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

behind me, demanding answers. She wasn’t there, but somebody else was. Standing on the second-floor landing was one of my own, a monster in a mask.

“It’s over!” I shouted. My voice was hot and half muted by the rubber over my face. I didn’t sound like myself, and the longer I wore the mask, the more the guilt and disgust ate away at me. “She screamed!”

I tried to make out which of us it was, but we were all in the same uniform—the black hoodie, white mask. From this strange angle, staring up at them, the person looked both dwarfed and menacingly large. They were little more than a dim shadow, with only the mask truly noticeable, its whiteness a ghostly beacon in the darkness. Whoever it was stood still for a moment. A statue. Like they were listening, considering what I’d just said.

“What are you doing?” I demanded. “Let’s go!”

They finally moved, but instead of following me down, they turned into the hallway and out of my view.

There was no time for this. I had to find the rendezvous and a safe place to pull off my mask. I briskly walked down a hallway but then a closet door swung open, nearly crashing into me. A hand reached out of the darkness and grabbed mine, pulling me in.

“What the hell?” I shouted. The door closed behind us, squeezing us into the tight space. I was crammed between swinging coats, some thick enough to be smothered by. My first reflex was to swing but my hand was caught midway, followed by a “Shh.”

“Freddie?” The only light in the closet came from the crack in the doorframe. Not enough to illuminate him, but I knew instantly that it was him by his scent.

“What are you—” I stopped to jerk my mask off my head. “What are you doing?”

Outside the door there was the sound of someone running past. “Anyone could’ve seen you,” Freddie whispered.

I yanked off the hoodie, my elbows knocking into Freddie and the coats. A few weeks ago I might’ve been thrilled to be in a closet with Freddie, shedding layers of clothes. So much had changed.

The hoodie was off, but it wasn’t enough. I could feel the familiar dread crawling up my skin like fire ants, my arms feeling weak and heavy, and all I could think to do was to reach out. My fingers felt for Freddie, searching for purchase, winding into his sweatshirt.

“She knew it was me,” I muttered, my voice hitching with panic. “She knew it was me under the mask, she’s going to figure it all out—the Mary Shelley Club, she already thinks I’m keeping secrets—”

Freddie pulled me into him, wrapping his arms around me quickly.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s over. I heard her scream.”

“She’s going to hate me.”

“She’ll be confused like everyone else. I’ll give you an alibi, okay? You can tell her you were in a closet with me, making out all night.”

It was hard to tell if it was meant as a joke, considering that in another timeline, we might have been doing exactly that. It put the spotlight on the awkward way we’d left things, and how we’d never actually sat down to talk everything through. Maybe this was the universe sending me a sign that we were meant to hash things out.

Freddie seemed to think so.

“Do you still think it was me?” he said. “What Bram accused me of, hurting Lux. You still believe that?”

I didn’t know anymore. I didn’t want to.

“Compromising the club would be the last thing I would ever want to do. Not only because I love the club, but because you know what would happen if we got caught. Bram, Thayer, Felicity—they’d be okay. But you and me? We don’t have a safety net. We don’t have family lawyers to bail us out of any binds. We can’t mess up.”

I nodded fervently.

“If you don’t want to be with me, that’s fine,” Freddie said. “But I can’t stand back and let Bram convince you that I’m some monster. He’s the one who made us wear masks tonight. He chose Saundra to get back at you. He’s the one who’s acting like a lunatic, Rachel.”

It was dark but I could feel his face close to mine, his warm breath. He wanted nothing more than for me to trust him. The truth was, I wanted that, too.

“Freddie, I—”

We jumped at the sound of a crash. It was so loud I could feel it in my bones—loud like the whole cabin was coming down.

Freddie and I didn’t need to say anything. The intensity of our conversation evaporated instantly, replaced by something graver. He reached for the doorknob first and we both ran out of the closet.

There was a group of people huddled in the grand foyer, looking down at something. I thought it was strange that they were looking down because all I saw was the gaping hole up above. The skylight was gone, with nothing left but shards of glass still dangling from the frame.

“There was somebody up there!” a boy cried. “I saw someone up there!”

But the rest of the crowd was strangely quiet. A tense quiet, like people gathered around a torched house or a car wreck. I broke through the crowd until I could see what they were looking at.

I recognized her hair first before I saw her face. She lay in the middle of the floor, too still. Her eyes stared up at me. I couldn’t remember what I said or sobbed in those moments. Just that my eyes instantly flooded, while Saundra’s stayed lifeless.

 40

“WHAT HAPPENED?” I asked. My voice didn’t sound like my voice. It was dazed and hoarse, and I didn’t know if it was from crying or screaming or both.

I also didn’t know how I’d gotten to the rendezvous point, behind the empty general store, standing with the Mary Shelley Club again. We were not the stoic, sober ghosts from earlier in the night. We were