The Scarlet Letterman Read Online Free Page A

forever without him in it.”
    “I know,” I say, having heard this before. “And having him here makes our dimensions unstable, I know, but if my great-great-great-grandmother managed to live in our world her whole life…”
    “Elizabeth Linton, the fictional daughter of Catherine and your ancestor, was a minor character in the book, and her absence is not missed in the story,” Ms. W tells me curtly. “By the time you read the book, she was completely gone from it, and that was fine. Her twin sister Catherine lived on in the book and moves the story forward. But without Heathcliff, there is no Wuthering Heights. We don’t know what would happen if a major character managed to make the leap from fiction to reality. It could be catastrophic.”
    “…and bring on the Apocalypse?” Everything around here seems to cause the end of the world.
    “Maybe,” Ms. W says, evasive. “We don’t know for sure.”
    I sigh, frustrated.
    “Miranda, there’s something else we need to talk about,” Ms. W says, her eyes darting back and forth as if she’s about to tell me something she shouldn’t. She nods at the door and it closes with a click. I’m still not sure about all her ghost powers, but it appears they include walking through walls and moving objects with her mind. It’s not something I think I’ll ever quite get used to.
    “The faculty are concerned about you,” she says, her voice at a low-pitched whisper. “You and your friends. They don’t like the idea of students knowing about…us and about…the vault.”
    The vault is the special room beneath the library where all of Bard’s Books with Powers are kept. If taken from the vault, characters from them can come to life. Like Heathcliff, my great-great-great-grandma, or not so nice ones, like Dracula or Frankenstein. They also hold the souls of the faculty ghosts, and if you destroy the books, you destroy the teachers.
    I can see why they might be nervous about students knowing this particular secret. It would be like if you found out your principal was Superman, and you knew the location of two tons of kryptonite.
    “I can understand that, but really, your secret is safe with us,” I say.
    “I know that, because I know you and your friends,” Ms. W says. “But the others aren’t so sure.”
    “Who?” I ask, wondering if it’s Headmaster B. She definitely wasn’t keen on us finding out the truth.
    “I can’t tell you, but you and your friends need to be careful,” Ms. W says. “For one, stay away from the vault.”
    “We weren’t planning on going near it,” I say. “None of us wants to see a reappearance of Dracula.”
    “Good,” Ms. W says, looking a little relieved. “Just keep a low profile this semester and do well in school, and I’m sure the other faculty will come around.”
    I’m not sure who she’s trying to convince more — her or me.

Five

    “That totally sucks,” says Blade that night during our study time. Every evening from 8:00 P.M . (curfew) to 10:00 P.M . (lights out), we’re confined to our rooms, where our choices are study or sleep. “They don’t trust us? But we saved their ghostly butts last semester.”
    “Tell me about it,” I say.
    “This just proves they’re not just dead, they’re crazy,” Blade says. “I mean, take Mr. B, my American history teacher. He talks to invisible people.”
    Mr. B is William Blake, the poet. I’d heard rumors about him before. Most of the students think he’s on drugs, because he talks to himself, and on occasion, people who aren’t actually there.
    I want to ask her more about Blake — even talking to Blade is preferable to reading one more chapter on the Puritans. But, before I can, I hear the footsteps of the Rat Patrol in the hall, and so both of us swivel to the front and pretend to be studying. The Rat Patrol is a group of Guardians who patrol the dorms and the campus grounds to make sure that no student is out of their room during mandatory study