Wuthering high: a bard academy novel (2 page)

I can tell that Mom is feeling guilty, even though she’s just had a Botox injection, so the only expression she can convey with her numbed face is slight confusion. It’s a little unnerving. Sort of like talking to a mannequin.

“I don’t hate you,” I say, trying to be calm and composed. I’m the adult here, after all, even if I am the one who’s being sent off to a school one thousand miles away. I was the shoulder Mom cried on when Dad left her five years ago for his secretary. He’s divorced and remarried since then, and Mom has been on maybe two dates. I love Mom, I do. But her neediness sometimes is a bit scary.

“It was your dad’s idea,” Mom pleads with me. Of course it’s Dad’s doing. Mom would never have had the guts to send me off, but Dad’s a different story. He’s been trying to disown me pretty much since I started talking and could talk back to him.

“Well, we both know Dad makes bad decisions. Why do you still let him boss you around?”

“I don’t let him boss me,” she says.

“You didn’t even ask him if he’d pay for your Botox. You should. He gave you those worry lines.”

Mom reflexively touches her face.

“You’re right,” she says.

I’m just about to reel Mom in, when we’re interrupted by the appearance of my little sister, Lindsay. She’s wearing a pair of jeans and her new purple push-up bra from Victoria’s Secret.

Lindsay, age thirteen, is a 34B, which is a full cup size bigger than me, since I barely fill out an A cup. It’s a bit embarrassing when your younger sister wears a bigger bra than you do. I’m not sure what my chest is waiting for, perhaps an engraved invitation. Apparently, my breasts are like diva pop stars and like to be fashionably late. When they arrive, I imagine they’ll also come with a list of outrageous demands, like that they’ll only tolerate blessed Kabbalah water, white Bentleys, and green M&M’s.

To make matters worse, Lindsay spreads her arms wide and cries, “Tah-dah!,” as if she just pulled her boobs out of a black magician’s hat. Show off.

“My baby’s first Victoria’s Secret bra,” Mom cries, turning her attention to Lindsay. “My baby is all grown up.”

Although Mom’s face doesn’t change expression, I hear a slight crack in her voice, the telltale sign of an impending emotional breakdown.

Mom is going through the early stages of menopause and is extremely emotional these days. I recently caught her crying in front of a Cingular One ad. It’s embarrassing.

“Lindsay, put some clothes on,” I say. Seriously, sometimes I feel like the only responsible adult around here. What is Mom thinking? “Since when is it okay to parade around in your underwear?”

“Miranda — this is a revolutionary new bra,” Lindsay informs me. “The patent is pending!”

“You don’t even know what a patent is,” I snap.

Lindsay sticks her tongue out at me. I glance down at Lindsay’s jeans and notice the strap of a matching purple thong sticking out from her jeans.

“A thong!” I cry.

Mom didn’t let me wear one of those until a month ago. And that was only after I wrote a two-page essay on the devastating effects of panty lines on my self-esteem. “She’s too young to wear a thong!”

“You wear them all the time,” Lindsay points out.

“I’m two years older. Mom? Really.” I cross my arms to show my disapproval. Mom just wipes a tear from her eye and then tries to hug us both. I squirm away. With Premenopausal Mom, you never know when you’re going to be blindsided with a hug. Last week, she wanted a hug in public in the middle of the cereal aisle at the grocery store. Thanks to my quick reflexes, I avoided PPDA (Parental Public Display of Affection), and Mom got an armful of Special K.

Lindsay, however, isn’t as quick as I am, and she gets the full force of Mom’s bear hug. I smirk at her, while she makes a face over Mom’s shoulder. There are some benefits to being older. Better reflexes.

Besides, it’s about time Lindsay took one for the team. She’s benefited from all my hard lobbying efforts to house-train the ’rents. Case in point: my hunger strike to wear lip gloss in eighth grade, the protracted negotiations to let us watch the TBS version of
Sex and the City,
and now the thong essays. At this rate, Lindsay will never have to learn to do anything for herself, since I’m always doing all the work. She doesn’t even have to work to have cleavage like I do. I need two rolls of Charmin’s double ply to get the hint of cleavage. Lindsay just went to sleep one night and woke up the next morning as Pamela Anderson. Life is not fair.

Lindsay sticks her tongue out at me behind Mom’s back. I squint at her. She’s gloating over the fact that she’s ruined my last reprieve. She’ll live to regret it. With me gone, there will be no one to blame when she does something bad, like breaking another of Mom’s Staffordshire dogs. Besides, one week alone with hug-crazy Mom and Lindsay will be begging her to let me come home.

Since Lindsay ruins my chances of a night-before reprieve, I set Plan B into motion. Plan B involves me dredging out the waterworks on the car ride to the airport, which I know Mom won’t be able to resist. I put some Visine in my purse for a quick-change act.

Plan B is thwarted, however, when Dad and Carmen (Secretary #2 who became Wife #3 — my dad doesn’t even bother to be creative with his adultery) show up the next morning in their new black Range Rover. With Dad alone I might have had a chance. But Carmen is immune to tears, and even so, I’d never cry in front of her. It would be like admitting defeat.

They emerge from the car arguing about whose fault it is that they’re late. They’ve only been married two months and they’re already fighting. I would be gloating, except for the fact that I’m about to be sent off to Siberia and no one seems to care. Mom is dry-eyed when she hugs me. Lindsay smiles and points down at her feet. She’s wearing a pair of my Steve Maddens. She’s going to stretch them out with her extra-wide Fred Flintstone feet.

“Stay out of my closet,” I mouth to her as I duck into Dad’s backseat. She just sticks out her tongue at me in defiance and then mouths, “Try and stop me,” as Dad backs out of the driveway.

“Nice car,” I say to Dad, meaning the opposite. The leather interior smells so strongly of new car, I feel a little nauseous. I can’t believe Dad bought a Range Rover when just three months ago he told Mom he wanted to reduce his child-support payments. “I thought that
Consumer Reports
ranked Range Rovers as the car that breaks down the most.”

I don’t know if this is true, but I remember Tyler saying something about it. Back when I cared what he said, before he assaulted me.

Dad’s eyes flick to mine in the rearview mirror. He frowns at me. “You’re the reason I had to buy a new car in the first place.”

I scoff. “How about a Honda? Mom has an Accord that’s ten years old.”

Dad turns a little red. He doesn’t like it when I point out that we’re poor. “Young lady, this is why you’re on your way to Bard Academy,” he says.

“Why? Because I tell you the truth?”

“I can’t believe you let her talk to you like that,” Carmen says, as if it’s any of her business.

At the airport, Carmen stays in the car. She’s still not talking to me because of the credit card incident. She says she hasn’t lived down the embarrassment of having her credit card denied at Saks Fifth Avenue. Never mind that she charged ten thousand dollars’ worth of purchases the month before, which meant that my one grand put the card over its maximum.

But, naturally, I’m the bad guy. I get it.

Dad, whose parenting skills have pretty much been limited to giving me lectures whenever I do something wrong, starts in on his “this hurts me more than it hurts you” lecture, the one he’s been using since I was four and he’d sit me in the corner for time-outs. I can almost repeat it, word for word.

“Now, I know you think we’re punishing you. But this is for your own good,” Dad says as we’re standing together inside the lobby of the airport. Carmen is outside in the car, pouting. Dad will probably have to buy her a few more thousand dollars’ worth of Tiffany jewelry for him to be back in her good graces. Probably only a semester’s worth of tuition or so.

“One day you’ll realize that we’re doing this because we care about you. This hurts us more than it hurts you.”

This would be a moving speech, except that Dad is looking at his watch while he makes it. He’s late for his tee time at the club. Honestly, I don’t get any respect around here. This is my life we’re talking about, and Dad is worried about getting to the putting green.

Dad is the opposite of Mom. Where Mom will blind-side you with PPDA in the grocery store, Dad goes to great lengths to avoid PPDA in any context. The closest he’ll get to actually hugging you is grabbing you in a side hug that he’ll quickly turn into a headlock. As if he is saying, “I didn’t mean to hug you — I want to wrestle,” which is somehow less embarrassing, he thinks. I hate it, though. He always manages to mess up my hair.

He does this now, in fact. He puts his hand on my head and gives it a rough rub, like I’m a dog.

“You’ll do great there, kiddo. I know you will,” he says.

I walk toward the metal detectors and the security line. I turn around to see if Dad is still there, but he’s already gone.

It’s official. My life blows.

Two

The only time
I’ve ever been away from home was the summer before fifth grade, right before my parents divorced. They shipped me and Lindsay off to some lame camp in Wisconsin where we were supposed to learn how to make keychains and canoe. I mean, I don’t do the outdoors. My idea of roughing it is shopping at Active Endeavors.

Lindsay, because she’s not right in the head, actually enjoyed the hikes, even though she got a nasty case of poison ivy. After that, she was stuck indoors and agreed with me that a camp lacking basic amenities (like private bathrooms) totally sucked. So I began a carefully crafted campaign to tug at the heartstrings of the ’rents. After a week of heart-wrenching letters, I convinced Mom to come and save us.

That’s when she told us she and Dad were getting a divorce.

Dad wasn’t there at the time. He’d taken the opportunity while we were away at camp to pack up all his things and move to a condo in downtown Chicago, complete with a lake view and a stainless-steel kitchen for his new life with his twenty - five - year - old secretary, Chloe, who turned out to only hold the title of Mrs. Tate for a nanosecond before Dad took up with Carmen. Mom blames Dad’s midlife crisis, his BMW convertible, and his new hair-growing Propecia prescription. I blame Dad. He could’ve at least had the decency to leave us for true love.

After a long plane ride, and then a short one on a small plane with propellers, I find myself at a tiny municipal airport somewhere near the coast of Maine. The last mall I saw was somewhere over Boston. I doubt even Gap.com delivers here. I am so not going to be getting any new clothes for a while. The thought seriously depresses me.

Dad says that if I applied five percent of the time I use to think about clothes and shoes to school, I’d have a 4.0 average. But what fun is a 4.0 if you can’t also look hot? Life is about balance.

My current “going to boarding school” ensemble involves: torn jeans, army fatigue cabbie hat, and olive green Juicy Couture tunic tank (bought on eBay on the cheap, but still cost me a month’s worth of lunch money and two weekends of babysitting cash). Gold bangles on my wrists and oversize hoop earrings, courtesy of Urban Outfitters.

I’m average height, though a bit on the lanky side (lanky = no boobs or hips), and I’ve got naturally kind of mouse-brown hair, only it’s not been that color since I learned how to use Clairol in eighth grade. Current color: dark brunette, like all the blondes-turned-brunette this season (Ashlee Simpson, Mary-Kate Olsen, you get the idea).

The whole wooded area thing is beginning to remind me of camp. Perversely, this gives me hope. I got out of that. I can get out of this.

On the bus to the ferry, I glance around and see some of my classmates. There are boys wearing eyeliner, one guy with bright green hair, and in front of me, a girl who looks like she ought to be starring in the next sequel of
The Ring.
Her hair is hanging in her face in greasy strands. I mean, did she ever hear of a comb? Seriously, gross.

These are my peers. And they are total losers.

Great.

I look away, slipping my hand into my backpack and wrapping my hand around my minican of mace. I’ve been carrying mace around ever since Tyler tried that stunt in his Toyota. I’m ready if any of these delinquents tries anything.

I put on my headphones to my CD player — another great injustice in my life. All I asked for last Christmas was an iPod Nano. Instead, Mom got me a sweater with stuffed Santa Clauses on it (one that I will not wear in public ever as long as I live), and my dad got me an Xbox 360. Yes, I know. An Xbox is cool. But I don’t play video games. I don’t care about blowing up space aliens. All I want is to be able to listen to Death Cab for Cutie without lugging five hundred pounds of CDs around with me everywhere I go.

Besides, Dad wanted the Xbox for himself, but was too embarrassed to admit it to the store clerk, so he had to say it was for me and my sister. But it was Dad who played Halo for four hours on Christmas Day.

Even worse, when I tried to sell the Xbox on eBay, Dad grounded me. Sure, it’s a bratty move. But consider this: Dad played the Xbox more than I did. It was clearly a me-to-me gift disguised as a dad-to-daughter gift. I called him on it, and I’m the one who got grounded. How is that fair?

The bus pulls up to a dock by the ocean, and we’re directed to board a boat that will take us to Alcatraz Academy. The wind whipping off the Atlantic is strong and cold, and the sign on the ferry says
TO SHIPWRECK ISLAND
.

Great. The island where I’m going to school is called Shipwreck Island. Why not go ahead and call it Skull Island? Or Dead People Live Here Island? I mean, where am I? A
Scooby-Doo
cartoon?

The brochure in the office where we wait for the ferry says that the island is called Shipwreck Island because of its odd ability to pull in ships during storms, when it was usually hidden by fog. Scores of sailors died when their ships hit the island and sunk. Great. I look at the island in the distance. It’s got a bit of fog around it, but I can still tell it’s covered in trees. It’s not exactly Maui.