The Scarlet Letterman

Also by Cara Lockwood

Wuthering High

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2007 by Cara Lockwood

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For all my English teachers

Contents

Acknowledgments

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Thirty

Thirty-one

Thirty-two

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to my ingenious friend, Elizabeth Kinsella, who named this book. She’s got the market cornered on clever. Thanks to my family: Mom, Dad, Matt, and my husband, Daren. A special thanks to my editor, Lauren McKenna, and my agent, Deidre Knight, and everyone at the Knight Agency. Much appreciation goes to my Bard Academy promotional varsity team: Kate Miller, Kate Kinsella, Shannon Whitehead, Christina Swartz, Jane Ricordati, Carroll Jordan, Stacey Causey, Linda Newman, Stacey Cohen, Kelly Ballarini, and Mary Chalfant.

One

I should be happy.

I am wearing Ryan Kent’s letterman jacket, which means that it’s official, we’re dating (in fact, as of today, it’s been six weeks, two days, and four hours — not that I’m counting or anything). Ryan Kent, for those of you who might be blind, is a state championship basketball player who happens to be Bard Academy’s reigning Sexiest Boy Alive, and is, as of this moment, my boyfriend.

That’s me, sitting in the stands of the Bard Academy gym, wearing the Bard Academy uniform along with some of my signature touches (leggings and lots of accessories). I watch as Ryan Kent sails above his competitors and dunks the basketball
again.
After he smashes the basketball into the basket, he gives me a wink and a wave as he travels back down to the other end of the court.

Coach H shouts at Ryan to stop “showboating,” but that’s like telling Ryan Kent not to be gorgeous. It’s just not in his genetic makeup.

I feel like I should be in a teen movie. You know, one of those movies where the not-so-popular, nerdy girl gets a makeover and finds herself with the star of the basketball team. Granted, I’ve never been nerdy, but I’m not exactly prom queen material, either. I’m the artsy, thrift-store girl. Typically not the one who lands the most popular boy in school.

So, like I said, I should be happy. And I am happy. Well,
mostly
happy, except for the fact that I’m not. Entirely.

And I don’t know why exactly.

Yes, it’s true I’m back at Bard Academy, delinquent boarding school, but it’s not that. I know I’m going to risk sounding like “that poor girl with the amazingly cute boyfriend” when I say this, but something is just not right.

And yes, that “something” has a name.

It’s Heathcliff.

And I can’t believe I’m dating one boy and thinking about another. I never in a million years pegged myself as one of those boy-crazy girls. The ones who desperately believe in a soul mate, except that said soul mate changes every day. Granted, I change accessories every day, but I thought I’d be less fickle when it came to romance.

Apparently, I’m not.

Because the more I try to just think about Ryan, the more I end up thinking about Heathcliff, which I know is wrong, wrong,
wrong.

Liz, my friend from my old school, would say I’m sabotaging myself. That secretly, I think I don’t deserve Ryan Kent, and that I
do
deserve bad-boy-to-the-core Heathcliff, so I’m trying to make that happen by tanking my relationship with Ryan. She calls this phenomenon Trading Down. It’s why, she thinks, she’s got serious sex-impulse control problems (meaning that she’ll just as easily have sex with a boy as she would let one open the door for her because no matter who she’s with she feels she doesn’t deserve them).

But maybe I
am
trying to trade down, and I don’t even know it.

It’s true that I never actually pictured myself with the captain of the basketball team type, the Should-Be-a-Recurring-Character-on-
The OC
guy. I always thought guys like Ryan had girlfriends like…well, like Parker Rodham, who is currently glaring daggers at me from the basketball court sidelines. She and her clones are in cheerleading outfits, and Parker keeps doing the splits in an obvious attempt to get Ryan’s attention.

It isn’t working and that’s making her mad.

I could deal with her. What I can’t deal with is the fact that Heathcliff is MIA. I haven’t seen him since last semester. This from the boy who told me I was his whole life. The only evidence I have that he exists at all is the necklace he sent me, the one that I wear around my neck.

The necklace reminds me that there’s another problem with Heathcliff: He’s not even real. He’s a fictional character from
Wuthering Heights
who happens to be stuck in
this
world. That’s right. I’m obsessing about a
fictional
character from 1847. Where do I start with what’s wrong with that? Not to mention the minor detail that him being here at all makes our dimension unstable. Confused? Welcome to my world.

“Is that a new necklace or something?” Hana asks me as she leans over, catching me fumbling with Heathcliff’s locket. Inside there’s a single piece of a page of the original copy of
Wuthering Heights
, which is the only thing keeping him in this world, as far as I know. Should it be destroyed, he’d be sent back to 1847.

Hana straightens the black-framed glasses she wears and puts down the book she brought to read at the game. Hana is never without reading material. She’s what I would call a Lit Nerd, although in a good way. She’s like walking CliffsNotes.

“No,” I say, dumping the necklace quickly into my shirt again, hiding it away. I feel a twinge of guilt for thinking about Heathcliff when I’m wearing Ryan’s jacket. And besides, Hana doesn’t even know that Heathcliff is still alive.

I can’t tell her or anyone else about him. For one, she’s not his biggest fan (since he kidnapped her, Samir, and Blade last semester). But secondly, he was supposed to have disappeared for good, but he didn’t. And I am in possession of the only thing that can send him back — the tiny remnant of the original
Wuthering Heights
. If the teachers found out, they’d demand he be put back into the pages of
Wuthering Heights.
It’s probably why he’s keeping a low profile. He doesn’t want to be zapped back to 1847.