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

when I turned back around, I knocked right into Lux McCray. I’d never actually met either of them, but they were high school royalty, the kind of popular that you don’t need to meet to already know everything about them. Lux and Bram were Manchester Prep’s resident power couple.

My phone slipped out of my hand and bounced on the carpeted hallway floor. It illuminated Lux, finding her the way that light always seemed to, and highlighted the sharp angles of her face so that she looked like the heroine on a V.C. Andrews book cover. Her eyes rounded in surprise, but then narrowed.

“What the hell?” Lux demanded. “Were you spying on us?”

“No?”

“I don’t know what you think you heard—”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

Her glare roved over me, from my Zappos slip-ons to my messy bun of thick brown hair, then lingered on my sandy face. Maybe Lux was asking herself why I had so many freckles and couldn’t I have found a beauty tutorial that would get rid of some of them?

I stared back at her. To Lux, my natural freckles probably looked like dirt compared to her fake ones. I could tell Lux’s freckles were fake because they were too round, uniformly small, and perfectly spaced. The kind you drew on gingerly with a brow pencil. They skittered over the bridge of her nose, fanning out above the tops of her cheeks. A beautiful constellation.

I got a whiff of her perfume. Miss Dior. The preferred eau de parfum of future disgraced political wives. Her peachy skin glowed, soft and toned, beneath the straps of her Brandy Melville tank and her hair was the color of whisked butter. She was the kind of blond and pretty that died early in horror movies.

But then Lux’s gaze diverted to my phone on the floor. She picked it up and looked at the screen long enough to see not only the post but also the Instagram handle. “Maybe watch where you’re going instead of stalking Matthew Marshall.”

A heavy ball of anxiety burrowed in my chest, threatening to expand to the rest of my body. It happened quickly like that, the way fear took over sometimes. One minute I could be fine and the next I’d start feeling uneasy, jittery, my fingers and toes tingling in a bad way. She wasn’t supposed to know Matthew’s name. No one was. I pounced for my phone, and Lux looked shocked and offended, as though it was her phone. I managed to snatch it out of her hands.

“Freak,” she hissed, shouldering past me and disappearing down the dark hallway.

It was an instant reminder of what I was. Not normal. A freak. It was obvious to everyone, including Lux. Yeah, I was officially over this party.

I headed downstairs to find Saundra so we could get out of there, but the unnerving darkness and the weird encounter with Lux followed me like a tablecloth I’d accidently tucked into my waistband. Nobody was supposed to know Matthew’s name. I’d known it was a bad idea to come to this party. I’d known it.

My brain swarmed with dizzying thoughts and it felt like I was going down the stairs both too fast and too slow. I pushed my way through the crowd, my tunnel vision zeroing in on the front door.

I was outside in a second, swallowing the crisp night air. I needed to get my mind right, do literally anything else but think about what had just happened. I needed to do something stupid. Reckless.

My eyes hooked onto the only person outside. I walked over and tapped him on the shoulder. In times like these, I could be a character in a possession movie if I needed to: lose all control and let something else take over. I barely waited for him to turn around before I grabbed a fistful of his shirt and pulled his face down to mine.

I hated the part of myself that did stuff like this. Reckless and wrong.

But it worked. As soon as our lips touched, all thoughts of Matthew Marshall and Lux and how stifling the house had felt were washed away. And in that moment, I didn’t care. I could chalk it up to high school party shenanigans. I could pretend I was drunk, be a wild girl, morals be damned. I was pretty sure this was what normal kids did at normal parties.

Soon I wasn’t thinking about anything at all, and as my thoughts quieted, my senses took over. There was the sound of his breathing; sharp as he inhaled through his nose and then soft as he sighed. I took in the scent of his shampoo, something woodsy. Pine and lime. And then even those senses fell away and I was left with only two. There was just the feel of his lips, and the taste of them.

When we both pulled away, breathless, I finally got a look at who I’d been kissing.

At the sight of him, my mind—serenely blank just a moment before—blared loud with a big resigned fuck.

“Rachel?” Saundra called as she came down the stoop.

I couldn’t tell if Bram Wilding was horrified or repulsed by what I’d just done, but he gave me the courtesy of staying stone-faced. So that was good to know. Bram, Lux’s-boyfriend-who-I’d-just-basically-assaulted-because-I-was-a-criminially-innapropriate-freak-like-Lux-said-I-was, was courteous. He turned and walked away before Saundra could see him.

“Who was that?” Saundra asked when she reached me.

“Nobody.”

She quirked an eyebrow. “I just saw you talking to somebody.”

“It was no one. A ghost.”

“It’s funny you should say that,” Saundra said, the tips of her fingers twiddling together. “’Cause there’s gonna be a séance!”

 2

SAUNDRA LED ME back through the house, her arm linked tightly through mine to prevent any attempt at escape. “Why are we doing this?” I asked.

“It’s a séance,” Saundra and I both said at the same time, though our tones were polar opposites.

“What could possibly go wrong?” Saundra asked.

“You’ve obviously never watched Night of the Demons.”

Saundra stopped walking and turned to face me. She