The Mary Shelley Club

by Goldy Moldavsky

  “She gets rescued,” Felicity said. “I’d hardly call that taking control.”

  “Okay, but Jess survives. We have to get through the early—yes, inherent—misogyny in order to show the protagonist breaking free of its trappings. It’s character development. It’s reflective of real life.”

  “Yeah, Black Christmas is totally relatable,” Felicity said, rolling her eyes.

  Sarcasm aside, I found myself leaning forward eagerly. I was actually having a conversation about horror theory with someone. Like Thayer had said: awesome. I could’ve gone on like that all night, and the way Felicity was sitting, fingernails clawed into the edges of her seat, poised to pounce, it looked like she could’ve, too. Maybe this was how to get Felicity to not hate me. Maybe this was the way to win them all over.

  But then Freddie switched the lights back on and the spell was broken.

  “Down with the patriarchy,” he said, raising a fist in solidarity. This time, both Felicity and I rolled our eyes.

  “But this is the portion of the evening where we answer some of your questions,” he continued.

  “You probably have so many!” Thayer said. He bounced up, suddenly determined to make use of every inch of the study as he took on the role of emcee for my benefit. He spun a copper-colored world globe and Bram promptly put a hand on it to stop it.

  “Firstly, what is it that we do here at the Mary Shelley Club?” Thayer pontificated. “The simple answer is that we are horror aficionados. Appreciators of the technique of terror. Experts in the field of fear.”

  “As I said way more succinctly: We like horror,” Felicity said.

  “How long has the club been around?”

  “A while,” Freddie said. “But no one is really sure how long. Bram and I both joined as freshmen. Thayer and Felicity came on as sophomores last year, when other members graduated.”

  “You could say the objective of the club is to answer a simple question,” Thayer continued. “What scares people the most?”

  “Which brings us to the contest,” Freddie said, casting me a secret smile.

  I sat up straighter. If I’d had a notebook with me, I would’ve been taking notes.

  Thayer cleared his throat. “To prove who amongst us is the most well-versed in the ways of fright, and to see which method of horror evokes the biggest reaction, we stage what we’ve come to call Fear Tests.”

  “Fear Tests?”

  “Each of us comes up with a horror scenario,” Felicity said. “It could be something original or a classic horror trope, maybe something you saw in a movie. And then we bring it to life.” She smiled with her lips closed but stretched wide enough to crinkle the corners of her eyes. If she’d been going for a diabolical look, it was working.

  “We’re used to reading horror stories or hearing them around campfires or seeing them play out on a screen,” Freddie said, “but the only way to truly feel fear is to experience it, to make it three-dimensional.”

  “Do horror movie tropes even work in real life?” I asked.

  “That’s part of the challenge,” Freddie said. “Are all the things we see in horror films scary only because we’re trained to see them that way? The shrieking violins, the angles of the shots? The anticipated jump scares? Or can we elicit real fear when we strip all the extra stuff away? No music. No perfectly framed scenes. Just you and what scares you the most.”

  I could feel goosebumps rising on my arms, but not from fear or anxiety. These were the excited kind. An electric thrill.

  “We all get to direct our own Fear Tests,” Felicity said. “And everyone plays a part.”

  “Kind of like being actors in a play,” Thayer said. “A scary play.”

  “After your Fear Test is complete, we rate it,” Felicity added.

  “Kind of like being in the Olympics,” Thayer said. “A scary Olympics.”

  “It’s more like an exam,” Freddie said. “Like in school, your highest grade can be a hundred. We each grade you, then tally up the scores to find the average. We evaluate your technique—”

  “Your panache!” Thayer cut in, plopping down next to me on the couch.

  “—ingenuity. Basically we’re looking for something that makes your test stand out. Whoever has the highest rating wins.”

  “Wins what?” I asked. I thought it was a pretty reasonable question, but it was met with silence. Felicity in particular looked at me like I was definitely not worthy of being there.

  “Bragging rights,” Thayer said finally.

  No cash prize. Nothing shiny to display on a shelf. I guess it made sense. What could you give to kids who already had everything?

  “So the séance at the abandoned-house party … that was a Fear Test?” I asked. “Whose was it?”

  “We all did that one together,” Freddie said. “Kind of like a kickoff to the contest. A warm-up.”

  “All right, enough pleasantries,” Bram said. “Time for the rules.”

  He stood. He’d hardly said anything the entire night, so now we were all hanging on his every word.

  “We don’t talk about the Mary Shelley Club,” he said.

  Thayer leaned close to whisper: “We’ve all heard the Fight Club jokes.”

  Bram cleared his throat and proceeded with the rules. They were as follows:

  The Mary Shelley Club is a secret.

  Everyone gets one Fear Test that all members must help execute. You must perform the task that the leader of the Fear Test assigns to you.

  You must pick your target before the test starts. That’s your eight ball. You may scare everyone else in the room, but if you don’t sink your eight ball, you’ve failed the test.

  The game isn’t over until everyone’s had their turn.

  Judging is left up to the other players’ discretion.

  A member of the club may never be a target.

  If you break any of these rules, your game is over.

  A Fear Test ends when your target screams.

  I tried absorbing it all, but even as I nodded along, I knew I wouldn’t have a full grasp of everything until I actually played. Which meant I had only one more question.

  “When do we start?”

  15

  TWO NIGHTS LATER, I stood in a dim alleyway in the East Village, facing a clown.

  “Red or blue?” I asked, holding up the face paint palette. I was helping Freddie with his finishing touches.

  “Red.”

  The party at Trevor Driggs’s house had been going for an hour, and the rest of the club members were already in place for Thayer’s Fear Test. Freddie’s role wouldn’t take more than ten seconds, but he was going all out anyway. I knew they all really got into the club, but this still felt a little excessive.

  The face-painting kit we’d bought at Abracadabra came in a cheap plastic molding, but it had all the primary colors. It also came with a little makeup wand, but after coating Freddie’s face in white, the little foam applicator was totally spent. My fingers would have to do.

  I dipped the tip of my pointer into the red. I tried to keep my hand steady. I couldn’t tell if my nerves were from my usual social anxiety or the fact that I was about to participate in my first Fear Test. I hesitated, my finger hovering over Freddie’s face as our eyes locked. Or maybe it wasn’t either of those things.

  “This is deeply weird,” I said.

  “What? All clubs require participation.”

  “Yeah? You do this for Film Club, too?”

  “Have you seen the Film Club? Clowns, all of them.”

  I smiled. “You mean the Tisch Boys?”

  Freddie’s face fell. “Is that what they call us?”

  “Yes.” I tried not to crack up at the look on his face.

  “No. No. Please tell me you are joking.”

  “I would, but I cannot lie to you, Freddie.”

  He pretended to gag and I laughed.

  “Film Club is like the bizarro version of the Mary Shelley Club,” Freddie said. “Whenever we w
atch a movie it’s usually something by Wes Anderson. He’s Scott Tisch’s favorite. We gotta kick him out of the club.”

  Talking to Freddie was so easy that it could make me forget my nervousness about the Fear Test. Almost.

  “I don’t want to mess this up,” I said, raising my paint-smeared finger. “Hold still.”

  “It doesn’t have to be a Warhol,” Freddie said. “Actually, wait, go Warhol, give me the full Marilyn.”

  I grinned and lightly touched the spot above his eyebrow with the red paint, then gently worked my way down, reapplying more paint to cover his whole eye socket.

  “I didn’t just mean your face,” I said. “I don’t want to mess anything up.”

  I tried to focus on just painting his skin, but it was kind of hard to do while I was standing so close to him. Touching him.

  “You’ll be great,” Freddie said. He held his glasses in his hand, but the way he looked at me, it was like he saw perfectly clear.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “None of us do. It’s mostly improv.”

  If I stopped to really think about what the club was doing, tonight and in general, it was supremely screwed up. But maybe this was just the evolution of fun for rich kids. Everyone else seemed to be partying or having sex or on xannies. Maybe scaring people was just the next level up.

  But I wasn’t rich. What if I wasn’t cut out for this?

  I held up the paint palette for Freddie to choose his next color. “Green,” he said.

  “Close your eyes.” I used my middle finger this time and started on his left eye. He kept it shut while I painted his lid, but his other eye squinted open, watching me through a wink.

  “I don’t think I’m good at thinking on the spot,” I said. “I hate improv.”

  “Did I just uncover Rachel Chavez’s secret fear?” Freddie’s cheeks, now painted creamy white, expanded with his smile. “Improv?”

  I wiggled my red and green fingers in front of his face. “Careful, I wield the face paint.”

  Freddie made a show of clamping his lips shut and I continued tidying up the oval outline around his eye. A moment of quiet settled between us and I decided to ask what was really weighing on my mind.

  “Can I ask why you’re in the club? Why you’re so invested in pulling this prank?”

  Freddie’s eyebrows knitted together. “It’s not a prank.”

  I could tell he had too much pride in what the club did—in the club itself—to call it just a prank, and maybe he was right. What we were about to do would amount to a lot more than just a prank.

  “Okay, not a prank. But you’re all putting a huge amount of time and energy into messing with someone. Scaring them.” I lowered my hand, leaving Freddie’s face half painted as he dwelled on my question. “Why?”

  “Well, tonight, Thayer’s getting back at somebody who’s been making his life hell since fifth grade,” Freddie replied. “Vigilante justice is pretty sweet.”

  “Is that why Thayer’s in the club?” I asked. “To get back at the people who’ve wronged him?”

  “You want my honest opinion about why Thayer and Felicity and Bram are in the club?”

  I nodded.

  “They live stable lives. Boring lives. They want for nothing. They go to sleep at night knowing they’ll wake up to breakfast, their clothes ironed and hung up, and their maids at the door with their favorite snacks ready. They’re practically toddlers. They’ll probably stay toddlers their whole lives.”

  He said this all plainly, as if just stating the obvious. I could tell he didn’t mean it in a disparaging way. I knew he would say it to their faces. And probably had.

  “The truth is,” Freddie continued, “they crave chaos.”

  I smiled. It felt like by grouping Thayer and Bram and Felicity together, Freddie had grouped us up together, too. We were separate from them. We weren’t the gilded elite. I guess that made us sort of a team.

  “Okay, but you still haven’t answered my question. Why do you do it?” I asked.

  “I, too, crave chaos,” Freddie said, pairing his faux tony accent with a devilish grin. “The way I look at it is as a great social experiment. What does fear do to a person? How can we control it?”

  “Control it?”

  “Yeah. We can work with fear, like a sculptor works with clay. It’s art.”

  My mouth twisted into a dubious smile as I looked at his crudely painted skin. What I’d done to his face was definitely not art. “That’s kind of a stretch.”

  “Well, I don’t know.” But his tone said he did know. Freddie had obviously thought a lot about this; I could tell by the way his eyes lit up behind his glasses. “Art is all about drawing an emotion out of someone, right? A beautiful painting could make you feel wonder. A song could make you cry. A movie could make you laugh. Evoking an explosive, immediate reaction out of someone? There’s nothing more visceral than being scared. It’s why some people love watching scary movies. I love being scared.”

  “Yeah, but we’re not doing all this in the hopes that Trevor will love it. We want him scared. We want him to suffer.”

  Hearing myself say that out loud made a shiver go down my spine. Was I getting in over my head?

  “Trevor’s entire existence is based around the idea that he’s better than everyone else,” Freddie said. “Fear strips that away. It’s the great equalizer. And when you’re truly scared, there’s nowhere to hide—no private school, no popularity, no trust fund. It’s just you and your most base emotion. Fear is where the truth lies.”

  I thought about my own fears—how my skin vibrated whenever I was panicked, like a monster was trying to get out. I didn’t let myself dwell on the thought.

  But Freddie’s ideas were big, and they filled up the small alleyway.

  “You’re really passionate about this stuff,” I said. I could tell that if Freddie’s cheeks weren’t covered in white, they’d be blooming pink, as though he thought he’d said too much.

  “I’m just trying to say that fear is kind of this important thing in our lives,” Freddie said. “It’ll always be there. And if you let it, fear will hold you back.”

  I thought of the ways my own fear could take over sometimes and leave me paralyzed, how anxiety crawled out of my mind and became something physical, ruling my body and pulling all the strings.

  “With the Mary Shelley Club, we’re taking the fear back,” Freddie said. “Once you take control of it, it gives you back your power. You can let go. It’s freedom.”

  “Seems reckless.”

  Freddie tilted his face back. “Freedom?”

  “Letting go.” I had a flash of Lux in the art closet, the scissors in my hand. I was afraid of that part of myself. And I could feel that fear coursing through me, trying to take control, trying to talk me out of doing this Fear Test. But if Freddie was right, then maybe what we did tonight really would give me some power back.

  “What if I suck at improv and things go haywire?” I asked. “Is there, like, a safe word to stop the Fear Test?”

  Freddie thought for a moment. “Sure, we can have a safe word. Pick one.”

  “Armadillo,” I blurted. It was the first thing that came to mind, and it made a smile crawl onto Freddie’s face.

  “Okay, I like that. If anything goes wrong—if you feel uncomfortable at any point and want to bail, just say ‘armadillo.’ This doesn’t have to be scary.” He paused, then shook his head, laughing. “I mean, yes, making it scary is kind of the objective, but it isn’t supposed to be scary for us. For us it’s gonna be fun.”

  “That a promise?”

  “Absolutely,” Freddie said. It was his smile—like a little kid’s—that convinced me. He was about to play his favorite game, and he had a new friend to share it with. I smiled back, feeling the excitement rising in my own chest.

  “Okay, I’m done.” I stepped back to examine my creation. “Have you considered that you might be too dedicated to this club?”

 
“Dedication is the only way to win, Rachel.” Freddie put the blue, frizzy wig on his head and smiled, his mouth a garish red. “As reigning champion, I should know.”

  16

  TREVOR DRIGGS

  WHEN TREVOR DRIGGS answered the door, he found the third nobody of the night standing on the other side. A short girl with short hair, looking way too angry to be at a party.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Felicity Chu.”

  “Do I know you, Felicity Chu?”

  The girl brushed her fingers over her little bangs and peered past his shoulder, into the party. There was a boy trying to do a handstand on a coffee table. But a girl jabbed him in the gut and he crumpled into a drunken heap.

  “We go to school together,” Felicity said. “I’m in three of your classes.”

  Trevor was still drawing a blank.

  “I let you cheat off my physics test last week.”

  Nope. Still couldn’t place her. And anyway, he’d cheated off a lot of people last week. Trevor didn’t want to be an asshole, but … “You sure you’re at the right house?”

  A hand snaked onto Trevor’s shoulder and squeezed. Trevor turned to find Bram standing there, drink in hand and with a smile that said he was three-quarters of the way to lit.

  “Let her in, man,” Bram said. “The more the merrier, right?”

  Trevor didn’t know who this happy-go-lucky Bram was or what he’d done with the real Bram, who would never let some rando in. But as he paused, the short girl, whose name Trevor had already forgotten, slipped by him and immediately disappeared into the crowd.

  “Dude, we just letting anybody in tonight?”

  Bram just shrugged and steered Trevor away from the door, his touch sure enough to lead anyone to a chiller plane of existence.

  “Do you want to spend the whole night playing bodyguard?” Bram asked. “Or do you want to finally make a move on Lucia?”

  Trevor followed Bram’s eyes to Lucia Trujillo, who sat at the edge of the couch talking to Lux and Juliet. He’d been crushing on Lucia like crazy since school started again, when she’d come back from a summer in South America all different. She was tanner, for one thing, and she’d dyed her hair to look like honey, which suited her real nice. And her body. Her body … Basically, the girl had come back grown.