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

Thayer let out a gasp. Freddie’s whisper had apparently not been low enough. “How dare you?” Thayer demanded. “It was a quality test. Way ahead of its time.”

“It was garbage,” Felicity said. She threw a handful of popcorn at him. Bram leaned over to pluck the kernels off the floor but as he stretched his arm out, he winced and grabbed his side. I seemed to be the only one to catch it.

“I still say I deserve a do-over,” Felicity said.

“No do-overs,” Freddie said. “That’s against the rules.”

“I was injured during my own test.” Felicity held up her arm to punctuate the point, an Ace bandage encircling her wrist. According to Felicity, when Sim had popped open his car door he’d seriously injured her, but I was pretty sure the only bruising she’d experienced was to her ego. “I didn’t get a chance to complete the rest of my test.”

“Rest of your test?” Thayer said, tickled. “Girl, you weren’t gonna do anything but chase him anyway.”

“Personal injury is part of the risk,” Bram piped in. “You have to come to terms with your test being a failure.”

Felicity exhaled loudly through her nostrils. “It wasn’t a failure. I scared him.”

“Okay,” Bram said. “But the biggest scream of the night came from Jennifer over a song.”

“Screw you, Bram.”

“Hey, it wasn’t a failure,” Freddie assured her. “You scared Sim.”

“Yeah, but his girlfriend wasn’t scared at all,” I said.

“Um, who asked you?” Felicity said. “The target is the only person you have to scare.”

“But when there are other people in the Fear Test, shouldn’t their reactions count for your overall score?”

“New Girl makes a good point,” Thayer said. “We should add that to the rules.”

“No way,” Felicity said. “The rules existed long before she joined the club.”

But Freddie leaned toward me. “What would the terms be?”

“I think if you’re going to do a Fear Test with a lot of people present, that’s going to be a harder test to pull off. The more people to convince, the bigger the risk.”

Felicity got up from the couch, blocking a shrieking Rebecca Gayheart on the screen. “So we’re just going to take New Girl’s advice on how to play this game?”

“It would make things more interesting,” Freddie said.

“We know how you love to make things more interesting,” Bram said. I didn’t know what he meant, but Freddie didn’t seem to take too kindly to the remark.

“This is ridiculous.” Felicity pointed a finger at me. “The only reason you’re in the club is because you found out too much about us.”

Her words landed like a blow to my stomach.

“Felicity,” Freddie said, his usual chill tone taking on an edge of warning.

But Felicity ignored him. “You were a threat to our ecosystem,” she said to me. “You were getting too close to finding out about us. Nobody actually wanted you in this club.”

“That isn’t true,” Freddie said quickly.

Thayer piped in. “We’re always on the lookout for new recruits. You fit the bill.”

We were sitting in our usual movie-watching spots but suddenly it felt crowded, with their gazes boring into me. Here was an opportunity for Bram to speak but he let it pass him by, his silence saying all I needed to hear.

Felicity turned back to the group. “The rules are bigger than any one of us. You can’t just change them.”

And with that, she was done, grabbing her coat and leaving.

Nobody said anything for a moment, and it felt like a curtain had been pulled back. Before, all I’d noticed were the great things about the club. I’d been naïve to the fact that there could be something ugly festering beneath the surface.

Thayer came to sit next to me, filling the space between Freddie and me.

“Felicity can be kind of dramatic,” Thayer whispered. “She’s upset because her test sucked, as her tests always inevitably do. Okay? We good?”

I nodded because it seemed like the response Thayer wanted, but I couldn’t shake what Felicity had said. Did they really want me here? Suddenly I wasn’t so sure, but I didn’t budge and we continued with the movie. For the first time a Mary Shelley Club meeting didn’t feel like the cozy blanket it usually was for me.

Freddie tried to catch my gaze, but I kept my eyes on the screen. The killer had finally caught up with Tara Reid and she let out a blood-curdling scream.

 25

BY MONDAY MORNING everyone at school had heard about Sim and Jennifer’s hookup from hell. In the People’s Court of Manchester Prep, they were defendant and plaintiff, arguing two wildly different accounts of what had happened.

Jennifer told everyone that Sim had taken her to a sketch AF car dealership in bumblefuck Brooklyn to bone and then suddenly made up some story about a killer with, like, bait and tackle or something, and then Sim just ran away, leaving Jennifer to figure out where the heck she was—did she mention she was in bumblefuck Brooklyn? Alone? At night!—and Sim very obviously totally just couldn’t get it up.

Sim told everyone that the Infamous Manchester Prankster had gotten him, threatened his life with a hook and then a knife, but then he’d beaten the prankster to a pulp with his bare hands and he was definitely not impotent. He had absolutely zero problems in that department. He had the opposite of that problem. He could prove it to any doubters.

Saundra was delighted with the new scandal.

“Prankster my ass!” she said, throwing her head back and laughing gleefully at lunch. “Obviously, I believe Jennifer,” Saundra said.

“Why?”

“Because Sim can’t get his story straight? First he sees a guy in a hoodie? Then the guy disappears. Then he sees him again with a hook. Then Sim apparently knocks him out when he opens his car door.” Saundra had gathered every scrap of info from both parties, leaving nothing on the parking lot floor. “Then he runs but is stopped by the hooded man again and this time he has a knife? No hook