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

never been more thrilled to see a knife-wielding clown in a park.

“HE PISSED HIS PANTS!” Thayer yelled to the sky.

I looked over at Freddie, and his expression matched mine. He was the first to start laughing. And like water on high heat, we all started bubbling with it. Bram’s shoulders shook, Freddie down on his knees, weak. It may have been Thayer’s Fear Test, but it was a team effort. Us against the world, wrapped up in a weird bubble that nobody could pop right now.

“Technically, you didn’t make him scream,” Felicity said. But even she wasn’t immune to this jubilant feeling. Her usual scowl had lifted and was on the verge of breaking into a runaway smile.

Thayer shook his head. “I’d take piss over a scream any day. BEAT THAT, MOFOS!”

“How did you know he was afraid of clowns?” Freddie asked, clapping Thayer on the back.

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was making us forget he pissed himself in front of a clown before. His seventh birthday party. I was there. It’s one of my fondest memories.”

“You’re lucky Trevor is so damn afraid of clowns,” Bram teased, “because those bloody clown shoe prints were cheesy as fuck.”

“It got the job done, didn’t it?” Thayer said.

“Just saying.” Bram shrugged. “I was about to break character.”

“What are you going to say to Trevor?” I asked Bram. “He’s going to know someone was messing with him. And that you were a part of it.”

“All Trevor knows is that he was drunk. No one else saw a killer clown.”

I watched Bram, took in how easy it was for him to lie. This all boiled down to a prank, but it was designed to be cruel—Thayer’s revenge for Trevor’s years of bullying. Although I thought Trevor deserved it, I still wondered how Bram could do that to his friend.

“But I wanted them to see me,” Thayer said.

“Yeah, why didn’t you come down to the party?” Freddie asked.

And now I remembered that that had been part of Thayer’s original plan. He was going to come down the stairs and run around scaring everyone else at the party for some “extra credit,” as he’d put it.

“Players who don’t finish their tests get an incomplete,” Felicity said.

“Where is that in the rules?” Thayer said. “Going down the stairs was just garnish. I still served a delicious freaking meal.”

“Why didn’t you go down the stairs?” Freddie asked again.

“Okay, I was going to, all right? But I tripped. Someone pushed me.”

“You tripped or someone pushed you?” I said.

“I don’t know. I almost fell down the stairs but I caught myself. I lost the momentum, though. Decided to go out the window instead.” He was still breathing too hard for me to tell whether this rattled him, the fact that there was a hitch in his test. But with his next deep breath came a change in subject.

“I was on fire, man. I killed it. I put Trevor in his place!” He bounced up and down like a spring, all energy and excitement. “I finally put that asshole in his place.”

Whatever thoughts any of us had about the hiccup in Thayer’s plot were already being erased by the realization of what we’d just done. The memory was so fresh I could practically smell it, breathe it in, feel it tingling my skin.

“He was so scared,” Thayer said. “He was scared shitless.”

“He was,” I said, smiling. “We all saw it.”

“But not all of it,” Freddie said, whirling around. “Bram. You were in the room. Did Trevor lose it?”

Bram took a moment and settled into his regular posture: broad shoulders slightly hunched, head bent. When he looked up, his lips stretched so slowly that it took a minute before I realized he was smiling. “He lost it.”

Thayer let out a delighted whoop.

We noticed two men coming into the park from the west side. They were about ten yards away. We froze. So did they. The men took us in, turned around immediately, and got the hell out of there.

Freddie cracked up, pointing at Thayer in his ridiculous clown costume, and then at Bram, covered in blood. Bram looked down at himself, messy with the red goo, and started to laugh, too. In seconds, we were all reduced to giggles again, Thayer practically squirming on the ground.

Anxiety and exhilaration were two sides of the same coin; both made you lose your breath, made your skin vibrate so strong your teeth could chatter. But on one side it felt like torture, and on the other it was elation. Enlightenment. Nirvana. It was the crystal-clear sense of the whistling trees all around you and the dark green grass tickling your cheeks. It was going dizzy but not feeling like you were about to faint. Feeling, actually, like you could float.

It was this, right now. And it was perfect.

Who knew that scaring someone could feel like this? I touched my humming lips, trying to make this emotion tangible. But what I felt was power. A sensation that had eluded me since the previous year.

Our laughter died down. On one side of me, Freddie readjusted his glasses, looking up at the black sky. On the other side of me was Bram. Tonight’s Fear Test had thawed the icy layer that had always seemed to stand between us. And for the first time Bram smiled at me. I smiled back.

If I was a monster, then so was everyone else in this club. And for once I didn’t feel like such a freak.

We could be monsters together.

 18

FREDDIE HAD BEEN right when he’d told me that pretty soon, everyone would move on from my drama with Lux.

The morning after Trevor’s birthday, no one looked at me funny as I passed them in the hall, I didn’t hear the words “Arts and Crafts Killer” whispered under anyone’s breath, and there weren’t any memes about me floating around. All anyone could talk about was what had happened at Trevor’s party. Well, not what had happened at