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

“It’s a secret knitting club,” I said too quickly. “So please forget I said anything.”

My mom licked her spoon. “I was only kidding,” she said finally. “Could you imagine me advising a club you were in?”

No. No, I could not.

“I’m glad you’re getting along better with the other students. I just heard about a student who isn’t so lucky. Do you know a boy named Trevor Driggs?”

I swallowed. “I know Trevor. Why?”

“I heard he relieved himself at a party?”

I hadn’t realized the story of a seventeen-year-old boy peeing his pants would reach the teachers’ lounge. “Yeah, I heard that, too. I think he just drank too much.”

The look on my mom’s face was equal parts sad and confused. “It’s not one of those social media challenges? Like for YouTube?”

“No, Mom, definitely not that.”

That sad look was still on Mom’s face. She picked up her glass of iced tea but stopped short of drinking it.

“That poor boy,” Mom said. “How awful.”

“He’s a jerk, Mom.”

“Rachel, have some compassion.”

I continued eating, but couldn’t taste much anymore. My mom’s words reverberated in my head, gnawing at that happy feeling I had had just a few hours earlier. Maybe it was true that what we’d done to Trevor was awful, but it was also true that he deserved it. Thayer had suffered daily torment at Trevor’s hands, and we’d helped Thayer level the playing field. I put a terrible person in his place. I wasn’t about to feel bad about it.

I served myself more ice cream and ate it up.

 19

THE NEXT NIGHT, Mom shook an already-nuked bag of microwave popcorn in one hand and held up the TV remote in the other. “Wanna watch something?” she asked. “I think a new Gut Stab movie just came out On Demand. Gut Stab Six, I want to say.”

“Sorry,” I said. She’d stopped me on my way out, and I grabbed my jacket off the hook by the door. “I’ve got plans.”

Mom dropped her hands, the popcorn and remote flopping against her pajama pants. “Where are you going?”

“Just seeing some people.” Then I added, haltingly, “Friends.”

“Oh,” Mom said, breaking into a smile. “Saundra?”

“No.” Saundra had been begging me to go on a shopping spree with her, and although holding her bags while she wore down the chip on her credit card sounded great, Madison Avenue would have to wait. “Other people.”

“On a school night?”

“It’s a good thing you don’t care about that kind of thing!” I turned the doorknob. “The Gut Stab movies suck anyway.”

“Gut Stab Six!” Thayer bellowed. Behind him the projection screen in the Wilding study lowered slowly. “We are about to embark on what is sure to be a perfectly mediocre addition to the horror canon. New Girl, tell me you haven’t seen this one yet.”

“I haven’t seen this one yet.”

“Yes!” Thayer pumped his fist in the air and held it for a moment like he was frozen in the end credits of an ’80s film.

“None of us have seen this one,” Freddie said. “It’s kind of a special occasion.” He sat next to me on the couch and passed me a bowl of fresh popcorn, stopping to look at me for a long moment. “You look different.”

There wasn’t anything different about me. Except the lip gloss I’d applied on the subway on the way here. Saundra had given it to me one day after I complimented her on it. She’d said boys like gloss more than lipstick. I looked the tube up online and saw that it cost sixty-five dollars. It was almost too expensive to wear. I didn’t know why I was wearing it now. Or maybe I did. Maybe it had something to do with the way Freddie was looking at me.

But now I felt self-conscious. I pressed my lips together, trying to subtly smudge away sixty-five dollars. “Different?”

Freddie shook his head. “Not, like, different,” he said, flustered. “Good. Not like…” He pushed his glasses up. “You look nice.”

I smiled, and the gloss stayed put. “So what happens when none of you have seen a movie before?”

Felicity strolled over to where I was sitting and dug into my bowl. “We draw a lottery and stone the winner to death.” She took a seat on the carpet, close to Bram’s chair, and munched on her fistful of popcorn.

“Felicity!” Thayer hissed. “Hush. You’ll scare the poor girl.”

“We play a game,” Bram said distractedly. Something on his phone had his full attention and he reached over to Felicity, tapping her on the shoulder to show her whatever it was. She leaned back, her head resting on the edge of Bram’s knee so she could see what was on his screen. And then she did something I’d never seen her do before. She giggled. She stuck her tongue out at Bram, a giant pink slug breaking through two black lips. And Bram, amazingly, stuck his own tongue out at her.

The whole exchange fascinated me. I wanted to know what was on Bram’s phone, what kind of sorcery he’d just conjured to get Felicity to laugh. But mostly I wanted to know who those two people were, because I’d never met them before. Maybe that meant that one day, Bram might share a joke with me. I imagined the two of us laughing together and felt a pang of something I was too proud to call jealousy.

“We like games,” Freddie whispered, snapping me out of my reverie. “I wasn’t sure if you could tell.”

“Oh, I got it,” I whispered back.

“It’s a senior citizen’s idea of fun,” Bram said.

Thayer pulled a stack of papers out of his backpack and began to hand them out. “Bingo!”

Like, literal bingo. It looked like something Thayer had made using Microsoft Word. It was possibly the dorkiest thing I’d ever seen, and I was totally there for it. There was a five-by-five grid with each box labeled. I looked over my sheet and read them all quickly.

Villain’s not really