She has a point.
I realize that she at least cares about my welfare. It’s more than I can say about my dad.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and mean it.
“I could turn you in, but I’m not going to. This is your one free pass, you understand me?” I nod. She looks at her watch. “Now you’re late for dinner. Change into your uniform and head to the cafeteria before all the food is gone.”
“I am not going out in public like this,” I say to my reflection in the mirror after I’ve changed.
I look down at myself and all I can see is old-school Britney Spears. I’ve got on a white starched shirt, which makes my already nonexistent boobs even more nonexistent, along with a navy blue skinny tie with the Bard Academy seal on it, and a short, pleated Bard Academy skirt. To complete the ensemble: white knee-high socks. All I need are pigtails and some dance moves and I am the pre–Federline Britney. If anyone I knew ever saw me in this, I’d literally die of embarrassment. I have a fashion reputation to protect. I should be singing “Oops, I Did It Again.”
I am already thinking about ways I can try to make it cooler. Maybe if I shredded the hem, or the tie? Anything would be an improvement. I put on my navy blue cap (the one Lindsay calls my Fidel Castro hat, because it’s square and has a short brim) and some bangles and dangle earrings, which is the best I can do on short notice.
The dining room is dark and depressing. The lights above are dimly lit chandeliers, with flickering bulbs that give off about as much light as candles. The electricity in the dining hall and about everywhere else seems patchy at best. The lights keep flickering.
The walls are all dark-paneled wood and the room is filled with long, wooden tables paired with benches that are bolted to the floor. No plastic chairs here. I wonder if this is to prevent students from throwing them. I head to the line, where I am the next-to-last person to get my tray and get my food.
Calling the meal they serve us “dinner” is being generous. Even calling it “food” would be something of a stretch. On the bright side, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to drop fifteen pounds without even trying.
The meal, if you want to call it that, consists of a big white roll (um, carb-heavy, no thanks), some mystery meat swimming in some unidentifiable gravy, and green beans so soggy they disintegrate on the fork.
I’m not sure what’s scarier. The woods, my polyester uniform, or this food.
Have these people ever heard of Cheetos? Cap’n Crunch? Something edible? I take my tray to the end of the line and then look for a place to sit.
Amazingly, everyone seems to be sitting in groups of friends already. It’s not even the first day of classes and already there are cliques. Where did they come from? Was there a meeting I missed? There are literally no singles sitting at any table. Everyone is at least paired up with someone else, and here I am, alone in a sea of unfamiliar faces. I literally see no one I recognize. Not even Blade. I feel my heart sink.
I wait a beat or two, counting down the seconds as I stand with my tray, glancing around the cafeteria. I realize that I’m quickly slipping from the “casually looking for friends” zone into the “this girl has no friends and doesn’t know where to sit” zone. I glance up and see a guy with a pink Mohawk, who nods at me. Does he want me to sit with him?
Oh God. Am I reduced to sitting with Pink Mohawk Guy? Seriously? Is this my life now?
And then, a punkish girl with green hair steps out of line behind me and heads to the Pink Mohawk Guy. He wasn’t nodding at me, he was nodding at Green Spiky Hair Girl. Great. Not even the Pink Mohawk Guy wants me to sit with him. I don’t think I can sink lower.
Get a grip, I tell myself. It’s not that bad to sit by yourself, is it? Besides, is it so bad to be a social pariah at Bard? I mean, what does it say about you if you’re popular at a school of delinquents? Yeah, thought so. This rationale makes me feel instantly better. I’m not a social pariah; if anything, being an outcast here makes me normal.
Then I see someone I recognize. It’s Hana. And she’s sitting with a boy. Oh, thank God! I’m saved. I catch her eye and she gives me a smile. I’m in.
“Hey, mind if I sit with you guys?” I ask, approaching them.
“Sure, have a seat,” Hana says, nodding to the seat in front of her.
“Thanks,” I say. “You saved me.”
“You owe me one,” Hana says, but she smiles at me. “Miranda, meet Samir. Samir, Miranda.”
Samir is slim with an olive complexion and jet-black hair that’s a bit unkempt. He seems not to care that his shirt is half tucked-in and half tucked-out of his pants. He looks like he just rolled out of bed.
“Will you marry me?” he asks me.
“Uh…” I glance at Hana.
“He asks every girl he meets,” Hana explains. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m what you call desperate,” Samir says.
“His parents want to arrange his marriage for him,” Hana says. “They sent him here because he refuses to get married to the girl of their choice when he turns nineteen.”
“That’s a little young to get married, isn’t it?”
“My parents grew up in India in a very traditional family. They have a different way of thinking about things,” Samir says. “So why are you here? Did your parents send you away for telling them you won’t have an arranged marriage, too?”
“No, but they could have. My parents are dorks,” I say.
“And?”
“And what?”
“What did you do?”
“Samir! Stop being so nosy. Miranda, you don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to.”
“She’s right, you know,” Samir says. “We can just look it up in your file when you aren’t around.”
“Ignore him, seriously,” Hana says.
“So? Come on. Can’t be that bad. You look too goody-goody for it to be that bad. Wait, let me guess. Eating disorder?”
“Just what are you trying to say?”
“Shoplifting. Must be.”
“Not even close.”
Hana and Samir stare at me. I sigh. I’ve never been good at doing the whole mysterious thing. “Fine. I wrecked my dad’s car. Maxed-out my stepmom’s credit card.”
“Sweet, right here,” Samir says, putting up his hand for a high five. Despite myself, I smile and slap his palm. Samir has a kind of contagious energy. He makes everything seem like a game. “That’s almost as good as Hana’s story. She wrecked her mother’s car, too. But you know all about Asian drivers.”
“First off, I’m only half-Japanese,” Hana says, flinging her soggy roll at him. “And second, by that logic, you should be driving a cab.”
“Maybe I will,” Samir says.
“And anyway, I didn’t wreck her car. My boyfriend did.”
“You mean your felon boyfriend did.”
“He wasn’t a felon when I was dating him. That was after,” Hana clarifies.
I try cutting the mystery meat, but I’m not getting anywhere with this plastic fork. I’d be better off using chopsticks.
“What’s with the plastic utensils?” I ask, holding up a fork.
“Someone got stabbed last year,” Samir says, unperturbed.
“Stabbed? Seriously?”
“It wasn’t very deep,” Hana says. “Some guy went ballistic on his roommate. Stabbed him in the arm with his fork. He tried to stab Ms. W, too, but missed.”
“He didn’t miss,” Samir says. “He hit Ms. W right in the forearm, but she didn’t bleed. Everybody knows that story. She’s an alien. Everybody knows it.”
“That is totally just a campus legend,” Hana says.
“Campus legend?”
“Bard’s version of urban legends,” Samir says. “Like the faculty don’t eat or sleep.”
“Or like the one about the UFO that crashed in the forest that keeps giving out that weird magnetic pulse, which makes people walk in circles out there.”
“That’s funny you should sa
y that, because I went into the woods, and…”
Both Samir and Hana drop their forks and their mouths hang open.
“You went into the woods!” they both cry at once in raised voices. A couple of other people look at us, and two Guardians standing by the mashed potatoes line glare in our direction.
Hana lowers her voice. “Baring the fact that if you were caught,” Hana says, looking from one direction to the other to make sure she’s not overheard, “you’d get grounded here for Thanksgiving and Christmas, not to mention dish duty for the semester, there’s the problem of…”
“Bears,” Samir says.
“And…” Hana starts.
“And wolves, don’t forget the wolves,” Samir adds.
“And…”
“And the ghost of Kate Shaw.”
“Would you let me finish my story?” Hana shouts.
“Who’s Kate Shaw?”
“The best campus legend,” Samir asks.
“I’m telling the story,” Hana says, giving him a stern look. “Kate Shaw,” she continues, “was a sophomore who came to Bard several years ago. Just like you, Kate Shaw tried to escape. They sent out a search party the next morning looking for her…”
“You’re not telling it right,” Samir says. “You left out the part about her backpack.”
“If you’d let me finish, I was getting to that part.” Hana glares at Samir, who just shrugs. “So she took her backpack, right? They searched for her for five days. And on the fifth day, they found her backpack in the woods by a stream. And it was covered in blood.”
“You are so telling this wrong,” Samir says. Hana ignores him.
“And it was empty, except for one book and a note. The note was covered in blood, and it said, ‘Beware the Third Bell.’”
“She was telling people not to be tardy?” I ask.
Samir laughs. “Hana, you’re forgetting that they also found her Bard jacket and it was —”
“Wait, let me guess. Covered in blood?” I’m not scared at this point. Just amused.
“And sometimes, late at night,” Hana says, continuing even though I’m clearly not scared, “people have seen her ghost wandering the woods and asking people if they’ve seen her backpack.”
“It’s much scarier when I tell it,” Samir tells me.
“It would’ve been fine if you hadn’t interrupted,” Hana says.
The lights above our heads flicker.
“What’s with the lights?” I ask them.
They shrug. “The island is powered by a generator,” Samir says. “But it’s not exactly like being plugged into General Electric.”
“Okay, so now back to noncampus legends and real-campus people,” I say. “Who are those people?” I nod my head toward a table two over from us. It’s filled with Goth types, complete with black lipstick and spiky black hair. “What’s their story?”
“Those are the E/rave kids. They’re always connected, even in here, with drugs.”
“And them?” I ask, pointing to what looks like the jock table.
“Impulse-control problems. Those guys steal everything that isn’t nailed down,” Hana says.
“And nearly all of them have probably hit one of their parents,” Samir says.
“What about them?” I ask, looking over at what must be the geek table, where Well Girl from the bus is sitting.
“The freaks? They’re the harmless ones. They aren’t trying to be social outcasts, they’re just that way naturally. They look all weird, but they don’t really want to harm anybody but themselves. There are a lot of cutters over there.”
“Gross,” I say, wrinkling my nose.
“Yeah, it’s pretty much the rainbow of problems here. Do their parents send them to therapists? No, they send them to a prison school, hoping it’ll all work out. Does that make sense to you?” Samir points his fork at me for emphasis. “But, like Headmaster B says, we’re all here because we have self-esteem issues.”
“Ugh,” Hana says, rolling her eyes. “Everything here is about self-esteem.”
“But what about them? They look normal,” I say, nodding toward a table full of people wearing Izod shirts.
“Oh no, they’re the worst,” Hana says. “They’re the rich kids. They tend to fall into the “Daddy got my drug/ date rape charges dismissed because he knows the DA” category. They’re the worst criminals here by far. The ring leader is sitting in the middle with the ponytail. That’s Parker Rodham, a junior. She poisoned her own mother with rat poison, or so the rumor goes.”
“The mother lived, but she lost a kidney,” Samir says.
“Seriously?”
“That’s the rumor,” Hana says. “Also, all of Parker’s boyfriends keep dropping off the face of the earth. We think she kills them.”
“Speaking of, looks like Parker found a replacement boyfriend in record time,” Samir says, as a blond boy who looks like he ought to be on the cover of a J. Crew catalog takes a seat next to Parker.
With a jolt, I realize I know him.
Ryan Kent, former star of the varsity basketball team at my old school. He was one year ahead of me. He was a sophomore at my school last year, until he had that car accident. His girlfriend was killed and he dropped out of school. Rumor had it he finished up his sophomore year at some private school in the Northeast. Looks like that school is Bard Academy.
I did not just get so lucky. This changes everything. I’m going to have to rethink my guyatus.
“Ryan Kent,” I exclaim, without meaning to. Both Samir and Hana look at me.
“You know him?” she says.
“Uh-huh,” I mutter, unable to stop staring. Even in his Bard uniform, you can just make out the outline of his state-championship triceps. It’s not possible for him to be more gorgeous. And if that’s not enough, he’s also an honors student. Brains and brawn. Things are definitely looking up. This is the first good news I’ve gotten since landing at Bard.
“Parker always does snatch up the best-looking boys,” Hana says, just as Parker leans in and whispers something into Ryan’s ear.
Okay, maybe I spoke too soon about things looking up.
“They can’t be dating,” I say, as my eyes slide back to Ryan and Parker.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” I say, watching Parker rub Ryan’s arm possessively. “They just can’t be.”
Seven
After dinner, I find Blade asleep in our dorm room. She’s found my stash of pretzels from the plane in my backpack and chowed down on them because there are empty wrappers on my bed. Nice. She’s laid out on her back and snoring. Apparently, stealing my stuff has really worn her out. I take the wrappers from my bed and toss them onto her chest. One of them flitters near her face. She swats at it, then rolls over and starts snoring soundly again.
I slip into my pajamas and crawl into bed, too. I stare at my photos for a while. I keep looking at Dad’s picture, although I don’t know why. It’s like I’m trying to figure him out. What about this day made him smile, when he never smiles any other time? I wonder how he found out about this place? Maybe it was one of his annoying golf buddies, like Mr. Lorgan who stares at my butt when he thinks I don’t see. Perv.
The bell outside starts tolling, signaling lights out. It’s then that I notice that my closet light is on again. I slip out of bed, and turn it off, then climb back into bed and switch off my desk lamp. The room feels suddenly colder than it did before, now that it’s nearly completely dark. I pull the covers high up to my chin and stare at the ceiling. I’m acutely aware of the weird sounds in my room. There’s the snoring from Blade, a kind of wheezing whine, and the eerie creaks and groans of the floorboards above my head. It sounds like someone is walking above me, but they shouldn’t be, since we’re all supposed to be in bed.
The furthest thing from my mind is sleep. The wind howls against my window and every so often a tree branch outside hits it just right so that I think someone is out there tapping on it. I’ve never fe
lt so out of place and alone before. I would probably have better luck sleeping in a deserted and haunted mineshaft or maybe a cursed Indian burial ground. Not that I’m the sort of person who believes in ghosts, but it’s hard not to think something is weird about this place. If there is such a thing as spirits, this is the place they’d be.
I have got to find a way out of here.
But even if I did manage to escape, where would I go? My parents think I’m a delinquent. Especially Dad. God, he’s so clueless. If he spent five minutes with me he might actually know something about me. If you quizzed him on my friends’ names, I bet he couldn’t come up with a single one.
When he and Mom were still married, at least Mom would tell him things about me, so he’d know something. I miss those days, I guess, even though it wasn’t all a big Disney movie or anything. They fought all the time, and usually Dad traveled a lot for work and wasn’t around much, but at least back then Mom wasn’t obsessed with her wrinkles and Dad wasn’t completely preoccupied with golf. And every so often, I felt like we were a family. Now I just feel like I’m in the middle of a battlefield all the time. And just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, they send me away, a hundred miles away from my friends and everything I loved about my life. It’s like Dad wasn’t just content with ruining our family. He had to ruin my whole life, too.
I’m starting to feel pretty sorry for myself, which is what usually happens when I think about Mom and Dad splitting up. I don’t know why, because, I mean, people’s parents get divorced all the time. It’s more the rule than the exception, isn’t it?
I feel a lump in my throat and I suddenly feel like I might cry.
Before I can, my closet light flicks on. I start, sitting up in bed. The light from inside the closet outlines the door, sending slashes of light across my bedspread.
What the…?
My heartbeat kicks up a few notches. It’s been a long while since I thought there might be monsters hiding in my closet, but I’ve never seen a light just come on by itself before. I’m temporarily paralyzed. Do I get up and investigate? I’m not exactly all that thrilled about investigating an odd light coming from the closet. I’m no horror movie virgin. I know what happens to the curious. It starts out as a weird closet light coming on and ends up with me being hacked to pieces.
Wuthering high: a bard academy novel Page 5