Free Geography Club by Brent Hartinger Page A

beginning to believe it too. We’d already said too much of the truth to each other to start lying now. As we kept looking back and forth at each other, I could feel the tension start to drain from the room.
    “Then who?” Terese said quietly.
    Min looked up suddenly. “Well, who says it was one of us? There are eight hundred students at this school. There have to be more than five gay people. Maybe it was one of them.”
    “Oh yeah!” Terese said. “And they just happen to be starting a gay support group at the same time we are?”
    “Hold on,” I said. “Toles didn’t actually say they were starting a gay support group. She just said they talked about a support group for gay teens.”
    We all thought about this for a second.
    “So no one talked,” Terese said. She sounded both grateful and relieved.
    “Pretty bad timing, though,” Ike said. “I mean, with our club and everything. Everyone’s talking about the gay club and who the gay kid might be.”
    “So what?” Min said suddenly. “We don’t have anything to worry about. I mean, no one here’s going to talk, so how could anyone find out? We’re the Geography Club. It’s official! Why would anyone ever suspect us?”
    We all thought about this too. It did make some sense.
    “People already think they know who the gay kid is,” Ike said. “My friends do anyway.”
    “Yeah,” Kevin said. “Mine too.”
    “Me too,” Terese said.
    “I’ve been hearing things,” Min said.
    “Who do people think it is?” I said, as if I didn’t know.
    Sure enough, Ike said, “Brian.”
    Kevin said, “Brian.”
    Terese said, “Brian.”
    And Min said, “Brian.”
    I thought, Who says the different cliques and groups at our school don’t have anything in common? They all seemed pretty united in their hatred of Brian Bund. The poor kid. Like he really needed people to be even more evil to him.
    “So no one’s even going to suspect us?” Terese said, and Min nodded.
    We were quiet a second longer, then Kevin said, “Docious!” This was short for “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” from that movie Mary Poppins , and it’s an example of my generation’s famous ironic wit. It’s sort of an all-purpose word at our school that can mean something is really good (“hot damn!”) or really bad (“holy shit!”). Kevin just meant he was glad that nothing bad had happened to the Geography Club.
    In fact, Kevin was so glad, he wasn’t nervously flipping his baseball anymore. Now he was happily tossing it high into the air. But on the way down, he misjudged his catch and accidentally tipped the ball away from his body. I happened to be standing next to him, so I reached out and snatched the baseball just before it hit the ground.
    “Good catch!” Kevin said as I tossed him back the ball. “You ever think about joining the baseball team?”
    I hadn’t ever thought about it. But I did now.
     
     
    I was surprised to see that Gunnar had waited for me during the meeting of the Geography Club. I found him reading on the grass by the bike racks. This was dedication, since it was still pretty cold outside. Either that, or he wanted something from me.
    “Hey,” he said, standing and packing his book away. “Where you been?”
    “Oh,” I said. “Sorry. I joined a club. Normally, our meetings are Tuesdays and Thursdays, but we had a special meeting today.”
    “What kind of club?”
    This was the question I’d been dreading from Gunnar for days. If anyone in our whole school would be interested in joining something called the Geography Club, it would be Gunnar. He was just that strange.
    “It’s called the Geography Club,” I told him. “But it’s really boring. I’m just doing it to have something to put on college applications.”
    “Oh.” I expected him to ask me questions about it, but he didn’t. “So, you ready to ride?”
    “Yeah, sure.” I started unlocking my bike, but what I really wanted to do was jump up and knock my heels