“This was your stupid prank!”
I looked around, trying to spot the guy with the portable speaker, but he hadn’t stuck around to see Lux chew me out. Everyone else was riveted, though.
An angry, guttural sound came from Lux’s throat and she threw her extensions on the floor. “Laugh it up now because you’re done at this school.” And with that she stomped out of the house.
I had stopped laughing by now. When I turned to Saundra, her face was frozen in a grimace. I waited for her to say something. Like all the encouraging things she’d told me when she said this party would be “totally fun” and that I’d “find my people.” But all she said was, “This is not good.”
3
I COULD FEEL how not good my situation was the minute I walked into school the next morning.
Manchester Prep was a private high school, and you could tell how exclusive it was by its location alone. Manhattan. Upper East Side. Basically on Museum Mile. It was four stories high, with the kind of intricate Gothic details carved into its facade that attracted tourists and their cameras. It was pretty on the outside, but cramped within.
We wore uniforms. Oxford shirts and gray blazers with the school crest. The boys wore slacks and the girls wore pleated gray skirts that were meant to chastely kiss the knees but more often than not grazed the thighs. I’d made the mistake of ordering my uniform online instead of having it fitted like everybody else, so my hemline scraped along my shins. The uniform was starchy and chafed and bit into the soft parts of my waist, and the whole thing was a big metaphor for how much I did not fit in here.
A part of it was the money thing. As in they had it, I didn’t. You’d think it wouldn’t make that big a difference when we all wore the same clothes, studied the same things, but as soon as they opened their mouths you could tell we belonged to two different worlds. They loved to talk about their things: how expensive they were and how many of them they had. They had unlimited credit cards and wore Cartier jewelry, and for some reason that I will never understand, they all had the exact same Celine Nano designer bag. I once saw one of my classmates try to buy a Twix bar at a deli on Second Avenue using a hundred-dollar bill.
So yeah. There was me and there was them and the chasm between us was the size of Manhattan.
But now, as I took the same route I always did to get to my locker, I felt like I didn’t fit in for a completely different reason. People were looking at me. Like, really stopping to look. Some sneered; others leaned into their friends to whisper, their eyes never leaving me.
I didn’t have to hear them to know what they were saying. That’s the girl who crossed Lux.
I’d worked so hard to not call attention to myself at this school, to blend in, that when all eyes were on me, I felt it as acutely as a sudden change in temperature. Everything went cold. Even the people in the alumni portraits that trimmed the high-ceilinged walls seemed to be watching me. They were mostly angry-looking dudes from back when Manchester was exclusively angry-looking dudes. The school became co-ed in the ’80s, and my locker was directly beneath the Technicolor portraits of two female alums with fanned hair. One had become an astronaut and the other a B-list sitcom actress. Both seemed way too interested in my being a newly anointed social pariah.
I didn’t see Lux, but I felt her presence all around, like a ghost haunting me. I felt it most strongly in my Women in Literature class when I saw Bram at his seat. Our gazes locked for an infinite moment in which I was yanked back to the kiss. I felt my face redden and I wondered if he’d told Lux about it and if I should expect my already-ruined life at Manchester to get exponentially worse. But then he looked away and so did I, and we both went back to pretending that I didn’t exist.
I tried my best to stop thinking about Bram, but unfortunately, he was Saundra’s favorite conversation topic.
“Were there any guys in your old high school who were as gorgeous as Bram Wilding?” Saundra asked as we sat down in the cafeteria.
I put down my sandwich. My stomach suddenly hurt but Saundra didn’t notice my loss of appetite. She ate distractedly, her gaze locked on the center of the room. It was the prime real estate of the school’s upper echelon. Saundra watched Bram and his friends like they were doing something truly remarkable instead of the same eating and chatting as the rest of us plebes.
Thanks to Saundra, I learned everything I never wanted to know about Bram. He was the product of Andrew and Delilah Wilding, a publishing magnate of Scottish descent and a former model from Cairo, respectively. But I knew something about Bram that Saundra couldn’t know. Like what his lips felt like.
“All the guys in my old high school were ogres,” I said. Saundra was doing me a solid by not talking about the elephant in the room (my sudden notoriety and social ostracism), but I desperately needed to change the subject. “Could we talk about literally anything else?”
“Okay, we can talk about the party, which I am legit still not over. We got to find out that Lux’s legendary locks are actually extensions?” Saundra looked up and sighed. “You pray to the scandal gods, but you just never think you’ll get a response, you know?”
“You didn’t think it was a mean prank?” I asked.
“Oh, don’t tell me you believe those rumors.”
“What rumors?”
Saundra’s eyes lit up. If there was one thing she liked to talk about more than Bram Wilding, it was rumors. “I forgot you’re new and you don’t know all of Manchester’s dirty secrets.” She swept her plate to the side, as though she needed to make space for the enormity of what she was about to say.
“People think there’s some big prankster in school pulling the strings behind everybody’s biggest humiliations. Like one time, Erica Belcott got locked in the basement pool at the Y and when they found her, she was curled up in the fetal position on the diving board. She said someone had been flicking the lights on and off. Another time Jonathan Calden woke up in a dumpster behind a Red Lobster without knowing how he got there. And there was that one time when Julia Mahoney swore somebody was leaving her creepy notes written in red lipstick all over the place, and when she found a tube of lipstick in her backpack in AP Chem, she freaked out and knocked over the Bunsen and nearly set the class on fire.
“Hence, the prankster theory. People think it’s all connected, that one person is behind it all. They’ll say, ‘That asshole got me.’ But it’s like, uh, no, Jonathan, how about some personal responsibility? Waking up in a dumpster is your own fault for going to that Red Lobster in Jersey.”
Usually when Saundra dropped a bunch of names on me I zoned out like it was white noise. But a mysterious menace on the loose, screwing with people’s lives? “Tell me more.”
“It’s been going on forever,” Saundra said. “I heard about the ‘prankster’ before I even started high school. But it’s just one of those urban legends.”
My mind went to the boy I’d seen when the lights came back up at the abandoned house. The one who’d discreetly shut off his portable speaker while everyone was distracted. I’d found out his name—Freddie Martinez. A look around the cafeteria and I spotted him, the sight of the loose curls cresting over his light brown forehead unmistakable. He sat surrounded by a group of friends.
“Who are those guys?” I asked Saundra.
“Ugh. The Tisch Boys. They’re in the Film Club together. They’re all going to the Tisch School at NYU to study movies—sorry, film,” said Saundra. “And one of them is actually a Tisch. Careful—they might try to recruit you on account of their club not having a single girl in its membership. It’s a huge optics issue. Once, Pruit Pusivic was trying to flirt with me and for a minute I was into it but then it hit me, like, Wait, do you really like me or are you just trying to get me to join Film Club? It really gave me trust issues.”
“Oh.”
“Exactly,” Saundra said. “They think they’re cool, but they’re just pretentious nerds.”
I didn’t think Freddie looked all that nerdy, tho
ugh. Yeah, there were the thick glasses frames, but I kind of liked them. Plus, he had the relaxed posture and easy smile of someone with a healthy amount of confidence. And there was that jawline. Sharp enough to light a match on. His clothes were kind of messy—the uniform oxford shirt wasn’t ironed like the other boys’, and his shoes were scuffed and in need of polishing—but I got the feeling all of that was on purpose. A look he cultivated.
“And what about that guy?” I said, jutting my chin in Freddie’s direction.
“Freddie Martinez?” Saundra asked. “Why?”
“Just curious.”
The look on her face said there were much more interesting people to gossip about at this school, but Saundra was always happy to show off her encyclopedic knowledge of the student body, even if it was only Freddie Martinez. She took a deep breath and launched into a list of Freddie facts.
I learned that he and I had something in common: In a school of one-percenters, we fell somewhere in the ninety-nine. He was a scholarship kid. His mom was a caterer who he helped out on the weekends, but he also sold cheat sheets and term papers. And apparently, for the right price he’d even take your standardized tests for you. Around here that was a lucrative side gig.
“Basically, he’ll do anything for a buck, which is so tacky, but I guess it comes in handy if you suck at algebra or something.” Saundra took a breath. “There’s also rumors he deals drugs, but personally I find those rumors so racist.”
It was a good thing she wasn’t spreading them, then.
Freddie was deep in conversation with the guy sitting next 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 need to stop watching movies together.”
“Is there something going on at school?”
“Nope.”
“’Cause I know you like to watch these movies after you’ve had a hard day.”
“School’s delightful,” I said, stuffing my mouth and voice full of corn.
“I’m serious. This movie makes me queasy and you’re watching it like it’s the Thanksgiving Day Parade.”
“I find this much more interesting than balloons and marching bands, Mom.”
“Exactly. How you can watch this stuff and snack at the same time is beyond me. You’re practically licking the butter off your fingers.”
My mom had to love me. The whole unconditional thing, it was in the Mom Handbook. But sometimes, like right now, she slipped up. I could tell she loved me despite the fact that I scared her. She must’ve thought that I was defective. And a part of me knew she watched these movies with me because she felt guilty. About what happened last year. For leaving me alone that night. For not being there.
“Are you saying I have no feelings? Like a psychopath?”
“Rachel—”
“Because that’s what it sounds like.” I didn’t want to argue with my mother, but sometimes it was easier than answering her questions. Sometimes you had to lean into the argument. I kept my voice flat. Like a psychopath’s.
“Jamonada,” my mom said softly. “Please don’t say that.”
I swallowed and grabbed my phone again. I’d only been joking. Kind of. Whatever it was, I’d picked a fight with my mom and I felt sorry. “I’ll find another movie.”
My mom shook her head again. Mother-daughter bonding time was too important. “It’s fine. It’s not that scary.”
My phone dinged. A new text from Saundra.
Heyyyy, just fyi stay off the internet for tonight?
The ball of dread in my stomach grew larger. I did her one better: I deleted my Instagram. I hardly used it anyway. I’d only signed up for a new account when I transferred to Manchester because it felt like the protocol. A normal teenage girl would have an Instagram full of selfies. But anytime I posted a pic, I felt a gnawing discomfort, like I was wearing a costume that was too tight. After taking all those useless selfies, I began to realize how forced my smiles looked.
Next, I searched for someone else. Freddie Martinez wasn’t on Instagram, but I found him on Twitter easily enough. His latest post was from half an hour before.
Film Forum playing one of my faves tonight for #MonthOfAThousandScares. #EvilDead2 lets go!
I smiled. So we also had horror films in common.
I put the bowl of popcorn on the end table, pure impulsiveness coursing through me. “I’m heading out.”
“Where are you going?” Mom asked.
“Meeting a friend.” I didn’t love lying to my mom, but I knew she wouldn’t stop me if there was a friend involved. And Freddie was a potential friend. Who I was technically going to meet for the first time. So, not really a lie at all.
The Mary Shelley Club Page 3