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

to him. I wondered if the two of them had come up with the prank, or if it had been just Freddie. I wondered if Saundra was wrong. Maybe there was someone messing with the students of Manchester Prep.

That would be awful.

It would also be the most interesting thing to have happened since I arrived.

 4

MY FAVORITE WAY to blow off steam was by watching horror movies. I considered them a sort of exposure therapy. Which was ironic because my former therapist hated the idea. But I found the horror soothing, almost cathartic. Maybe it was the knowledge that everything I was seeing was fake and would be wrapped up neatly in under two hours. If I could train myself to sit through scary movies, face all different kinds of horrors head-on, then maybe I could transform into a calmer, more serene version of myself.

That was the plan, at least. I started watching horror movies last year, after I was attacked. At first they creeped me out. When I saw The Exorcist I had to look away anytime there was a close-up of Linda Blair’s frothy, veiny face. And after I watched The Ring I refused to answer my phone for a week.

Scary movies made me feel everything they were designed to make me feel. I got scared, then I got over it. If I got chills, they eventually exploded over my skin like a splash of cold water. You get the jolt at first, but then you’re clean and refreshed and all the happier for having taken the plunge.

But over time, I got addicted to the feeling, and after I watched most of the mainstream horror movies, I started stumbling into the subcategories of horror that were more campy or cheesy than scary. The stuff with bad makeup and worse dialogue. I wasn’t immune to horror or anything, but lately, scary movies just weren’t cutting it.

Tonight’s fare—a movie called Rabid—included. It didn’t help that I kept getting distracted by my phone.

I thought I’d left the weirdness at school behind, but that had been naïve. The moment with Lux and her hair extensions lived on in social media, played out in all kinds of different iterations. I was being tagged in Instagram posts where people either crossed out my eyes or wrote long, rambling captions about how I was the worst person in the world for what I’d done to Lux.

I sighed as I scrolled through my notifications and found a TikTok in which a boy dressed as Lux (I could tell by the blond wig) and another boy dressed as me (freckles drawn on as big as moles all over his face) wrestled each other to the ground.

All of this because I’d been laughing at a dumb prank. But of course, to everyone else it looked like I’d been laughing at Lux. And maybe a part of me had been laughing at her, had found joy in her fear, taken pleasure in her distress. I let the TikTok play again and zoomed in on the cackling face of “Rachel.”

A year ago, before fear and anxiety became unwelcome friends of mine, the monster side of me had reared its ugly head. Ever since then, everything I did was an attempt to keep it hidden. But for that brief moment, when the lights came on in the abandoned house, I’d been exposed. And now this monster was popping up all over social media for everyone to see.

But the worst posts—the ones that felt like a finger-blade glove had just sliced through my stomach—were the ones that explicitly made fun of Lux. Snide anonymous tweets about her fake hair, Photoshopped images of Lux with a bald head. It was those posts that signaled that this, as Saundra had so succinctly put it, was not good. I could feel the dread clawing its way down my throat, and it had nothing to do with the movie I was watching. I felt bad for Lux, but even in our brief interactions, I had gotten the sense that Lux was not a girl who took humiliation lightly. She would want revenge.

My mom’s dread was definitely coming from the movie, though. She sat at the other end of the couch with a stack of ungraded papers on her lap and both her hands covering her face, peeking out only to see if the gore was still on the screen.

“Do they have to show so much … cheek muscle?” she asked.

Rabid was about a woman who gets most of her face torn off in an accident. We were at the part where doctors were showing her the damage. Lots of wailing ensued, both from the patient and from my mother. I’d never seen the movie before.

“Yes. They have to show it all,” I said. I put my phone down and grabbed a fistful of microwave popcorn from the bowl balanced on my thighs.

I’d never once invited my mom to watch movies with me, but she always insisted on joining in. I was pretty sure she considered this mother-daughter bonding time.

“This is so gross,” my mom said. “And gratuitous! Why do these movies always have to show violence against women?”

“It’s directed by two women. The Soska sisters.”

“Really?”

“I can watch it in my room if you want.”

My mom shook her head like I knew she would. I think she indulged my scary-movie habit because she probably saw this as my dealing with “my trauma” from what happened last year. But she didn’t have to like it. Which she made clear during every horror film we watched together.

Instead of looking at the screen, Mom busied herself with her papers. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her uncap her red pen and draw three successive question marks in the margin of some kid’s essay. My mom looked up when the screaming started again and winced.

“Should I be worried, Rachel?”

It took everything in me not to slide off the couch as I rolled my eyes. “We