Wuthering high: a bard academy novel (8 page)

It’s freezing in our room and there’s also a strong draft. I look up and see that it’s because our window is broken.

Just like in my dream.

There are shards on the floor and the windowpane is cracked and hanging from the window frame in jagged pieces.

That is some coincidence.

Suddenly, I don’t want to get out of bed. I have the irrational fear that if I do, I’ll see the ghost floating outside, her arms extended, drifting into the room.

The next thing I hear is the sound of a bugle, making me start.

It plays that military thing, you know what I’m talking about, the only piece of music ever written for a bugle. This must mean it’s time to get up. Not that I could go back to sleep anyway.

Okay, I tell myself. It’s just a broken window. There was probably a storm and a tree branch broke it, which is why I
dreamt
it was broken in the first place. That’s it. I get up and start picking up shards when I look up and see that my closet light is on.

Again.

I feel a little chill, but then I talk myself out of being scared. The window and the closet — I bet it’s all some prank. That explanation seems so rational that I immediately feel better.

I throw the glass shards into the trash and stalk over to the closet and open it. There’s nothing inside but my own clothes. I snap off the light again, but this time I notice a carving in the closet floor. I kneel down to take a closer look. It says:

K.S. WAS HERE. 10/31/90.

Wow. 1990. That’s old. That’s the year I was born.

When I run my hand over the carving, the floorboard seems uneven and even a little unstable, like it might be loose. Without too much effort, I find the seam of the wood and pry the board up. Underneath it, there’s a hidden space, and in it there’s contraband, 1990 style. The first thing I pull out is a cassette tape player. Talk about old! Cassette tapes! You have to be kidding me. Next, I pull out some long-dead batteries, an ancient Snickers bar, and the ripped-out page from a book.

It’s from
Wuthering Heights,
page 139, to be exact.

Weird.

There’s something else in the hidden space, too. A card — a library borrowing card for the Bard Academy Library.

And it belongs to:

Kate Shaw.

Okay, I had to imagine that I saw that name. It couldn’t be
the
Kate Shaw, a.k.a. Missing Girl, the covered-in-blood campus legend. I look down at the card again. Nope, that’s her name. I turn the card over and I see she’s also signed it in scrawly, curlicue writing, with a heart for the “a” in Shaw. Kate Shaw.

I get goose bumps on my arms.

“What’s that?” Blade, my roommate, asks me, sitting up in bed and rubbing her head and yawning. Apparently, she’s abandoned her vow of silence.

I stuff the page and the library card in my backpack. I don’t feel like telling my occult-happy roommate that we might be living in the dorm room where the campus’ most famous ghost used to live.

“Nothing,” I lie. “Just a Bard brochure.”

“Hey,” Blade says, seeing the broken window for the first time. “Why did you break the window?”

Blade sounds legitimately surprised. I don’t think she’s that good an actor. I guess she didn’t do it, either.

“I didn’t,” I say, hastily throwing on my Bard uniform.

“But…”

I’m out the door before I can hear the rest of the sentence. I don’t bother with makeup or even with combing my hair. I need to find Hana and Samir.

“The
Kate Shaw? She was a real person? I thought it was just a story,” Hana tells me when I show her the library card.

”I knew she was real,” Samir says. “I knew it. I told you that a friend of my cousin’s girlfriend’s brother knew her.” Samir pauses, then says, “I bet your room is haunted. That’s why the closet light came on. Wow, this is
so
cool. We should have a séance in the room. I could invite all the hot freshmen. You know, because girls put out if they’re scared.”

“You are disgusting,” Hana says, wrinkling her nose. “You are a perv. A total mlut, you know that: a man slut.”

“You mean, he would be if anyone would have him,” I tease.

“Okay, that is not fair,” Samir says. “Not fair at all. I’m just a man. We have needs.”

“Ignore him,” Hana says as she takes the library card from my hands and inspects it. “Wow. I guess she did exist, but it doesn’t prove that she disappeared.”

“We could find out,” Samir says. “By looking her up in the archives at the library.”

Nine

The library is what
I would imagine the Library of Congress might look like if I’d ever seen it. Aside from two giant lion statues standing guard outside the biggest building on campus next to the chapel, the library has stone pillars outside it and a huge, tiled lobby guarded by a large, round circulation desk. The bookshelves line the building from floor to ceiling, which has to be at least twenty-five-feet high. Long, rolling ladders are at every shelf and the shelves are so crammed with books that high stacks of them are leaning against nearly every shelf, continuing on for as far as I can see. For some reason, the library seems even bigger on the inside than it looks like it should be from the outside. There’s something about the immenseness of it that makes you feel small. I get the feeling that if you scream at one end, no one could hear you at the other.

Now, however, the library isn’t quiet. It’s full of dozens of students waiting in lines near the front desk, trying to pick up their class schedules.

“You can’t get breakfast until you get your schedule,” Hana tells me, explaining the lines.

I think about the awful dinner from the night before.

“If you don’t get your schedule, does that mean you don’t have to eat breakfast?” I ask, ever hopeful.

“Sorry,” Samir says. “I already tried that. They make you eat it, anyway.”

“Crap,” Hana exclaims suddenly. “We can’t get up to see the old newspapers and yearbooks. They’re upstairs and they have it roped off.”

I look where she’s looking, and sure enough, there’s a velvet rope draped across the staircase leading up. There’s a sign that says
DO NOT ENTER
.

“You’re going to let a sign stop us?” Samir asks. “Aren’t we supposed to be delinquents?” And with that, he marches straight over to the staircase and steps right over the velvet rope.

Hana looks at me, and we both shrug and then follow Samir up the stairs.

Upstairs, the lights aren’t on and it’s darker and more musty smelling than downstairs. It’s that old-attic smell, sort of like mothballs and Grandma’s house. I’m not sure how we’re supposed to find anything in the semidark. Samir leads us straight to the old school yearbooks.

“I thought you never went into the library,” Hana says, amazed.

“I said I didn’t study in the library,” Samir says. “But I know where the yearbooks are. How do you think I do research on all the hot sophomores?”

“I thought you preferred freshmen,” I say.

“That’s this year,” Samir says. “Sophomores were last year.” He winks at me.

“Guess I missed my window then,” I say. “That’s too bad.”

“I would definitely make an exception for you,” Samir says.

“She was clearly kidding, you dork,” Hana says. “Anyway, I’m going to go find the local newspaper stuff.” Hana ducks down the next aisle.

I pull out the 1990 yearbook. I flip to the S’s, finding Kate Shaw at the top corner of the page. She has dark, straight hair and good cheekbones, and carefully done makeup. In a word, pretty.

I take a closer look.

Actually, she looks a lot like…well,
me.

I feel something cold in the pit of my stomach. This is not the kind of coincidence I was prepared for.

“Whoa, she was hot,” Samir says. “How come that wasn’t in the campus legend?” He grabs the yearbook from me and turns the picture around so he can see it better. “Actually, you know, she looks an awful lot like…”

“Don’t say it,” I say.

“You,” he finishes. “Wow, that’s kind of weird.”

“Tell me about it.”

We could practically be sisters.

I look at the picture again. She is smiling, which is weird because very few of her classmates are. The yearbook as a whole has a feeling of mug shots from prison. But Kate seems different. She seems perky, even
happy,
which is weird considering she was sent here. But then I think back to her signature with the heart.

I flip through other parts of the yearbook, but find no more pictures of Kate. “I wonder what Ms. W looked like fifteen years ago,” I ask. “Or Headmaster B! That I would pay to see. You think they were here then?”

I flip through, but there are no pictures of faculty. None. Not even standing around in the background of a campus shot.

“No teachers — that’s weird,” I say.

“What’s weird is that a place like Bard has yearbooks at all. Can you imagine wanting anybody here to sign it?”

Samir has a point.

“Found it,” Hana says, carrying an old bound volume of newspaper clippings. It’s a local town newspaper, called the Maine Township
Globe
. Hana has it open to an issue dated November 5, 1990. The headline reads “Student Still Missing.”

“You know what’s weird,” Hana adds, “this girl looks like…”

“Miranda? Yeah, we know already,” Samir says, showing Hana the yearbook.

While the two of them draw similarities, I start to read the newspaper article:

Kate Shaw, a sophomore at the local boarding school Bard Academy, is still missing and police fear the worst. Shaw, 15, disappeared from her room Halloween night and police have called for an intensive search of the area. Her backpack was found in the woods near the campus three days ago, and police say traces of blood on the backpack point to foul play.

“Wow, the story
is
real,” Samir says, whistling. “I wonder what other campus legends are true. Maybe this means it’s true that Bard is a secret psychology experiment. Or that the cafeteria gravy is actually made from dead students.”

“Wait, does this say she went missing on Halloween?” I ask, rereading the story. “That’s the date that’s carved into my closet floor. It’s October 31, 1990.” I reread the story and something strikes me as odd. “They don’t mention her family at all. No parents or siblings or anything.”

“Weird,” Hana says, shifting the big book in her arms. As she does so, a small, thin book slides out of the bound volume.

“Hey, what’s this?” Samir asks, stooping to pick it up. It’s an old book, with tiny gold print on the outside. It says “Bard Academy for Boys, 1855.” Inside, there’s a large picture of an old class.

It is a yearbook, but not like any I’ve seen. There’s just one picture in it, and a lot of typed words, spelling out the school’s classes and facilities. I suppose it’s less like a yearbook and more like a publicity brochure, circa 1855.

The one picture shows some students standing in front of the old chapel. It looks exactly the same, even though the students are dressed in old-fashioned clothes. The boys are wearing knickers and newsboy caps. It’s just one photo, the students in rows, and sitting in chairs, with the teachers standing behind them. It’s grainy and old, but definitely a photograph.

“Wow, read this,” Hana says, of the paragraph at the bottom of the page.

“Does it say the academy was built on an ancient Indian burial ground?” Samir asks.

“Not exactly. But the school was built on top of an old colonial school that burned to the ground in 1847. Thirty students died in that fire. The chapel is new in this picture, see? Built in 1855.”

“I think that counts as being built on graves,” Samir says. “Even if they aren’t Indian. That’s another true campus legend.”

There’s a woman standing beside another teacher, and someone has circled her head in pencil. She’s clearly a teacher, but her face is a bit blurred, like she just moved at the last second. It’s an old photograph, and those old cameras didn’t do well with movement. But oddly enough, all the teachers are like that. Each of their faces is blurred, even though all the students’ faces are mostly clear.

Out of curiosity, I flip to the back to see who’s checked it out. That’s when I see Kate Shaw’s name, right on the last line. She was the last person to have this book, and it’s stamped October 1990, the very month she disappeared. That’s a strange coincidence. Who put this book in with the newspaper clippings of Kate’s disappearance? Strange.

“Well, I’m taking this with us,” I say of the slim Bard Academy yearbook. “I think it has something to do with Kate Shaw’s disappearance.”

“Who are you? Veronica Mars?” Samir asks me.

“Look, I’m the one who’s living with Kate’s ghost, or whatever,” I say, noting the skepticism on their faces. And granted, a hall light isn’t a ghost, but it sort of feels like one. If it’s not her ghost, then it’s a weird coincidence that she seems to be pointing me in the direction of clues. “At least I can try to figure out what happened. Besides, if I can prove that this school is unsafe, then I get a one-way ticket home.”

“Come on, let’s go get our schedules for Neptune High,” Samir says, as he starts to hum Elvis Costello’s “Veronica.”

Ten

My schedule reads
like some kind of insane
Amazing Race
itinerary. Every little bit of time from the moment I get up (6:30
A
.
M
.) until I go to sleep (10:00
P.M.
) is marked by some activity. If it’s not class, it’s counseling or study time, and if it’s not that, it’s mandatory extracurricular activities, like yearbook or school newspaper or sports.

“Basketball?” I cry, looking at my schedule. It’s marked there every afternoon from four to six. “I can’t play basketball. I’ve never played in my whole life.”

I’ve had a doctor’s note to get out of every gym class since I started middle school. These came courtesy of my friend Liz, whose dad is a doctor, a podiatrist, but he’s got really cool stationery that says “From the Desk of Dr. Pauley.” Liz makes up a new ailment every year to get out of gym class herself, but I stick to the tried and true: asthma (which, by the way, is a total lie).