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

Hero falls while being chased in woods

“Let’s split up!”

No phone signal

Running upstairs???

Hiding under bed / in closet

Some boxes just had a single word, like:

SEX.

And some boxes came with little questions at the top that I had to fill in myself, like Who will die first? and Body count?, which was the middle square.

“How am I supposed to know who dies first?” I whispered to Freddie.

He held up his own sheet, which he had already started filling in. “You just guess.”

For who would die first he’d simply written The Custodian. I pulled a pen out of my bag and wrote in my own answer: The Childhood Friend.

“Rules are simple,” Thayer said as he killed the lights. “Circle a box when it happens on-screen, yell bingo when you get a line, celebrate your superiority over the rest of us, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Ready?” Bram asked the room. He clicked on the keyboard and Gut Stab Six began.

The bingo game made Gut Stab Six a lot more enjoyable than it otherwise would’ve been. But so did the fact that I was seeing it with a group of people who felt exactly the same way about it. Which was to say, we all hated it because it was trash (lousy dialogue, bad acting, every horror cliché known to man), but we also watched every minute devoutly because we loved it.

I circled one of my boxes every time there was a corresponding scene in the movie. Thayer giggled and let out a whoop! every time he circled a new box. But Freddie kept missing his. He was distracted.

It reminded me of when we’d first watched a movie together, back at the Film Forum, when we were keenly aware of each other and made sure to keep our eyes glued to the screen. But this time I kept catching Freddie sneaking glances at me.

I checked my bingo sheet, then looked up. Freddie quickly looked down at his own sheet, pretending he hadn’t just been looking at me.

“Creepy Kid,” I whispered.

“Huh?” Freddie said.

I tapped my pen against his paper. “A creepy kid just appeared.”

“Oh.” His glasses reflected the pale blue glow of the movie, hiding his eyes. He pushed them up as he circled the box on his sheet.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

I reached for some popcorn from the bowl sitting between us just as Freddie did the same. Our fingers touched, and we both jerked our hands back as though we’d touched something hot.

“Sorry,” I said quickly, and Freddie said it, too. On the floor in front of us, Felicity whipped around to shush us.

I turned back to the movie, but was distracted by Freddie. I wanted more popcorn, but I was waiting for him to go for it so I would know when the coast was clear. Out of the corner of my eye, I could tell that he was doing the same thing. He watched the movie, then watched me, then grabbed a single piece of popcorn and popped it into his mouth. He ate slowly, his razor-sharp jawline tightening as he chewed. He swallowed, which I took as my signal to take a piece of popcorn. It felt like we were on a seesaw, picking up popcorn and chewing, picking up popcorn and chewing.

We had the whole routine down pat without missing a beat, even when Thayer erupted with a new whoop! But somewhere along the line, when I dipped my fingers into the bowl, they found Freddie’s fingers again. This time, our fingers stayed put, like they had minds of their own. Freddie’s fingers were soft and slightly slick with butter. On-screen, the blond girl and the brown-haired guy whose names no longer mattered began to take each other’s clothes off.

“Have sex?” Freddie asked.

I tore my eyes from the two gyrating figures on screen and turned to Freddie. “Like … now?”

He pulled his buttery fingers from mine and pointed down at my sheet. “Like there.”

“Oh!” I nearly choked, and I wasn’t even eating popcorn. I circled the SEX box, hoping he couldn’t see how warm my cheeks were.

“Bingo,” Freddie prompted.

“Bingo!” I said a little too loudly.

“Bingo?” Thayer asked. I showed him my sheet and he waved it around, happier for me than I was for myself. “We have a bingo here! You know what that means.”

Felicity whipped her head around, looking uncharacteristically thrilled. Thayer grabbed a handful of his popcorn and flicked it at me. Bram, weirdly, did it, too, a small smile fighting its way onto his face. Freddie laughed and half-heartedly tossed some bits of popcorn on me, too.

Then I learned why Felicity was so happy. She took her full bowl in both hands, walked right up to me, and dumped it over my head.

“It’s tradition,” she announced with a self-satisfied grin.

 20

I MAY HAVE just joined the Mary Shelley Club but already I was devoted.

I’d found a pack of weirdos who liked the same things I did, and we shared a secret, which made every minute we spent together feel heightened—alive. We were doing something bad and it felt so good.

In fact, ever since the Mary Shelley Club had come into my life, I’d noticed I didn’t feel as anxious as I normally did. Memories from that terrible night on Long Island stopped storming into my mind unbidden. A club about fear was helping to rid me of mine.

All I wanted to do every day was leave the world of Manchester behind so I could hang out with the club, where we could shed our itchy wools and stiff button-downs to slip into our real clothes and be our real selves. Occasionally some of us even slipped into something more extravagant, like when it was Thayer’s turn to pick a movie to watch and he chose Re-Animator. He said it was to honor Mary Shelley with “hands down the best modern reimagining of Frankenstein.” But I think it was so he could show up at Bram’s in a green surgical gown and skeleton mask split in