The Scarlet Letterman (3 page)

This time Ryan hears it, too. His head snaps up. I try to focus on the trees, but I can’t make out anything but dark blobs.

The whole scene just smacks of a horror movie. Didn’t Jason kill people who were making out?

“It’s probably just a bear,” Ryan says.

“I hope you are kidding,” I say.

“I am. Bears are hibernating now, aren’t they?” Ryan takes his attention away from the forest and turns back to me. “Come on, we only have a few minutes before Coach H comes looking for me.”

Ryan starts to lean in, but I put my hand on his chest.

“I think we’d better go,” I say. I’m not at all sure it’s safe to be here anymore.

“Come on, one more minute,” Ryan says.

“Ryan, I’m serious. I think something is out there. I think we need to go.”

“Where?” he asks, looking out over my head to the forest behind us.

And that’s when, over Ryan’s shoulder, I see two eyes peering out from the darkness. They’re glowing red.

“Behind you!” I stutter.

But when Ryan turns, the eyes disappear.

“I-I-I saw something,” I say, already moving away from Ryan. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Miranda, come on.”

“I’m
serious
,” I say. “I don’t care if you want to stay, but I’m going.”

And then, almost as if someone else were reading my mind, I hear a high-pitched scream.

Three

Ryan and I
both start, and then, without saying a word, we both run toward the sound of the scream.

When we clamber out of the forest, we see Parker, down on the ground, surrounded by two of her clone posse. Parker is looking a little disheveled and clearly out of it.

“What happened?” Ryan asks, a wrinkle of worry forming in his forehead. I don’t like that wrinkle. And I certainly don’t like that Parker is causing it.

“She was
nearly raped
,” says one of the clones.

“By who?” I ask.

“Some guy, I didn’t see his face,” Parker sputters. “He cornered me, just here, and he slammed me against the wall…”

Something about this situation doesn’t feel right to me, and not only the fact that Parker is a known pathological liar. I can’t help but think it’s quite the coincidence that Ryan disappears with me for a make out session, and Parker conveniently gets attacked. Okay, this is evil of me, I know, but it’s
Parker
we’re talking about. No tactic is beneath her. She’s been coveting Ryan since he came to Bard, and she’d be willing to do anything to get his attention.

“We should call a Guardian,” I say. “Report him.”

“No,” Parker says, giving me a sharp look. “I’m okay.”

Bingo, I think. She doesn’t want to report it to the authorities because maybe it didn’t happen?

“What did he look like?” Ryan asks, kneeling down so he’s nearly at eye level with Parker.

“She
said
she didn’t see his face,” the other clone says.

“I don’t know,” Parker adds. “He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt and it was dark.”

“Hooded sweatshirt?” I echo, my attention suddenly focused on Parker’s every word. “You’re sure he wore a hooded sweatshirt? Was it blue?”

“Um, yeah, why? Was he one of your friends?” Parker snaps.

Ryan and Parker’s clones are now looking at me.

“Not exactly,” I say. “I just saw a guy in the gym, wearing a sweatshirt. But lots of guys do.” Could Heathcliff have shoved Parker? He doesn’t like her, that’s for certain, but I didn’t think he would ever try to rape her or anyone else. Would he?

“Ryan, would you mind walking us back to the dorm? I don’t feel safe out here,” Parker says, rubbing her own arms and shivering.

Ryan doesn’t even glance at me. “Of course,” he says, helping Parker to her feet. When she stumbles a little, he puts an arm around her. So that only I can see, Parker sends me a smug smile.

By the end of the week, word about Parker’s attacker circulates like wildfire through the campus. It doesn’t help that on Wednesday one of Parker’s clones also claims to have been attacked by the Hooded Sweatshirt Stalker. By Friday, there’s an all-out security alert on campus for the would-be rapist, and there are posters even, with a drawing of Parker’s attacker, who looks a lot like the Unibomber. So much for Parker insisting on keeping this quiet. I guess she decided to tell the teachers after all.

“Do you believe the lengths Parker will go to for a little attention?” Hana asks me as we watch her clones hand out fliers on campus.

“So you don’t think she was attacked, either?” I ask Hana, surprised.

“Do
you
?” Hana asks me.

“I don’t know.” Hana and I watch as Parker is trailed by Ryan, who is helping her carry a box of flyers to the library.

“She gets attacked while you are sucking face with your boyfriend and then said boyfriend suddenly becomes her twenty-four/seven errand boy and you don’t find that suspicious?”

“She’s scared to walk around campus without an escort,” I say.

“So why does the escort have to be
your
boyfriend?” Hana says.

“I know.” I sigh. “I don’t know what I can do about it, though. Anytime I bring it up with Ryan, he acts like I’m being insensitive.”

“Maybe you should remind him that Parker poisoned her own mother. I think her stalker has more to fear from her than vice versa.”

Before I can reply, the Bard school bus churns and lurches into view at the other end of the snowy campus commons.

“Watch out,” Hana says. “It’s the driver’s ed class.”

As we look on, the bus careens into some nearby bushes, nearly hitting two students, before coming to a skidding stop about ten feet from us.

Behind the wheel is a white-faced Samir, who looks like he just went on a roller coaster without being buckled in. Thompson, our driver’s ed teacher, stumbles out of the bus and declares, “Now
that’s
what I call crazy mad parallel parking!”

“You do know that you’re in the middle of the commons?” I ask Thompson.

He frowns at me. “Details, details,” he murmurs.

“How can he possibly be qualified to teach driver’s ed?” I whisper to Hana.

“I don’t know, but I’m taking it in special session next week,” she says. “Aren’t you? Isn’t your birthday in March?”

“My dad would never sign off on me taking it,” I say. “And they require both parents to give permission.”

“But you won’t be able to take your driver’s test when you get back home this summer without some driver’s ed.”

“I know,” I say. “I’ve written to my dad a hundred times. I think he doesn’t even read my letters. But even if he did, I seriously doubt he’d give me permission. First of all, I totaled his car. And second, the man doesn’t
like
me.”

“That’s just because you’re the only one who calls him on his BS,” Hana says.

“Exactly. And there’s so much of it. I mean, the way he goes through wives, he should just rent his next spouse from Blockbuster. It’ll save him all those settlement fees,” I say. Dad left my mom, sister, and me for his secretary five years ago. He’s divorced and remarried since then. As far as I’m concerned, he’s doing his best to pretend that I, his firstborn, don’t exist.

“Yo! Heathcliff!” I hear someone behind us call. Without thinking, I whip around.

I find myself searching frantically for the tall, broad, and brooding figure of Heathcliff, but instead I just see two skater types trying to do jumping tricks on the stairwell near the library sans skateboards, using only the soles of their tennis shoes.

“Looking for someone?” Hana asks, eyeing me with some suspicion.

I shake my head just as the bell tower tolls, signaling the end of lunch. “I’ve got to go see Ms. W,” I say, leaving Hana standing near the bus.

On my way to my counseling session, I walk close to the library, near where the skater types are flinging themselves off the railings.

“Hey,” I ask the one who sails into the air and lands on bended knee in front of the stairs. His hair is dyed red, with long bangs in front and a cropped, shaved cut in back. “Do you know Heathcliff?”

“Do we know him? Dude —
everyone
knows him,” the skater says.

Heathcliff’s reputation at Bard was made last semester when he single-handedly took down three Bard Guardians, the glorified mall security guards that keep us delinquents in line. Heathcliff knocked out three of them in the cafeteria and escaped in front of nearly the entire school. In his absence, his legend has only grown, and he’s about to join the league of Campus Legends, which include Kate Shaw’s Ghost and the Haunted Library.

“But have you seen him? I mean, lately?”

He looks at me as if I’ve taken one too many bong hits.

“But you called his name?”

“Dude, that’s a mad move, ‘the Heathcliff,’ ” he says. “I’ll show you.” He rears up, jumps on the staircase railing, and slides down it like he’s skating, and then does a flip at the end, landing on his feet at the bottom of the stairs.

“That, dude, is a ‘Yo! Heathcliff.’ ”

“So you haven’t seen him?” I can’t help but be disappointed.

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “You heard the rumor, right? Headmaster sent him to juvie.”

That’s one rumor that I know isn’t true. You can’t send a fictional character to juvenile detention. But where is he? And why is he staying away from me? Maybe if I knew what had happened to him, then I wouldn’t be so obsessed with him.

Four

“Thinking about Heathcliff?”
Ms. W asks me, zeroing in on my thoughts with uncanny precision like she always does. I’m sitting in her office where I’ve appeared for my monthly counseling session, during which we normally talk about how I feel about my complicated relationship with my absentee dad. But lately we’ve been talking more and more about Heathcliff and about my fictional ancestor and about coping with that.

“Is it that obvious?” I ask her.

“It was the book that clued me in,” Ms. W says, nodding toward my backpack, where my dog-eared copy of
Wuthering Heights
is sticking out. “You’re never without it. How many times have you read it now?”

I shrug. “A couple,” I say, although it was probably closer to a dozen. The book is my only insight into Heathcliff. I can’t decide if he’s a good person or a bad person, but the book is all I have to explain him.

“You know, it’s okay that you miss him,” Ms. W says.

“It is?” I ask, surprised. “I thought you hated him.”

“I don’t hate him. I don’t think he’s good for you, but I don’t hate him. I think he belongs in his world and not ours. I do see that the two of you had a strong connection.”

“You think we have a strong connection?”

“Had, Miranda. Not
have
,” Ms. W corrects. “It’s natural for you to feel strongly about someone who saved your life. He put himself in danger to rescue you more than once, and you’re likely to feel a sense of obligation. But don’t confuse that sense of obligation with something deeper than that.”

“But why —” I start, and then stop myself. I was going to ask her why, if he was willing to risk his life to save me, now he didn’t seem to want to talk to me. I can’t believe I almost blurted out the secret that Heathcliff was still alive in this world.

“Why what?”

Quickly, I try to cover up my near mistake. “Why does he have to stay in
Wuthering Heights
?”

“You know he can’t live in this world permanently,” Ms. W says. “If he did, he’d disappear from
Wuthering Heights,
and think about all the people who would miss knowing him. In fact, the entire book might disappear forever without him in it.”

“I know,” I say, having heard this before. “And having him here makes our dimensions unstable, I know, but if my great-great-great-grandmother managed to live in our world her whole life…”

“Elizabeth Linton, the fictional daughter of Catherine and your ancestor, was a minor character in the book, and her absence is not missed in the story,” Ms. W tells me curtly. “By the time you read the book, she was completely gone from it, and that was fine. Her twin sister Catherine lived on in the book and moves the story forward. But without Heathcliff, there
is
no
Wuthering Heights.
We don’t know what would happen if a major character managed to make the leap from fiction to reality. It could be catastrophic.”

“…and bring on the Apocalypse?” Everything around here seems to cause the end of the world.

“Maybe,” Ms. W says, evasive. “We don’t know for sure.”

I sigh, frustrated.

“Miranda, there’s something else we need to talk about,” Ms. W says, her eyes darting back and forth as if she’s about to tell me something she shouldn’t. She nods at the door and it closes with a click. I’m still not sure about all her ghost powers, but it appears they include walking through walls and moving objects with her mind. It’s not something I think I’ll ever quite get used to.

“The faculty are concerned about you,” she says, her voice at a low-pitched whisper. “You and your friends. They don’t like the idea of students knowing about…us and about…the vault.”

The vault is the special room beneath the library where all of Bard’s Books with Powers are kept. If taken from the vault, characters from them can come to life. Like Heathcliff, my great-great-great-grandma, or not so nice ones, like Dracula or Frankenstein. They also hold the souls of the faculty ghosts, and if you destroy the books, you destroy the teachers.

I can see why they might be nervous about students knowing this particular secret. It would be like if you found out your principal was Superman, and you knew the location of two tons of kryptonite.

“I can understand that, but really, your secret is safe with us,” I say.

“I know that, because I know you and your friends,” Ms. W says. “But the others aren’t so sure.”

“Who?” I ask, wondering if it’s Headmaster B. She definitely wasn’t keen on us finding out the truth.

“I can’t tell you, but you and your friends need to be careful,” Ms. W says. “For one, stay away from the vault.”

“We weren’t planning on going near it,” I say. “None of us wants to see a reappearance of Dracula.”