A Tale of Two Proms (Bard Academy) Read online

  Heathcliff saw me and turned to walk to our table. I felt my stomach jump in anticipation. He was coming to talk to me. It was a bold move. It was during a school day and in the middle of the cafeteria—but Heathcliff clearly wasn’t in a mood to follow the rules today. I could tell that by the frown on his face.

  “This is what I’m talking about,” Blade exclaimed. “Could Prom be more sexist? I doubt it.”

  “It’s not sexist to be asked by a boy you like,” Hana said. Samir nodded his head in agreement. Heathcliff was nearly to our table now. He was so tall. My mouth went dry and I grabbed my glass of water.

  “Are you going to ask for my dowry next?” Blade rolled her eyes and angrily stuffed another gooey bite of lumpy oatmeal into her mouth.

  “Is someone getting married?” asked Heathcliff. His black eyes were on me – and only me.

  I nearly spit out my drink of water. Instead, I swallowed it down the wrong way and came up coughing. Heathcliff’s expression did not change. Avoiding his glance, I focused on Blade.

  “It’s worse than a wedding—it’s prom,” Blade said.

  Heathcliff frowned in confusion.

  “They didn’t have proms in 1836,” Hana pointed out.

  “Oh, right,” Blade said. “You know, it’s like a dance thingy.”

  “Thingy? You mean a ball.” Hana rolled her eyes.

  “Whatever. I’m just trying to bring old Cliff up to speed.”

  “It’s Heathcliff, Blade,” I corrected, once I’d recovered from choking. Heathcliff wasn’t the kind of boy who liked cutesy nicknames. Only Blade would be bold enough to tease him like that. He didn’t acknowledge her, though.

  “He doesn’t mind. Do you Cliff?” Blade gave Heathcliff a big elbow nudge. Heathcliff’s face remained expressionless. It was hard to make him smile.

  “You’re insane. If you’re going to do a nickname, you’ve got to go with ‘Heath,’” Hana said. “He looks like a Heath. Not a Cliff. No way.”

  “You guys are playing with fire,” I said. But Heathcliff’s mouth quirked up in a smile. Maybe he liked the idea of a modern nickname after all.

  “He’s not kicking anyone’s butt, so I guess we’re okay,” Samir said. Heathcliff had a temper, it was true. But the fact was he’d saved all of us way more often than he’d put us in danger. He saved my life more than I could count. Sophomore year, I would’ve been burned to a crisp by crazy, pyro Mrs. Rochester. Heathcliff had saved me from her and from many other less-than friendly characters. My friends like to conveniently forget about things like that. They preferred to think of him like a surly ticking time bomb that could explode any second.

  “Leave him alone,” I said, feeling protective.

  “Testy,” Blade said. “Cliff knows we’re just kidding, don’t you?”

  Heathcliff said nothing. But then, when he was with my friends, he usually didn’t say much. Instead, Heathcliff slid carefully into a seat on the other side of the table from me so we couldn’t touch. He studied me from that distance. I could feel in the look he was giving me that his feelings were still hurt from the night before.

  As for me, I was still carrying that acceptance letter in my pocket, wondering what I was going to do about it. I hadn’t told anyone that I’d gotten it yet.

  “Miranda wants to go to prom, don’t you Miranda?” This was Samir. Heathcliff’s eyes focused on me now.

  “Um… actually, I’m not so sure prom is a good idea,” I said.

  Blade seized on my words. “See? Even Miranda thinks it’s stupid.” Heathcliff was looking at me, carefully studying my expression.

  “How can you think prom is stupid?” Samir demanded.

  “I didn’t say stupid,” I said.

  “I thought you of all people would be really into it,” Hana added.

  “Well…” I looked at Heathcliff and tried to imagine pretending we weren’t a couple in a place where everyone was a couple.

  But that wasn’t my only reservation. “It’s not that I don’t theoretically like prom. It’s just that a Bard Academy prom? I mean, does anyone else think that’s a bad idea?”

  I got blank stares from everybody but Blade. I was going to have to spell this out.

  “Our teachers are ghosts, and two of them tried to end the world by permanently blowing opening the portal between our world and the fictional one. It just seems like prom would be the perfect place for one of them to try something.” Some of the ghosts were friendlier than others. And some were so determined to break out of purgatory hell that they were willing to end the world to do it. The twisted, angry, and half-mad face of Sylvia Plath came to mind. She’s the ghost who’d brought Moby Dick to life. She’d also tried to sail a ship away from Shipwreck Island last year. It hadn’t worked.

  “But, Miranda, nothing crazy has happened here for nearly a year.” Samir pointed his fork at me. “You’re just paranoid.”

  Samir was right. Nothing had happened for a year. In the last several months, everything at Bard had been surprisingly… normal. But part of me just couldn’t shake the feeling that we were due for a storm. A bad one. Things had been too quiet and too peaceful for too long. And Bard was many things, but peaceful just wasn’t one of them.

  “I just… I don’t know. I can’t shake the feeling that a prom is a very bad idea.”

  “Well, geez, Miranda, just invite trouble why don’t you,” Samir said, waving his spoon at me. “You start thinking bad things are going to happen around here and they do. You’ve got to be positive. Like me.” Samir plastered on a big, fake smile. “Positive thinking! I am completely imagining winning the lottery right now.”

  “You should be imagining a B in physics, because you are going to fail today,” Hana teased.

  “If I win the lotto, I won’t need to pass physics,” Samir pointed out. “I’ll be riiiich, biotches!”

  “You really think prom could be trouble?” Blade asked me, her dark-ringed, heavily make-upped eyes looking hopeful. Blade was the only one of us who really liked it when crazy stuff happened. She loved near-death experiences, ghosts, and any fictional character bent on destruction. She’s the only one who thought it was cool sophomore year when pyromaniac Mrs. Rochester was let loose on campus. “Maybe the LITs could get back together!”

  The LITs—Literary Investigative Team—was Blade’s brainchild. She gave our group of friends the name after we saved Bard and the world three times (but who’s counting?).

  “Great, let me just fire up the Mystery Machine and grab Scooby Doo,” Hana said, rolling her eyes. Hana was the one who least liked the name (and the T-shirts). She also had gotten pretty tired of fighting ghosts and fictional characters. I knew how she felt. It’s not like we got any credit for it. None of us were on Time’s list of the 100 Most Intriguing Butt-Kicking-Crazy –Fictional-Characters-While-Quipping People.

  “There’s no need to investigate anything,” Samir said, his tone a tad nervous. Samir never met a ghost he wouldn’t happily hide from. If he and Shaggy ever had a coward-off, Samir would win, hands down. “Nothing has happened.”

  “Yet,” Blade said.

  “Stop that! Do you want to see more ghosts around here?” Samir was losing his veneer of calm rapidly. All you had to do was pull out the Oujii board and he’d go white like a sheet and faint.

  “Everything okay here?” asked Coach H. He snuck up on our table with the stealthy moves of the ghost he was. He looked surprisingly solid, even though ghosts had to concentrate to make themselves appear like real people. It was all an illusion, though. He wasn’t really in that body. It was just a projection.

  Still, his white and gray beard was just the same as I remembered from English class the day before. He had a stocky build, and the gruff, no-nonsense approach you’d expect of Bard’s head coach. Coach H never minced words, and he didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about tact, either. But what else would you expect from the ghost of Ernest Hemingway?

  Heathcliff stiffened a little beside me, stra
ightening up his shoulders, ready to defend me. Not that I had anything to fear from Coach H, but Heathcliff had a healthy skepticism of the motivations of the faculty. Coach H was a good ghost, as far as I knew. He’d saved us several times. He’d not tried to feed us to any vampires, either. I think that proved that he liked us.

  “Coach, geez, you scared me,” Samir said, flattening one hand against his chest and breathing hard.

  “Just wanted to make sure you guys are all up on your reading.” Coach H flashed us a grin. Part of his purgatory punishment included teaching remedial English to a bunch of juvenile delinquents. Coach H had been here for more than fifty years.

  “Eavesdropping again,” Samir said.

  “Can’t help it.” Coach H shrugged.

  “Well, maybe you can settle this argument for us,” Hana said, turning to him. “Prom? Good or bad?”

  “Why?”

  “We’re curious about your opinion. Since this is the first time Bard has had the big dance.”

  “Hmmmm.” Coach H seemed to weigh this a moment. “I don’t see the harm in it.”

  “You don’t think a big celebration is a bad idea?” I asked.

  Coach H quirked an eyebrow. “Why not? You will be graduating in a couple of months. Then, you’ll be off this island and free to live your own lives. Isn’t that worth celebrating?” He sounded wistful, and not a little bit jealous. I was sure graduation was difficult for many of the teachers. While we moved on to the next stage of our lives, they had to remain here. Forever.

  “Yes,” Hana, Samir and Blade said together.

  I was the only one who didn’t agree. I looked at Heathcliff, but his face gave away nothing.

  “You’re not looking forward to leaving?” Coach H asked me. He knew I would be thinking about what graduation would mean for me and Heathcliff. Both Heathcliff’s time here and mine was coming to an end. Coach H knew it and so did I.

  But that didn’t stop me from hoping I could find another way, a different way. I thought about the cabin Heathcliff had shown me. I thought about him asking me to marry him. I thought about spending the rest of my life with him.

  Or, I could leave him and go to college.

  What on earth was I going to do? For the first time in my life, I really had no idea.

  “Graduation, hooray,” I told Coach H, but my voice sounded weak. I felt a pitying look from Hana.

  “Coach—you think Miranda and Heathcliff could go to prom?” Blade asked. Blade has never been shy about getting to the point.

  “Blade!” I kicked her shin under the table.

  “What? Everybody is dancing around it, but come on. You all were thinking it.”

  Coach H considered this. “You know a relationship is forbidden,” he told me. He glanced at Heathcliff as he said this. I felt the need to busy my hands, so I grabbed my glass and took another drink.

  “It’s not a relationship it’s a prom date,” Blade said. “They’re going to dance a little. Not get married.”

  For the second time, I choked on the water and starting coughing uncontrollably. I felt my face turn beet red. Why did Blade have to say that?

  Heathcliff and Coach H, along with everyone else at the table, were staring at me. Hana, next to me, gave me a pat on the back. Eventually, I stopped coughing and I could breathe again. My face felt hot and flushed. Geez, why didn’t I just blurt out to everyone that Heathcliff had asked me to marry him? It was no doubt written all over my face.

  “I’ll talk to Headmaster B,” Coach H said, after a while. But he didn’t say if he’d recommend it or not.

  “Is that a yes?” Blade asked him. “Can they go together?”

  “It’s a maybe,” Coach H said. “Finish up, kids. I know some of you have midterms this afternoon.”

  Samir groaned. “Don’t remind me. Physics!” He put his hand on his face as if the thought of the exam made his head hurt. That’s because it probably did.

  When Coach H left the table, Hana nudged me with her elbow. “You and Heathcliff might get to go to Prom! Aren’t you excited about it now?”

  “Uh… yeah,” I said, nodding, even though the dread in the pit of my stomach hadn’t left. I didn’t know why, yet, but I knew something was going to go wrong. Heathcliff was staring at me, too. Trying—and probably succeeding—in reading my thoughts. He usually did. He knew me better than I knew myself sometimes.

  “I still think Prom is lame.” Blade wasn’t going to be changing her mind anytime soon.

  Outside, we heard the squeal of brakes as a bus driven by Mr. H.S. Thompson skidded into the lawn on the commons, narrowly missing the statue of William Shakespeare holding a scroll.

  “New recruits!” called Samir, standing up so he could get a better look out the window. I stood to see, watching as puzzled and dazed kids not yet decked out in the Bard uniform filed out of the bus. Every month, new students would find themselves at Bard. It seemed like only yesterday that I was one of them. I’d met Heathcliff on that fateful bus ride nearly three years ago. He’d been his dark and brooding self, sitting in the back of the bus, eyeing me. He’d had on those strange old clothes from his time then, before he found a Bard uniform to help him blend in. Of course, with Heathcliff, there really was no blending in no matter how he was dressed.

  I felt his eyes lingering on me, and I looked up and met them. The day I first saw him seemed like a lifetime ago. He’d called me Cathy because I looked a little like Catherine Earnshaw.

  We watched as the students filed out of the bus. Some of them fit the stereotype of the usual delinquents—the tattooed and pierced, the potheads, and the dropouts. But I was surprised to find that they looked so young. Had I looked that young and clueless when I’d arrived on the bus?

  I felt a dark pull at the pit of my stomach and I realized it was jealousy. They were only starting out here. They had years left before they’d graduate. I wanted to be them, wanted to turn back time and be that girl again just starting this adventure at Bard. There were some things I’d do over, but mostly, I’d just appreciate the time I had here.

  Back then, I’d been a little spoiled, I’ll admit. I’d been obsessed with clothes and what the world owed me. Now, things were different. There’s nothing quite like nearly losing your life a bunch of times to make you grateful that you have one.

  As I watched, a girl stepped off the bus. She was wearing a long light blue dress that nearly dragged the ground. She had dark hair—like mine—pulled back into a loose bun at the nape of her neck. Something about her seemed familiar. I leaned over, trying to get a better look, and Heathcliff followed my gaze. She turned, ever so slightly, taking in a deep breath of air as she stepped onto the green. Unlike the other kids, she carried no luggage, no backpack, not even a purse. She also seemed strangely happy to be here. While the others frowned and moped, she opened up her arms wide, like she wanted to hug the air, as if she was finally free.

  I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Something wasn’t right. Something about her was all wrong. I looked over and Heathcliff was suddenly transfixed. It was as if I wasn’t even in the room. He focused on the girl in the commons with a laser-like intensity that I found troubling. He never looked at other girls like that. Only me.

  He stood and moved to the window like she was pulling him there by a string.

  That’s when I knew.

  “No,” I said, as my heart sped up, the beats bouncing together frantically like heavy drops of rain on a tin roof. “It can’t be.”

  “Can’t be what?” Hana asked me.

  Then, just for an instant, the girl in the long dress turned to face me. I swore she saw me, staring at her from the cafeteria window. I felt frozen to the spot, fear shooting through my veins.

  Heathcliff was at the window, too, staring out of it as if in some kind of trance.

  “Cathy,” Heathcliff said softly, putting his hand to the window. “Cathy.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The shock made it hard for me to breath
e, like there was a big flat stone on my chest pressing all the air out of me. I’d seen the impossible again and again at Bard Academy and yet this was the one thing my eyes simply didn’t want to believe.

  Catherine Earnshaw was dead. I’d seen Emily Bronte kill her with my own eyes. I remember like it was yesterday, the sight of her hand, turned to bone.

  But if she was here, and she was alive, that changed everything.

  I suddenly felt stupid. How many times had I thought Heathcliff had died? Only to see him appear again? The same could happen to Catherine. This was Bard, where the impossible wasn’t just possible, it was probable.

  I don’t know why I was so shocked to see her, standing in the commons, her arms spread wide and a smile on her face.Maybe it was because she really did look like me. She was standing fifty feet away and yet it was like I was looking in the mirror. I’d heard there was a resemblance, but this was ridiculous.I didn’t just kind of look like her. I was her.

  My eyes sought out Heathcliff, but he was turned away from me, hand on the window in a kind of trance. I knew Heathcliff had probably liked me at first because I reminded him of her, but I thought it was only part of his feelings for me. I had no idea that I was a dead ringer for Catherine Earnshaw.

  Now, it really all made sense. Heathcliff loved me not because a part of her was in me, but because he could pretend all of her was. I felt the room spin and the floor shifted beneath my feet. I needed him to tell me it wasn’t true.

  I reached out to touch Heathcliff, to grab his hand, but he moved away from me, and I grasped air.

  “Miranda? Are you okay?” Hana eased in beside me.

  “You look like you saw a ghost,” Blade said.

  “Who’s Cathy?” Samir asked Heathcliff. But Heathcliff was three steps away, then five. He was going outside. There was nothing I could do to stop him. I watched him, not able to move, as he quickened his pace, found the door and slammed it open. He was almost to the green—to Catherine—before I could even answer Hana’s question.