Austin. My elbows had just begun hurting.
    Cheryl was there waiting for me. That's one thing about her; she was always there, and she never laughed at me either.
    "Are you OK?" she asked.
    I looked back toward Austin, then turned to Cheryl and asked, "So, what are we going to call our club?"

 
     
     
    The Charter at Stonehenge
    I DON'T THINK anyone knew what used to be there, but whatever it had been, only the old stone foundation remained, in a clearing in the woods. The stones were worn and covered with moss. Inside the rectangular stone foundation was a pit about six feet deep and twenty feet across, filled with bushes and trees. It could have been there for a hundred years—nobody knew.
    Cheryl, Randall, and I had found it years ago, exploring as kids, but it seemed too eerie to play in, so we had left it alone, filing it away in our heads for future reference. The old foundation sat there in the thick woods between Cheryl's house and the ocean, waiting. I had always thought of the foundation as waiting—waiting for someone to use It again, I guess, or maybe just waiting to disappear into the earth, like the building that once stood above it had.
    It was waiting, all right, and on the second Friday of ninth grade, I had this certain exciting feeling that it was waiting for us.
    As Cheryl and I stood on the outer edge of the deep stone foundation, looking into the pit, Cheryl said, "This is great! I couldn't think of a better place to have our meetings!"
    I walked around the edge until I came to a place where the foundation had given way, and the earth sloped down into the pit. I climbed down into the center, and Cheryl followed.
    "It looks like it could almost be magical," she said.
    "Maybe it's haunted or something."
    "Well, don't go and make it all spooky," she said. But it was spooky already; spooky in a fun sort of way, like the mummy cases in the museum, or a ghost town. There was a feeling to the place that made anything we could possibly do there seem very, very important. It would give our club meetings a hint of mystery.
    "What time is it?" I asked.
    "Four-fifteen. They'll be here in fifteen minutes."
    As I looked around, I began to see things you couldn't see from up on the ledge. There were old green Coke bottles, and aluminum cans with the old-fashioned pull-off tabs that they stopped making years ago. There were designs on the cans that I didn't even recognize. For all I knew they could have been here since the building came down. All around us were little bits of the past that no one had touched for years and years. It was magical—like that Stonehenge place in England, mysterious rocks with a hidden history.
    "Let's call this place Stonehenge," I said to Cheryl.
    "Great!" she said. "I like that." She climbed back up to the edge and sat on a moss-covered cinder block at the lip of the pit. The edge of Stonehenge.
    "I feel like . . . a witch," she said.
    "You look like one!" I said. She had stepped right into that one!
    "Shut up! You know what I mean. It's like we could conjure up ghosts here!"
    "What time is it?" I asked.
    "Four-twenty," said Cheryl.
    At first, I had felt funny talking to kids about this club; I was afraid they would laugh in my face—but no one did. Picking out the kids for the club became like a game. Cheryl and I would keep our eyes open, watching for kids in our exact situation; kids who were second-best, were miserable about it, and had to live under the shadow of some nasty "unbeatable" person, who rubbed their noses in it every day.
    We ruled out some kids right away, others took longer, but finally we came up with a list of five kids who would be perfect. We didn't want a big group; seven, including us, was just fine. One by one, either Cheryl or I spoke to them when no one else was around. And you know what? Every single one of them wanted to be in the club—The Shadow Club— as