Wuthering high: a bard academy novel

by Cara Lockwood

  And that’s when I do something I know I’ll regret — aside from helping Parker. I’m going to walk away from Ryan Kent.

  “Ryan, I’ll be right back,” I say, pushing past him and moving between Heathcliff and Coach H, hoping to intercept him.

  Heathcliff notices me then and my eyes flick over to Coach H, who’s moving in fast. He follows my gaze and nods.

  “What are you doing?” Hana hisses at me, coming up quickly behind me. “You’re helping him get away.”

  I look over and see Guardians moving in behind him. He’s surrounded.

  “Parker!” I shout. “Look out!”

  She just looks at me, giving me a smug smile. She doesn’t see the Guardians. She thinks I’m jealous. What an idiot.

  My eyes shift back to Heathcliff, who grabs Parker hard by the arm and spins her around so her back is pressed up against his chest. I was right about him. He doesn’t care about her. It dawns on me in that instant that he intends to use her as a hostage.

  “Told you Parker would get what she deserved,” Hana says. “Trying to steal your guy and look what happens!”

  At first, Parker is just surprised. Then she seems to take it as some kind of compliment, like he’s trying to hug her, but then when it becomes clear he means to take her into the path of four large Guardians she starts resisting. Heathcliff easily brings her along, as if she were nothing more than a small dog. Out in the aisle, he roughly whirls her in front of him and grabs her by the hair. Ouch. She struggles against him in earnest now, because it’s become obvious to her what’s already obvious to me. He intends to use her as a human shield.

  Parker has made a big mistake. Heathcliff is no good boy in bad boy’s clothes. He’s an OMDB Boy, through and through. The original bad boy since 1847.

  “Get back,” Healthcliff tells the Guardians, who slow their approach. Parker is seriously squirming now, and calling Heathcliff all kinds of names. He’s completely unfazed.

  Everyone in the cafeteria now is looking at them and all chatter has stopped as everyone waits to see what’s going to happen. Are the Guardians going to win? Or is Heathcliff? I can tell you right now that most of the kids are rooting for Heathcliff. This is a reform school, after all. Nobody in prison cheers for the guards to win.

  Heathcliff inches closer to the front doors of the cafeteria as the Guardians follow him tentatively, their arms up. A few more Guardians come up from behind. They plan to trap him. But Heathcliff sees it all coming. With one quick motion, he shoves Parker hard toward the first set of approaching Guardians. She whirls, off balance, and stumbles into them. One of the Guardians flings her away and tries to lunge at Heathcliff. She falls to the ground, hard, her skirt flying up and revealing the fact that she’s wearing pink polka-dotted underwear with Hello Kitty on them. I can’t help but snicker a little (yes, I’m a terrible person and I’m probably going to hell, blah, blah, blah, but this is Parker Rodham, remember? I can gloat about her accidental Girls Gone Wild moment. It’s my right).

  Meanwhile, Heathcliff uses the distraction to make his escape. In one swift motion, he jumps on top of the edge of a table, leaps straight into the approaching Guardians from the rear, and with a couple of quick and furious blows, he’s free of them. He slams open the doors and is free. The two Guardians he bested are on the ground, groaning.

  Some of the kids, in awe, start applauding.

  Parker, however, is livid. Her face is bright red and she glares at me as if she wants to kill me with her bare hands. She is so mad, she actually shoves one of her own clones when said clone tries to help her to her feet. She then starts shouting at Coach H, who is trying to calm her down, but she is in full-fledged tempertantrum mode. There’s no calming her down. Eventually, the Guardians have to take her by force back to her dorm. Her clones follow after, as if on a string.

  I turn around to look for Ryan, hoping to start up our conversation where we left off, but he’s gone.

  Twenty-seven

  Heathcliff makes good on his escape. He has a knack for disappearing and he eludes the Guardians with ease.

  “If you insist on helping him, I don’t know what we’re going to do with you,” Ms. W says to me, looking very disappointed as we walk back to the dorm. Hana and Blade are with us, but Samir and Coach H have headed back to Macduff, the junior/senior boys’ dorm.

  “I didn’t help,” I say.

  “You did, and lying doesn’t improve matters,” Ms. W says. “I don’t know how much clearer I can make this. He doesn’t belong in this world, Miranda.”

  “But you said yourself you don’t know if him being here will really cause the end of the world. You said you don’t know exactly, but you think it could.”

  “Do you really want to take that risk?” Hana asks me. “I mean, I know he’s hot and all, but you have to use your brain here.”

  “He’s not hot, is he?”

  “Duh,” Hana says. “He so obviously has bad boy mojo, and you are completely falling for it.”

  Am I?

  “He’s only going to end up doing more harm than good,” Ms. W says. “Remember Tyler?” she reminds me gently.

  It’s true. People tried to warn me about Tyler, and I just didn’t want to listen. Maybe Ms. W is right about Heathcliff, and I just don’t want to see it.

  Back at our dorm, Ms. W orders the three of us to go to bed. We’re given a full day’s pass from Saturday activities — which include mandatory study hall and assembly — and ordered to go straight to our rooms to sleep. I’m so keyed up that I don’t think it’s possible for me to sleep, but amazingly, I put my head on the pillow and I’m out. I sleep like the dead, probably because I’ve spent so much time with them. I slip into a dream that’s so real, I could swear it’s really happening.

  In the dream, I’m standing in a graveyard, which under normal circumstances would seem creepy, but here for some reason just seems sad. There’s a funeral going on, and everyone is dressed in black, in period clothes — I’d say more than a hundred years old. The crowd around the grave disperses and I see Heathcliff, standing and staring at the grave. As I approach him, I see the name on the gravestone. It says: Catherine Earnshaw Linton.

  Heathcliff’s true love.

  Heathcliff, normally so strong and stoic, drops to his knees and starts sobbing and clawing at the gravestone. My heart breaks watching him. He’s in misery.

  I put my hand on his shoulder and he looks up at me, then wraps his arms around my legs, sobbing. I’m not sure what to do, I put my hand on his head to try to comfort him.

  That’s when, out of nowhere, Emily Brontë, the raving woman in the black dress, appears before us. She lifts her hands and the ground beneath our feet gives way. Heathcliff and I are both falling, tumbling, straight into Catherine’s grave.

  I wake with a start, cold sweat dripping down my back.

  The dim light of morning is shining through my window and it takes me a moment to realize that I’ve slept the entire day and all night. I guess this is what happens when you don’t sleep for a month and then are up all night.

  I rub my face to try to wake myself up from the nightmare. What could it mean? I can’t help but think that Heathcliff isn’t the dangerous one. Emily Brontë is.

  Everything from the night before (or night before that, technically) comes rushing back to me. Was it real? Or was it all a dream? Ghost teachers of the literary variety, fiction coming to life. That’s when I notice on my bedspread, lying across my feet, there’s the page from Wuthering Heights. The one Kate Shaw had hidden in her closet.

  I just stare at it. Where did it come from? Coach H took it ages ago and now here it is, back on my bed?

  I glance around my room, but Blade’s bed is empty. She must’ve gotten up a long time ago. Tentatively, I pick up the page. I hold it like it might be dynamite. I don’t know what kind of powers it has, or whether just holding it might bring about the end of the world.

  I look at the page; I hadn’t really read it carefully bef
ore, but it’s the scene between Heathcliff and Catherine when Catherine is dying (has made herself sick because Heathcliff and her husband Linton can’t get along), and Heathcliff is accusing her of betraying him by marrying someone who isn’t her true love. It’s a heart-wrenching scene.

  I turn it over and that’s when I see handwriting. Kate’s handwriting.

  It says, “You are in danger.”

  “Kate? Cathy? Whoever you are. Is that you?” I say to the room. “If you’re there, I need some help. What should I do? How am I in danger?”

  The room is silent. No closet lights go on. No drawers open. I can’t tell if she’s here or not and I’m starting to feel a little silly that I talked to an empty room. Besides, she wasn’t even a real girl, so how could she be a ghost?

  Reluctantly, I pull myself from bed and get dressed. I decide to put the page from Wuthering Heights in my pocket and try to give it to Ms. W or Coach H. They ought to have it back.

  I wander into the dorm’s den, looking for Ms. W, and find her directing a large group of students lingering in the hall in a line that looks like they’re waiting for concert tickets to go on sale. Some are leaning against the wall and others are sitting on the floor in the hall. I push my way to the front and see something even stranger than ghosts.

  Payphones have appeared in the den. Five of them. They weren’t there before and now they are. They are the kind of payphones Clark Kent would use to change into his Superman outfit, big glass-and-wood boxes with folding doors for privacy.

  Where did they come from?

  They all have girls inside, talking on the phone. And I just thought I’d seen it all on this campus.

  Ms. W is standing by them, navigating the wait, summoning girls up to use the phones.

  “What’s going on?” I ask her.

  “Haven’t you read your campus mail? Today is parents’ Sunday. The only time you get to talk to your family before Thanksgiving.”

  And then I remember. Last week, the flyer in my mailbox. The one that said we can make two outgoing calls and that our parents have been notified to be on alert for our calls.

  I was supposed to write up something to say to Dad, too, but I guess I’ve been a little busy. I remember suddenly the half-written letters that I’ve been writing to him. I never managed to finish one.

  “How are you doing this morning?” Ms. W asks me, looking concerned.

  “As good as can be expected, considering.” Considering I was almost eaten by a plant, sucked dry by Dracula, burned by Mrs. Rochester, and abducted by Heathcliff.

  As I watch, a girl exits one of the phone booths. Ms. W signals to me.

  “Go on,” she tells me. “You’re next.”

  “Hey! No fair,” cries Parker Rodham, who is sitting near the fireplace with her clones. “We’ve been waiting for an hour.”

  Ms. W sends Parker a look that silences her immediately.

  “But, Ms. W…” I start, trying to tell her about the wayward book page. She silences me with a wave of her hand.

  “Come on, Miranda,” Ms. W says, waving me forward. “Alexander Graham Bell won’t wait for you all day.”

  “Do we really have time for this now?” I ask Ms. W, thinking that there are clearly bigger problems I need to deal with than talking to my parents. Saving the world, for starters.

  “The world will wait,” Ms. W says, as if reading my mind. “For your family, you need to make time.”

  Reluctantly, I step into the phone booth, half expecting to see the inventor of the telephone sitting there. But it’s empty.

  “You won’t be able to tell them about Bard,” Ms. W cautions. “What happens here, stays here.”

  “Just like Las Vegas,” I say, but Ms. W doesn’t get the joke.

  I dial my mom’s number and Lindsay picks up on the second ring.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she says, sounding disappointed. “I thought you were going to be a telemarketer. I was going to mess with you.”

  That’s my sister for you. She’d rather talk to a telemarketer than me.

  Lindsay’s favorite thing next to watching the Discovery Channel is to get up the hopes of telemarketers by promising to buy what they’re selling and then at the end of the conversation, admit that she’s only thirteen. Lindsay has no real friends, so she has to resort to taunting telemarketers. It’s sad, really.

  “So I can see you miss me a lot,” I say sarcastically. “So? What have I missed?”

  “You mean aside from me wearing all your shoes?”

  “I’m not going to dignify that with an answer,” I say.

  “Well, for one thing, you missed big news.”

  “What? Did Dad get divorced — again?”

  “No, silly, that wouldn’t be news,” Lindsay says, and I have to laugh. “No, Mom went on a date.”

  “What? Mom doesn’t have a social life.”

  “You mean she used to not have one,” Lindsay says. “She’s gone out on three dates now with my math teacher, Mr. Perkins. I totally set them up. It’s, like, so cool. I’m totally gonna get an A this semester.”

  Oh my God. I leave the house for a month and Mom has gone insane. She’s going on a date with Mr. Perkins? He wears short-sleeved polyester shirts and his pants only come down to his ankles. He’s not fit to date!

  “Miranda? Oh Miranda, is that you?” Mom cries, picking up the phone and butting into our phone conversation. “Oh dear, how are you? Are you okay? I’ve been trying to call, but the school administrators have said we can’t talk to you during your adjustment period. I’ve been getting your letters. Have you gotten mine?”

  Normally, I’m annoyed by Mom’s drama, but it’s nice to hear that she misses me. And for once, I’m not annoyed when she spends twenty minutes out of thirty talking about how she’s considering liposuction.

  I feel like I’ve grown up a lot in the last month. I find that I’m not even mad at her anymore for sending me away. All I feel is longing to see her and Lindsay. Hearing their voices makes me homesick.

  “So what have you been up to at Bard? Have you been studying the classics?”

  “Uh, yeah,” I say, thinking Mom has no idea how true this is. “They really immerse you in literature here.”

  I suddenly really want to tell her about the ghosts, and about Kate Shaw, no matter how crazy it sounds, but I find, just as Coach H predicted, that I can’t find the words. The more I try to tell them, the more I can’t speak. Literally, I’m tongue-tied.

  I guess the spell of the school works on phone lines, too. You can’t talk about the goings-on at Bard to anyone outside campus.

  “Did you develop a stutter or something?” Lindsay asks me, still on the line.

  “It’s nothing,” I say. “Forget it.”

  Ms. W taps on the glass after a little while.

  “Time to call your father,” she tells me, tapping her watch.

  Reluctantly, I let Mom and Lindsay go, and dial Dad’s mobile number. I get his voicemail — of course. I hang up without leaving a message. I have no other choice but to call his house and risk getting Carmen. As the phone rings, I pray she’s out shopping or something, which is probably the very first time in history that I’ve actually wished she was out spending my college fund.

  On the third ring, Carmen answers.

  Dammit.

  “Hello? Hello!” she says, sounding annoyed. I’ve paused too long.

  “Um, Carmen, it’s me, Miranda.”

  “Miranda who?” she asks.

  Nice one. You see why I’m not fond of calling her “Stepmother,” despite Dad’s insisting.

  “Miranda Tate. Your stepdaughter?”

  “Oh,” she says, sounding disappointed. As if another Miranda might be more interesting. “Your father isn’t here.”

  Wow. She’s ruder to me than most people are to telemarketers. She makes Cinderella’s stepmom look like Mother Teresa.

  “But didn’t he know that today is the only day I can talk to him?” I ask her, trying to
keep the disappointment out of my voice, but failing. I mean, the one chance he has to talk to me for three months and he can’t wait by the phone for an hour?

  “I don’t know. He’s golfing — as usual,” Carmen says, sounding annoyed. “Anyway, I have to go.”

  “Well, can you tell him —”

  I don’t get to finish my sentence because Carmen hangs up on me.

  “— that I called?” I finish, but it’s too late. I’m talking to a dial tone.

  Ouch.

  I stare at the phone. I can’t quite believe what jerks they are. Carmen and my dad both. But, for once, I don’t cry. I don’t know if dealing with ghosts and the supernatural has empowered me or what, but this doesn’t seem like the end of the world like it normally would when Dad ignores me. I mean, you know, now that it’s possible the world might really end. For once, I see clearly that it’s not my fault that Dad is blowing me off. It’s his. If he doesn’t want to know me, I think, his loss. There are plenty of people who find me interesting. Heathcliff, for one, and Ryan Kent for another, I think. So if Dad can’t be bothered, then he’s the jerk. Not me.

  Ms. W pats me on the shoulder as I get out of the phone booth. “It’s not your fault, you know,” she says, as if she heard the entire conversation with Carmen.

  “I know,” I say, and I really mean it.

  “If I could, I would go haunt his house,” she whispers to me, and this makes me smile. I imagine Dad trying to deal with ghosts. He can’t even deal with his ex-wives or his daughters. I’d like to see him deal with the dead.

  Twenty-eight

  Ms. W cautions me to be careful walking about on campus, since Emily Brontë and Heathcliff and Mrs. Rochester are still on the loose. She makes me promise that should I see Heathcliff, I will sound the alarm immediately. I promise to do so, even though I’m not quite sure how I feel about that. I check my room for Blade, but it’s empty. Hana’s room is empty, too. Strange.