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

than risk the game ending prematurely. There was only his Fear Test left and he was going to make sure it happened one way or another. He didn’t tell any of us he was going to vandalize her plaque. We were as shocked to see our names up there as you were.”

“Why did you go through with the game?” I asked. “After Lux got hurt, didn’t you know something might happen to Saundra?”

“By then I’d started to believe that what happened to Lux must’ve been an accident. I didn’t think Freddie was actually capable of really hurting anyone. But I was wrong.”

I felt a twisted sense of relief in knowing I wasn’t the only one who’d been fooled by Freddie. But the feeling was fleeting. “How could you go through with all of this?”

“The rules—”

“Screw the rules,” I snapped. I could chalk up Freddie’s reasoning to keep this messed-up game going to him being out of his mind, but Bram? He was trying to defend himself, even now. And I didn’t get it.

“The club was important to me,” Bram said, finally. “My life—my parents, Lux, my friends at school—I always had to live up to their expectations. The club let me breathe.”

I couldn’t relate to Bram’s woes of having everything but still feeling trapped. Though the way he’d acted at his after-party was starting to make sense. He’d looked like an actor in a play, and now I finally understood why. But I could immediately relate to the safe-haven part, and how important it was to have something you could always turn to. How absolutely life-sustaining it was. Selfishly, I’d figured I needed the Mary Shelley Club more than anybody. The comfort of a group of people who were like me, who understood me, who accepted me. I guess Bram needed that, too.

“I loved the club,” Bram continued. “I wanted it to keep going, just like it always had. That’s what I was fighting for. Even as Freddie started to poison it—I fought for it even more.”

I could get that. But in the end … “It was just a game, Bram. It was a stupid game.”

“It was more than that. I know you found the folder on my computer, the one titled Chaps.”

I’d forgotten about that. “Yeah?”

“Chaps as in chapters.” Bram looked me in the eye, the familiar unwavering stare that reminded me that he was still the same Bram I’d known. “There are chapters of the club all over the country. We didn’t invent the game.”

“What?”

“The game is much bigger than just our club,” Bram continued. “It always has been. Matthew Marshall was a member of a Mary Shelley Club on Long Island.”

What happened with Matthew had been a separate thing, something from my past life, before I’d come to the city, before I’d met anyone in the Mary Shelley Club. “That isn’t true.”

But Bram nodded. “It is. The break-in at your house was a Fear Test. Matthew’s Fear Test.”

I let the news wash over me. I’d always wondered what Matthew was doing at my house that night. Why a typical, popular high school boy and his friend would break into a house wearing masks. It was wild. But not any wilder than anything I’d participated in these last few months.

“So Freddie chose me because, what, he wanted to avenge Matthew?”

“That was only part of it,” Bram said. “When you broke that Fear Test—when Matthew died—the game got thrown off course. Freddie couldn’t have that.”

“So he had to punish me.”

“He thought that was the only way to reinstate order and to make sure nothing like this happened again. Freddie cared about the club more than anything else.”

I listened to Bram as though through a fog. He was supposed to be the incoherent one, on pain meds, but it almost felt like it should’ve been me in that hospital bed for how mentally and emotionally banged up I felt.

I couldn’t speak. I could barely even think. All I could do was look down at my hand, resting uselessly on my thigh, when Bram’s hand covered it. When I looked up Bram was leaning forward, closer than I expected him to be.

“Sit back, you’ll hurt yourself.” I didn’t mean it to come out like an order, but even so, Bram ignored me. His serious look was gone, replaced by something softer. “I’m sorry,” he said.

It wasn’t an apology from Freddie, but this was the closest I was going to get. And I needed it.

“Freddie was loyal to a club that’s bigger than all of us,” Bram said.

I stayed with Bram a little while longer, until he fell asleep, and then until his mother returned with his favorite sushi pajamas. I did it for him, but I also didn’t want to be alone. Eventually, though, my mom texted, wondering where I was, and I decided I’d given her enough scares to last a lifetime.

Outside, the Upper East Side of Manhattan got on with the day as usual. There were patients and their families leaving the hospital, nurses in scrubs coming back from their breaks, ambulances clogging the busy street. I passed them all like it was a normal day. But it wasn’t, and it wouldn’t be again.

I walked, thinking about this game I’d played, and all of those who’d died. I thought of Saundra, of Freddie, and even of Matthew.

Since the incident on Long Island last year, I had done everything in my power not to think about it. I didn’t ever want to revisit the ugliest moment of my life. Now I did just that, but from the perspective of the Mary Shelley Club.

Two high school boys in repurposed Frankenstein masks. One left, one stayed. I’d always figured Matthew wanted to hurt me, but if he was playing the game then all he’d wanted was to hear me scream. For a primal, guttural roar to be unleashed. I must not have ever screamed that night, not once.

I’d thought it was just the two of us alone on that kitchen floor. But