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

transformed room. There were people bottlenecking at the doorway, yelling and frantic to get out. But mainly we all stared at Lux, who was in a full-blown panic. She was wildly pulling at her beautiful blond strands, crying hysterically for someone to help get the flies out of her hair.

But there weren’t any flies. The light ushered in a stillness, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the only other person who wasn’t freaking out. Not one strand of his loose, curly hair was out of place. His thick-framed glasses were not askew. I watched as he clicked a portable speaker and slipped it into his pants pocket. And just like that the buzzing came to a halt.

I clamped my lips shut. I tried not to let it out. The rest of the people in the room swore and caught their breaths, but something else was bubbling up inside me. Finally, I had to let it go.

I laughed. Hard. I laughed so loudly that soon, people turned to look at me like I was the weirdest thing in the supposedly haunted abandoned house.

Lux’s eyes locked onto mine. She was breathing hard, her fists full of blond clumps, like sad bouquets. I thought for a moment she’d pulled out her own hair, but then I noticed the clips at the edges. Hair extensions.

“You did this to me!” Lux pointed at me as if I had been the one to snatch her bald.

I shook my head, and though I was trying to be serious, little laughs continued to slip out.

“This was your stupid prank!”

I looked around, trying to spot the guy with the portable speaker, but he hadn’t stuck around to see Lux chew me out. Everyone else was riveted, though.

An angry, guttural sound came from Lux’s throat and she threw her extensions on the floor. “Laugh it up now because you’re done at this school.” And with that she stomped out of the house.

I had stopped laughing by now. When I turned to Saundra, her face was frozen in a grimace. I waited for her to say something. Like all the encouraging things she’d told me when she said this party would be “totally fun” and that I’d “find my people.” But all she said was, “This is not good.”

 3

I COULD FEEL how not good my situation was the minute I walked into school the next morning.

Manchester Prep was a private high school, and you could tell how exclusive it was by its location alone. Manhattan. Upper East Side. Basically on Museum Mile. It was four stories high, with the kind of intricate Gothic details carved into its facade that attracted tourists and their cameras. It was pretty on the outside, but cramped within.

We wore uniforms. Oxford shirts and gray blazers with the school crest. The boys wore slacks and the girls wore pleated gray skirts that were meant to chastely kiss the knees but more often than not grazed the thighs. I’d made the mistake of ordering my uniform online instead of having it fitted like everybody else, so my hemline scraped along my shins. The uniform was starchy and chafed and bit into the soft parts of my waist, and the whole thing was a big metaphor for how much I did not fit in here.

A part of it was the money thing. As in they had it, I didn’t. You’d think it wouldn’t make that big a difference when we all wore the same clothes, studied the same things, but as soon as they opened their mouths you could tell we belonged to two different worlds. They loved to talk about their things: how expensive they were and how many of them they had. They had unlimited credit cards and wore Cartier jewelry, and for some reason that I will never understand, they all had the exact same Celine Nano designer bag. I once saw one of my classmates try to buy a Twix bar at a deli on Second Avenue using a hundred-dollar bill.

So yeah. There was me and there was them and the chasm between us was the size of Manhattan.

But now, as I took the same route I always did to get to my locker, I felt like I didn’t fit in for a completely different reason. People were looking at me. Like, really stopping to look. Some sneered; others leaned into their friends to whisper, their eyes never leaving me.

I didn’t have to hear them to know what they were saying. That’s the girl who crossed Lux.

I’d worked so hard to not call attention to myself at this school, to blend in, that when all eyes were on me, I felt it as acutely as a sudden change in temperature. Everything went cold. Even the people in the alumni portraits that trimmed the high-ceilinged walls seemed to be watching me. They were mostly angry-looking dudes from back when Manchester was exclusively angry-looking dudes. The school became co-ed in the ’80s, and my locker was directly beneath the Technicolor portraits of two female alums with fanned hair. One had become an astronaut and the other a B-list sitcom actress. Both seemed way too interested in my being a newly anointed social pariah.

I didn’t see Lux, but I felt her presence all around, like a ghost haunting me. I felt it most strongly in my Women in Literature class when I saw Bram at his seat. Our gazes locked for an infinite moment in which I was yanked back to the kiss. I felt my face redden and I wondered if he’d told Lux about it and if I should expect my already-ruined life at Manchester to get exponentially worse. But then he looked away and so did I, and we both went back to pretending that I didn’t exist.

I tried my best to stop thinking about Bram, but unfortunately, he was Saundra’s favorite conversation topic.

“Were there any guys in your old high school who were as gorgeous