Wuthering high: a bard academy novel (21 page)

The room is silent. No closet lights go on. No drawers open. I can’t tell if she’s here or not and I’m starting to feel a little silly that I talked to an empty room. Besides, she wasn’t even a real girl, so how could she be a ghost?

Reluctantly, I pull myself from bed and get dressed. I decide to put the page from
Wuthering Heights
in my pocket and try to give it to Ms. W or Coach H. They ought to have it back.

I wander into the dorm’s den, looking for Ms. W, and find her directing a large group of students lingering in the hall in a line that looks like they’re waiting for concert tickets to go on sale. Some are leaning against the wall and others are sitting on the floor in the hall. I push my way to the front and see something even stranger than ghosts.

Payphones have appeared in the den. Five of them. They weren’t there before and now they are. They are the kind of payphones Clark Kent would use to change into his Superman outfit, big glass-and-wood boxes with folding doors for privacy.

Where did they come from?

They all have girls inside, talking on the phone. And I just thought I’d seen it all on this campus.

Ms. W is standing by them, navigating the wait, summoning girls up to use the phones.

“What’s going on?” I ask her.

“Haven’t you read your campus mail? Today is parents’ Sunday. The only time you get to talk to your family before Thanksgiving.”

And then I remember. Last week, the flyer in my mailbox. The one that said we can make two outgoing calls and that our parents have been notified to be on alert for our calls.

I was supposed to write up something to say to Dad, too, but I guess I’ve been a little busy. I remember suddenly the half-written letters that I’ve been writing to him. I never managed to finish one.

“How are you doing this morning?” Ms. W asks me, looking concerned.

“As good as can be expected, considering.” Considering I was almost eaten by a plant, sucked dry by Dracula, burned by Mrs. Rochester, and abducted by Heathcliff.

As I watch, a girl exits one of the phone booths. Ms. W signals to me.

“Go on,” she tells me. “You’re next.”

“Hey! No fair,” cries Parker Rodham, who is sitting near the fireplace with her clones. “We’ve been waiting for an hour.”

Ms. W sends Parker a look that silences her immediately.

“But, Ms. W…” I start, trying to tell her about the wayward book page. She silences me with a wave of her hand.

“Come on, Miranda,” Ms. W says, waving me forward. “Alexander Graham Bell won’t wait for you all day.”

“Do we really have time for this now?” I ask Ms. W, thinking that there are clearly bigger problems I need to deal with than talking to my parents. Saving the world, for starters.

“The world will wait,” Ms. W says, as if reading my mind. “For your family, you need to make time.”

Reluctantly, I step into the phone booth, half expecting to see the inventor of the telephone sitting there. But it’s empty.

“You won’t be able to tell them about Bard,” Ms. W cautions. “What happens here, stays here.”

“Just like Las Vegas,” I say, but Ms. W doesn’t get the joke.

I dial my mom’s number and Lindsay picks up on the second ring.

“Oh, it’s
you,
” she says, sounding disappointed. “I thought you were going to be a telemarketer. I was going to mess with you.”

That’s my sister for you. She’d rather talk to a telemarketer than me.

Lindsay’s favorite thing next to watching the Discovery Channel is to get up the hopes of telemarketers by promising to buy what they’re selling and then at the end of the conversation, admit that she’s only thirteen. Lindsay has no real friends, so she has to resort to taunting telemarketers. It’s sad, really.

“So I can see you miss me a lot,” I say sarcastically. “So? What have I missed?”

“You mean aside from me wearing all your shoes?”

“I’m not going to dignify that with an answer,” I say.

“Well, for one thing, you missed
big
news.”

“What? Did Dad get divorced — again?”

“No, silly, that wouldn’t be news,” Lindsay says, and I have to laugh. “No, Mom went on a date.”

“What? Mom doesn’t have a social life.”

“You mean she
used
to not have one,” Lindsay says. “She’s gone out on
three
dates now with my math teacher, Mr. Perkins. I
totally
set them up. It’s, like, so cool. I’m totally gonna get an A this semester.”

Oh my God. I leave the house for a month and Mom has gone insane. She’s going on a date with Mr. Perkins? He wears short-sleeved polyester shirts and his pants only come down to his ankles. He’s not fit to date!

“Miranda? Oh Miranda, is that you?” Mom cries, picking up the phone and butting into our phone conversation. “Oh dear, how are you? Are you okay? I’ve been trying to call, but the school administrators have said we can’t talk to you during your adjustment period. I’ve been getting your letters. Have you gotten mine?”

Normally, I’m annoyed by Mom’s drama, but it’s nice to hear that she misses me. And for once, I’m not annoyed when she spends twenty minutes out of thirty talking about how she’s considering liposuction.

I feel like I’ve grown up a lot in the last month. I find that I’m not even mad at her anymore for sending me away. All I feel is longing to see her and Lindsay. Hearing their voices makes me homesick.

“So what have you been up to at Bard? Have you been studying the classics?”

“Uh, yeah,” I say, thinking Mom has no idea how true this is. “They really immerse you in literature here.”

I suddenly really want to tell her about the ghosts, and about Kate Shaw, no matter how crazy it sounds, but I find, just as Coach H predicted, that I can’t find the words. The more I try to tell them, the more I can’t speak. Literally, I’m tongue-tied.

I guess the spell of the school works on phone lines, too. You can’t talk about the goings-on at Bard to anyone outside campus.

“Did you develop a stutter or something?” Lindsay asks me, still on the line.

“It’s nothing,” I say. “Forget it.”

Ms. W taps on the glass after a little while.

“Time to call your father,” she tells me, tapping her watch.

Reluctantly, I let Mom and Lindsay go, and dial Dad’s mobile number. I get his voicemail — of course. I hang up without leaving a message. I have no other choice but to call his house and risk getting Carmen. As the phone rings, I pray she’s out shopping or something, which is probably the very first time in history that I’ve actually
wished
she was out spending my college fund.

On the third ring, Carmen answers.

Dammit.

“Hello? Hello!” she says, sounding annoyed. I’ve paused too long.

“Um, Carmen, it’s me, Miranda.”

“Miranda who?” she asks.

Nice one. You see why I’m not fond of calling her “Stepmother,” despite Dad’s insisting.

“Miranda Tate. Your stepdaughter?”

“Oh,” she says, sounding disappointed. As if another Miranda might be more interesting. “Your father isn’t here.”

Wow. She’s ruder to me than most people are to telemarketers. She makes Cinderella’s stepmom look like Mother Teresa.

“But didn’t he know that today is the only day I can talk to him?” I ask her, trying to keep the disappointment out of my voice, but failing. I mean, the one chance he has to talk to me for three months and he can’t wait by the phone for an hour?

“I don’t know. He’s golfing — as usual,” Carmen says, sounding annoyed. “Anyway, I have to go.”

“Well, can you tell him —”

I don’t get to finish my sentence because Carmen hangs up on me.

“— that I called?” I finish, but it’s too late. I’m talking to a dial tone.

Ouch.

I stare at the phone. I can’t quite believe what jerks they are. Carmen and my dad both. But, for once, I don’t cry. I don’t know if dealing with ghosts and the supernatural has empowered me or what, but this doesn’t seem like the end of the world like it normally would when Dad ignores me. I mean, you know, now that it’s possible the world might
really
end. For once, I see clearly that it’s not my fault that Dad is blowing me off. It’s
his.
If he doesn’t want to know me, I think,
his
loss. There are plenty of people who find me interesting. Heathcliff, for one, and Ryan Kent for another, I think. So if Dad can’t be bothered, then he’s the jerk. Not me.

Ms. W pats me on the shoulder as I get out of the phone booth. “It’s not your fault, you know,” she says, as if she heard the entire conversation with Carmen.

“I know,” I say, and I really mean it.

“If I could, I would go haunt his house,” she whispers to me, and this makes me smile. I imagine Dad trying to deal with ghosts. He can’t even deal with his ex-wives or his daughters. I’d like to see him deal with the dead.

Twenty-eight

Ms. W cautions me
to be careful walking about on campus, since Emily Brontë and Heathcliff and Mrs. Rochester are still on the loose. She makes me promise that should I see Heathcliff, I will sound the alarm immediately. I promise to do so, even though I’m not quite sure how I feel about that. I check my room for Blade, but it’s empty. Hana’s room is empty, too. Strange.

I strike out onto campus, still a little surprised that she let me go out at all, with the hope of finding Ryan Kent and apologizing. I can’t help but feel like he’s got the entirely wrong idea about Heathcliff and me, even though I can’t even explain to myself that particular relationship.

I think about Ryan and the look on his face before the fire ruined the moment. Was he going to kiss me? Maybe I’d just been imagining it. Maybe he was just about to tell me I had something on my face — like Fritos crumbs. Then again, I’m pretty sure he was going to kiss me. He had that same look in his eyes that Tyler did when Tyler went in for the sloppy kill, except that Ryan wasn’t drunk or belligerent.

But what about Heathcliff? Do I have feelings for him, too?

Life is way too complicated at the moment. I have so much in my head, I don’t know what to think.

Outside, the campus is nearly deserted. I guess everyone is inside trying to make phone calls. I guess that goes for Hana and Blade, too, although they weren’t in the dorm. It’s mid-October and the chill in the air is definite. The wind kicks up, rustling the leaves and making it sound like whispers. Birds settle on the tops of trees and flocks of them fly off in the distance, looking more like bats.

Leaves rustle along the path in front of me, making an eerie sound like footsteps, but every time I turn I see nothing. The campus has the feel of the opening scene in
28 Days Later,
where the guy wakes up in the hospital to a deserted London. I wouldn’t be surprised if fast-running, red-eyed zombies started sprinting across the commons.

I find myself standing in front of the boys’ dorm, Macduff, wondering how I’m going to find out where Ryan Kent is. The girls aren’t allowed in the boys’ dorms, just like the boys aren’t allowed in the girls’. Not that I’d let that stop me. I try the front door of the dorm, but it’s locked.

I peer into one of the windows and see the lounging room is full of boys waiting to use the phone. I don’t see Samir, but I do see Ryan. He makes eye contact with me. I wave at him, but he looks pointedly at me and then away. He doesn’t wave. He doesn’t even acknowledge me.

My heart sinks.

He’s mad at me. He’s mad about the whole Heathcliff scene in the cafeteria. I try once more. I tap on the glass, but Ryan just looks up at me again and then turns away, putting his back to me.

Ouch. Rejected.

I step back from the window and stick my hands in my blazer pockets for warmth, and my fingers touch the page of
Wuthering Heights
that I’d put there. With all the family drama, I forgot to give it to Ms. W. I pull it out to look at it and notice that the handwritten message is gone. Huh? How did that happen? It was there, I could’ve sworn the warning was there, and now it’s not.

As I study the page, a gust of wind kicks up, whipping it out of my hands as if someone plucked it from my fingers.

Crap! I lunge after it, but the wind has taken it. I chase it down the path as it rolls and tumbles like a leaf in the wind. Over and over. When I get closer to it, the wind picks up and blows it just out of my reach. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the page was leading me somewhere.

The paper just keeps blowing forward, landing, finally on the steps of the library.

As I’m standing there, the library door opens with a creak, like an invitation. “Kate?” I find myself whispering. “Is that you?”

Is she opening the door? I realize she’s a fictional character, but maybe she is also a ghost. At Bard, I suppose anything is possible.

The wind kicks up again and the piece of paper blows inside the library.

I hesitate. I should
not
go inside. I should turn around right now and leave. There’s a point in all those horror movies when the girl or guy does something incredibly stupid (goes off separately from the group into the dark woods, for example), and you just want to shout at him to
go back.
The only reasonable course of action is to leave the haunted mental hospital/forest/mansion/town. But do they ever leave the haunted mental hospital/ forest/mansion/town? No, they don’t. They just stay there like a bunch of morons and get hacked to pieces.

I should turn around, right now, and head back to my dorm.

But I don’t.

I need to get that page back.

I walk inside the library and pick up the piece of paper, which is now lying still on the ground.

That’s when I look up and see Heathcliff standing on the other side of the library.

He looks at me — sadly almost? — and turns to walk down the aisle.

“Wait…” I say, but he doesn’t listen to me. He just keeps walking.

I pause. Should I go get a Guardian? But there isn’t time. I’m torn. Heathcliff is going to get away if I don’t follow. And besides, I think suddenly, maybe I can convince him to turn himself in. I stuff the page in my pocket and chase after him, down the aisle of the library and pause, keeping distance between us, as he reaches into a bookshelf and pulls down a book:
Shakespeare’s Complete Works.