A Tale of Two Proms (Bard Academy) (30 page)

“If you truly love her,” Headmaster B said. “You’ll do this. She won’t be safe any other way.”

I glanced at Heathcliff. “No, don’t….Don’t do this!” I screamed, but I could tell by the look on his face he’d already decided.

“If it will save Miranda, I’ll go,” Heathcliff said and held his head high. “Do what you will.”

Headmaster B began to open the book, and I struggled to get to my feet, but Coach H held me fast. He wasn’t going to let me go.

 “There is another way,” Miss A said. She came from somewhere behind me, her skirts rustling as she walked past. Sydney trailed behind her. Headmaster B eyed them both warily, holding the book out as if it were a weapon. “Be still, Charlotte. This isn’t a mutiny. Just consider another option.” Miss A spread her hands to show they were empty and Headmaster B relaxed a little. She was willing to let her pass. Miss A walked closer to Heathcliff, bringing Sydney with her. She stood him beside Heathcliff. The two boys looked at each other, eyeing one another from head to toe. In the dark of the street I could hardly tell them apart. Heathcliff frowned, as if he didn’t like what he saw. Sydney frowned right back at him. It was like watching a live action mirror.

“The resemblance is really uncanny,” Hana said. She’d drawn closer to Coach H and me.

“They could be twins,” Coach H agreed.

“They are nearly identical,” said Headmaster B. “But surely you don’t mean to…” She glanced at Miss A, and then both of them exchanged a look with Coach H. 

“Could it work?” Coach H asked. He turned to Headmaster B as if they were trying to figure out how to fix a projector. 

“Of course it wouldn’t.” Headmaster B gave a dismissive wave of her hand.

“You won’t know until you try.” Miss A smiled sweetly at Headmaster B, who did not loosen her grip on
Wuthering Heights.

A column fell with a thundering crash behind them. A big hunk of the roof tumbled forward. It sprayed me with dust and small bits of broken concrete. Lindsay stood beside me, her hair sprinkled with specks of gray dust.

 “Can we move things along?” Lindsay asked. “I’d rather
not
get crushed by flying debris from the library. So can you all stop farting around and
tell the rest of us what you’re talking about!
” I guess it was Lindsay’s turn to lose her crap and yell at the faculty. 

“Tone, please, Miss Tate,” Headmaster B said tersely. She cleared her throat and continued. “To answer your question, Miss Tate, Miss A, I believe, is offering up Sydney in a kind of exchange.”

“What?” I cried, and I wasn’t the only one.

“Sydney is going to take
Heathcliff
’s place? And Sydney is
cool
with that?” Samir blurted.

Every one of us stared at Sydney, expecting him to complain loudly about the prospect. Instead, he surprised us all and slowly nodded his head.

 “It’s my choice,” he said. 

I thought back to when Miss A had pulled Sydney aside earlier that evening. I thought about how intent they were in their conversation. Had she been preparing him for this very moment? But…how could he do something like this? He barely knew me.

“But I thought he was supposed to die in
A Tale of Two Cities
,” Hana said.

 “He already had his execution day,” Miss A said, referring to his brush with the guillotine. “He won’t be missed. The actual execution is not described in detail in the book. This is an area that could be… ” She paused, then added, “glossed over.”

I could feel Heathcliff’s eyes move from me to Sydney. He didn’t say a word. I didn’t know if what he planned to do.

“You can’t want to have Heathcliff’s life,” Headmaster B told Sydney. “It’s a wretched one full of suffering.”

Heathcliff didn’t seem fazed by Headmaster B’s cold assessment of his whole existence. Either he was resigned to the fact she saw him that way, or he agreed.

“Better than losing your head to the guillotine, though, I suspect.” Sydney gave me smile. “And yet, possibly equally heroic.” He looked at me intently and I understood why he was doing this.

“You can’t make a decision like this in the moment, son,” Coach H said, as he let me go and moved closer to Sydney. “There’s no turning back after you go.”

“I’ve had days to think about it,” Sydney said. “I’m ready.”

Days? But he and Miss A had only been talking tonight. Unless this had been Miss A’s plan all along. Unless
she
had been the one to bring Sydney over to this world. She was looking at me expectantly, as if she were waiting patiently for me to put it all together.

“When you said you’d help me and Heathcliff, you didn’t really mean help us go to prom. You brought Sydney here.” I took several steps forward. Everything started to make sense. 

Miss A nodded. “Forgive me, Miranda. I may have been a bit…
overzealous.
But, I wanted what was best for you two. I knew Charlotte was intent on keeping you apart, but I thought there might be a way to keep you together.”

“I don’t think we even know if them being together is the best thing for
anyone
,” Coach H said. None of the surviving faculty held all that high an opinion of Heathcliff.

Heathcliff’s eyes studied me, but he remained silent.

“I want to do this,” Sydney told me.

“There has to be another way,” I said. I might not be in love with Sydney, but I didn’t think it was fair that he’d have to take Heathcliff’s place, either.

Sydney approached me, and gently put his hands on my arms. “Miranda, I am a worthless and mean drunk. I’ll make a great Heathcliff. No offense meant.” He nodded at Heathcliff, who just scowled.

“But…” I looked at the ground, confused and torn.

Sydney lifted my chin with one finger.

“This is a far, far better thing I do now, than I have ever done,” he said and he bent and gave me a light kiss on the cheek. Near me, Heathcliff stiffened. I put my hand out and touched his arm. He didn’t move.   

Sydney pulled away from me and then walked to Headmaster B, holding his head high. Headmaster B hesitated, and in that pause, Miss A swooped in and scooped the book straight out of her hands.

“Jane!” she exclaimed, displeased.

“Charlotte, you know this is the best course of action.” Jane pushed up the sleeves of her gown as if she planned to do some heavy lifting and then she opened the cover of the old book.

Miss A began to read from the novel and as she did, a portal appeared, like the others. It shone gold along the edges as it grew from the size of a lunchbox to a full-sized doorway. On the other side, I saw a cloudy sky and rolling hills as far as the eye could see—the moors, I assumed. Heathcliff took a step closer to the portal, his eyes wide. I didn’t know if he ever thought he’d see his home again. I wondered if he missed it. Despite all he’d done and said, I found as I looked up at his sharp profile that I still had nagging doubts. Did he want to be here with me? Or did a part of him want to go back? I couldn’t read the expression on his face. I wished I knew what he was thinking.

I tried to imagine what it would be like to leave everything and everyone you’d ever known, understanding that you’d never be back. It was what he had asked of me—to stay at Bard. I realized he’d already done this himself. He was asking of me what he’d already given up.

Heathcliff felt me looking at him. He didn’t turn but he reached out and grabbed my hand. He squeezed it once as if he already knew all the questions I was asking him. His touch grounded me.

I felt Sydney’s eyes on me and I looked at him. He’d been studying me and Heathcliff and it seemed to confirm something for him. He gave me a nod and a wink.  

“I’ve got two for the price of one,” Sydney said. And I think I was the only one in the room who knew what he meant. He meant that both Lucie and I would think about Sydney long after he’d gone, about the sacrifice he’d made for us. I could feel Heathcliff’s questioning eyes on me, but I didn’t return his gaze. I squeezed his hand instead. He would have to be content with that.

After all, things were far from settled between us. We had a long talk ahead of us, about just what he’d done with Catherine. About why he’d taken such a reckless risk, and how he could make me think he’d left me. I knew he’d done it because he thought it was best for me, but next time, he should just let me in on the plan. His secrecy was going to be a major issue if he thought he could solve problems without me. But for this moment, he knew that I picked him and I knew that he picked me, and for now, that was enough.

Sydney turned from me then and walked into the portal. He didn’t look back again. He just stepped through. As soon as he was over the threshold, Miss A clamped the book shut. Heathcliff worked his arm around me and squeezed.

The tremors, I noticed, had stopped. The library was quiet and calm.

“Well, I’ll be damned, it worked,” Coach H said. “How did you even think of it?”

Miss A spread her hands as if she’d been caught red-handed. “What can I say? I
am
a romantic.”  And then she smiled at me. “And I
do
so love a happy ending.”

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

I had my own doubts about how things were going to work out. For one thing, we had the not-so-little problem of getting Bard Academy out of 18
^th
century England and to present-day Shipwreck Island. We sat together in the dark of the London night as the faculty members debated string theory. Coach H thought we could all just
imagine
ourselves back there, but Headmaster B pointed out that they’d have to get all of the Bard students to imagine the exact same scene and that would probably be impossible. Hana thought maybe we could read ourselves out by using a vault book, but that seemed only to offer a doorway into another book, not back home. Blade suggested that Heathcliff and I just make out and see if we could cause a dimension shift like Catherine had. I wasn’t on board with
that
theory. Besides, Miss A didn’t think it would work, anyway. And it might just send us off somewhere we didn’t want to go if it did.

Eventually, Headmaster B clapped her hands. “I have a solution,” she declared. “Miranda, give me your journal.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I said,
please get your journal,
Miss Tate,” Headmaster B said, holding out her hand expectantly. You didn’t say “no” to Headmaster B even if that meant handing over something as personal as a journal. Besides, she could just snap her fingers and it would appear in her hand, anyway, probably. The asking part was just her being polite. 

 I dug around in my backpack and came up with the journal. It was there, wedged behind
For Whom the Bell Tolls
.

“This is our link to the real world,” Headmaster B explained. “If we write the scene we’d like to see in this journal, then stand in a circle and read from it, we’ll be given passage back to Shipwreck Island to the exact moment in time we write about.”

“How is that even possible?” I asked.

“Because
we’ll
be doing the reading,” Headmaster B said, as if the answer were obvious. Add “making journals magic dimension-crossing machines” to the list of the things a Bard ghost could do.

“So you can just write a scene and make like none of this ever happened?” Samir asked.

“We can’t erase your memory, if that’s what you mean,” Headmaster B said.

“And we might not be able to bring back the chapel, either.” Coach H looked concerned.

“So—wait,” Blade held up her hand as if to stop the rush of information. “The chapel is rubble and all the Bard students will
remember
this?

The faculty exchanged a somber glance.

“Can you say
massive class action lawsuit
?” Samir said. Now that he was done worrying about homicidal fictional characters, Samir was focused on the economic health of Bard.

“We’ll figure something out,” Miss A said. She sounded pretty confident, but then, she was probably the most optimistic person among us.

“Guys?” This was Blade. “Can we just get out of the 18th century first, please? My corset is making me itch.” Blade was trying to scratch her back and failing. She did look uncomfortable. I felt her pain—literally. The whalebone in this Spanx-on-steroids was squeezing my ribs. Now that I wasn’t in danger of being crushed by falling walls or sucked into classic literature, I had the luxury of realizing that my clothes were seriously uncomfortable.

“Patience,” Headmaster B said, and then took a pen out of her skirt pockets and began writing in my journal. After a few minutes, she passed the book along to each of us. There were three sentences there, and we all committed them to memory. And then, we formed a circle, each one of us holding hands. Headmaster B began to recite the words she’d written on the page, and each of us joined in.

And then the portal opened, and on the other side was our beloved home, Bard Academy on Shipwreck Island and we all walked through together…

The portal opened up right before us, gleaming and golden, leading the way back to Bard. The difference this time was that the portal grew so large that it came over us, like a giant bubble. We didn’t need to walk to it. It came to us, washing over us, changing everything around us. It was as if the entire scene in London was simply a page of a book being painted over in large swatches of color. Night gave way to day. London became Shipwreck Island.

Heathcliff squeezed my hand. I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them we were standing together on the green under the statue of William Shakespeare, the sun still shining in the sky. I noticed all the buildings were back in place—all of them except the school chapel. Where it should’ve stood was just the rubble of the crushed building. It was smoldering, actually, as if it had just been on fire. Near it, the library was in bad shape, too. Half of it was sunken in.

  Students wandered around half-dazed, wondering what had happened. They stumbled into each other, as if not sure if what they’d experienced in the last week was just a group dream or some kind of mass hallucination.