Wuthering high: a bard academy novel (4 page)

I can feel Pyro’s eyes on me. I glance over at him and notice that the cut above his eye is starting to bleed a little bit.

“Are you okay?” I ask him, pointing to my eye and squinting. It looks painful.

He looks surprised that I mentioned it.

He shrugs, but says nothing.

“What did the other guy look like?” I joke, but he doesn’t even crack a smile. Tough crowd. “You’re sure you’re okay? It looks like it hurts. You might need stitches.”

“Stitches?” he asks, perplexed, as if he’s never heard of them before. Does he have an accent? He sounds like he has an accent. I think it might be English or Scottish. I can’t quite tell, but it’s definitely Beatles-esque. Cool. I like boys with accents.

“Cathy?” he asks abruptly in his Scottish/English/ Irish brogue.

“Sorry, wrong girl,” I say. “My name is Miranda.”

He looks a little surprised, like he thinks I might be joking with him.

“Miranda Tate,” I say, extending my hand. “And you are?”

He looks at my hand, and then at me. “Heathcliff,” he says cautiously, taking my hand. His hand is rough and calloused. Either he’s a guitarist, or he’s done some hard work on a farm.

“So who’s Cathy?”

I watch as a storm cloud moves over his features, then his face settles into a scowl again. He says nothing. I guess it’s a sore subject. He doesn’t elaborate. Great start I’m off to here at Bard. I try a different tact.

“Where are you from?” I ask him. He glances over at me, scowl still on his face.

“Wuthering Heights,” he says.

“Like the book?” I ask him, but he gives me a blank look. He lives in a place called Wuthering Heights and nobody ever told him there’s a famous book by the same name?

He falls back into his strong-and-silent routine, so I guess our conversation is over. I look up to the front of the auditorium. On the small stage, a line of what I can only assume are teachers, because they’re old and they’re dressed badly, files out onto the stage. A tiny but severe-looking woman with jet-black hair parted down the middle and pulled tightly back from her temples steps up to the microphone at the podium, then adjusts it for her height. Some of the kids start snickering.

“I am Headmaster B, and I’d like to welcome you to Bard Academy,” she begins in a neatly clipped British accent. Headmaster B? What kind of name is that? Is that because this is our parents’ Plan B — to be disciplined by Headmaster B? As I’m thinking this, I notice that she’s wearing a broach around her neck on a black ribbon. It’s very retro. Like this whole place, actually.

“You suck!” somebody yells.

“Silence!” Headmaster B shouts, and all the doors in the chapel slam shut at once. The lights above our heads flicker.

Wow. That’s some party trick. For a full few seconds, no one says a word. Then some students giggle uneasily. Others start booing. The bouncers near the back file down the aisles like storm troopers.

“There will be order,” Headmaster B says again. She snaps her fingers and one of the muscle-bound Guardians grabs the nearest kid making noise, wrestles him to the ground, and ties him up like a calf at a rodeo. “Class, it’s my pleasure to introduce you to our disciplinary force at Bard Academy, the Guardians.”

The muscle-bound guy who has his knee in the back of one rowdy student momentarily straightens and throws up his hand in a kind of salute.

Nice. This boarding school comes with gargoyles
and
prison guards. I can’t believe I’m at a school that has its own security force. This is so embarrassing.

I watch as one of the kids in a row near us says “Screw this,” and gets up to leave. He’s instantly wrestled to the ground, bound, gagged, and put back in his seat. Clearly, he’s not the brightest of the bunch.

I make a mental note to put this in my letters home. I think the “Guardians” are clearly violating some Constitutional rights here, like the Constitutional right not to have a 250-pound man put his knee in your back.

“Above me, you will see the motto that we all live by. ‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.’ It’s from
Richard II,
and it’s a warning to all of us not to waste time. You are here because you wasted your time getting into trouble, but believe me, there will be no wasted time here.”

The Guardians hand out packets. I take a stack and pass them on to Heathcliff, who stares at the folder long and hard like he’s never seen one before. I wonder if he’s high.

Inside the folder, there’s a whole book outlining what we can and can’t do. Uniforms must be worn at all times beginning “straightaway after orientation.” Curfews are enforced daily: 8:00
P
.
M
. for underclassmen, 9:00
P
.
M
. for seniors. All students must sign in at their dorms every day, before their curfew. No going into the woods at night, or ever.

“I would like to draw your attention to page five of
The Student Code of Conduct.
For those of you who are new to Bard Academy, you will find a very important announcement. Every student must earn the right to return home for holidays, such as Thanksgiving and Christmas. You do this by earning good grades and good conduct marks.”

What?
Hit pause. Rewind. There’s a chance I won’t be able to go home for Thanksgiving? Or Christmas?

Students across the chapel murmur. I involuntarily let out a sigh of frustration. One of the Guardians in the aisle gives me a sharp look. Next to me, Heathcliff glares at the Guardian and leans forward a little as if to protect me from the Guardian’s gaze. I’m not sure what that’s about, but apparently Heathcliff has taken it upon himself to protect me. I guess this is better than killing me.

Headmaster B continues.

“Also on that page, you’ll notice that, in the vein of not wasting time, frivolous distractions from your studies are not allowed at Bard Academy. This includes cellphones, pagers, laptops, electronic games.”

At this rule, the chapel erupts in protests. Apparently skipping Christmas isn’t nearly as bad as going without your PlayStation. The Guardians rough up some of the louder offenders, and then everybody else falls silent. No one wants to become a human pretzel.

“Now,” continues Headmaster B, “if boys will file out to the left, and girls to the right, we’ll begin the process of checking you in.”

As we stand, Heathcliff scowls. He seems reluctant to leave me. For the first time, I notice that he doesn’t have any luggage. I’ve got a rolling suitcase, a backpack, and a Bed-in-a-Bag (Mom’s doing). But he has nothing. Just his lighter and the folder they’ve passed out.

“Um, see you around?” I say to him.

He says nothing, but watches me leave. I can feel his eyes on me the entire way out of the chapel.

Four

“This is totally bogus,”
complains the girl standing in line in front of me. She’s talking in an exaggerated California surfer-girl accent. “I mean, like, oh — my — God, I cannot live without my iPod.”

I watch as the guards confiscate mini TVs and DVD players, BlackBerrys, cellphones and Palm Pilots, iPods and Nanos, PSPs, Xboxes, even laptops — basically, anything you can think of that might make life tolerable in the middle of nowhere. Even our hair dryers and curling irons are confiscated, which to me is the worst thing of all. It means that my hair isn’t going to be coming out of a ponytail until I leave this place. Not that I have anyone here I want to impress exactly, but it’s the principle of the thing.

“Is this school run by the Amish or something?” says someone else behind me. “I am so not giving up my PSP.”

I’ve got a hand-me-down laptop from Dad — it’s four years old and it only does dial-up — but it’s a computer anyway, and how else am I supposed to check my e-mail? And I guess I can kiss blogging on MySpace good-bye. My last entry said: “Am off to an island off the coast of Maine. If you don’t hear from me in twenty-four hours, call for help.” I guess I’ll find out how much my MySpace pals really care about me.

The thought of being without e-mail, IM, or MySpace is just too much. Surely there are at least computer rooms here? I mean, it’s the new millennium. How are we supposed to do our classwork without computers? Do they expect us to write with quill pens?

I shiver. And what is up with the AC blasting in here? It’s freezing. Seriously. It’s at least twenty degrees colder in here than it is outside. It’s like the dark, Gothic setting just sucks away heat.

I’m getting closer to the end of the line, where Headmaster B is standing. She is watching Guardians search through backpacks and luggage. The bouncers confiscate anything that runs on batteries, as well as “contraband,” which includes drugs, CDs, DVDs, games, and magazines.

I inch forward and watch as the surfer girl has her bag searched.

“Do you know who my dad is?” the surfer girl says. “He’ll be suing all of you. My psychiatrist says I can’t be without my iPod, okay? It’s for my mental health.”

The Guardians looking through her bags take the iPod anyway.

I slip my mobile flip-phone into the waistband of my jeans and pull my sweater down over it. There’s no way I’m going to be without my phone. I don’t care what they say about the digital-free zone. There’s got to be somewhere on this campus where phones work.

I glance behind me and see a dark-haired girl standing there. She’s got long, jet-black hair and a bit of an exotic look about her. Her eyes are nearly black, they’re so dark, and she’s got smooth, flawless skin. She’s also got a sort of thrift-store style that I admire. She’s wearing a bunch of clunky necklaces with colored glass beads and black-framed glasses.

“Nice necklace,” I say.

“Thanks,” she says. She hesitates a minute and then adds, “Hey, if you want to keep that phone, give it to me.”

I guess the phone is kind of obviously stuck in my waistband.

“I’ve got a hiding place,” she says, pointing to an interior pocket of her bag. She’s got a half-open book in there, except the book has a square cut out of its pages. She already has a few batteries stowed there. I hesitate. Is she going to steal it?

In front of me, a girl is frisked, and a Guardian pulls out an iPod from the back of her jeans. I guess I don’t really have a choice here.

I take the phone out of my pocket and put it into her book. She snaps the book shut and then zips up her backpack. I notice she has a lot of books in there. I wonder if they are all hollow.

Before I know it, it’s my turn, and the Guardians open my suitcase and rummage through my underwear. Gross.

The Guardians take away my CD player and CDs, which is just as well since the CD player is broken. They look through my coat, and a woman actually frisks me. It’s embarrassing. I am so in hate with my parents right now.

While I’m being manhandled, I see the alcoholic coach from outside walk up to Headmaster B. He whispers something in her ear, and then they both look in my direction. I think they’re talking about me.

And then, Headmaster B approaches.

“Miranda Tate,” she says. It’s not a question. “Miranda, Miranda, our innocent young heroine of
The Tempest.”

This is an odd salutation, but hey, maybe it’s what headmasters do. Go around quoting Shakespeare.

“No, I’m Miranda Earnshaw Tate, named after my great aunt on my father’s side,” I correct.

We read
The Tempest
in English class last year. It’s a Shakespeare play where Miranda falls in love with Ferdinand. Guys in my class would make kissy faces to me during all the love scenes. I didn’t understand all of the story, but I know Miranda and her father (Prosperous? Prospero? Something like that) were shipwrecked on an enchanted island. Maybe the comparison isn’t that far off. I feel more than a little shipwrecked at the moment.

She turns to go, and the guards hand me back my bags and then get started on the one behind me. Headmaster B waves her hand to show that I’m dismissed.

The dark-eyed girl behind me is calm as they look through her bag, not bothering to inspect the books very closely.

Outside the building, the dark-eyed girl speaks.

“Headmaster B seems to be interested in you,” she says.

“Is that a good thing?” I ask her.

“Definitely not,” the dark-eyed girl says, which makes me laugh. “Here,” she says, handing me back my cellphone.

“Wow, thanks.” I put the phone in my pocket. “How did you know to do that?”

“This is my second year at Bard,” she says, shrugging. “By the way, I’m Hana Mura.”

“I’m Miranda,” I say.

“Yeah, I heard,” she says. I blush a little.

“You’re new, right?” she asks me with a cool calmness about the way she’s assessing me. I can sense she’s normal, unlike the freaks on the bus I rode in with.

“Yeah. Did the ‘oh my God, where have my parents sent me’ look on my face give me away?”

Hana laughs, and I feel a strange kind of relief. I desperately want her to like me. She’s the only normal person I’ve seen here.

“You’re a sophomore, too, right?” she asks.

“How’d you know?”

“The tag on your luggage,” she says, pointing to the blue sticker the Guardians put on it. “Come on, I’ll show you our dorm.”

Hana leads me to Capulet Hall. I learn from Hana that there are two sets of dorms on campus for girls and boys, divided by age. Capulet (freshman/sophomore) and Macbeth (junior/senior) for girls, and Montague (freshman/sophomore) and Macduff (junior/senior) for boys. There are some particularly young-looking girls lingering on the steps of the Capulet dorm, and I wonder what they did to be shipped off to delinquent boarding school. I mean, when I was fourteen I barely got into trouble at all. Not to mention I made it more than halfway through the year after my fifteenth birthday before getting into trouble at all. I’m practically sixteen (March 25 — yes, I’m an Aries. Watch out). It dawns on me that there’s a chance (albeit remote) that I’ll be spending my birthday here. If that happens, I
swear
I will never speak to my parents again.

Like all buildings on campus, Capulet has a pointed roof, and lots of gargoyles.

“Cozy,” I say, staring up at the winged monster that’s sitting above the door.