As Lux fell the rest of the fourteen steps and crashed to the bottom of the staircase—a scream stuck in her throat—the last thing she saw was that monster’s face.
33
LUX SPENT THE night in the hospital with a broken arm and six stitches in the back of her head. Bram sent out a text saying he’d found her unconscious at the bottom of the stairs. But when Lux woke up, she had a story. One that was different from the one I had intended to tell.
According to Bram, Lux said there was a man in a mask. And he’d tried to kill her.
There was a flurry of texts from the rest of us, wanting more details and asking more questions. But the texts from Bram stopped coming.
The next day it seemed like the whole school had as much information as I did. The rumor mill of Manchester was spinning on overdrive, pouring with sympathy for Lux, exalting Bram for rushing to her rescue. It wasn’t like when Sim had declared that a masked man was after him and no one believed him. Everyone believed Lux. It was like a trend. Largely ignored but as soon as the most popular girl in school christened it acceptable, it was all anyone wanted to talk about. The Masked Man was a thing now—as exciting as a new handbag or the latest pointless game app. An instant legend, on everybody’s lips.
The news was of such mythic proportions that Saundra couldn’t even wait for lunch to talk about it. She cornered me at my locker after homeroom, breathless with excitement. “Someone attacked Lux! Someone in a mask!”
I shut my locker a little too forcefully. I felt bad when Saundra jumped, but this whole thing had me on edge. It’d been my Fear Test and it’d gone all wrong. Someone had gotten seriously hurt and I was responsible. Indirectly or not, I had put Lux in harm’s way.
And there was the issue of this mask. There wasn’t supposed to be a mask in my Fear Test.
“Can we not talk about it?” I started walking to my next class, but Saundra followed, incredulous.
“Are you kidding me? Your nemesis got taken out and you don’t want to talk about it?”
“She’s not my nemesis,” I hissed, looking around to make sure that no one was listening.
“What, are you scared that someone’s going to think you did it?” Saundra asked, her words colored with a sprinkling of laughter. My cheeks colored red.
“Oh my gosh, I’m kidding! What if there is a prankster after all? What if the mask is, like, his calling card? Ooh, what if he’s hot?”
I stopped walking and now it was my turn to be incredulous. “Lux was hurt, Saundra.”
Saying it out loud—hearing it all over school—made it more real. It made my involvement in it more real. My pulse was already at a quick pace and getting quicker; my cheeks tingled, my teeth were on the cusp of chattering. My whole body was acting like it couldn’t hold up the anvil of guilt bearing down on me.
“Yeah,” Saundra said. “Hence, I’m a fan.”
My phone buzzed in my hand—a text from Felicity.
Emergency meeting on roof. Now.
“I gotta go,” I told Saundra.
* * *
The roof was a recreation space surrounded on all sides by chain-link fence, but no one ever came up there. Thayer, Felicity, and Freddie were all huddled together.
“What’s going on?” I asked when I got there. Nobody answered. They were looking behind me at Bram, who’d just shown up.
“Bram, I’m sorry,” I started. But Bram stalked right past me, to Freddie. He rushed him, grabbing two fistfuls of his blazer and pushing him against the bulkhead door.
“It was you,” he said. “You did this.”
Felicity watched with unabashed interest while Thayer stumbled back, out of the way. But I tried to put myself between the two boys.
“What is wrong with you?” I pushed my palms on both their chests and when Bram finally noticed me, he let go of Freddie.
“What the hell was that?” he asked me. “Were you in on it? Was a masked man part of your Fear Test?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t know how Lux got hurt. I’m sorry, Bram, the test was only supposed to rattle her.”
“How convenient for you,” Bram said. “The person you hate the most almost got killed.”
His words were like a hot knife gliding slowly through my middle. I already felt guilty, but hearing it out loud from him compounded the guilt. It was heavy, crushing me. And I couldn’t even defend myself.
“Hey, Rachel told us all her plan,” Thayer said. “We all stuck to it.”
“I want to know what you’re accusing me of,” Freddie said to Bram over my head. He was a lot calmer than I’d thought he’d be, given that Bram looked like he wanted to murder Freddie.
Bram bit down, his jaw tightening. He breathed in, as if trying to regain some chill, but it came off more like a bull huffing through flared nostrils, ready to charge. “Lux said there was someone in a mask on the second floor. And since you, Freddie, were the only one who was supposed to be up there, it was obviously you.”
Freddie shook his head. “I left through the backyard. Like Rachel told me to.”
“Stop lying!” Bram roared. He was nearly on Freddie again, raising a pointed finger at his face like a loaded gun. “You put on a mask. You chased after Lux.”
“Bram, why would Freddie do that?” I asked.
“He was at the rendezvous with us,” Thayer said. “We were waiting for you.”
“Freddie only left the house after Lux fell down the stairs,” Bram said. But it sounded like he was trying to convince himself.
“Did you see the person in the mask?” Felicity asked Bram. “When you showed up and found Lux, did you see anyone?”
Bram took a breath. He looked like someone trying desperately to calm himself down, to not say something out of line that he would regret. He shook his head. Then he turned to me with the same intense focus he always had. The force of his gaze made me take a step back, sticking close to Thayer. But Bram’s eyes followed me. It was like we were the only ones up on the roof, and the rest of the members of the club fell away. “You didn’t plan for this to happen? You didn’t tell Freddie to chase Lux?”
“No,” I said. It was a small, simple word, but I hoped it was big enough to convey that I meant it. It looked like Bram believed me because he turned to Freddie next.
“You’re too obsessed with this game,” Bram spat. “You took it too far this time.”
“No, I didn’t,” Freddie said. His voice was just as even as Bram’s, but with much less venom. He didn’t seem intimidated at all. “I get that you’re mad. Your girlfriend got hurt and the Fear Test didn’t go as planned and Lux should have run out of the house.”
“What?” Bram said.
“You have to admit she fell into the trope where the babysitter stays inside. Classic mista—”
Bram lunged for him again, and this time I wasn’t quick enough to get between them. Bram’s fist crashed against Freddie’s lip, splitting the bottom one. Behind me I could hear Felicity squeak with surprise and Thayer shout something unintelligible.
“This isn’t a fucking game,” Bram said.
Freddie touched his lip and looked at the red stain left on his fingers like it was nothing more than war paint. “Yes, it is.”
A moment passed where Bram seemed to collect himself, breathing in, setting his features back to their normal passive calm. But everything felt like it had changed, like we’d crossed a line as a club that we wouldn’t be able to get back behind. Bram walked through the stairwell door without another word.
Thayer and Felicity looked at Freddie, maybe hoping for some clarity about what to do next. Freddie always seemed to know what to do next. But all he did was shrug. “He’ll cool off,” he said. “Just give him a while.”
And with that, Thayer and Felicity left the roof, too. But I hung back.
“Did you wear a mask last night?” I asked quietly.
When it’d been Bram asking the questions, Freddie stood his ground, cool under the threat of Bram’s wrath. But
now that I was the one asking, he looked like he’d just taken a second punch. Shocked. Exasperated. Wounded.
“You think I messed with your Fear Test?”
“I think Lux really saw someone wearing a mask. I don’t know why she would lie about that.”
“I don’t know either,” Freddie said. It suddenly felt like that night when he’d shown me Bride of Frankenstein had happened forever ago. When he took a step toward me, I took a step back. The hurt in Freddie’s eyes was magnified by his glasses.
“Do you believe Bram?” he asked. “Do you think I went behind your back and put on a mask and actually tried to hurt Lux?”
I didn’t want to.
But. “You were the only one upstairs.”
“Rachel, I left. I followed your instructions and left to meet everyone at the rendezvous point.”
This time, when I didn’t say anything, it was Freddie who pulled back, shaking his head. I hadn’t outright accused him of anything, but there’d been enough said between the lines to sever something between us.
He headed for the door, but when his hand was on the knob, he took a deep breath. “I can’t believe you think I’d do something like this.”
“Freddie—”
“If there was someone else up there last night, it wasn’t me.”
He left, leaving me alone on the roof.
34
IT HAD BEEN a week since my Fear Test and I was still trying to make sense of how it had gone wrong.
It could only have been one of three things.
A) Freddie had put on a mask for some reason. Maybe he’d thought it’d be a good idea, help my test. Maybe something went wrong and Lux’s fall down the stairs was just an accident. Maybe Freddie didn’t want to take the blame for what had happened to her.
B) Lux was lying. She didn’t actually see anything. She fell down the stairs on her own, and to make the whole story a little less embarrassing—and maybe get herself more attention—she glommed onto something she’d heard Sim say. A prankster wearing a mask.
C) There was someone in a mask, and they were messing with our Fear Tests.
I pushed option C out of my mind as soon as I thought it. It was the least likely thing, and the one I refused to accept. Because a rando in a mask was way too similar to what had happened to me last year. And what happened last year needed to stay in the past.
But the thing about the past was that there were other people who lived it, too. Mainly my mom. And all she apparently wanted to do was talk about it.
“How are you doing?” she asked, leaning over to grab a handful of popcorn from my bowl.
It was a weird question to ask in the middle of Hereditary.
“I’m fine,” I said without taking my eyes off the TV. “Why?”
“I heard about what happened to Lux McCray.”
I swallowed and watched as Toni Collette worked on her miniature art project. “What’s that got to do with me?” I asked, and then wondered if that sounded too defensive.
“I’m just wondering if it brought anything back up for you.”
On-screen, Toni Collette broke one of the tiny pieces of furniture she was working on. I watched her fly into a rage and destroy the entire display.
“I haven’t given it much thought at all,” I said calmly.
I didn’t turn to see my mother’s face but I could picture it. Concerned. Slightly disappointed that I was not being honest. And finally, open, beseeching, hoping that I’d say something.
“Do you know anything about what happened?” I asked. Maybe the teachers had been briefed about Lux’s trauma, just as AssHead had been briefed on mine. Maybe my mom knew a detail that none of the students knew, something that would help me cross out one of the possibilities on my short list.
“Just that Lux was alone in a house and there was a man in a mask who attacked her.” My mom shuddered. “It hit so close to home when I heard it.”
Too close.
I grabbed the remote and clicked the stop button.
“I’ve seen this one already,” I said. “And I’m kind of tired.”
It was early but I retreated to my room. The idea of a masked man was my worst nightmare, and he wasn’t confined to my dreams or memories anymore.
* * *
The dream—no—nightmare. Again.
The same figure, the same black clothes. The mask. He was on top of me, just as he was every time, but now he was holding a knife. I knew this was a dream. And yet, fear still gripped me so hard I couldn’t budge. My hands reached for whatever they could, scrambling all over the cold kitchen tile, but the only thing I could grab was fistfuls of bedsheets.
I watched as the figure lowered the fist-clenched knife almost in slow motion, the gleaming blade inching closer to my chest.
I sat up in bed. A thin film of sweat dotted my hairline, my eyebrows. I gulped for air.
Even out of the nightmare all I could see was the mask. The white, old-man face with thin lips and sunken cheeks. The same face Sim and Lux had claimed to see. The face that had chased me around at the Halloween party.
The face I’d left behind on Long Island. Or thought I had.
35
FREDDIE AND I hadn’t talked since the emergency meeting on the roof, almost two weeks before. Not that I blamed him. I’d accused him of doing something terrible—something I wasn’t even sure he’d really done. There were so many times when I wrote him an apology text, but I always deleted it before I hit send. There was no way he wanted to hear from me.
The worst part of it all was that I missed him. Freddie was the only person I wanted to talk to after my latest nightmare. And after school I still caught myself waiting for him so we could walk to the subway together, even though we hadn’t done that in a while. I wanted to talk about our favorite movies, tease him about all his wrong opinions, say something to make him laugh.
The hard truth was that either Freddie had done something bad, or he hadn’t and I was needlessly punishing him. Either reality sucked.
And Bram wasn’t talking to anyone in the club at all. Which meant no more club meetings in his study. It was like I’d traveled back in time to those first few weeks of school, when I knew him only from the whispers that trailed him wherever he went. These days, he was constantly at Lux’s side when she wasn’t in class. I saw her in art class, where we dutifully avoided each other. She wore a gray-and-pink ski cap to cover up her stitches, the dress code having been waived especially for her.
Felicity was back to her normal self, which mainly meant ignoring me when we were at our lockers getting our books. I still had Thayer, though. Weekends at the Shustrine were my lifeline to the club.
When our shift wound down and the concession stand was quiet with just the hum of the popcorn machine, I asked him if he knew what the hell was going on.
“About the Masked Man?” Thayer asked. He had a People magazine open on the counter, flipping through it absentmindedly. “No clue. But I figure Lux is lying.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “She’s a liar. End of.”
“That’s it? Lux is a liar?”
“You know that better than anyone. She told the whole school you tried to kill her with a pair of scissors.”
I glanced at his magazine to avoid looking at him. “Right,” I muttered.
“Or maybe she’s not lying,” Thayer said. “Maybe she got scared because your test was so good and she fell down the stairs and she thinks she saw someone in a mask because she heard Sim talking about it in school and mass hysteria is real and all that jazz. The point is, you shouldn’t feel bad about it.”
Feeling bad wasn’t the issue. I wanted answers. Everything felt so up in the air right now. Lux. Freddie. The club.
“Bram punched Freddie,” I said. “How are they gonna come back from that?”
Thayer slid the magazine aside. “New Girl, you don’t know this because—as your name implies—you’re brand-spankin’-new. But Bram and Freddie have been known t
o have their little tiffs from time to time.”
I inched closer on my stool. “Really? Like physical fights?”
Thayer waved his hand dismissively, neither confirming nor denying my question. “All I’m saying is there’s been plenty of drama between members before. And it’s always been resolved. In due time. Bram’s just gotta cool down, put on the ol’ ice mask, and do some stomach crunches in his underwear while listening to Huey Lewis and the News. Then he’ll let us know when he wants to do his Fear Test and the game’ll continue like normal.”
“Freddie said the same thing on the roof. That the game will just keep going. The game feels pretty much over, don’t you think?”
“The game isn’t over until everyone’s played.” Thayer flipped another page of his magazine. The article, a puff piece about some reality show contestant, stole his attention away.
* * *
The sudden absence of the club in my life made me realize how heavily I had relied on it as my main social outlet. I still had Saundra, of course. Now that I had more time on my hands, we hung out after school. I invited her over to the apartment in an attempt to recreate the club’s horror movie nights. I started off with a sure bet: Scream. A perennial fave. But to my horror Saundra showed up at my apartment with her tablet loaded with the MTV series based on the movies. When I told her, very gently, that I would rather tear my skin off than watch that abomination, she laughed and hit play.
So that was the end of movie nights with Saundra.
We still had lunch, though, with her regularly scheduled Bram show. She spoke of his hair (shinier than ever), and his heroism (sticking by Lux’s side through this traumatizing ordeal), and his hotness (scorching and getting hotter), her words mixing all together in a Bram lexicon blender.
I watched him at the center of the room. It was ridiculous that he was always around—in my lunchroom, in my classes, in my thoughts—and I couldn’t just go over and talk to him. I wanted to know what Lux had told him about her accident. If he was ever going to host another club meeting. If he had completely shut us out forever.
The Mary Shelley Club Page 19
