The Scarlet Letterman (7 page)

“I never said it was a monster,” I say, feeling a bit betrayed. Ryan looks a little sheepish. He mouths to me “sorry.” He
did
tell her. I could kill him.

“That’s not what I heard. I heard you thought it was going to eat you.”

“I saw a big animal, that’s all.”

“Where did you see it?” Parker asks. “Wasn’t it near here somewhere?” Her voice sends a chill down my spine. She knows I don’t want to go anywhere near the woods. Who would? It’s pitch-black, and I’m not nearly as dumb as I was when I first got here. I know there are things
living
in the woods. Big things. With fangs. Parker takes a step closer to the woods. “Why don’t you show us?”

“It’s too dark to see now,” I say.

“What are you? Afraid?” Parker taunts. Right now, I really,
really
hate her. What are we? Ten?

I should let her taunts roll off me, but I can’t. I don’t like being told I’m afraid in front of Ryan. It doesn’t seem right. Besides, he already thinks the whole thing is a big joke. He didn’t see the glowing red eyes. He doesn’t know about half the things that go on around here. Neither does Parker.

“I can show you, but it won’t make a difference,” I say.

“It’s too dark anyway,” Ryan says, trying to save me. “Let’s save it.”

“No,” Parker says. Her voice is steely and resolved. “I want to see it now. I want Miranda to show us.”

I glare at Parker and she glares back. She knows she has me. She’s not going to let this go.

“Fine,” I say. I walk off the lighted path toward the woods. I stop about ten feet from them. “It was about there,” I say, pointing to the old oak tree where I saw the animal.

“Here?” Parker says, stepping in front of me. She walks boldly up to the tree. “Right here?”

“About there.”

“So why don’t you come over here? Are you scared to be close to the tree?” she says, and touches it with one hand.

“I’m not scared,” I snap, but I sound like a kindergartner. “This is childish,” I add, before walking over to the tree and standing by Parker. “There? Are you happy now?”

Then, deep in the woods we hear a wolf’s howl. I glance quickly in the direction of the sound, but Parker just looks at me and laughs. “Do you sleep with the light on, too?”

“Why don’t we go inside?” Ryan says, glancing at me with a worried look on his face. I can’t tell if he thinks I’m a total idiot or if he’s uncomfortable that I’m uncomfortable.

“How much would you pay me, Miranda, to walk five feet into the woods right now?”

“I wouldn’t pay you anything, Parker.”

“What if I paid you one hundred dollars to do it. Would you?”

“Parker, quit fooling around. Let’s go inside.” Ryan sounds less patient now.

“What? I’m just saying. Look,” she says. She walks into the woods and is quickly enveloped in shadow. We hear her footsteps in the leaves and then, suddenly, they stop.

I glance over at Ryan, and he looks over at me.

“Why don’t we just leave her in there?” I whisper to him. He laughs.

“Parker?” Ryan calls. “Parker, come on.” She doesn’t answer. Ryan tries again. “Parker! Seriously. Quit it. Come on.”

Still no answer.

“Parker. Come out, already. We’re cold,” Ryan says.

I have that eerie feeling. You know the one. Like Parker’s been slashed into a million pieces by some chain saw–wielding maniac or a monster with red eyes, and we’re next.

“Parker?”

The next thing we hear is a scream.

Ten

Ryan leaps into
the woods, because he is ridiculously brave
and
good-looking. He is so going to be a firefighter one of these days. I go in after him, not because I want to save Parker, but because I really don’t want to be left alone.

We only make it a step or two before Parker nearly collides with us. She has something dark and sticky on her hands.

Blood.

She’s mumbling inconsolably, pointing backward. That’s when the clouds covering the moon lift and it suddenly gets brighter. There, lying only five feet away, is the carcass of a dead bear. Its mouth is open, and its tongue is out, and it has a big bloody gash down the side of its neck.

Instantly I think of the creature with red eyes I saw in the woods. Could it have done this? I shiver.

I look at Parker and realize she must’ve tripped over the bear, or fallen into it. She’s got bear blood on her hands and a big dark smear down the front of her white Bard shirt.

She buries her face in Ryan’s chest, and he folds his arms around her to comfort her. My stomach shrinks, and not because of the dead bear. I don’t like Ryan hugging Parker.

“Come on,” he says. “Let’s get out of here.”

The next morning, everyone is talking about Parker’s run-in with the bear. I’ve about decided that it doesn’t matter
what
Parker does. People will still want to talk about it anyway. I can just see the next
Bard Weekly
headline: “Parker Pops Zit, Entire Campus Watches.”

“Don’t look now, but Parker has co-opted your boyfriend again,” Hana says, nodding in the direction of Parker and Ryan, who are standing in a group of Parker’s clones and relating the bear story. “I have a feeling we’re going to be hearing about this all day.”

“Did you hear about the bear?” Blade asks me, finding us in line. Hana rolls her eyes.

“Duh — Miranda was there.”

“Really? Why don’t you
tell
me these things?”

“I would’ve, if you’d been
awake.”
Blade was fast asleep when I got back to my dorm. And that was at eight o’clock.

“So did Ryan kill the bear with his bare hands like they say?” Blade asks as we take our seats at a table near Parker’s. I try to get Ryan’s attention, but he’s too busy pantomiming the act of saving Parker from a bear carcass. I’m still peeved he told Parker about my monster sighting. How could he have betrayed my trust like that?
And
to Parker, of all people?

“No. The bear was already dead.”

“Was the bear big? I heard it was five hundred pounds.”

“It was huge,” I say. “But what we should worry about is whatever killed that bear. I don’t think it was a hunter. The bear was half-eaten.”

“Ew!” Hana says. “I’m trying to eat my breakfast slop here.”

“Guys! Bear? Did you hear?” Samir says, joining us as he slides his tray down in front of an empty chair.

“Duh — old news!” Blade says, waving her hand as if she hadn’t just heard the story five minutes ago. “So do you think that bear was killed by that monster you saw in the woods?”

“What did you see in the woods?” Hana asks me.

“If you tell me Dracula, I am so going to get a transfer,” Samir adds.

I guess I forgot to mention the red-eyed thing to Hana and Samir. I relate the story.

“Maybe it was just an owl,” Samir suggests. “Owls are way creepy.”

“They don’t have glowing red eyes, dummy,” Blade says, tossing her empty milk carton at him.

“And they’re not big enough to kill bears,” Hana adds.

“Can’t blame a guy for trying to explain things logically,” Samir says. “By the way, did you hear —”

“No, Parker was not bitten by anything, and
no,
Parker did not vanquish the bear by farting or whatever it is she’s supposed to have done,” Hana says, exasperated. “Now can I finish eating?”

“Parker farts?” Samir echoes, looking puzzled. “Anyway, what I was
going
to say is that Coach H is missing.”

“He’s what?”

“He was AWOL at basketball practice and for his afternoon classes yesterday, too,” Samir says.

“That’s weird,” I say.

“Yeah. Apparently Headmaster B is going to make some kind of announcement at morning assembly.”

The official excuse for Coach H’s abrupt departure, according to Headmaster B, is that he’s just on a leave of absence, but the four of us know that ghosts don’t just take vacations. And Hana thinks whatever happened to Coach H wasn’t planned in advance.

“Otherwise he would’ve had a substitute teacher,” she points out as we file out of the chapel after morning assembly.

“Something bad happened to him, I know it,” Blade says. “This is why we need to form the LITs.”

“Not the club again,” Hana says, exhaling a sigh.

“Maybe he escaped purgatory somehow,” Samir says. “Wasn’t he supposed to help people patch up bad relationships? Maybe he’s done that and moved on.”

“Coach H? Are we talking about the same person?” I say. Coach has a long way to go in the people skills department. “I think it might take him a long time to get out of purgatory.”

“That’s exactly my point,” Blade says. “Something bad happened to him. We ought to investigate.”

“How are we supposed to do that?” Hana asks.

“How else? Snoop around,” Blade says.

Eleven

Blade’s idea of
snooping involves sneaking into the boys’ dorm after curfew, armed with nothing more than a book of her Wiccan spells.

“I can’t
believe
I let you talk me into this,” I whisper as we’re standing in the hallway of Macduff dorm. The dorm hallway is nearly dark, except for small lights near the floorboards. The living room is dark, and giant shadows in the corners are either sofas or bear-eating monsters. Okay, so they’re probably not monsters.

Still, I’d rather not find out. I wouldn’t be here at all, except for the fact that Blade guilt-tripped me. Coach H did save our hides last semester a couple of times when Emily Brontë was on the loose wreaking havoc. She reminded me that despite my recent falling out with Coach H, we had history, and the least I could do was try to find out what happened to him. And she’s right. I only wish she could’ve been right during daylight hours.

“I should’ve listened to Hana,” I say and sigh.

Hana was, at this moment, sleeping in her bed back in our dorm, where we were supposed to be. She was having no part in snooping. She said the idea was stupid, and not worth the risk of dish duty — our punishment should Guardians catch us breaking curfew.

“Where’s your sense of adventure?” Samir asks me. He’s the one who let us into the dorm.

“As if you have a single adventurous bone in your body,” I whisper back. Samir is the biggest coward I know.

“I ate the foul goopy stuff they called dinner. That’s the very
definition
of adventurous.”

“Shhhhhhhhh,” Blade hisses at us. A light at the end of the hall comes on, sending us all scurrying to find hiding spots.

I duck behind one of the giant shadows — a couch, thankfully. Blade flattens herself against a bookcase, and Samir, caught without a place to hide, simply stands in the corner of the room near the fireplace with his chin jutting out, like some kind of pajama-wearing statue.

The light flicks off, but then a flashlight beam bounces along the floor. It’s being wielded by a Guardian, who is patrolling the halls, looking for curfew breakers. He must not be looking very hard, because he passes by the living room with only a cursory look, managing to miss Samir, who is standing in the corner with his hand inside his pajama lapel like he’s imitating Napoleon.

After the Guardian disappears around the corner, I let out the breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding.

“A statue?” Blade hisses at Samir, sounding disapproving.

“What? It worked for Shaggy on
Scooby-Doo
.”

The three of us move down the hall — in the opposite direction of the Guardian — toward Coach H’s room.

The door is locked.

Blade whips out what looks like a Swiss army knife and proceeds to pick the lock.

“How did you learn how to do that?” I ask her. “Is that in your Wicca training?”

“No, you dummy. I got busted for breaking and entering. I picked our neighbor’s garage and stole their set of lawn gnomes.”

“
That’s
why you got sent here?” Samir asks. “Lawn gnomes? You have to be kidding.”

Blade shrugs. “That and my dad is a pastor. He thinks pagan worship is the devil’s work.”

“Wait. Rewind. Your
dad
is a pastor?” Samir can’t believe his ears. Neither can I.

“I’m going to guess that your Satan poster didn’t go over really well with him,” I say.

“Definitely not. He thought I might be possessed by demons,” she said. “Anyway, are we going to snoop, or what?” Blade asks, pushing open the door. She lights her mini skull lighter, which casts a flickering glow to parts of the room.

Coach H’s room looks normal. No papers are out of place. There’s nothing that would suggest a struggle. Like all teachers’ rooms, his doesn’t have a bed. Ghosts don’t need to sleep.

“So what are we snooping for exactly?” I ask Blade.

She gives an exasperated sigh. “
Clues
,” she breathes, as if it’s obvious. I’m not sure how she expects us to find them. I can barely see two feet in front of me. Straight ahead, there’s a window, and it shows a perfect full moon hanging above the tree line. We’re on the first floor, so the window also has a view of the chapel, about fifty feet away. The moon outside makes it look brighter out there than it is in here. While I’m considering this irony, a big black shadow moves quickly across the window.

“Did you guys see that?” I ask Samir and Blade.

“See what?” Samir asks, suddenly sounding nervous. I was wondering how long his fake-bravery act was going to last.

I look up at the window, but there’s nothing there. Maybe I just imagined it. Like you imagined the red eyes in the woods? a voice in my head tells me. Against my better judgment, I take a few steps closer to the window to get a better look. If I were in a horror movie, this is the point where you’d tell me I was an idiot for putting my nose up against the glass when something most definitely is going to jump up suddenly and scare the bejesus out of me. But this isn’t a horror movie. At least, not that I know of.

I put my hand on the desk to peer out the window, and that’s when I feel a bit of paper. It’s the only thing on the desk and it sticks to my finger. When I inspect it, I see that it’s about the size of a quarter, and it looks like another ripped piece of paper, like the one I found outside the gym and on the path near the commons. It’s too dark to see exactly what the piece is, but I’m pretty sure it’s part of the same picture. Before I can compare it to the other two bits, it dawns on me that this is Hooded Sweatshirt Stalker’s calling card. He was here at some point. And if he was here, in Coach H’s room, maybe he
did
have something to do with Coach H’s disappearance.