A Tale of Two Proms (Bard Academy) Read online

  But, Catherine was moving, too. She was sliding into a crowd, and then, just like that, she disappeared. One second she was here, the next she was gone.

  Heathcliff was on the green, spinning around, his head whipping first one way and then the other, frantic to find her. I don’t think I’d ever seen such a desperate look on his face before.

  She was gone. Disappeared. Just like a ghost.

  ***

  “Catherine? Here. You’re sure?” This was Headmaster B. She was sitting at her desk, her face grave. She was a tiny woman, and even when she was standing she came just barely to my shoulder. Sitting in her massive oak chair behind her desk, she looked like a child playing at being a grown-up. She was wearing a prim, modern gray suit. I tried to imagine her in old-fashioned clothes like she would’ve worn when she was alive in the early 19th century, but I couldn’t quite imagine it. She wore tortoise shell glasses and had her hair pulled back in a severe bun. She might be small, but make no mistake Charlotte Bronte was not to be tested. She might be tiny, but she could kick some serious butt. And it might just be yours if you didn’t show her enough respect. I’d learned that the hard way.

  “I’m positive,” I told her. Hana and I had come here to tell Headmaster B what we’d seen. We’d been told to report any fictional characters running loose.

  “What about you?” Headmaster B turned to Hana, who was standing next to me. “Did you see her?”

  “Well…” Hana hesitated. “I mean, I saw someone. But I didn’t get a good look at her face. There were a lot of people on the green and the new kids coming off the bus. It was hard to see. But Heathcliff did say ‘Cathy’ and then he ran out looking for her.”

  I hadn’t mentioned that part. That part was too hard to talk about. So was the fact that Heathcliff had disappeared shortly after that without saying goodbye. He’d run off into the crowd, determined to find her, and I hadn’t seen him since. At the thought of him running after her, the knots in my stomach tightened.

  All I wanted was for Heathcliff to come back, to talk to me, to let me know what was inside his head. I honestly had no idea and the not knowing was killing me. Without him to reassure me, I imagined all kinds of scenarios—none of them good.

  “Besides, remember, she’s been here before.” Hana meant that Catherine had slipped into this world as Kate Shaw, a Bard Academy student, years ago. In fact, I’d even stayed in her room the first year I was at Bard. That was back when I thought the only thing wrong with the school was a little haunting by one disgruntled ghost. Turned out, the ghosts at Bard were far more real than I ever imagined. So was Catherine Earnshaw. And so was Heathcliff. “All you need is access to the vault and…” Hana didn’t finish her sentence. We both knew where she was going.

  And to Wuthering Heights, I thought. The very book that had been sitting on Heathcliff’s shelf in the cottage he’d shown me the night before.

  Wait… Had Heathcliff summoned Catherine? I suddenly felt hot and cold all at once.

  But, no. He’d been surprised as anyone, hadn’t he? I tried to recall the look on his face. Surprised, yes. Stunned, even. No, Heathcliff hadn’t done it.

  My mind clicked forward. Whoever had summoned Catherine must have known about the cabin. This made my palms sweat. Who knew about Heathcliff’s cabin? And the vault books?

  “This is troubling,” said Headmaster B as she paced in front of her massive oak desk. She rubbed her chin as if in deep thought. “We’ll have to double check the vault.”

  I already knew that she would find the book missing. For some reason, however, I didn’t volunteer this information. I could feel Headmaster B’s eyes studying me as if she knew I was hiding something. I knew I should speak up, but I kept quiet. I wasn’t going to tell Headmaster B about Heathcliff’s cabin. If she knew already there was nothing I could do about it. But if she didn’t, I’d be getting Heathcliff in a world of trouble.

  “Do you think it means…” Hana began and then stopped. I knew where she was going with this. She meant if Catherine was here, did that mean Emily Bronte had found a way back?

  “It would make sense if Em…” I began.

  “Don’t say her name,” Headmaster B admonished. Her brown eyes grew wide and fearful. Emily Bronte had been banished from Bard for trying to destroy the school. And the world, too. Emily had been driven half-mad by purgatory. She was determined to banish us all. It had taken the strength of nearly the entire faculty to fight Emily Bronte last time.

  And Charlotte was her sister. It had been especially difficult for her to face Emily. I sometimes wondered what that would be like—if Lindsay and I found ourselves on opposite sides of an epic battle—could I do what needed to be done? Could I banish my own sister to a fate possibly worse than death?

  I wasn’t so sure I could do it. Lindsay was a pain, and we didn’t always agree—or frankly, ever agree on anything—but she was still my sister.

  “I just mean it’s a coincidence that Catherine is back. I think we should all be on guard,” I said. The last time she’d been on campus, Emily had tried to kill us all.

  “What do we do first?” Hana asked.

  “I’ll have to call a meeting.” Headmaster B looked distracted now as she sat back down at her desk and stared out the large window looking out to the woods surrounding Bard.

  “When and where?”

  Headmaster B glanced up at us as if waking from an unpleasant dream. “Oh, no, no. This is a faculty matter. I’m afraid you two are not invited.”

  “But…” I had a stake in this, too. If Emily was behind Catherine’s appearance, then she might be able to manipulate Heathcliff to do her bidding. She’d done that before. The first time she tried to take over Bard, she’d put Heathcliff under some kind of spell and he’d kidnapped my friends.

  He’d managed to fight it – a feat that only spoke to how strong Heathcliff really was – but I wasn’t sure if he’d always be able to resist her call. Or Catherine’s, for that matter.

  “Miranda has to be involved,” Hana said. “After last time…”

  Hana meant that Emily had tried to use me to open the portal between the fictional world and ours. My family was supposed to have a special link to Emily and to Wuthering Heights. Some faculty members thought that my great-great grandmother was Catherine Earnshaw’s long lost daughter. It’s a complicated story, but the rumor was a minor character escaped from the book some years ago, and managed to leave Shipwreck Island somehow. That makes me like one-sixteenth fictional or something like that. It was supposed to explain why I looked so much like Catherine.

  The short of it was I was supposed to be a living, breathing bridge between the two worlds, one reality and one fiction. At least, that’s what they faculty had said. I was still clueless about the big picture. And so was everyone else. Honestly, I didn’t even really know if I believed the story. But I knew that Emily did.

  “No,” Headmaster B said. “It’s too dangerous.”

  I suddenly thought about Lindsay. She could be in danger, too. Emily wouldn’t hesitate to use her if necessary.

  “I’ll have to keep an eye on Lindsay,” I said, wondering if I’d even be able to, given how often she liked to disappear lately.

  “And we’ll be keeping an eye on you,” Headmaster B said, her tone flat and her eyes suspicious.

  ***

  “That was rude,” Hana said after we left. “How many times have you saved this place? And you still get no respect.”

  “She’s just being cautious.” I’m not sure why I was defending Headmaster B. She had been rude, but maybe I was just feeling guilty for not telling her about the cabin in the woods. Or maybe part of me felt guilty in general. It did seem like a lot of trouble at Bard was my fault, whether or not I intended for any of it to happen.

  “I think the word you’re looking for is ungrateful.”

  We walked out of her office and down the long, dark hallway. Everything at Bard was poorly lit and made of old dark wood so even the most
brilliant of lights probably wouldn’t have brightened up the rooms all that much, and the lights here were dim at best. At Bard, the sun never seemed to shine. It was perpetually cloudy and overcast, putting a gloomy wash over everything. Fog covered the grounds as regularly as rain. Most of the old buildings were embellished with stone gargoyles and that didn’t help lift the mood, either. Bard had been here at least a hundred and fifty years, but the island had been working its magic for much longer.

  I had an uneasy relationship to this place. Sometimes I felt like I understood it. Other times, it just scared me.

  “She’s just trying to be cautious,” I said. “Given that I’m in the middle of nearly every plot to take over Bard, can you blame her?”

  “That’s not your fault that you’re part fiction or whatever they say you are.” Hana shifted her backpack on her shoulder. “You know, what bothers me is that nobody really even knows what could happen if the portal is opened.”

  “Do I need to remind you about Dracula? Or Mrs. Rochester, aka fire starter?” Talk about a memorable sophomore year.

  “Yeah, but you remember what the faculty said at first? They thought if more than one fictional character crossed the barrier into our world, then it could cause the dimensions to be unstable. They thought just having Heathcliff and Mrs. Rochester here might destroy the world. But that didn’t happen, did it?”

  I shook my head. She was right.

  “So, the point is,” Hana continued, “nobody really knows what would happen if the portal was opened and stayed open.”

  “Do you really want to take that risk and find out?”

  Hana shrugged. “I guess not, but it bothers me, that’s all. We don’t even know what we’re fighting for—or against—here.”

  “Do we ever?” I asked. I felt defeated and I hadn’t even started to unwind this mystery. I don’t know if it was the cold shoulder Headmaster B had given me or the fact that I might be losing Heathcliff, but I felt hopeless.

  Because I didn’t want to think about Heathcliff, I focused on Headmaster B. Hana was right. Her distrust was insanely unfair. I’d risked my life a dozen times for the school, and yet, Headmaster B continued to think I was a menace. I realized this must be what Heathcliff lived with all the time since nobody trusted him. Everyone just expected that eventually he’d do something rotten. I hated that feeling. It was like Headmaster B and the rest of the faculty were just waiting for me to screw up big time. And all I wanted to do was prove them wrong.

  And then there was Catherine.

  Why was she here? And why now?

  “I honestly don’t know what he sees in her,” Hana was saying now, as we walked out onto the path leading through the commons.

  “Do you mean Catherine?” I asked. I was thinking the same thing. I never quite understood why Heathcliff loved Catherine in the first place. She was self-centered, completely shallow, she treated him terribly and she eventually married someone else, basically for his money. You can almost (not quite) see why Heathcliff goes all diabolical/revenge-obsessed in the second half of his story Wuthering Heights. She’d be enough to drive me crazy, too.

  “No,” Hana said, shaking her head. “I was talking about Blade.”

  “What?” I blinked, and realized that Hana was staring out across the patch of grass where Blade and Samir were sitting beneath the statue of Shakespeare laughing at a joke one of them had made. “Oh, right… well…” I took in Blade’s dark eyeliner and her multiple body piercings and Samir’s straight-laced, fully ironed Bard uniform, and wasn’t sure I got it, either. “I guess opposites attract?”

  “I guess,” Hana said. She pushed up the glasses on her nose. Of all of us, Hana really didn’t deserve to be here. Her wealthy family sent her away to a number of boarding schools mainly because they didn’t like her underfoot. She kept running away from them, trying to get back home to her little brother, and that’s why they eventually sent her here to Bard. It was hard to run when you were stuck on an island. It was like Alcatraz for the acne-prone.

  “Do you… uh, have a thing for…”

  “For who?” Hana’s voice was sharp.

  “For Samir?”

  “What? No!” She shook her head vehemently back and forth. Her denial was a little bit too passionate, I thought. “I mean, he can date who he wants. I don’t care.”

  I didn’t have time to press her on the point, because I nearly collided with my sister, Lindsay.

  These days, every time I saw her, I was surprised by how grown-up she looked. She’d matured quite a lot in the last year. Lindsay had ditched the retainer, grown three inches, and had eased up on her obsession with popularity and acceptance by the cool kids (at least, a little bit). Girls like Parker Rodham, the most evil Queen Bee, who lured gullible Lindsay into her web of deceit last year. Thankfully, Lindsay had now sworn off all things Parker.

  “How did you get over here so fast?” was the first thing Lindsay said.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked her.

  “When I left the library you were still in there. And what’s up with ignoring me? I’m your sister, yo’!”

  That was Lindsay—she was the whitest girl I knew but that didn’t stop her from trying to sound like Usher.

  “Lindsay, I wasn’t in the library. I was talking to Headmaster B.”

  “Yes, you were. And you were all chummy with Parker Rodham. I thought you guys hated each other. And you told me I wasn’t supposed to talk to her…”

  “What? I wasn’t talking to Parker Rodham.” Had hell frozen over? Parker was pretty much evil incarnate. She’d had plenty of opportunities to reform, but had never taken any of them. In other words, I would not be chatty with Parker. Not in this universe. It had been the worst news ever when I’d heard Parker didn’t graduate with her class last year. She’d been held back after she’d been caught cheating. In one case, she copied one of my papers, word-for-word.

  “And you looked different. You had your hair in pigtails.”

  “I don’t do pigtails,” I said.

  “You did. It was vintage Britney Spears.”

  “I don’t do vintage Britney Spears.” It was impossible to keep the exasperation out of my voice. Did Lindsay not know me at all? I didn’t do the sexy school girl thing. I did the artsy chick thing.

  “Hey—I saw what I saw. Geez, you’re touchy.” Lindsay said. “Maybe you need to borrow a tampon?”

  “Lindsay!” She may look older, but she was the same old embarrassing little sister. She was always trying to talk about periods and feminine products in public.

  “What? Hana doesn’t care—do you Hana? Just us girls here.”

  “Not that that would stop you,” I muttered. I guess I should’ve been clearer. Lindsay had matured on the outside. On the inside, she was fifteen going on twelve.

  “You really thought you saw Miranda in the library?” Hana asked.

  “Yes, and she was ignoring me—so rude.” Lindsay glared at me to show she was taking it personally. I was starting to get a bad feeling about this. Lindsay was serious. It wasn’t a joke.

  I looked at Hana. “You don’t think it was…”

  “Who? Oooh—wait—a character, right?” Lindsay couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice. Next to Blade, she was always the most geeked up when something paranormal happened. She’d been extremely disappointed by our relatively drama-free year.

  “I bet anything it was Catherine,” Hana said, sounding confident.

  “What? She’s back? When did that happen?” Lindsay’s face glowed at the prospect of another Bard adventure.

  “Long story,” Hana said.

  “I'm going to go have a word with her,” I said.

  “I smell girl fight,” Lindsay said.

  “Do you really think that’s a good idea?” Hana asked me. “Headmaster B told us not to get involved. Maybe this is what Catherine wants—some kind of showdown.”

  “Wait—can it be a girl fight if you’re trying to knock out you
r great-great-great-great grandma?” Lindsay mused, mostly to herself, because neither Hana nor I were paying attention to what she was saying anymore.

  “I can’t just sit here and do nothing.” I’d rather squeeze some lemon juice into a paper cut, thank you very much.

  A bell sounded, signaling the impending start of fourth period.

  “Well right now it’s got to wait,” Hana said. “Now, we’ve got class with Coach H.”

  I considered for a second skipping class, but I knew what the penalties were. If guardians caught you on the grounds, it was instant detention or worse. Still, it might be worth it if I could solve this Cathy problem.

  “You really want to risk getting further on Headmaster B’s bad side?” Hana asked me, as if reading my mind.

  “No,” I sighed and shrugged.

  “Besides, she’s probably long gone by now,” Hana said. “Let’s go to class.”

  “What? No fight? Come on,” Lindsay seemed disappointed as she fell into step beside us.

  “You’re not helping, Linds,” Hana said.

  I glanced up then and saw Ryan Kent sitting on the steps of the upperclassmen boys’ dorm, talking to a couple of other basketball players. Ryan looked like he belonged on a college brochure; his bright white smile was commercial-ready. When he saw us, he stood and walked over. I was always surprised by how tall he was. Sure, next to Heathcliff, he looked a little on the thin side. But that was only because Heathcliff was so tall and broad. When there was no Heathcliff around to compare him to, Ryan was a presence in his own right. Add in his clear blue eyes, and it’s no wonder that half the girls at school were crushing on him. Ryan was moving towards us now, his eyes on Hana. He sent me a brief glance and then, in an interesting twist, settled back on Hana. He missed Lindsay altogether.

  “Hey,” Ryan said, pushing himself away from statue and his friends. “Can I walk with you to class?”

  Lindsay nearly tripped over herself to say yes, but I noticed—again—he was looking at Hana. This was new. He promptly fell into step beside Hana, who only gave him the barest of nods. It just showed how things had changed. When Hana first met Ryan, she’d been as transfixed by his looks as most any heterosexual girl with two x chromosomes. But, after time, she’d become used to him, I guess, and settled into her role as platonic acquaintance.