A Tale of Two Proms (Bard Academy) Read online

  I don’t remember falling asleep. One minute I’d given up trying to reach my journal and the next, I was dreaming. I knew right away it wasn’t going to be a good dream. I was walking up the stairs of some old cottage, following a click-clacking sound, almost like two pencils being tapped together. After I’d climbed the flight of stairs, I found an older woman sitting in a rocking chair, knitting. The clicking sound was the wooden knitting needles, of course, moving quickly together. She was at work on the world’s longest scarf, which was really the only way I could think to describe it. The knitting poured over her lap and wound down into a large pile on the ground. The pile of new knitting was nearly as tall as her chair. I had a feeling if she straightened out the scarf it would stretch across the room and down the stairs. The scarf was decorated with an odd pattern of squiggles. When I took a step closer, I realized they were letters.

  “Bon jour, Miranda,” she said. “Je m’appelle Madame Defarge.” That’s about as much as I understood her say. The rest of her French came out in a tumble of advanced vocabulary far beyond my one semester of French.

  Madame Defarge worked her needles furiously together, adding length to her scarf every few minutes. I felt I should know her. She looked familiar.

  “What are you knitting?” I asked her, but as I looked at the words in her knitting, I realized they were not just any words – they were names. And then it hit me: I knew where I’d heard her name before. It had been in A Tale of Two Cities. She was a blood thirsty French Revolutionary who spent her time knitting the names of people who she thought ought to die.

  She said something more in French that I didn’t understand and then she dropped her knitting needles in her lap. She shook out the scarf and held it up so I could see it.

  That’s when it dawned on me that those weren’t strangers’ names. I knew them. They belonged to people I knew at Bard:

  Hana

  Samir

  Blade

  Heathcliff

  Ryan

  As I read the names, an uneasy feeling bubbled up in my stomach. They weren’t betrayers of the Revolution! None of them even lived in that time. But she wanted them dead. Or, perhaps, she was telling me they already were.

  Madame Defarge gave me another smile, and I felt suddenly very cold.

  “Why are my friends on that list?” I asked her. “Why?”

  She just spoke more French that I didn’t understand. It hardly seemed fair that this was my dream and yet I couldn’t understand a word she said. I asked her again, but this time she shouted something loudly and three or four angry men stomped up the staircase. They were carrying knives and old rifles and they had on old-fashioned clothes. One of them grabbed me and pulled me away from Madame Defarge. As he dragged me away, I managed to get one last look at the scarf.

  At the very top, on the patch she was just starting to finish, I saw she was working on completing the last “a” of “Miranda.”

  My name was on the death scarf, too.

  Then, I was pulled out of the room. The last thing I heard was one of the men shouting, “Vive la Revolution!”

  I woke up with a start to see Mom’s face hovering above mine. “Miranda?”

  I tried to calm down. That’s what I get for reading a classic before bed.

  I sat up straight, trying to get my bearings and that’s when I saw I was still sitting in the waiting room of the hospital ICU. Lindsay was gone, but I was there and it was morning, because weak daylight had started to stream in through the blinds covering the windows next to me. My neck felt like I’d slept at a right angle all night and maybe I had.

  “Your father is awake,” Mom said now. “And he’s asking to talk to you.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said, and I stood up and stretched, trying to get the image of those angry men out of my mind. It had just been a dream, I told myself. Just a dream.

  “Should I wait for Lindsay before I go in?” I asked Mom as we began to walk away from her.

  “She’s in the bathroom, and anyway, your father said he wanted to speak to you first.”

  “He did?” I was skeptical. I couldn’t imagine a universe where Dad would want to see me before Lindsay. Mom took me by the arm and led me down the hall to Dad’s room. When we got there, Dad’s doctor was in his room talking to Dad. Dad looked pale, I saw, but not as bad as yesterday. Plus, his eyes were open, which just made him seem way more alive than yesterday when all the alarms in the room were going off at once. I glanced up at his heart monitor and saw the steady beep, beep of his heart rate pop up on the screen in steady green lumps. He seemed calm and stable. I wonder how long that would last after he saw me.

  “So, we’ll take it easy today, and maybe by tomorrow we can move you out of the CICU,” I heard the man in the white doctor’s coat say. He glanced up and saw Mom and me, and turned to include us in the conversation.

  “Is this the Miranda I’ve been hearing so much about?” the doctor glanced at Mom and when he got the nod, he extended his hand. He hadn’t been the doctor on call last night, but then I realized it had been late and last night’s doctor was probably an intern or some other doctor in training. This one looked older and more put together. I took his hand and shook it, even though I always still felt weird when adults did that. It was like they were treating me like one of them. I never knew how hard to squeeze an adult’s hand or how long to hold it. It’s not like I got much practice at Bard. None of the faculty there shook hands. I couldn’t blame them. It took a lot of concentration and energy for a ghost to keep up a solid form.

  “I’m Dr. Givens, and I have to say that I think you saved your dad’s life,” Dad’s doctor said.

  “Me?”

  “Well, we weren’t sure he was going to wake up,” Dr. Givens said. “Miranda, I think you brought him back. It was really touch and go there for awhile.” Dr. Givens glanced through the window. “You must be a very special daughter.”

  I glanced at Dad briefly, but he didn’t stand up and shout “you lie!” or anything else to deny it. I half expected him to do something like that, but he didn’t say a word. He just lay in his bed still looking a little tired. Maybe he was just too pooped to tell Dr. Givens I was not the favorite daughter. I was a far, far distant second. He gave me a weak smile, instead.

  “Well, I’ll leave you all to talk,” Dr. Givens said and then he left the room. Mom left with him, and then there were only the two of us. I noticed he no longer had the tubes in his mouth or all over his face, and Dad motioned me over with a gentle lifting of his hand. I didn’t really want to go closer. It was one thing to talk to Dad when he was in a coma. It was another thing when he was awake and could respond. Of course, he couldn’t really yell and scream at me, I thought. He was still weak from the heart surgery.

  He glanced at me, his eyes a little glazed, but I could tell he was there. That was him in that hospital bed. He was back.

  “Hey, pumpkin,” he said, his voice a scratchy croak. He smiled at me. “Pumpkin” was a name I hadn’t heard since I was four. Terms of endearment weren’t at the top of the list of things Dad usually said to me.

  “Hey,” I answered back, suddenly wondering if he had brain damage. Did he think I was actually four?

  “Miranda, sorry you had to leave Bard and your school work,” Dad said and he cleared his throat. Okay, so, he didn’t think I was four. That was good. Also, Dad never apologized. For anything. I wasn’t sure what to make of this turn of events.

  “Uh, Dad, you had a heart attack. I think that’s more important than a few research papers.” Besides, somebody had to get Lindsay home, I thought.

  “I have something I really want to tell you,” Dad said.

  I braced myself. When Dad had news, it was usually that he was getting married – again.

  “I want you to know that since Carmen left me, I’ve been seeing this counselor,” he said.

  “Are you two engaged?” I asked, assuming the usual.

  “What? No!” Dad started to sound like
his usual defensive and grumpy self, but then he pulled it back. “No, I mean, I see why you would think that, given my track record, but when I said ‘seeing’ I meant in a professional capacity.”

  “You’re in therapy?” This was even more surprising. Dad never asked for help for anything in his life. Mom tried to get him to go to marriage counseling for years and he never did.

  “Yeah, I am,” Dad said.

  I thought about this a minute. “So did the shrink give you the heart attack?” Maybe all that regurgitating of his childhood was too much for Dad to take.

  “No, Miranda. He didn’t give me the heart attack.” Dad cleared his throat and tried to sit up a little in bed. “But he has helped me to see things a little clearer, and I realize that I made a lot of mistakes with you. You had—and have—every right to be angry at me. I really screwed up a lot of things, pumpkin.”

  I glanced down, wondering if Dad remembered anything I’d said to him when he was unconscious.

  “But I realize that life is short, and I might not be here tomorrow,” Dad said. “And when I was in that coma, I saw you. I heard your voice, and I swear, Miranda. It brought me back.”

  “Because you wanted to ground me?” I joked.

  Dad gave me a weak smile. “No. I know you think I’ve always been angry with you, but really, I was angry with myself. I punished you when I really wanted to punish myself. I was angry at me, not you. But what I want to do now is make it up to you if you’ll let me.”

  “Okay.” It was as if Dad had really heard me when he’d been in his coma. Isn’t this what I asked for? A truce?

  “You don’t have to be my best friend. I don’t expect you to give me the best Dad of the year award ever, but I just want the chance to get to know you better without all the anger and the judgment. Does that sound good?”

  I nodded. It did.

  And for the first time in a very long time I wasn’t angry at him. And I realized that all these years, that I hadn’t just been angry at Dad for missing visits or for ignoring me. I’d been angry at him for disapproving of me being me. And even though I thought I was too old to care what Dad thought of me, I realized I wasn’t. It mattered to me.

  Dad reached up then, opening his hand, and I took it and he squeezed.

  “Uh… Dad?” Lindsay was at the door, her eyes brimming with tears.

  “Come here, you,” Dad said and Lindsay threw herself into a hug. Fortunately for Dad, the ICU came equipped with bedrails, or Dad would’ve been flung to the floor. All was right in the world again.

  During that week that Lindsay and I spent at home, we visited Dad every day at the hospital. In some ways, I thought the heart attack was the best thing that could’ve happened to our relationship. Not that I’m glad Dad had to have open heart surgery or anything, but I was glad we were on speaking terms again. I was also really happy to discover that the sight of me didn’t make a vein pop out on the side of Dad’s head like it usually did.

  Even Lindsay was glad to see us not fighting, and I realized how stressful it had been for her, too, all these years, constantly being asked to take sides when Dad and I fought, continually disappointing either him or me when she didn’t seem loyal enough.

  We even laughed, like really laughed, and we were in the hospital, and yet, it was all like we were at Disney World or something. And, for the first time, I felt proud of Dad. He was evolving. He was seeing a counselor. He was working on his life. It was all good.

  I could almost forget my nagging worry that something was going on at Bard – something big. I called the main line to the dorm several times, but got a busy signal each time. Cell phones and email were banned at Bard, so it’s not like I had a lot of other options to get in touch with people. In fact, the dorm phones had only just been installed. We used to have to wait to the end of the week and use payphones to call out. Nobody called in. But the faculty had put in the phones as a perk, and we could use them during specified times. It also gave the staff another privilege to take away if the students misbehaved.

  I considered calling Headmaster B’s office, but ultimately decided against it. None of the faculty liked to talk on the phone and it would probably just annoy her. Plus, even if she did know something about what was happening at the school, I seriously doubted she’d tell me. I considered calling Coach H. He was the closest thing to a friend I had on the faculty—next to Miss A. But it would be impossible to get a hold of either one without running the call through the Headmaster’s office. Plus, I seriously doubted Headmaster B would simply pass my message along to Coach H or Miss A without interrogating me first. And what would I tell them? I’d had a nightmare and I was worried?

  So, I’d have to simply wait and see what was happening when I returned to school.

  The hardest part, by far, was not talking to Heathcliff. I was worried about what Sydney was doing to Heathcliff’s reputation. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something important about the fact that Sydney looked like Heathcliff and that this resemblance was the reason he had been brought to Bard in the first place. But no matter how long I thought about it, I couldn’t come up with any good answers.

  The day before we were scheduled to head back, Dad offered Lindsay and me the option of staying at home and not going back to Bard. Three years ago, I would’ve jumped at the chance. But that was before I’d met Heathcliff and before I’d found out just what a special place Bard was.

  I touched the locket Heathcliff had given me. It was still in my pocket. I did consider, just for a second, what it would be like not to go back. I tried to imagine walking away from whatever insanity was unfolding there now. Could I just say “not my problem” and never return?

  But I already knew I couldn’t. There was Heathcliff to think about. And Hana, Samir, Blade and Ryan Kent. I thought about my nightmare and Madame Defarge and her scarf of death (by far the most creepy piece of knitting I’d ever seen in my life).

  No, I definitely couldn’t leave them there alone. Something was going on, and I had to find out what. But that was me. Lindsay didn’t have to come and I told her so, but she wouldn’t hear of staying behind.

  “Want to keep something as cool as Bard to yourself, huh?” she asked me, even as we packed up our clothes.

  “I’m serious, Linds,” I said. “You could stay here. I think something is going on – something that isn’t good.” I told her about Sydney Carton and about my dream. I also reminded her that Catherine was running loose around campus.

  None of this fazed Lindsay in the least.

  “I’m still going with you,” she said, folding up her jeans and stuffing them into her backpack. “No way am I letting you go off and save the world by yourself. I want a little credit, too.” She grinned at me and I grinned back.

  “You’re sure? It could be dangerous.” I didn’t like the idea of Lindsay being in danger at all. She’d seen enough close calls since we’d been at Bard. She really didn’t need another.

  “Knowing that crazy island, I am sure whatever is going on esxs dangerous. That’s part of the Bard charm. Besides, maybe if I ride in and save the day, Ryan will notice.”

  This was the first time Lindsay had mentioned Ryan since we’d gotten home.

  I looked at her a second. “You know that he likes Hana,” I said.

  “I know, I’m not blind,” Lindsay said. “But a boy could change his mind.”

  “Or not.”

  “Look, if he’s in trouble, I still want to help him, okay? Wouldn’t you do the same for Heathcliff?”

  I thought about this. It was true enough. Even if he loved Catherine, I would still want to help him. I nodded.

  “Well, then, you see what I’m talking about.” Lindsay set her mouth in a stubborn line.

  I tried a little longer to convince Lindsay to stay, but it was a lost cause. She was going with me, no matter what I said. Eventually, I had to stop arguing with her.

  Mom and Mr. Perkins dropped us off at the airport. There were lots o
f hugs and some tears (on Mom and Lindsay’s part) and then we were through security and waiting in the terminal. On a whim before we boarded, I called the house phone at my dorm at Bard one last time. Lindsay was busy eating another candy bar.

  “Want some?” Lindsay asked me, offering up a square of chocolate.

  I shook my head no and signaled to the phone. Not that me being on the phone would stop Lindsay from interrupting. Besides, I half-expected a busy signal, per usual. But then a funny thing happened. It rang. It rang three times and then someone picked up.

  “Hello?” her voice was a thin whisper that was vaguely familiar.

  “Who is this?” I asked.

  “Parker Rodham,” came the oddly cowed-sounding voice on the other end of the line. Now I realized it did sound like Parker, but she seemed strangely subdued. It was like she was sleepy or she was talking to me in a roomful of sleeping bears that she was afraid could wake up at any moment.

  “Parker! It’s me, Miranda.”

  Now was the time that Parker usually insulted me. Or she hung up. But neither one of those things happened. Only silence came through the line. Okay, so she wasn’t insulting me, which was very un-Parker like. Granted, I had done her a favor recently. Maybe she was feeling good about me after I had exposed Catherine’s lie. Parker hated to be duped. Then again, no matter what I ever did for Parker, she always hated me in the end. No matter what happened, in Parker’s world I was always to blame.

  “Are you still there?” I asked. I had a bad feeling about this. Bad, like the scared guy in the space marines about to invade a place overrun by killer aliens bad.

  I heard Parker exhale, but that was it.

  “Parker, you’re freaking me out a little.” Suddenly, I had Lindsay’s attention. She stopped stuffing her face with chocolate and looked at me. She gave me a questioning raise of her eyebrows. I shrugged. I didn’t know what was happening, either. Lindsay drew closer, putting her head close to mine, so she could hear Parker’s voice on the other end of the line.

  “Can I talk to Hana? Or Blade? You see them?”