Wuthering high: a bard academy novel (11 page)

No one answers me. I put a foot out in front of me, but no one is there. Tentatively, I put my hand back on the wall, but I just feel the cool, smooth tile. Stay calm, I tell myself, and just get to the door.

My hand falls on the door and I push it open and stumble out of the bathroom. Outside, I smell smoke. Something is burning. At the end of the hall, I see Hana turning the corner. Before I can call out, I realize that the smoke in the hall is coming from my room.

I rush in, pushing open the door. There’s no sign of Blade, but there is a fire burning brightly in our trashcan. Without thinking, I stomp on it, trying to put it out, and in the process semiruin my favorite pair of Pumas.

Could this be Kate’s doing? Did her ghost set this fire?

“Hey!” cries Blade, appearing at the door. Ms. W appears right behind her, frowning.

“Are you all right, Miranda?” Ms. W asks, worried.

“I’m okay,” I say, feeling glad that somebody around here cares if I live or die.

“I’m fine, if you consider that my roommate just tried to burn down the dorm,” Blade says.

“Me? I didn’t do this,” I exclaim. “It had to be you.”

“Wasn’t me. I was in the den,” Blade says.

“Now, Miranda. I thought we talked about this.”

I suppose she’s referring to the acting-bad-as-a-way-to-get-attention talk during our session.

“But I didn’t do this — I swear!” I hate that she thinks I’m responsible for this. “I understand that acting out isn’t going to get me the kind of attention I want. And look, all I want to do is go home. Setting a fire isn’t going to do that.”

I try to show that I’m logical. I’m reasonable. Still, Ms. W looks at me with some doubt on her face. Blade looks at me, too.

“It could always be the vampire,” she says. “He’s definitely a troublemaker.”

I smack my palm against my head. Vampires! First, my room has a ghost, then a pyromaniac starts a fire in my trashcan, and now my roommate’s going on about her vampire obsession. It has got to stop.

“I told her to wear garlic,” Blade tells Ms. W, “but she won’t listen to me.”

“That’s nice,” Ms. W says, clearly not believing Blade. “As for you,” she says, looking at me, “I
will
send you to the headmaster’s office if I so much as even see a match in this room, you understand?”

I nod. “Yes, Ms. W.”

“Good. Now both of you — to bed.”

“But it’s only nine,” Blade whines.

“To
bed,”
Ms. W says in a tone that doesn’t leave open room for argument.

That night, I have the same nightmare — again — and wake up even before the bugle. It’s the same, in fact, for the next five nights in a row. My Worst Day Ever turns into my Worst Week Ever; between my nightmares and not getting any sleep, I am even more of a zombie than I was the first day of classes. I keep showing up late, and getting lost, and pretty much making a fool out of myself at every available opportunity. I still don’t know who started the fire, and Hana says she didn’t see anything.

I don’t know why, but I think the fire, Kate Shaw, and my nightmares might be connected somehow, but I don’t know how. In my (very little) free time, I try to find out more about Kate. Oddly, in all the newspaper clippings, there’s no mention of a family or siblings. It’s like she didn’t have any ties at all.

I also discover that she checked out other old yearbooks from the library, not just the 1855 one. She checked out almost all of them, at one time or another, but in particular, the ones she checked out the most were 1855, 1848, and 1849. She borrowed those four separate times, which means she had them out for two months apiece. And, in each one, it seems like she might have circled a picture of a faculty member. And each picture is too blurry to make out the teacher’s face. I have three of them in my room, trying to make sense of what she was looking for. I’m not sure if it’s even related to why she disappeared.

By the end of the week, I meet with Ms. W again and she asks me how my letter to my dad is coming. It’s not, really. I’ve got a bunch of balled-up pieces of paper in my trashcan, but that’s about it. I’ve had other things on my mind.

Besides, it’s hard to write my dad, because I don’t really know what to say to him. Although I can think of two words I wouldn’t mind writing, but Ms. W said I should try not to be profane.

In the meantime, Ms. W gives me letters from Mom and Lindsay. They’ve both written me one for every day I’ve been here. Dad hasn’t, though. I try to not be upset by it. I wonder why, when my expectations are so low, that he still manages to disappoint me.

I still want to get out of here, but in the meantime, I’ve decided to make the best of it. The teachers aren’t as bad as I thought (Ms. P actually teaches a pretty mean sophomore lit class), and even though Coach H makes me run around the gym, he’s an interesting history teacher. He brought actual World War I artifacts to class the other day, including a bullet he said was pulled from a soldier’s leg. Now, try getting that kind of hands-on learning at my old public school. Fat chance.

After one week of classes, I find that I have more work than I did during a whole semester at my old school, which means that I have less time to worry about the mystery of Kate Shaw, why Heathcliff seems to be able to disappear into thin air, who set a fire in my room, and pretty much life in general that doesn’t involve homework.

For two hours after dinner every night, we’re supposed to study, read, write letters, or basically do anything constructive by yourself sitting at your desk. Your other choice is to just go to bed early, which is what Blade does, because she’s piled into her bed at 8:00
P.M.
, and is snoring. I don’t know how she can manage to sleep so soundly in this place — especially if she thinks vampires are about. But then again, she does have a poster of Satan above her bed, so she’s clearly not like the rest of us.

I settle down to read
Wuthering Heights
for English lit. As I get into the book, I can’t help but start thinking about some weird coincidences. Two things immediately strike me as strange. One, Heathcliff in the book is
a lot
like Heathcliff at Bard. They are both surly, tough, and adopted, and they are both semi-obsessed with a girl named Cathy.

Is Heathcliff obsessed with this book? Is he trying to
be
Heathcliff? But then again, he can’t read, right? Unless he’s faking that, too.

Another strange parallel is that a character in this book has the
exact same
nightmare I am having. The ghost outside the window, asking to be let in.

Very weird. It’s like life imitating art, for real. I’m not sure what to make of it. I look at the front of my book and see that it was originally published in 1847. That date sounds familiar for some reason. I look down at my backpack and see the Bard Academy 1855 Yearbook.

I open it, and sure enough, 1847 is the year that the original Bard Academy burned down.

That’s some odd coincidence. Did Kate figure out some connection between the three? The fire and the publication of the two books? In the front of my copy of
Wuthering Heights,
there’s a foreword that discusses the life of Emily Brontë and her sisters. It says Emily (author of
Wuthering Heights
) died in 1848 of tuberculosis. Anne (
Agnes Gray
) followed in 1849 of the same. And then Charlotte (
Jane Eyre
) died in 1855 of “exhaustion,” whatever that is.

1855.

1849.

1848.

Those are the same years of the Bard yearbooks that Kate checked out.

I get them from under my bed and open them again to the pages where teachers are circled. In each of the three, she has circled a female faculty member. But each face is blurred and indistinct.

Those dates, and then three different women. Is she trying to say that the Brontë sisters
didn’t
die? That they somehow faked their deaths and then wound up at Bard?

I absently kick my foot out, and my shin hits the edge of a drawer that’s out slightly. Ow. I shut the drawer closed with my foot, rub my shin, and then go back to reading.

I peer at the circled picture in the 1848 catalog, but it’s just another blurred face. There’s no telling if the picture is anything like the painted portrait on the back cover of my copy of
Wuthering Heights.

I swing my foot out and it hits the drawer — again.

Okay, this time I am not imagining it. I
just
closed it. Now it’s open again. Something weird is going on here. I look down at the drawer, wondering if it’s broken, when, inside the drawer, I see familiar handwriting. Kate has etched her initials here, too.

I feel my blood run cold. Is this another haunted closet situation? I guess Kate Shaw isn’t done with me yet.

I open the drawer. It’s empty. I pull on the drawer and lift it up and out of its track, then inspect it. It seems okay — there’s a little raised piece of wood on each side of it that fits into the groves of the old desk. It doesn’t seem broken or warped or anything. No reason that it would just slip open on its own. I put the drawer down and look into the empty drawer space. I pull down the desk lamp for light and peer in. It’s empty, except for something sticking out at the back of the drawer, hanging from the top. Is it tape?

I put down the lamp and reach into the back of the drawer. I can’t seem to reach whatever it is, so I lean in farther so that I’m nearly up to my armpit, and that’s when I feel a hand grab my wrist.

I whip my arm free, and the force of my pulling flings my body several feet back and into Blade’s desk so hard that I knock off her skull candle, which falls straight into my lap, with its two black eye sockets staring up at me and its mouth grinning its lipless grin.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack.

“Dammit, Blade,” I mutter under my breath, relieved that I am in one piece, and that the skull is made of wax and isn’t real. As if it isn’t enough that I’m living with a girl ghost, I have to have Ms. Halloween as a roommate, too. Why couldn’t I get the girl who loves pink, stuffed Teddy bears? No. I had to get the freak who likes skulls. It’s no wonder I’m seeing ghosts everywhere.

Blade snorts and rolls over, still asleep.

I am breathing hard, but I carefully put the skull candle back up on her desk and reach back over to right the lamp I knocked over. Okay. Let’s try this again. It probably
wasn’t
a creepy skeleton ghost hand (like I imagined in my mind) that grabbed my wrist. I probably just got it caught on something, right? Okay, right. But better safe than sorry.

“Kate,” I whisper, in a low voice while I look around the room, “if that is you, please stop scaring me half to freaking death, because I am trying to
help
you, okay?”

The room is silent.

“Okay, I’m going to take that as an apology, all right? Now, let’s start again. No more grabbing on the first date. I am not that kind of girl.”

I put the desk lamp back in front of the drawer and peer in. That’s when I see that there’s some kind of key partly taped to the top of the drawer. It’s now hanging loose, dangling. Either my gyrations or the skeleton hand knocked it part of the way free.

“I’m putting my hand in here now, but don’t take any liberties. Just chill out.”

I reach in quickly, grab the key, and yank it free, unmolested.

“Thank you,” I say to the room. I look at the key. It’s an old, worn brass one that fits into my palm. It has no inscription on it. It’s just a key. But to what?

The Bard bell tolls, signaling lights out. I slip the key into my backpack pocket and put the drawer back in its rightful place, then switch off our lights.

I’m just crawling into bed when Ms. W sticks her head in my door.

“Everything okay in here? No fires, I hope?” she asks me.

“No fires,” I say. Normally, I wouldn’t mind talking to Ms. W, but I’m a bit preoccupied. It seems like the more I find out about Kate Shaw, the more mysteries she presents to me. I don’t know what the Brontë sisters have to do with Bard, or what the key has to do with anything.

“You sure everything’s okay?” Ms. W asks me.

“You mean everything aside from being here?”

“Oh, I’m that bad, am I?” she says, but I can tell she’s teasing. She turns to go, and then pauses at the door. “You know it’s okay to be upset.”

“Upset? Why?” Does she know about my haunted room?

“With your father. For sending you here,” she says, as if it’s obvious that’s what I should be upset about.

“Oh, right. Yeah,” I say. I’ve sort of forgotten about him for the time being.

“You know sometimes parents don’t do things for the best reasons,” she says. “But sometimes it works out anyway. You know that if you want to talk…”

“You’re here,” I finish.

“You’re catching on,” Ms. W says. She steps away from my door and moves on down the hall.

I look down at the floor where she’d been standing and notice there’s a puddle there, along with wet footprints down the hall. Odd. Why does she always leave a trail? One of these days, I’m going to have to ask her.

Fourteen

“If I could only talk
to Kate somehow, then maybe I could figure all this out,” I tell Hana and Samir the next day during study hall. We’re all sitting together in the library, where we’re supposed to be studying, but we’re talking about Kate Shaw, as usual. I ought to form the Kate Shaw Mystery Society, since that’s practically our whole focus these days.

“Who’s Kate Shaw?” asks Blade, stopping at our table with a stack of books.

“Nobody,” I say. The last thing I want to do is spend any more time with Blade than necessary. She’s already obsessed with vampires. I don’t want to add to her delusions.

“She’s a ghost,” Samir says.

“A ghost? Oooh, I like ghosts,” Blade says, sitting down practically in Samir’s lap and pretending to be very interested in everything he has to say. Does Blade
like
Samir? “Hi, I’m Blade. Who are you?”

“Samir,” he says.

“Oooh, I
love
that name,” Blade oozes, and then wraps her finger around one of his black curls. Samir doesn’t quite know what to do with himself. He’s not usually the object of such a strong come-on. I’m not sure what Blade is up to, but I’m sure it has something to do with witchcraft. Maybe she needs hair from a man for a spell.