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

I put down my sandwich. My stomach suddenly hurt but Saundra didn’t notice my loss of appetite. She ate distractedly, her gaze locked on the center of the room. It was the prime real estate of the school’s upper echelon. Saundra watched Bram and his friends like they were doing something truly remarkable instead of the same eating and chatting as the rest of us plebes.

Thanks to Saundra, I learned everything I never wanted to know about Bram. He was the product of Andrew and Delilah Wilding, a publishing magnate of Scottish descent and a former model from Cairo, respectively. But I knew something about Bram that Saundra couldn’t know. Like what his lips felt like.

“All the guys in my old high school were ogres,” I said. Saundra was doing me a solid by not talking about the elephant in the room (my sudden notoriety and social ostracism), but I desperately needed to change the subject. “Could we talk about literally anything else?”

“Okay, we can talk about the party, which I am legit still not over. We got to find out that Lux’s legendary locks are actually extensions?” Saundra looked up and sighed. “You pray to the scandal gods, but you just never think you’ll get a response, you know?”

“You didn’t think it was a mean prank?” I asked.

“Oh, don’t tell me you believe those rumors.”

“What rumors?”

Saundra’s eyes lit up. If there was one thing she liked to talk about more than Bram Wilding, it was rumors. “I forgot you’re new and you don’t know all of Manchester’s dirty secrets.” She swept her plate to the side, as though she needed to make space for the enormity of what she was about to say.

“People think there’s some big prankster in school pulling the strings behind everybody’s biggest humiliations. Like one time, Erica Belcott got locked in the basement pool at the Y and when they found her, she was curled up in the fetal position on the diving board. She said someone had been flicking the lights on and off. Another time Jonathan Calden woke up in a dumpster behind a Red Lobster without knowing how he got there. And there was that one time when Julia Mahoney swore somebody was leaving her creepy notes written in red lipstick all over the place, and when she found a tube of lipstick in her backpack in AP Chem, she freaked out and knocked over the Bunsen and nearly set the class on fire.

“Hence, the prankster theory. People think it’s all connected, that one person is behind it all. They’ll say, ‘That asshole got me.’ But it’s like, uh, no, Jonathan, how about some personal responsibility? Waking up in a dumpster is your own fault for going to that Red Lobster in Jersey.”

Usually when Saundra dropped a bunch of names on me I zoned out like it was white noise. But a mysterious menace on the loose, screwing with people’s lives? “Tell me more.”

“It’s been going on forever,” Saundra said. “I heard about the ‘prankster’ before I even started high school. But it’s just one of those urban legends.”

My mind went to the boy I’d seen when the lights came back up at the abandoned house. The one who’d discreetly shut off his portable speaker while everyone was distracted. I’d found out his name—Freddie Martinez. A look around the cafeteria and I spotted him, the sight of the loose curls cresting over his light brown forehead unmistakable. He sat surrounded by a group of friends.

“Who are those guys?” I asked Saundra.

“Ugh. The Tisch Boys. They’re in the Film Club together. They’re all going to the Tisch School at NYU to study movies—sorry, film,” said Saundra. “And one of them is actually a Tisch. Careful—they might try to recruit you on account of their club not having a single girl in its membership. It’s a huge optics issue. Once, Pruit Pusivic was trying to flirt with me and for a minute I was into it but then it hit me, like, Wait, do you really like me or are you just trying to get me to join Film Club? It really gave me trust issues.”

“Oh.”

“Exactly,” Saundra said. “They think they’re cool, but they’re just pretentious nerds.”

I didn’t think Freddie looked all that nerdy, though. Yeah, there were the thick glasses frames, but I kind of liked them. Plus, he had the relaxed posture and easy smile of someone with a healthy amount of confidence. And there was that jawline. Sharp enough to light a match on. His clothes were kind of messy—the uniform oxford shirt wasn’t ironed like the other boys’, and his shoes were scuffed and in need of polishing—but I got the feeling all of that was on purpose. A look he cultivated.

“And what about that guy?” I said, jutting my chin in Freddie’s direction.

“Freddie Martinez?” Saundra asked. “Why?”

“Just curious.”

The look on her face said there were much more interesting people to gossip about at this school, but Saundra was always happy to show off her encyclopedic knowledge of the student body, even if it was only Freddie Martinez. She took a deep breath and launched into a list of Freddie facts.

I learned that he and I had something in common: In a school of one-percenters, we fell somewhere in the ninety-nine. He was a scholarship kid. His mom was a caterer who he helped out on the weekends, but he also sold cheat sheets and term papers. And apparently, for the right price he’d even take your standardized tests for you. Around here that was a lucrative side gig.

“Basically, he’ll do anything for a buck, which is so tacky, but I guess it comes in handy if you suck at algebra or something.” Saundra took a breath. “There’s also rumors he deals drugs, but personally I find those rumors so racist.”

It was a good thing she wasn’t spreading them, then.

Freddie was deep in conversation with the guy sitting next