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

anywhere in sight? And then Sim beats him up? That is highly unlikely, my friend. The only thing Sim has ever tried to beat is—we now know for sure—his nonfunctioning dick.”

I nearly choked on my kale. “Saundra!”

“What? I never liked Jennifer Abrams, but I believe women.”

Just as she said this, the lunchroom din was interrupted by the screeching of metal chair legs being dragged across the floor. Sim hopscotched from a chair to a table, getting everyone’s attention.

“I am telling the truth!” he declared. The desperation in his voice was tinged with hoarseness, probably from denying his impotency all day. “I was attacked! That guy almost killed me!”

I spotted something white soaring in a soft arch toward him, landing at his feet. And then again. Napkins? Tissues? I followed Sim’s confused gaze to see where the flurry of napkins was coming from. Felicity pinched a new napkin and threw it at him, like it was a rose and he was a performer. Except weirder, obviously.

“What are you doing?” he shrieked.

Felicity shrugged and said in her patented monotone: “Cry me a river.”

Jennifer Abrams stood up then, too. She made a quick beeline toward Felicity, pinched a napkin from the stack in Felicity’s hand and started flinging them at Sim, too. And then other people joined in. Tissues flew like feathers from a pillow fight, the laughter and mocking applause drowning out anything Sim was trying to say.

“This is ridiculous!” he said. “I did nothing wrong!”

I spotted my mom walking up to Sim and trying to get him to come down from the table, and then more teachers joined her. As Sim was being pulled off, he bellowed, “It was a big, scary dude in a hood! A big, scary-as-fuck dude in a scary-as-fuck mask!”

Everyone else laughed or jeered or continued to throw their napkins at him, but everything in me stopped.

Mask.

None of us had worn masks to Felicity’s Fear Test.

I decided that Sim must’ve been mistaken. But that word stuck with me for the rest of the day, like a hot breath on the back of my neck.

It was the kitchen floor that came to me first. I could feel the familiar laminate, the coolness against the back of my head. My hands were preoccupied, fists clutching, fingers curled in black fabric as I tried to push him off me. But he was too strong. Every time I grabbed at a forearm, it’d slip out of my grasp. And there were his knees, locked on either side of me, pinning me down.

I reached up for his face, but the rubber mask of a muted monster stared down at me.

I woke up, skin clammy and breathing hard. I fought with my blanket as though I was still fighting for my life. It took a minute for my fingers to relax and unclench.

It also took me a minute to remember. Because it wasn’t a nightmare. It was a memory.

I buried my face in my hands. I hadn’t thought about that night in so long; I’d forced myself not to, but something had unsettled me. Since joining the club I thought I’d buried that memory deep but it had found a way to come out, like a zombie’s hand breaking through the surface of a fresh grave. I pressed my hands into my eye sockets until I felt pain. Until the blackness there burst with glowing shapes and patterns.

 26

I COULD’VE TALKED to my mom about my nightmare. But I didn’t want to worry her. So I was back on my old bullshit. The moment I started to feel a creeping sense of anxiety, I shut it down by doing something really stupid. Tonight’s rendition of stupid was climbing down the fire escape outside my bedroom window, riding the subway into the city at two A.M., and not stopping until I was standing in front of a building in Washington Heights.

I held my phone in my hands, waiting for an answer to my text. I watched the screen, clicked it back on every time it went dark. Then three dots.

Be right down.

It was only then that it hit me just how stupid this was. But I couldn’t turn back now. I was here because I had thought that by joining the Mary Shelley Club, I was beginning to push past everything I’d been through last year. And for a while it had worked—I wasn’t rattled by fear, wasn’t thinking about what had happened to me and what I’d done. But that nightmare shook me up. The rumor of the Masked Man had triggered something, and now I couldn’t think about anything else. So I needed to stop thinking, period.

Freddie pulled open the door to his building. He wore black sliders over slouch socks, sweatpants, and an undershirt wrinkled by the sleep I’d just interrupted. He wasn’t wearing his glasses and when he looked at me, it was through a squint.

“I’m sorry I woke you up.”

“You can wake me up anytime. Want to come in?”

“Your family’s probably sleeping,” I said, though I remembered that he’d once told me his brother worked weeknights as a security guard.

“My brother’s working and my mom’s a deep sleeper. It’s way too cold to be out here.” His voice was soft but authoritative, like he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. “Come in.”

We walked through the lobby, which was a muted pink and smelled like vegetable soup. The elevator was small, only a few feet wide, and dipped slightly as we stepped inside. Freddie hit number twelve and we sputtered and lurched upward.

The ride was slow, but neither of us spoke. My mind was still swampy with flashes of my nightmare. When we got out I followed Freddie to apartment 12C. The hallway light bathed a triangle of space inside the apartment, but when I closed the door behind me, it was pitch-black. I felt Freddie’s fingers encircle mine and he led the way to his room.

Freddie switched on a lamp. There were