The Mary Shelley Club by Goldy Moldavsky (ebook reader for manga TXT) 📕

“This is deeply weird,” I said.

“What? All clubs require participation.”

“Yeah? You do this for Film Club, too?”

“Have you seen the Film Club? Clowns, all of them.”

I smiled. “You mean the Tisch Boys?”

Freddie’s face fell. “Is that what they call us?”

“Yes.” I tried not to crack up at the look on his face.

“No. No. Please tell me you are joking.”

“I would, but I cannot lie to you, Freddie.”

He pretended to gag and I laughed.

“Film Club is like the bizarro version of the Mary Shelley Club,” Freddie said. “Whenever we watch a movie it’s usually something by Wes Anderson. He’s Scott Tisch’s favorite. We gotta kick him out of the club.”

Talking to Freddie was so easy that it could make me forget my nervousness about the Fear Test. Almost.

“I don’t want to mess this up,” I said, raising my paint-smeared finger. “Hold still.”

“It doesn’t have to be a Warhol,” Freddie said. “Actually, wait, go Warhol, give me the full Marilyn.”

I grinned and lightly touched the spot above his eyebrow with the red paint, then gently worked my way down, reapplying more paint to cover his whole eye socket.

“I didn’t just mean your face,” I said. “I don’t want to mess anything up.”

I tried to focus on just painting his skin, but it was kind of hard to do while I was standing so close to him. Touching him.

“You’ll be great,” Freddie said. He held his glasses in his hand, but the way he looked at me, it was like he saw perfectly clear.

“I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“None of us do. It’s mostly improv.”

If I stopped to really think about what the club was doing, tonight and in general, it was supremely screwed up. But maybe this was just the evolution of fun for rich kids. Everyone else seemed to be partying or having sex or on xannies. Maybe scaring people was just the next level up.

But I wasn’t rich. What if I wasn’t cut out for this?

I held up the paint palette for Freddie to choose his next color. “Green,” he said.

“Close your eyes.” I used my middle finger this time and started on his left eye. He kept it shut while I painted his lid, but his other eye squinted open, watching me through a wink.

“I don’t think I’m good at thinking on the spot,” I said. “I hate improv.”

“Did I just uncover Rachel Chavez’s secret fear?” Freddie’s cheeks, now painted creamy white, expanded with his smile. “Improv?”

I wiggled my red and green fingers in front of his face. “Careful, I wield the face paint.”

Freddie made a show of clamping his lips shut and I continued tidying up the oval outline around his eye. A moment of quiet settled between us and I decided to ask what was really weighing on my mind.

“Can I ask why you’re in the club? Why you’re so invested in pulling this prank?”

Freddie’s eyebrows knitted together. “It’s not a prank.”

I could tell he had too much pride in what the club did—in the club itself—to call it just a prank, and maybe he was right. What we were about to do would amount to a lot more than just a prank.

“Okay, not a prank. But you’re all putting a huge amount of time and energy into messing with someone. Scaring them.” I lowered my hand, leaving Freddie’s face half painted as he dwelled on my question. “Why?”

“Well, tonight, Thayer’s getting back at somebody who’s been making his life hell since fifth grade,” Freddie replied. “Vigilante justice is pretty sweet.”

“Is that why Thayer’s in the club?” I asked. “To get back at the people who’ve wronged him?”

“You want my honest opinion about why Thayer and Felicity and Bram are in the club?”

I nodded.

“They live stable lives. Boring lives. They want for nothing. They go to sleep at night knowing they’ll wake up to breakfast, their clothes ironed and hung up, and their maids at the door with their favorite snacks ready. They’re practically toddlers. They’ll probably stay toddlers their whole lives.”

He said this all plainly, as if just stating the obvious. I could tell he didn’t mean it in a disparaging way. I knew he would say it to their faces. And probably had.

“The truth is,” Freddie continued, “they crave chaos.”

I smiled. It felt like by grouping Thayer and Bram and Felicity together, Freddie had grouped us up together, too. We were separate from them. We weren’t the gilded elite. I guess that made us sort of a team.

“Okay, but you still haven’t answered my question. Why do you do it?” I asked.

“I, too, crave chaos,” Freddie said, pairing his faux tony accent with a devilish grin. “The way I look at it is as a great social experiment. What does fear do to a person? How can we control it?”

“Control it?”

“Yeah. We can work with fear, like a sculptor works with clay. It’s art.”

My mouth twisted into a dubious smile as I looked at his crudely painted skin. What I’d done to his face was definitely not art. “That’s kind of a stretch.”

“Well, I don’t know.” But his tone said he did know. Freddie had obviously thought a lot about this; I could tell by the way his eyes lit up behind his glasses. “Art is all about drawing an emotion out of someone, right? A beautiful painting could make you feel wonder. A song could make you cry. A movie could make you laugh. Evoking an explosive, immediate reaction out of someone? There’s nothing more visceral than being scared. It’s why some people love watching scary movies. I love being scared.”

“Yeah, but we’re not doing all this in the hopes that Trevor will love it. We want him scared. We want him to suffer.”

Hearing myself say that out loud made a shiver go down my spine. Was I getting in over my head?

“Trevor’s entire existence is based around the idea that he’s better than everyone else,” Freddie said. “Fear strips that away. It’s the great equalizer. And when you’re truly scared, there’s nowhere to