The Scarlet Letterman (20 page)

“Nice try,” I tell Death, who smells, well, a lot like roadkill. Quickly I snatch up his drawing and rip it to pieces. His face and arms are suddenly beginning to crack, each wrinkle filled with bright light brimming up from beneath, as if he’s going to explode. Instead he just falls to torn pieces that glow briefly on the ground before they turn to ash. I dispatch the other horsemen just as easily, and Ms. W and Coach H seem surprised for a moment, and then see the pieces of the drawings in my hand and give me nods of approval. After Pestilence is destroyed, Samir comes to with a groggy moan.

“God, what happened? I have the worst hangover ever.” He groans, holding his head as if he’s afraid it might fall apart.

“You almost died, you big idiot,” Hana cries, and then throws her arms around Samir in a hug so tight that Samir can’t breathe. When she realizes what she’s doing, she drops her arms, and instead winds up and gives Samir a hard punch in the shoulder.

“Ow! What was that for? I nearly
died
.” Samir groans again.

“Exactly! You almost died and left me, you jerk,” Hana says.

“Why didn’t Death kill me?” I ask Ms. W, who approaches and puts her arm around me.

She studies me for a second. “You’re different from Samir,” she says. “You have roots in both this world and the fictional one. So he didn’t have the same power over you.”

Wow. Finally a perk of having a great-great-great grandmother who’s a fictional character.

“Where’s Blake?” Coach H asks me, shaking off droplets of water from the river, which has turned back, thankfully, to a normal water color.

Just then, we hear a crashing sound coming from the boathouse. I’d completely forgotten about Heathcliff.

I’m the first to scramble up the stairs, although Coach H and Ms. W don’t bother with them (they simply float straight up through the floor of the boathouse office). Inside I see Heathcliff cornered by Blake — not Blake the tiger, but Blake as his normal self. Blake has opened the locket and has the tiny remaining corner of
Wuthering Heights
out, and is holding it precariously between two fingers. Heathcliff is temporarily frozen, not sure whether to leap on him or stay put.

“Stay back! All of you,” shouts Blake. He seems to have a kind of wild look in his eye.

“Blake, you have to stop what you’re doing,” Ms. W says in her most calm voice. “No good will come of it.”

Coach H tries to work his way to the other side of Blake, but Blake whirls. “I said
back
,” he shouts, waving the piece of paper in front of him. I’m surprised Ms. W and Coach H don’t just sweep forward. It’s not like they would mind if Heathcliff is sent back to
Wuthering Heights.

“This is not part of God’s plan,” Blake mumbles to himself. “This place is an abomination.”

“What place? Bard?” I ask him. If I can keep him talking then he won’t destroy the paper.

“Obviously,” he says. “I was a faithful servant of God. I do not deserve to be stuck in limbo. I ought to be in heaven with my darling wife. Heaven was promised to me by Gabriele! Limbo is for sinners. Dante’s sinners. And the very nature of this place is a sacrilege. That church is an insult to God. I spent my life working in the glory of the Lord. All my poetry and artistry dedicated to His great power.”

Okay, he’s clearly gone off the deep end.

“But you yourself know that God’s will can’t be known,” Ms. W says. “Your tiger represents the unknowable and often contradictory nature of God. He didn’t just create the peaceful lamb. He also created the fierce killer, the tiger. It proves you can’t really understand God’s motives.”

“Yes, but…”

“And if God is truly mysterious, then He could have created a place like this. To test people like you, and people like us.”

Blake is temporarily calmed by this new thought. He lowers his arms, as if trying to process this new information.

“But…Gabriele told me,” he says, looking up to a space above our heads.

“Did you actually
see
Gabriele?” Coach H asks.

“No, but I heard her,” Blake says. “She spoke to me.”

“She? I thought Gabriele was a man,” Hana says.

“Emily,” Ms. W hisses under her breath to Coach H.

Does she mean Emily Brontë? The ghost who just last semester tried to free all her fictional characters, nearly destroying our dimension as we know it. Could she have survived the destruction of her book? Then again, Heathcliff is here because part of one page survived. Maybe Emily is, too, only she’s invisible to most of us. Or chooses to be.

“Did you know about this? Is Emily still with us?” Coach H thunders at Heathcliff, but Heathcliff looks just as surprised as the rest of us.

“She’s the stalker,” I cry, struck by a sudden thought. “What if it was Emily Brontë wearing the sweatshirt and running around campus causing mischief? Heathcliff was tied up, but Emily — as a ghost — could have taken nearly any form she wanted. That would explain why the Hooded Sweatshirt Stalker didn’t have a face. Maybe Emily had enough power in this plane to fill out clothes, but not much else.”

“Emily?” Blake echoes. “Emily Brontë?”

“We think you’ve been misled,” Ms. W says softly. “We think the angel you thought was Gabriele might have been the voice of Emily Brontë. She’s wanted to destroy this campus and she used you as her pawn. She’s the one who told you what you wanted to hear.”

Blake slumps forward, the piece of
Wuthering Heights
and my locket slipping from his grasp. Coach H sweeps forward, picking up both items. Ms. W puts her arm around Blake, who seems to be crying.

“I think the danger’s over,” Ms. W tells us.

“But what about Emily?” I ask. “She’s still on the loose.”

“She clearly needs help to do any damage, or she wouldn’t have involved Blake,” Ms. W says. “There’s nothing we can do now but tell Headmaster B about what’s transpired.”

“That means show’s over, folks,” Coach H tells us.

Thirty

“I
missed
the horsemen
of the Apocalypse?” cries Blade when I find her in our room the next day and fill her in on the near ending of the world she just missed. “Oh my God, I am going to
die
.”

As I suspected, my Goth roomie is very sorry to have missed Death and Pestilence.

“Where were you anyway?” Hana asks her, standing in our doorway and eyeing Blade’s Satan poster.

“Duh — with Number Thirty-one,” she says. “We were having sex in his room.”

“Um, and just how did you get away from the Guardians? How did you avoid the room sweeps?” I couldn’t get two minutes alone with Ryan, and here is my roomie doing the dirty with Number Thirty-one.

“I have my ways,” Blade says. “Like an invisibility spell.”

“Does your ‘invisibility spell’ have anything to do with hiding in Number Thirty-one’s closet?”

“It might,” Blade says.

“So you didn’t see the tiger?” Hana asks, disbelieving.

“Nope,” Blade says, shaking her head.

“God, you missed
everything
,” Hana says. “So much for your psychic Wiccan witch powers.” Hana nods toward Blade’s witch graduation diploma on her wall.

“I’m not psychic,” Blade says. “If I had ESP, then I would’ve known Number Thirty-one is a waste of time because he has a pecker the size of a…” Blade holds up her pinkie finger.

“Ew,” Hana and I both say at once.

“That’s TMI,” I add.

“God — I can’t
believe
I missed the horse dudes,” Blade exclaims, punching her pillow. “Were they cool? Tell me everything.”

“They weren’t cool. Pestilence nearly killed Samir,” Hana says.

“Pestilence! Ugh — and I missed it!” Blade says, flopping down on her bed and covering her face with her pillow.

“So how do you think they’re going to explain the tiger?” Hana asks me, ignoring Blade’s theatrics.

“They don’t have to,” Blade says, holding up the latest edition of the
Bard Weekly.
“There’s already a rumor that it escaped from a ship carrying a zoo across the Atlantic.”

The newspaper’s headlines read “Tiger Escapes from Zoo Ship” and “Headmaster B Subdues Tiger with Folding Chair.”

“Did she really kick the tiger’s butt with a
chair
?” Blade asks.

“Pretty much,” Hana says.

“Don’t you think parents will be upset?” I ask.

“Uh, did you forget where we are?” Hana asks me. “The parents who sent their kids here don’t care.” Hana looks down at her hands. She speaks from personal experience, considering her parentals seem to always take neglect to the next level.

“Do you know what’s going to happen to Heathcliff?” Hana asks me.

“I don’t know,” I say. This much is true. Ms. W and Coach H took him with them to see Headmaster B. Ms. W promised they wouldn’t hurt him, and that I’d be summoned later. I remember the look on Heathcliff’s face, though. He seemed resigned to whatever they decided. I can’t help but worry. I’m not even fully enjoying my new freedom. Ms. W took away my red vest and told me I’m once again allowed to mix with the Bard masses.

“By the way, speaking of beefcakes, you’ll be happy to know that Ryan’s going to be okay,” Blade says. “He had a mild concussion and he’ll be hanging out in the infirmary for a couple of days, but should be fine.”

I’d been so worried about Heathcliff, I temporarily forgot about Ryan. What does that say about me? What kind of girlfriend — I mean, ex-girlfriend — am I?

Down at the bottom of the front page of the newspaper, there’s a small story saying they’ve caught the Hooded Sweatshirt Stalker. Hana taps that story with her finger.

“What is Parker going to do without a stalker around?” she asks. “She doesn’t have an excuse to stalk Ryan.”

“I’m guessing she’s not happy,” I reply.

“That karma, she’s a bitch,” Blade adds. “So are you going to give up the details about the horsemen? Or am I going to have to beg?”

“Begging would be nice,” I say.

“Don’t make me put a hex on you,” Blade says.

That afternoon, Ms. W takes me to Headmaster B’s office.

“Ms. W, I was wondering,” I say.

“Yes?”

“Before you disappeared, you tried to tell me something about my future here at Bard. What did you mean?”

Ms. W gives me a sidelong glance.

“I think you’ll find things out in your own time.”

“But is there something you know — that the faculty knows — and aren’t telling me?” I think back to the bombshell that I’m part fiction. The faculty knew and didn’t say. What else do they know about me?

Ms. W sighs.

“There’s some speculation that you’re going to be a writer. A very good writer,” Ms. W says.

“Me?” I ask. “But Coach H just accused me of plagiarizing.”

“He knows you didn’t do that. But Parker put him in a difficult position,” Ms. W says. “But, more importantly, you’d be the first prominent writer with fictional roots. No one knows what this could mean. But it would be a first.”

“How do you know I’ll be a good writer?”

“Let’s just say that writers know their own,” Ms. W says. “We can smell them a mile away. And if you’d like, I’d like to tutor you. Mentor you, even.”

“So if I become a famous writer, then you get some good karma points and get one step closer to getting out of this place?”

“You see right through me,” Ms. W says, smiling. “That’s the first step in being a good writer. Being a good observer.”

“So the lessons are already starting then?” I say. “Does this mean you’re going to be my Mr. Miyagi? Wax on. Wax off?”

“Mr. Who?” Ms. W asks. Sometimes I forget that her pop culture references only extend to 1941.

“So are you going to tell me what Headmaster B decided to do with Heathcliff? Or do I have to guess?”

“You’ll find out shortly,” Ms. W says. “It’s a fair decision.”

In Headmaster B’s office, I see a subdued Heathcliff sitting quietly in a chair, staring at Headmaster B, who is sitting behind her desk with her arms crossed. Heathcliff’s dark, curly hair is back from his face and he looks like he’s shaved. The Bard uniform barely fits his broad shoulders.

“Miranda — sit,” Headmaster B says. I take the open seat next to Heathcliff. I look over at his face, trying to read it, but as usual it’s a blank slate. Correction: a frowning slate. He doesn’t like authority figures, least of all Headmaster B — the sister of his creator, Emily Brontë.

“First of all, I owe you an apology,” Headmaster B says. “We unfairly accused and convicted you of meddling in the disappearance of two of our faculty members. For that, I apologize.”

“Apology accepted,” I say.

“Now, before us is the more serious issue of you withholding information about Heathcliff,” Headmaster B says. “And, more generally, about Heathcliff’s future.”

I glance over at Heathcliff, but he’s just staring at his shoes. “I think it’s important for you to know how helpful he was these past few weeks,” I blurt. “Not only would I have been dead, but most of the students, if it wasn’t for Heathcliff —”

Headmaster B waves her arm to show she doesn’t want to hear more. “I know, Ms. Tate,” she says, unable to keep a little annoyance from her voice. “But what’s more important, Miranda, is that you no longer keep secrets like this from us in the future. It’s important that we be able to trust you.”

“I understand,” I say. “I promise.”

“Good,” she says and nods her head. “Now, the faculty have met to discuss the fate of Heathcliff. And we’ve decided that, for now…he can stay.”

“He can stay!” I shout, elated. Without meaning to, I lean over and hug Heathcliff. He’s temporarily taken aback, but then he folds his arms around me.

“Ahem,” Headmaster B says, clearing her throat. “Contain yourself, Ms. Tate,” she commands before continuing. “There are three conditions under which he can stay. He cannot leave the school grounds, which basically encompass this island. His stay here can only be three years, as that’s the length of time he is missing from the novel
Wuthering Heights.
And he’s already spent eight months of that time here.”

“That’s all!” I cry. That’s hardly fair. He can only stay in this world, well, until I graduate.