Wuthering high: a bard academy novel (10 page)

I have less than a minute to get across campus, and even if I sprint, I doubt I’m going to make it. As I think I’ve mentioned before, I am not what you’d call especially athletic. My idea of exercise is to flip through
Teen Vogue.

I burst through the chapel doors only to find everyone is inside, and Headmaster B standing at the podium. All eyes turn toward me as the bangles on my arm clink together, making a sound louder than the chapel bell.

Um, can you say “embarrassing”?

I feel my face flush red, and naturally, that’s the moment when I look up and see Ryan Kent staring at me, a puzzled look on his face. Then there’s Hana and Samir two rows down from him, giving me pitying looks. Ms. W just shakes her head and puts her head in her hands, disappointed.

“Sorry,” I say, holding up a hand, which sends another loud clank of metal-on-metal bracelets together. I slide into the last row of seats and stumble a little, sitting down hard on my butt on one of them, my bracelets clanging like an annoyingly loud ringtone. Note to self: get quieter accessories.

I tug on my newsboy cap, wishing I’d bought one big enough to fit my whole body in.

“Ms. Tate,” Headmaster B says, sounding particularly annoyed. “Congratulations. You are the last student to assembly, and you’ll be the first this semester to enjoy dish duty at Bard Academy.”

There are snickers, and everyone is still staring at me. This is so embarrassing. It’s one of those times I wished they made an emergency jet pack. They could keep it in high school buildings around the country in glass cases right next to fire extinguishers, except that on the outside of the cabinet it would say “In Cases of Extreme Humiliation, Break Glass.”

Barring that jet pack, I think I am pretty much stuck being the center of attention at the moment. Parker Rodham and her clones point at me and whisper to themselves something that makes them all laugh.

“You shall report to the cafeteria…” Headmaster B is interrupted by the chapel door, which swings open and bounces against the wall.

Heathcliff walks in, or I should say
strolls,
because he certainly doesn’t look like he is in a hurry to get anywhere. His black eye has faded, and he’s wearing his Bard Academy uniform with the top button open and the tie loose. He stares at Headmaster B, and then at all the faculty members sitting at the front of the chapel, as if daring them to do something to him.

I’ve never been so glad to see him. He’s just gotten me out of dish duty.

He glances over at me, giving a slight nod in my direction. I can’t help but feel that he did this on purpose somehow. That he’s saved me.

The faculty members look a bit flustered, because they start talking among themselves, and even Headmaster B is temporarily speechless. I get the feeling there’s something else going on here that I don’t know about.

And then, as everyone watches, Heathcliff turns around and leaves, swinging the chapel door wide behind him. I have to hand it to him. He has moxie.

Two Guardians head after him out the door.

All the kids start whispering and murmuring. In that one instant, he just became the school hero, I think. Still, chances are he’ll spend the rest of the semester in solitary confinement as soon as the Guardians catch up to him.

“That’s enough, students,” Headmaster B says, slapping a ruler hard against the podium. “Enough entertainment for one morning, I should think. Let us focus on the task at hand. And Ms. Tate, I expect you to pay attention, especially now that your friend has gotten you out of your punishment. That is, unless you’d rather just do the dishes for fun?”

“No, Headmaster,” I say, feeling everyone’s eyes on me again. And I know it’s just going to be one of those days.

You know the kind of day when you simply can’t do anything right? If there really were Humiliation Escape jet packs, I would’ve used every last one on campus. Let’s recap:

1. 1) Morning assembly debacle
   
2. 2) Couldn’t find a single class on campus, when everyone else seems to have no problems at all.
   
3. 3) Walked into one of Ryan Kent’s classes by mistake, only to be told by his teacher that I was in the wrong building.
   
4. 4) During history class, when Coach H called on me, I had been reading one of the Bard yearbooks and didn’t realize he was talking about Franz Ferdinand
   the archduke of Spain whose assassination set off World War I,
   and not Franz Ferdinand the band.
   
5. 5) Was so tired from not sleeping most of the night that I fell asleep in English lit, right after our teacher, Ms. P, passed out our reading assignment (
   Wuthering Heights
   — again, big surprise — I can’t get away from that book), and woke up in a puddle of my own drool. One of Parker’s clones pointed and laughed at me, and then passed me a note that said, “You were snoring.”
   
6. 6) A girl faints in the hall (she was probably anorexic), and Blade insists it was because she’d been bitten by a vampire. In fact, shouts it for everyone to hear, with me standing right next to her, and then says, “My roommate will tell you — it’s true!” Because my social life isn’t enough of a vacuum at this point. I really wish she’d go back to her vow of silence.
   
7. 7) At basketball practice, I’m so inept, that I can’t even dribble the ball. I keep hitting it off my foot, sending it rolling off onto the next court (the boy’s), where Ryan Kent is. He even witnesses my ball-in-the-face, when I don’t realize another girl is passing to me and she hits me in the side of the head.
   Ka-pow.
   Coach H then makes me run five laps around the gym.
   

By dinnertime, I am so sore (both physically and mentally) that I don’t even care what the food is on our plates (hot dogs — something semirecognizable). Hana and Samir and Ryan Kent are MIA, and even Blade isn’t anywhere to be found. I’m once again alone in the cafeteria. If I have to sit by myself, I swear I’m going to sue my parents later for emotional scarring. I had plenty of friends at my old school. I never, under almost any circumstances, ate alone there. It’s like my dad is trying to undermine my self-esteem. As if he didn’t accomplish that enough by ignoring me.

That’s when I look up and see Heathcliff.

He’s sitting by himself in the corner, staring at the hot dog on his plate as if he’s never seen one before. He picks up the hot dog and examines it, and then sniffs at it. It looks like he can’t decide whether or not it’s edible. I know how he feels.

“That was some trick you pulled this morning,” I say, as I put my tray down in front of him. Instantly, he stands up and gives me a little bow. Is this some kind of British chivalry? I don’t know.

“Is it okay if I sit here?” I ask, still not sure what he’s doing standing up.

He nods at me, but says nothing. I sit, and then he sits.

“Did you get in trouble?” I ask him. He looks up at me, reluctantly almost, and shrugs. “I should probably thank you, you know. You saved me a lot of dish washing.”

“Washing dishes is beneath you,” he says. I wonder for a moment if he’s being sarcastic, but I see that he’s serious. He means it. He thinks I shouldn’t wash dishes — ever. That’s some serious chivalry.

“So why are you here?” I ask him. “What did you do to get sent away?”

He shrugs.

“You don’t say much, do you?”

He shrugs again.

“In a conversation, when I ask a question, you’re supposed to answer,” I tease him. “That’s how conversations work. And then you can ask me a question, and I answer. Like, you can say, ‘Wow, the food is really bad here, don’t you think?’ and then I say, ‘Oh yeah, it’s terrible. What classes do you have?’ and so on.”

He just looks at me, the half scowl he usually wears on his face replaced by something that looks a little more like confusion. I can see he’s not the talkative type.

“Okay, I’ll start the conversation. My parents suck, which is why I’m here,” I say, figuring this might be a safe line of conversation. Nearly every kid in this place has a beef with one parent or both. “What about yours?”

“My parents are dead,” he says.

Instantly, I feel like an idiot. “Oh my God, I’m sorry,” I say.

He shrugs. “I never really knew them,” he says. “I was taken in by a man and his family.”

“In a place called Wuthering Heights?”

He nods.

“Is that in England?” I ask, trying to place his accent.

He nods again.

“Well, I told you there was a book by that same name,” I say, reaching into my backpack and showing him my paperback copy of
Wuthering Heights
from English lit. “And you know there’s a Heathcliff in it, too.”

I heard that much about the book, at least, before I fell asleep in class.

Heathcliff looks surprised.

“That’s some coincidence, isn’t it?” I ask him. “But I guess you don’t read much?”

He takes the book from my hand and studies it, a questioning look on his face. He turns the book upside down and then opens it up. It occurs to me quite suddenly that it’s not that he doesn’t read, but that
he can’t read.
I take the book from him and put it the right way.

“You can’t read, can you?” I ask him.

He drops the book, looks down at his tray, and then turns his attention back to his hot dog, which he picks up and nearly eats in one bite. I think I’ve embarrassed him. I feel bad about it, because the last thing I want to do is make him feel stupid. First, I bring up painful memories about his dead parents, and now I point out that he can’t read. Wow, I am on a roll.

I can only imagine all the teasing he’s gotten about not being able to read. And there could be a million different reasons he didn’t learn to read. Maybe he has dyslexia.

“You know, I could teach you,” I say, without thinking it through. First, I have no idea how to teach someone to read, and second, do I really want a lot of one-on-one time with what could be the biggest troublemaker in school? Still, I brush those thoughts aside. I owe him, and if he needs tutoring help, then so be it. And besides, don’t I pride myself on being friends with everybody? I don’t make snap judgments about people. Not like the Parker Rodhams of the world. The last thing I am is a snob.

Heathcliff looks up at me and there’s hope on his face, and maybe even the trace of a smile. He seems to like the idea. But just as suddenly as the cloud lifted from his face, it descends again and his lip curls into a scowl. His eyes are focused on something beyond my left shoulder and when I turn to see what he’s looking at, I see two Guardians headed our way from across the cafeteria. They seem to be after Heathcliff. In fact, they have their police batons out, as if they anticipate a fight.

“Uh-oh. It looks like you might be in some trouble. What did you do now?” I ask, turning back around. But I discover that I’m talking to an empty chair. Heathcliff has gone. All that’s left is his tray with his half-eaten hot dog. I scan the cafeteria, but see no trace of him. I look under the table, but he’s not there, either. He disappeared.

“Where did he go?” a Guardian asks me gruffly.

“I don’t know,” I say.

The Guardians push past me, into the crowd of students by the dish-washing station, but they’ve lost him, too. Secretly, I find myself glad he got away.

Thirteen

After dinner,
I head to the bathroom for mandatory shower time. I’m late for my shower, on purpose, because this means I’ll miss most of the other girls. I don’t need everyone to see me naked, thanks.

I’m so sore from basketball and running around campus that all I want to do is have a long soak in the shower. Unfortunately, there’s nothing about our dorm bathrooms that is relaxing or soothing. It’s kind of like taking a bath in the public bathroom at the airport. You know that everything is filthy.

The worst part is that I didn’t bring flip-flops, and the tile floor is disgusting. The bathroom is dark and dank, like nearly every other place at Bard Academy. It’s got black-and-white tiles on the floor, and the toilets in the stalls have
wooden
toilet seats. The toilets also have those weird, high backs, with long chains for flushing. Porta-Potties have more amenities.

The showers are in the back, white stalls (well, more like once were white, but now sludge gray color with soap scum and mildew). They’re empty, as usual. No one likes to use them. I saw a girl washing out her armpits in the sink yesterday.

I take the first stall on the left and turn on the hot water. Okay. Commence Fastest Shower in the History of Mankind. I run through the shampoo and skip the second round and the conditioner. I’m rinsing out Pantene, when I hear the sound of…laughter. It’s faint at first and then it grows louder. It’s not the happy kind. It’s the creepy I’m-a-crazed-killer kind.

Okay. I’m naked. In a mildew-infested shower. The possibilities of foot fungus are scary enough. I don’t need any enhancements here, people.

“Who is that?” I call, hoping the peevish sound of my voice discourages whatever delinquent prankster thought it would be a good idea to hit me when I was most vulnerable.

“Is someone in here?” My voice echoes in the bathroom. Naturally, they don’t answer. The sound of laughter gets louder. It’s hard to tell where the sound is coming from, but I can definitely tell that it’s a girl’s voice, not a boy’s. It’s a girl or woman, and she’s laughing her demonically possessed head off.

“Okay, whoever is doing that, it’s not funny,” I say, trying on my best I’m - not - really - freaked - out - by - the - weird - maniacal - laughter voice. I finish rinsing and then turn off the shower. I’m in the process of throwing on my pajamas, even though I’m still wet. While I’m yanking on my shirt, the lights go out.

The hairs on my forearm stand up. Okay, forget trying to be cool. I’m outta here. I jump into my Pumas, feet still wet, and scramble out of the shower stall, my pajamas sticking to me in odd places, as I feel my way along the tiled wall toward the door. I’m groping my way along the wall, hoping to find the light switch. I make it five steps, then six, but instead of feeling a switch, my hand suddenly touches another hand.

“Ack,” I cry, recoiling. “Who’s there? Who is that?”