The Mary Shelley Club, Goldy Moldavsky [e ink ebook reader txt] 📗

disheveled and rambling. This time everything was completely fucked.

The last thing I remembered seeing was Saundra’s face, frozen in fear. It was the last thing, the first thing, the only thing I could think of.

Everything else fused together: the dark woods, the endless snow, the medley of rushed voices. Felicity was loud—jarringly, unexpectedly loud, asking where we all were when it happened.

There was Thayer. His face was blank but wet with tears.

Bram was the last to join us. He emerged from the dark edges of the woods, silent and stumbling like some kind of Frankenstein.

Somebody was letting out ragged sobs and it took me a moment to realize it was me. “Can somebody please tell me what happened?” I asked again.

Freddie’s hands were ice-cold when he cupped my face. “Are you okay?” he asked.

I stared back at him, not understanding the question, but he kept asking it. The words eventually rearranged from “Are you okay?” to “You are okay.” Over and over again until I could finally breathe.

“We need a plan,” Felicity said. “The cops are going to come and they’re going to be asking questions.”

“That’s what you’re focusing on now?” I nearly screamed.

“Rachel’s right. We need to slow down. We still don’t know what happened,” Freddie said.

Something caught my eye, a flash of dark red. The stuff was smeared on Bram’s fingers. Some of it on his cheek, his hair. The sight of it made my mind short-circuit, go back to the spot on the floor where Saundra lay, surrounded by the pool of blood that had been seeping out of her.

“Whose blood is that?” I asked. But nobody heard me.

Bram caught me looking, though. He wiped his hand on his hip and the red disappeared just like that, soaked up by the black material.

“We don’t say anything,” Felicity said, pulling me back into the moment. She was pacing. I didn’t know if she was talking to me or to us or to herself. A part of me wanted to laugh. This was what the club was really about. Not fun movie watching, not debates about horror.

“We don’t say anything,” I said, mimicking her, my words spilling over clumsily.

“She’s in shock,” Freddie was saying. “I think she’s in shock.”

“Forget about her. We need to get our stories straight!” Felicity said. “We can’t expose the club.”

The club. Really? I leaned my head back and this time I let a laugh ring out. They stared, but I didn’t care. I laughed so much that my teeth chattered. I laughed so much I shivered. And as they stared at me, watching me shake, I said, “Saundra is dead.”

Everyone stopped. Felicity stopped talking and Bram stopped pacing and Thayer stopped crying and Freddie stopped looking at me like I was a fragile thing. I wasn’t sure why that had commanded their attention. All of us had known she was gone. I only said it because nobody else had yet. And it felt like something that needed to be said. Maybe if I said it more it would sink in. Feel real. Because it didn’t yet. “She died.”

“Is this Captain Obvious story hour?” Felicity asked.

“Shut it, Felicity,” came Bram’s voice, dark and thundering.

Saying the words out loud didn’t make me stop, though. It actually felt like everything in me started moving again. My heart started pumping so hard I could feel it down to my toes. The numbness all around me washed away. There was a scream inside me and it filled my head, so loud that it shook me.

“Saundra jumped through the skylight,” Felicity said. “She killed herself.”

I was on my feet in an instant, rushing toward Felicity. “She didn’t kill herself!” I yelled in her face. Felicity was only an inch away from me, but I couldn’t see her clearly through my tears. “She wouldn’t do that!”

Saundra had fallen.

Or she’d been pushed.

And as soon as I thought that, I felt in my bones that it was true. There was that masked figure on the landing. The memory came fast and burning, like taking a bitter shot of straight alcohol. I’d seen someone at the top of the stairs right before I went into the closet with Freddie. I remembered how the person had just stood there when I tried to talk to them. How uneasy I’d felt. How every hair on my body had stood up like a warning flag.

“We were running around with masks on trying to scare her,” I said. Whoever pushed Saundra had been wearing a mask too, which meant we were responsible. I was responsible. That burning feeling from before turned into a sticky roiling in the pit of my stomach. I was nauseous suddenly. Sick.

“Yeah, if anyone asks, how about we don’t fucking say that,” Felicity said.

“We all tossed our masks, right?” Freddie asked.

There were grumbles and nods. Thayer, who’d been holding his mask in a white-knuckled fist this whole time seemed to suddenly realize it. He hurled it into the woods like it was a live grenade.

“Bram, give me your lighter,” Felicity said. She kicked at the ground where she stood, spattering snow and clumps of dead grass like she was a dog trying to bury a bone. She dropped her mask into the newly made hole. Bram fished a gold Zippo out of his pocket and passed it to Felicity, but he was still holding his own mask. He examined it, and from three yards away I did, too. There was blood on it, standing out against the monster’s white face. Bram shoved the mask into the front pocket of his hoodie. I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head. There were too many things being hidden away, too many secrets.

“We have to tell someone what we did.”

“We didn’t do anything,” Thayer said. He said it over and over again, trying to make it more true.

“Someone died. Saundra died,” I said. “We have to tell them what we were doing.”

I could hear sirens in the background, getting closer, and it was all too obvious