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

of Bram’s wrath. But now that I was the one asking, he looked like he’d just taken a second punch. Shocked. Exasperated. Wounded.

“You think I messed with your Fear Test?”

“I think Lux really saw someone wearing a mask. I don’t know why she would lie about that.”

“I don’t know either,” Freddie said. It suddenly felt like that night when he’d shown me Bride of Frankenstein had happened forever ago. When he took a step toward me, I took a step back. The hurt in Freddie’s eyes was magnified by his glasses.

“Do you believe Bram?” he asked. “Do you think I went behind your back and put on a mask and actually tried to hurt Lux?”

I didn’t want to.

But. “You were the only one upstairs.”

“Rachel, I left. I followed your instructions and left to meet everyone at the rendezvous point.”

This time, when I didn’t say anything, it was Freddie who pulled back, shaking his head. I hadn’t outright accused him of anything, but there’d been enough said between the lines to sever something between us.

He headed for the door, but when his hand was on the knob, he took a deep breath. “I can’t believe you think I’d do something like this.”

“Freddie—”

“If there was someone else up there last night, it wasn’t me.”

He left, leaving me alone on the roof.

 34

IT HAD BEEN a week since my Fear Test and I was still trying to make sense of how it had gone wrong.

It could only have been one of three things.

A)  Freddie had put on a mask for some reason. Maybe he’d thought it’d be a good idea, help my test. Maybe something went wrong and Lux’s fall down the stairs was just an accident. Maybe Freddie didn’t want to take the blame for what had happened to her.

B)  Lux was lying. She didn’t actually see anything. She fell down the stairs on her own, and to make the whole story a little less embarrassing—and maybe get herself more attention—she glommed onto something she’d heard Sim say. A prankster wearing a mask.

C)  There was someone in a mask, and they were messing with our Fear Tests.

I pushed option C out of my mind as soon as I thought it. It was the least likely thing, and the one I refused to accept. Because a rando in a mask was way too similar to what had happened to me last year. And what happened last year needed to stay in the past.

But the thing about the past was that there were other people who lived it, too. Mainly my mom. And all she apparently wanted to do was talk about it.

“How are you doing?” she asked, leaning over to grab a handful of popcorn from my bowl.

It was a weird question to ask in the middle of Hereditary.

“I’m fine,” I said without taking my eyes off the TV. “Why?”

“I heard about what happened to Lux McCray.”

I swallowed and watched as Toni Collette worked on her miniature art project. “What’s that got to do with me?” I asked, and then wondered if that sounded too defensive.

“I’m just wondering if it brought anything back up for you.”

On-screen, Toni Collette broke one of the tiny pieces of furniture she was working on. I watched her fly into a rage and destroy the entire display.

“I haven’t given it much thought at all,” I said calmly.

I didn’t turn to see my mother’s face but I could picture it. Concerned. Slightly disappointed that I was not being honest. And finally, open, beseeching, hoping that I’d say something.

“Do you know anything about what happened?” I asked. Maybe the teachers had been briefed about Lux’s trauma, just as AssHead had been briefed on mine. Maybe my mom knew a detail that none of the students knew, something that would help me cross out one of the possibilities on my short list.

“Just that Lux was alone in a house and there was a man in a mask who attacked her.” My mom shuddered. “It hit so close to home when I heard it.”

Too close.

I grabbed the remote and clicked the stop button.

“I’ve seen this one already,” I said. “And I’m kind of tired.”

It was early but I retreated to my room. The idea of a masked man was my worst nightmare, and he wasn’t confined to my dreams or memories anymore.

The dream—no—nightmare. Again.

The same figure, the same black clothes. The mask. He was on top of me, just as he was every time, but now he was holding a knife. I knew this was a dream. And yet, fear still gripped me so hard I couldn’t budge. My hands reached for whatever they could, scrambling all over the cold kitchen tile, but the only thing I could grab was fistfuls of bedsheets.

I watched as the figure lowered the fist-clenched knife almost in slow motion, the gleaming blade inching closer to my chest.

I sat up in bed. A thin film of sweat dotted my hairline, my eyebrows. I gulped for air.

Even out of the nightmare all I could see was the mask. The white, old-man face with thin lips and sunken cheeks. The same face Sim and Lux had claimed to see. The face that had chased me around at the Halloween party.

The face I’d left behind on Long Island. Or thought I had.

 35

FREDDIE AND I hadn’t talked since the emergency meeting on the roof, almost two weeks before. Not that I blamed him. I’d accused him of doing something terrible—something I wasn’t even sure he’d really done. There were so many times when I wrote him an apology text, but I always deleted it before I hit send. There was no way he wanted to hear from me.

The worst part of it all was that I missed him. Freddie was the only person I wanted to talk to after my latest nightmare. And after school I still caught myself waiting for him so we could walk to the subway together, even though we hadn’t