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

He finally tore his gaze away and looked straight ahead at the house where his girlfriend was moments away from being scared out of her mind. Hopefully.

“I’m nothing like Lux. Or you,” I said finally. “I would never put a game before someone I cared about.”

“Which is exactly why you don’t belong in the club.”

My fingers stopped twitching. I no longer wanted to reach for my phone. There was a reason why Bram and I never talked, and as much fun as this was, I was ready to start my Fear Test.

“When she calls you,” I said, “tell her she’s just imagining things. Make her think everything’s going to be all right.”

Giving instructions felt good. And Bram, who cared so much about this game, would have to comply. He checked his watch. Like, an actual timepiece and not something that told him now many steps he’d taken today. He stood up and walked away, leaving his swing squeaking in the wind.

 32

LUX McCRAY

LUX McCRAY DIDN’T like babysitting, and she certainly didn’t need the money. But being Wyatt Salgado-Hydesmuirre’s nanny was a coveted position that she couldn’t pass up. And not because she loved Wyatt. He was a cute kid, but Lux mostly cared about his dad. Not in a gross babysitter fantasy way. Ew.

She cared because Henry Hydesmuirre was a bigwig at Condé Nast. Lux wasn’t sure what his position was exactly (COO, CFO, VP—she knew it was a combination of any of those letters). But the details didn’t matter. What mattered was that if she got along with Henry’s son, then she was good as golden to get an internship at Vogue before senior year. There were at least two other people from her school who’d interviewed for the babysitting job, but Lux had beaten them out.

The Salgado-Hydesmuirres required her services on their weekly date night, which could be anything from a movie, to a fundraiser, to a white-tie eight-course dinner gala. All Lux had to do was show up and spend about an hour with the six-year-old before putting him to bed. It’d been the same routine for the last five months: play with Wyatt and his always-new, always-expensive toys, make sure he brushed his teeth, give Sugar a chew toy to gnaw in her doggy bed, put the kid to sleep, and then, finally, text Bram to let him know the coast was clear.

She would usually wait a half hour before texting Bram. She killed the time by kicking back on the deep brown leather sofa in the living room and scrolling through IG. She spent a few seconds looking at each post, double-tapping as she went. She got to a photo of Lucia, head tilted and lips pursed. Poor filter choice, yet again, and when would this girl learn her angles? When Lux zoomed in, she could see a blazing zit that did not have enough concealer on it on the underside of Lucia’s jaw. Lux wrinkled her nose and scrolled past the post without double-tapping.

After a couple more minutes of this, she looked up and found Wyatt standing in the room. She gasped so loud that Sugar, on the doggy bed at her feet, jumped. “What are you doing here?”

“I can’t sleep,” Wyatt said.

Now the dog was out of bed too, and scampered to Wyatt’s bare feet. Soon they’d be playing together. Soon they’d be hyper. This was not good.

“Just close your eyes,” Lux said. “You’ll fall asleep before you know it.”

She prided herself on how tough she was with kids, that she wasn’t a pushover. She knew instinctively that babying Wyatt—scratching his back like he always requested, and sitting with him until his eyes fluttered shut—was the wrong approach. He was way too old for that stuff, and anyway, if she started that precedent, then she’d have to do it every time she came over. No. Tough love was the way to go. None of this coddling bullshit. No one at her house had ever given her attention when she cried. Toughness, she knew, had to be instilled at a young age.

Wyatt’s parents were always shocked when they came home and learned that the boy had gone to sleep without putting up a fight. To them, Lux was a miracle worker. She tried ever so subtly to hint that she could also work miracles fetching lattes for editors or assisting at photo shoots. But so far, no internship offer. Yet.

“It doesn’t matter if I close my eyes,” Wyatt said. “I keep hearing noises.”

“What kind of noises?”

“It sounds like someone’s tapping on my window.”

The Salgado-Hydesmuirres lived in a huge house in a neighborhood full of huge houses that looked nice, but inside they were crap.

“It’s just the cold, Wyatt.” The houses here lived and breathed, but seemed to perpetually suffer from pneumonia. Always drafty, always leaky; you couldn’t take a step without the floors moaning.

“The cold doesn’t make noise.”

“It does in this house. Now go to bed.”

Wyatt sighed and marched back upstairs in his too-small spaceship pj’s, muttering about climate change and how it wasn’t that cold out tonight anyway.

Lux went back to her phone, but it was only a couple of minutes until Wyatt showed up again. The whole thing was legit getting old.

“Can you stay in my room until I fall asleep?” he asked. All her tough love crap went out the window. Now it was just about expediency. The faster he went to sleep, the faster she could text Bram, and she really needed to text Bram.

He always came over after Wyatt was asleep, but she still wasn’t sure if he would tonight. They’d had a fight.

Lux couldn’t even remember about what, just that Bram had been acting weird and then she’d said something she probably shouldn’t have and he said some things he definitely should wish he hadn’t and the whole thing had blown up.

They hadn’t spoken a word to each other at school earlier. Yeah, they’d