The Mary Shelley Club

by Goldy Moldavsky

  “What the hell?” Lux demanded. “Were you spying on us?”

  “No?”

  “I don’t know what you think you heard—”

  “I didn’t hear anything.”

  Her glare roved over me, from my Zappos slip-ons to my messy bun of thick brown hair, then lingered on my sandy face. Maybe Lux was asking herself why I had so many freckles and couldn’t I have found a beauty tutorial that would get rid of some of them?

  I stared back at her. To Lux, my natural freckles probably looked like dirt compared to her fake ones. I could tell Lux’s freckles were fake because they were too round, uniformly small, and perfectly spaced. The kind you drew on gingerly with a brow pencil. They skittered over the bridge of her nose, fanning out above the tops of her cheeks. A beautiful constellation.

  I got a whiff of her perfume. Miss Dior. The preferred eau de parfum of future disgraced political wives. Her peachy skin glowed, soft and toned, beneath the straps of her Brandy Melville tank and her hair was the color of whisked butter. She was the kind of blond and pretty that died early in horror movies.

  But then Lux’s gaze diverted to my phone on the floor. She picked it up and looked at the screen long enough to see not only the post but also the Instagram handle. “Maybe watch where you’re going instead of stalking Matthew Marshall.”

  A heavy ball of anxiety burrowed in my chest, threatening to expand to the rest of my body. It happened quickly like that, the way fear took over sometimes. One minute I could be fine and the next I’d start feeling uneasy, jittery, my fingers and toes tingling in a bad way. She wasn’t supposed to know Matthew’s name. No one was. I pounced for my phone, and Lux looked shocked and offended, as though it was her phone. I managed to snatch it out of her hands.

  “Freak,” she hissed, shouldering past me and disappearing down the dark hallway.

  It was an instant reminder of what I was. Not normal. A freak. It was obvious to everyone, including Lux. Yeah, I was officially over this party.

  I headed downstairs to find Saundra so we could get out of there, but the unnerving darkness and the weird encounter with Lux followed me like a tablecloth I’d accidently tucked into my waistband. Nobody was supposed to know Matthew’s name. I’d known it was a bad idea to come to this party. I’d known it.

  My brain swarmed with dizzying thoughts and it felt like I was going down the stairs both too fast and too slow. I pushed my way through the crowd, my tunnel vision zeroing in on the front door.

  I was outside in a second, swallowing the crisp night air. I needed to get my mind right, do literally anything else but think about what had just happened. I needed to do something stupid. Reckless.

  My eyes hooked onto the only person outside. I walked over and tapped him on the shoulder. In times like these, I could be a character in a possession movie if I needed to: lose all control and let something else take over. I barely waited for him to turn around before I grabbed a fistful of his shirt and pulled his face down to mine.

  I hated the part of myself that did stuff like this. Reckless and wrong.

  But it worked. As soon as our lips touched, all thoughts of Matthew Marshall and Lux and how stifling the house had felt were washed away. And in that moment, I didn’t care. I could chalk it up to high school party shenanigans. I could pretend I was drunk, be a wild girl, morals be damned. I was pretty sure this was what normal kids did at normal parties.

  Soon I wasn’t thinking about anything at all, and as my thoughts quieted, my senses took over. There was the sound of his breathing; sharp as he inhaled through his nose and then soft as he sighed. I took in the scent of his shampoo, something woodsy. Pine and lime. And then even those senses fell away and I was left with only two. There was just the feel of his lips, and the taste of them.

  When we both pulled away, breathless, I finally got a look at who I’d been kissing.

  At the sight of him, my mind—serenely blank just a moment before—blared loud with a big resigned fuck.

  “Rachel?” Saundra called as she came down the stoop.

  I couldn’t tell if Bram Wilding was horrified or repulsed by what I’d just done, but he gave me the courtesy of staying stone-faced. So that was good to know. Bram, Lux’s-boyfriend-who-I’d-just-basically-assaulted-because-I-was-a-criminially-innapropriate-freak-like-Lux-said-I-was, was courteous. He turned and walked away before Saundra could see him.

  “Who was that?” Saundra asked when she reached me.

  “Nobody.”

  She quirked an eyebrow. “I just saw you talking to somebody.”

  “It was no one. A ghost.”

  “It’s funny you should say that,” Saundra said, the tips of her fingers twiddling together. “’Cause there’s gonna be a séance!”

  2

  SAUNDRA LED ME back through the house, her arm linked tightly through mine to prevent any attempt at escape. “Why are we doing this?” I asked.

  “It’s a séance,” Saundra and I both said at the same time, though our tones were polar opposites.

  “What could possibly go wrong?” Saundra asked.

  “You’ve obviously never watched Night of the Demons.”

  Saundra stopped walking and turned to face me. She gently put her hands on my shoulders and looked at me very seriously. “Rachel? No one gets your references.”

  I sighed. That was fair.

  “It’ll be fun,” Saundra said. “And anyway, this is how you make your mark at Manchester. This is how you get to know the heavy hitters.” She dropped her hands and squeezed my elbow. “This is how you find your people.”

  Who knew that all I needed to do to find my people was conjure up some dead spirits? There was already a group forming a circle on the living room floor. By now the party had quieted down, leaving about fifteen of us still there. Unfortunately, one of them was Lux. My stomach knotted up as she glared at me. I was already on her bad side—I prayed she would never find out I’d just kissed her boyfriend.

  Someone had shut off the construction lights, so the only light came from the center of the circle, where some kid was lighting thick block candles set on the floor. When the room was sufficiently eerie with flickering candlelight and everyone was sitting in place, the guy stood up. “My father owns this place, so this séance better not mess anything up.”

  “Rodrigo, your father bought this place so he could demolish it and build luxury condos,” someone reminded him. “Let’s raise hell!”

  There was a smattering of laughter, but I must’ve missed the joke. One girl raised her hand. She looked different out of her school uniform, but I recognized her instantly because she was always assertively raising her hand in Earth Science. Just like she was now. “What kind of séance will this be?”

  “A past-life séance,” Thayer Turner suggested. His father was the state’s attorney general and as Saundra had informed me, the Turners were practically the next Obamas. Admired, beloved, perfect in every way. Even now, at this party, Thayer was dressed impeccably in a purple blazer that looked great against his dark brown skin.

  “What’s a past-life séance?” Raisey-hand asked.

  “It’s when you look in a mirror and you see what your past life was,” I said.

  Thayer turned to look at me. In fact, everyone turned to look at me. It was probably the most words any of them had heard me say since I’d infiltrated their school. I’d been joking when I mentioned the séance in Night of the Demons, but as I looked back at their ghoulishly lit faces, it was starting to feel more like a prediction.

  “Yeah,” Thayer said slowly, taking an extra beat longer to examine me. “New Girl’s right. Lucky for us I saw a mirror in the hall closet!”

  “What were you doing back in the closet?” someone said. I shot the guy a dirty look. There was a sniveling jeeriness to his tone, which Thayer hadn’t missed. His shoulders squared as he headed for the hallway.

  “Ha ha, funny, Devon,” he called back.

  When Thayer came back into the room, he was ho
lding a full-length mirror. He leaned it against the fireplace. The glass was murky with age and decay, and everyone scooted around it to get a better look at themselves.

  “It might take a minute,” Thayer said. “You have to concentrate.”

  If this were anything like the movie, a bony demon would appear any minute now. But there was only a group of bored teenagers tilting their faces to show off their best angles.

  Of course I knew that there wasn’t going to be a demon popping out at us, or even that we’d see our past lives, but still, I was starting to feel the familiar prickling sensation at the back of my neck. I didn’t believe in past lives, but I had a past. What if I looked in this mirror and they were all able to see who I really was?

  “Nothing’s happening,” Raisey complained.

  “Well, I guess you don’t have a past life,” Thayer said.

  “To go along with your nonexistent love life,” snickered Devon, the asshole. People laughed again, and I began to wonder if I wasn’t in fact seeing a bunch of demons in the mirror after all.

  “Settle down, children,” Thayer said. “Why don’t we forget the past-life thing and try to communicate with actual spirits?”

  “Like our great-grandparents?” someone said.

  “Like the people who lived in this house,” Thayer said.

  “I thought it was abandoned,” Devon said.

  “Well, someone had to live here first to abandon it, smartass.” Thayer leaned forward. It was a subtle move, but it quieted everyone down and made them lean forward, too. “There was a couple who lived here, Frank and Greta. Typical hipsters—I’m talking vegan cashew cheese and terrible style. All’s well in Hipsterville until one day Greta starts to hear a buzzing.”

  “Buzzing?” somebody asked.

  “Like when a fly whizzes by your ear,” Thayer said. “At first it was just once in a while, like maybe a bug got in through the kitchen window and couldn’t get out. But then it was more constant. Insistent. Greta realized the noise was loudest whenever Frank was home. Anytime they’d be together, she’d hear it. The buzzing. She asked if he was making the noise on purpose. Frank said he couldn’t hear anything. But Greta kept hearing the buzzing and eventually she couldn’t take it anymore. Greta broke down and begged him to please stop buzzing and Frank looked her straight in the eye and said he didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “But Greta didn’t trust him. The buzzing was too loud. She didn’t believe he couldn’t hear it. And as Greta began to spiral, she no longer just thought he was lying about the buzzing. She thought he was the buzzing. Greta became convinced that Frank was wearing a skin suit—that underneath it, he was just a million flies, buzzing and swarming and out to get her.”

  Some people (Devon) snorted, but they still listened, waiting for Thayer to continue the story. I leaned in. I wanted him to continue, too.

  “Frank tried to reason with Greta, of course, but Greta couldn’t stand to be near him, what with all that buzzing. Some mornings, as he ate his cereal, she’d see a fly crawl over his earlobe and he wouldn’t even be bothered. At night she couldn’t sleep because Frank slept with his mouth open and anytime she closed her eyes, she imagined the flies pouring out.”

  Thayer opened his mouth, letting his jaw drop low, stretching it as far as it would go. No flies came swarming out, of course, but he held on to the pose, staring us down. I could feel Saundra squirm next to me. When he clamped his mouth shut with a click, a few of us startled.

  “Greta couldn’t stand it anymore,” he continued. “One day she took a meat cleaver and swung it right into Frank’s neck.”

  Saundra gasped dramatically.

  “She was trying to free the flies. But she just ended up killing Frank. And when Greta saw that there weren’t any flies, she offed herself next. And the scariest part of the whole thing is that Frank and Greta were”—Thayer made his eyes go wide and lowered his voice to a whisper—“registered Republicans.”

  I snorted, but nobody else seemed to find it funny.

  “Okay, that was a joke, but the rest is totally true!” Thayer went on. “It was a week before anyone even discovered their bodies. Neighbors heard buzzing at all hours of the day and it just kept getting louder and louder. Someone finally called the police, and when they broke down the door, guess what they found?” The pause was dramatic. “Flies. Hundreds of thousands of them, crawling all over the house—and the bodies.”

  “You’re full of it,” said one girl, but beside her, a guy swatted his neck and shivered.

  “So what, are we gonna, like, try to talk to the people that died here?” Lux asked. “Don’t we need a Ouija board or something?”

  Another girl, Sienna Something, cleared her throat. “I’ve been part of séances before. I know what to do.” She made a show of sitting ramrod straight and locking hands with the people on either side of her.

  I didn’t know whether I was supposed to be impressed or disturbed, because séances, plural? But I didn’t have time to dwell on it as the girl next to me grabbed my hand.

  “Go on, then,” Thayer coaxed, amused. “What do we do next?”

  “We have to concentrate on nothing but also open our minds and souls to all the possibilities that the universe presents to us,” Sienna said, sounding like a YouTube wellness guru. She raised her chin toward the broken chandelier in the center of the ceiling and took a deep breath. “Greta, we come to you with love and concern in our hearts. Your death was untimely and, like, totally brutal and stuff, and that sucks. And we’re aware that you had that small issue of killing Frank or whatever, but I also believe in giving women the benefit of the doubt and I know he was probably buzzing all day under his breath to tick you off. We’re here for you and we love you. If you can hear us, send us a sign.”

  My mind and soul were open and all that, but a deep crease formed between my eyebrows. The only thing I knew about Greta was that she was one hundred percent a made-up person in a made-up story. But I seemed to be the only one to take issue with this.

  Around me, everyone closed their eyes, the only sounds in the room the quiet strains of people trying to stay still or hold their breath. Definitely no signs from Greta. And yet we waited for what felt like way too long a time. I thought about sneaking out, but I didn’t want to be the one to break the spell. I was pretty sure that wasn’t what Saundra had meant by finding my people. But thankfully, I didn’t have to do anything because someone spoke up for all of us. “Okay, this is obviously—”

  A thud in the ceiling interrupted him, and more than a few heads snapped up at the noise. It was loud and strong enough to make the chandelier crystals chime like this was a breezy day on a North Carolina wraparound porch and not an abandoned house in Williamsburg.

  “Is there someone upstairs?” somebody hissed.

  “It’s Gretaaaaa,” Thayer said, his voice vibrating spookily.

  “Greta, is that you?” Sienna asked. “Tap once for yes and twice for no.”

  Everyone waited again, listening closely for more sounds. After a moment, another thud. “Greta,” Sienna said. “Are you okay?”

  Another moment, another thud. And then, just in time to make Sienna’s smile flicker off, a final thud. Two taps.

  “She’s not okay,” Saundra whispered.

  There was a moment of restless silence as we all snuck glances at each other, looking to see who was scared and who believed.

  “Greta, how can we help you?” Sienna asked.

  “That isn’t a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question. How’s she supposed to answer us?” Lux said, rolling her eyes.

  Then a new noise came from above. Not another thud, but more of a rumbling, like a bowling ball being hurled across the floor. Dust fell from the popcorn ceiling. Then all at once other things started to happen. It wasn’t just the ceiling now, it was the walls too, knocking, pounding, as if the house was coming alive. The candles went out and I heard a piercing crash. The mirror had fallen, spraying us with glass.

&nbs
p; Screams broke out, loud enough to match the growing cacophony of the crumbling house. Saundra’s scream was shriller than everyone else’s and she yanked my hand suddenly, pulling me up so fast that my feet slipped as I scrambled to stand. The sounds of people rushing around in the dark mixed with the thunderous roar still coming from the ceiling and walls. And then the noise morphed into something else.

  Something much closer.

  A swarm.

  A buzzing.

  As though a hundred thousand flies were crawling all over us.

  The screaming started in earnest then, particularly from one person. “Get them off me!” she screeched. “Get them off me!”

  The bright fluorescence of the construction lights flickered back to life and illuminated a totally transformed room. There were people bottlenecking at the doorway, yelling and frantic to get out. But mainly we all stared at Lux, who was in a full-blown panic. She was wildly pulling at her beautiful blond strands, crying hysterically for someone to help get the flies out of her hair.

  But there weren’t any flies. The light ushered in a stillness, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the only other person who wasn’t freaking out. Not one strand of his loose, curly hair was out of place. His thick-framed glasses were not askew. I watched as he clicked a portable speaker and slipped it into his pants pocket. And just like that the buzzing came to a halt.

  I clamped my lips shut. I tried not to let it out. The rest of the people in the room swore and caught their breaths, but something else was bubbling up inside me. Finally, I had to let it go.

  I laughed. Hard. I laughed so loudly that soon, people turned to look at me like I was the weirdest thing in the supposedly haunted abandoned house.

  Lux’s eyes locked onto mine. She was breathing hard, her fists full of blond clumps, like sad bouquets. I thought for a moment she’d pulled out her own hair, but then I noticed the clips at the edges. Hair extensions.

  “You did this to me!” Lux pointed at me as if I had been the one to snatch her bald.

  I shook my head, and though I was trying to be serious, little laughs continued to slip out.