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

done that in a while. I wanted to talk about our favorite movies, tease him about all his wrong opinions, say something to make him laugh.

The hard truth was that either Freddie had done something bad, or he hadn’t and I was needlessly punishing him. Either reality sucked.

And Bram wasn’t talking to anyone in the club at all. Which meant no more club meetings in his study. It was like I’d traveled back in time to those first few weeks of school, when I knew him only from the whispers that trailed him wherever he went. These days, he was constantly at Lux’s side when she wasn’t in class. I saw her in art class, where we dutifully avoided each other. She wore a gray-and-pink ski cap to cover up her stitches, the dress code having been waived especially for her.

Felicity was back to her normal self, which mainly meant ignoring me when we were at our lockers getting our books. I still had Thayer, though. Weekends at the Shustrine were my lifeline to the club.

When our shift wound down and the concession stand was quiet with just the hum of the popcorn machine, I asked him if he knew what the hell was going on.

“About the Masked Man?” Thayer asked. He had a People magazine open on the counter, flipping through it absentmindedly. “No clue. But I figure Lux is lying.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “She’s a liar. End of.”

“That’s it? Lux is a liar?”

“You know that better than anyone. She told the whole school you tried to kill her with a pair of scissors.”

I glanced at his magazine to avoid looking at him. “Right,” I muttered.

“Or maybe she’s not lying,” Thayer said. “Maybe she got scared because your test was so good and she fell down the stairs and she thinks she saw someone in a mask because she heard Sim talking about it in school and mass hysteria is real and all that jazz. The point is, you shouldn’t feel bad about it.”

Feeling bad wasn’t the issue. I wanted answers. Everything felt so up in the air right now. Lux. Freddie. The club.

“Bram punched Freddie,” I said. “How are they gonna come back from that?”

Thayer slid the magazine aside. “New Girl, you don’t know this because—as your name implies—you’re brand-spankin’-new. But Bram and Freddie have been known to have their little tiffs from time to time.”

I inched closer on my stool. “Really? Like physical fights?”

Thayer waved his hand dismissively, neither confirming nor denying my question. “All I’m saying is there’s been plenty of drama between members before. And it’s always been resolved. In due time. Bram’s just gotta cool down, put on the ol’ ice mask, and do some stomach crunches in his underwear while listening to Huey Lewis and the News. Then he’ll let us know when he wants to do his Fear Test and the game’ll continue like normal.”

“Freddie said the same thing on the roof. That the game will just keep going. The game feels pretty much over, don’t you think?”

“The game isn’t over until everyone’s played.” Thayer flipped another page of his magazine. The article, a puff piece about some reality show contestant, stole his attention away.

The sudden absence of the club in my life made me realize how heavily I had relied on it as my main social outlet. I still had Saundra, of course. Now that I had more time on my hands, we hung out after school. I invited her over to the apartment in an attempt to recreate the club’s horror movie nights. I started off with a sure bet: Scream. A perennial fave. But to my horror Saundra showed up at my apartment with her tablet loaded with the MTV series based on the movies. When I told her, very gently, that I would rather tear my skin off than watch that abomination, she laughed and hit play.

So that was the end of movie nights with Saundra.

We still had lunch, though, with her regularly scheduled Bram show. She spoke of his hair (shinier than ever), and his heroism (sticking by Lux’s side through this traumatizing ordeal), and his hotness (scorching and getting hotter), her words mixing all together in a Bram lexicon blender.

I watched him at the center of the room. It was ridiculous that he was always around—in my lunchroom, in my classes, in my thoughts—and I couldn’t just go over and talk to him. I wanted to know what Lux had told him about her accident. If he was ever going to host another club meeting. If he had completely shut us out forever.

From the pulsing static of Saundra’s words, two broke through.

“… breaking up.”

“Huh?” I said.

“Marcela Armagnac told me that Bram and Lux are on the verge of breaking up,” Saundra repeated.

“But you just called him heroic for … basically sitting next to her at lunch.”

“Exactly,” Saundra said. “The rumor is that he doesn’t want to be with her anymore, but he can’t break up with her now because it’d make him look like an asshole, or like he didn’t want to be with her because she has an ugly scar on the back of her head.”

Lux hadn’t parted from her ski caps yet and there was rampant speculation that it was because her scar was unsightly. I wanted to groan but it would have been the loudest groan in the world and I really didn’t want to draw attention to myself.

“I hear Lux is still really shook and she just wants to move on from everything, including maybe Bram, and now she’s desperate to see other people and maybe so is he, but they want to wait until after the ski trip.”

The ski trip. I’d first heard about it from Thayer a few weeks before, and the closer we got to it, the more it was brought up. It wasn’t a school-sanctioned trip, but it was tradition. The juniors and seniors organized it themselves, and headed up to Hunter Mountain for a day of skiing and a