The Scarlet Letterman

by Cara Lockwood

  “First, we have business to take care of. Your papers,” Coach H barks. Boy, he’s in a particularly foul mood this afternoon.

  He walks down the aisles of the class, handing out our papers. I thought I did an unusually good job on mine (“The Real Scarlet Letter: Puritanism in America”). Even after one semester at Bard, I’ve learned the importance of putting colons in your paper titles. They make you sound smarter than you are.

  I’ve yet to break the A barrier in this class, but if any paper could do it, it’s this one. I did research, I even have a bibliography; basically above and beyond the opinion essay we were supposed to write. I even made a cover sheet, which is more than I can say for most everybody else.

  So it comes as quite a surprise when Coach H plops down my paper and on the cover there’s a big, fat, red…F.

  An F? How can this be? I flip to the end of the paper where it simply reads: “Plagiarism will not be tolerated. This is your one and only warning. Next time, severe disciplinary action will follow.”

  I glance around me as if I can find the answer in the air. I didn’t plagiarize anyone! This is 100 percent my original work, such that it is. My eyes fall on Parker Rodham’s desk, which is next to mine, and I see that she’s got her paper faceup. It’s got a bright red A on it, as well as “good work!” with an exclamation mark. And the title is…“The Real Scarlet Letter: Puritanism in America.”

  “Hey…” I hiss at Parker, who just looks up at me and gives me a slow, deliberate smile. She’s done this on purpose. She’s framed me for plagiarism. And then I remember seeing one of her clones in the library two weeks ago. The one who asked to borrow some notebook paper, the one who was sitting at the table when I got up to find a book in the stacks and bumped into Ryan, who kept me distracted for longer than I intended. I’d left my backpack there, along with the first draft of my theology paper. The clone must’ve copied it, replaced it, and then given a copy to Parker. That was a few days before the paper was due. I bet she gave Coach H an early draft, just to plant the seed that she was the one with the original work. She framed me. Evil witch!

  Parker just straightens the papers on her desk and acts as if nothing is wrong. I suppose I should count myself lucky. Being framed for plagiarism is better than getting my Pellegrino spiked with rat poison, which is allegedly what she did to her own mother.

  I fume until the bell rings, signaling the end of class. But as I try to present my case to Coach H, he doesn’t seem to want to hear it.

  “You can’t really believe I copied this paper,” I say. “The colon was totally my idea!”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Tate, but Parker told me about her paper in advance. She showed me a copy.”

  “But Parker copied me. One of her friends took my paper in the library. And —”

  “Miranda, I want to believe you,” Coach H says, his tough exterior showing a little unexpected tenderness. “And I do believe you. Because I know Parker, is well, simply put…lacking in scruples. But she didn’t leave me much choice here. The evidence — which I’m sure is planted by her — is all on her side, and I can’t play favorites.”

  “But —”

  “Just be careful next time, and be glad I don’t send you to Headmaster B, because she takes a far harder line on plagiarism than I do. She believes it’s a figurative expulsion offense.”

  Like the Puritans in The Scarlet Letter, Bard faculty sometimes punish students by shunning them. Figurative expulsion is one of these shunning punishments, in which a student is ordered not to talk to or interact with any other student or faculty member for a certain amount of time. No students are allowed to talk to you, either. You wear a red sweater vest, so basically you walk around campus like a ghost, unable to talk or interact with anyone or have anyone talk to you. It’s one of the worst punishments at Bard, and more feared even than toilet cleaning duty.

  “But Coach, this is not fair. I didn’t do this,” I say, trying to keep my voice at a reasonable level, but failing. The unfairness of it is just too hard to swallow. Not to mention the fact that Parker got an A because she stole all my hard work.

  “Is there a problem here?” asks Headmaster B, who appears from nowhere as she often does. She’s more ghostlike than any of the teacher ghosts around here, and by far the strictest. She’s only about four feet tall, but she’s not someone you want to mess with.

  “We were just finished here, weren’t we, Ms. Tate?” Coach says, nodding his head in the direction of the exit.

  “Fine,” I grind out. I heave a frustrated sigh, snatch my paper off his desk, and stomp out of the room. It’s not very mature, but I can’t help it. It’s so not fair.

  Outside class, on the stairs leading out, I nearly bump straight into Ryan. He’s wearing his Bard blazer open, and his tie loose. He looks good enough to eat. And, even better, Parker is nowhere to be found. For once!

  Immediately some of my anger at Parker fades a little, as I take in Ryan’s smile of recognition and feel the warmth of his arm as he swings it around me.

  “You look like you’re on the warpath,” he says, his arm casually around my shoulder.

  “You have no idea,” I say.

  “How about you tell me over lunch?”

  Eight

  One of the unwritten perks of having a boyfriend is that you never really have to worry about eating alone again. It’s what relationships are about, really. You have a permanent, standing date for movies and meals.

  I’m not sure how Ryan will react when I tell him his new charity project, Parker, has framed me. When I tell him about the plagiarism, he seems to take her side.

  “I can’t believe she’d do that on purpose,” Ryan says, shaking his head. Ryan is not someone who likes to believe there are bad people in the world. He’s sort of an eternal optimist. It’s probably the result of having so many things come so easy to him. He just doesn’t realize the lengths other people will go to have what he has naturally.

  “She definitely did it,” I say.

  “Maybe it was just an honest mistake,” Ryan says.

  “Are you defending her?”

  “Well, no, I mean, not exactly. It’s just, I didn’t think she’d do something like that.”

  I roll my eyes. Ryan has no idea what Parker is capable of. I’m sure she only shows him her Mother Teresa personality.

  As we stand in line for our food, a few girls walk past us and giggle. I think for a second that they might be laughing at me, but then I quickly dismiss the idea. I should be used to Ryan’s effect on girls by now. He turns even forty-year-old soccer moms into giggly little girls. He’s got that kind of charisma.

  “I know you find this hard to believe, but she’s not as nice to other people as she is to you. You know the rumor about her and her mother.”

  “Look, I don’t know all the details, but I do know that you can’t believe everything you hear.”

  I find myself annoyed that Ryan keeps defending Parker. What gives?

  “Yeah, like what they say about your car wreck,” I say, and then immediately regret it. We haven’t actually talked about Ryan’s car crash, the one that sent him here a year ago. He was driving his girlfriend home and wound up wrapping his car around a telephone pole, killing her. Rumor was that Ryan may have been drinking, although it’s also rumored he passed a blood-alcohol test. Ryan never brings it up at all, which I think is a little strange. At some point, you might want to confide in your girlfriend about it, or at least admit it happened. But he doesn’t even acknowledge it.

  Like right this second, when he abruptly changes the subject.

  “They call this steak?” he says, pointing to the mushy, brown lump of meat covered in brown gravy that’s shoved unceremoniously onto our dinner trays. He’s dodged the issue, again. “Say, I have a surprise for you.”

  “You do? I hope it isn’t that you know where this steak came from,” I say, eyeing the food in line with some trepidation.

  “It’s in my blazer pocket. Go on. It’s
a gift.”

  I reach into his left pocket and pull out a small, pink drawstring bag.

  “What’s this?”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t know what day it is,” Ryan says. When I look blank, he says, “Happy Valentine’s Day — ring a bell now?”

  Valentine’s! I’d totally forgotten. It’s not like I’m used to having someone give me a valentine. Normally it’s a holiday where I lay low and try to pretend I don’t care that I don’t have a boyfriend. Except this year, I do have a boyfriend. A boyfriend who’s giving me a present! For a split second, I completely forget Parker.

  “I’m guessing this means you didn’t get me something,” Ryan says, but he’s smiling. He doesn’t seem to care.

  “I totally forgot,” I say, feeling embarrassed. Not to mention guilty. I was too busy obsessing over Heathcliff to remember my own boyfriend on Valentine’s Day.

  “That’s okay,” Ryan says, shrugging. “I like that you’re different from other girls, and you don’t think Valentine’s Day is a big deal.”

  I wonder if he’s talking about one of his exes. Specifically, the ex, Rebecca, the one who died in the car wreck. I tear into the package and pull out a small silver bracelet with a heart charm.

  “Ryan! I love it,” I say, immediately putting it on. “Thank you.”

  “I’m glad,” he says, and leans down and kisses my nose. This causes more giggles behind me, but I ignore them.

  We take our so-called food from the line, and I can’t help but think that people might be staring at us as we make our way across the cafeteria. I tell myself this isn’t anything new. After all, people like to look at Ryan Kent.

  We find Samir and Hana sitting in the corner and join them. They seem to be intent on some serious discussion in urgent whispers because when we come to their table, their conversation abruptly stops. Not them, too! I tell myself they were probably talking about the Bard ghosts, but for some reason that explanation just doesn’t feel right to me. Something else is going on here.

  “What’s up, guys?” I ask them, but they both fall resolutely silent. And when I sit down, Hana won’t make eye contact with me and Samir turns a dull shade of red, like he’s seen me naked and doesn’t want to admit it. Just what is going on around here?

  “Uh, nothing,” Hana says, staring at her soggy green beans.

  “Where’s Blade?” I ask the table.

  “Over there,” Samir says, nodding toward an adjacent table where Blade is sitting on the lap of Number Thirty-one, her basketball crush.

  “She’s dating Kinsey! No way,” Ryan says, not quite believing his eyes. From the shell-shocked look on Kinsey’s face, he doesn’t believe it, either.

  “Kinsey? Is that his name?” Hana asks Ryan.

  “Well, he’s sort of sex-obsessed, so we call him Kinsey. You know, after the sex scientist. I think his real name is Kilgore or something like that.”

  At the word “sex-obsessed,” Samir clears his throat uncomfortably and Hana shifts in her seat. Just what in the world is going on around here?

  Ryan scarfs down his food, even as the rest of us pick at ours, and then he hops up and tells us that he’s got basketball practice that he can’t miss.

  “Coach H will make me run laps if I’m late,” he says, grabbing his backpack and giving me a quick, sweet peck on the cheek before he ducks out of the cafeteria.

  “Okay, you two,” I say, looking at them both. “Tell me what the heck is going on. What were you two talking about before we got here?”

  “Do you want to tell her?” Samir asks Hana.

  “No way, I don’t want to tell her,” Hana says, shaking her head.

  “Well, I’m a guy, so I can’t tell her,” Samir says. “It’s in the rules.”

  “What rules?” Hana cries.

  “The ones I made up just now. Besides, you’re the one who heard the rumor.”

  “Would someone just tell me what is going on?” I cry, getting frustrated.

  “Okay, fine, I’ll do it,” Hana says, sighing. She looks at me. “People are saying that you wearing Ryan’s jacket means that you had sex with him.”

  “What?” I cry. I don’t add that this is impossible, since I am the big V.

  “That’s not all. You, uh, also had sex with the starting lineup of the basketball team,” Hana says.

  “Well, technically not sex. Just blow jobs.”

  “WHAT!” I shout, and then lower my voice when other people start to stare. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s what people are saying,” Samir says.

  I flashback to Derek slithering up to me in the hall. No wonder he was so flirty with me, since he thought I’d partied with the entire starting lineup of the Bard Academy varsity basketball team. He must’ve felt left out since he’s a benchwarmer, not a starter. Ugh. I think I might vomit.

  “Wait, it gets worse,” Hana says.

  “I don’t see how that’s possible,” I say.

  “I think Parker is the one spreading the rumors,” Hana says. “She’s telling everyone that the reason why she returned the jacket to Ryan was because he asked her to do this and she’s not ‘that kind of girl.’ ”

  Parker wore Ryan’s jacket for a brief period last semester, but Ryan says he’s the one who asked for it back, and he only leant it to her because she got caught in the rain and was cold. They’d never actually had a relationship, according to Ryan.

  “That’s a lie,” I say. “She had to give back the jacket because Ryan asked for it back.”

  “Not according to her,” Hana says.

  “I don’t feel so good.” I put my head on the cafeteria table.

  The very idea that everyone thinks I fooled around with the entire basketball team makes me really think I might be sick. I have standards, you know. High ones. I’d only had two kisses before I went with Ryan, and now suddenly it’s Miranda Does Bard?

  I glance down at Ryan’s letterman jacket and see the bright red B. It feels like a brand: B for bimbo.

  This is it, I think. The very last straw.

  I am going to have to kill Parker Rodham.

  Nine

  Parker Rodham, however, isn’t easy to kill.

  She’s one of the most popular (and feared) girls on campus. Any girl not in her clique wants to be in it. And even those brave enough to say they despise her don’t dare say it to her face.

  “How am I supposed to get even?” I ask Hana, as the two of us watch Parker Rodham and her clones walk past us. Hana and I are standing in front of a stone statue of Shakespeare, in the middle of the campus commons. Even Shakespeare manages to look creepy on the Bard campus. He’s got blank eyes, and his quill pen is raised at an odd angle. In the semidark of dusk, he looks a lot like a psycho killer, getting ready to stab someone. I only wish his victim were Parker.

  “You don’t, unless you want to get dead,” Hana says. “I mean, do you see any of her ex-boyfriends around?”

  This is one of the nagging rumors about Parker. All of her exes seem to magically disappear the minute they break up. Most people think she poisons them.

  “Does that really happen, though? I mean, she can’t just kill people,” I say. “Where are the bodies?”

  “The river,” Hana says. “Or the woods. Or the ocean. I’ve heard all kinds of stories.”

  “You think Headmaster B would really put up with Parker killing people?”

  “Let’s just say I don’t want to find out, okay?” Hana asks.

  “What are you guys talking about?” Blade asks, jumping into our conversation midstream.

  “Nothing,” Hana says.

  “Parker Rodham,” I say.

  “I could put a hex on her,” Blade offers. “All I’d need is a live chicken sacrifice.”

  “Ew!” Hana says.

  “What? It would totally work,” Blade says. “I’ve only tried it with Perdue frozen chicken breasts, but I swear a live chicken would work.”

  “Um, no thanks,” I say.

 
; “You coming to the pit?” Hana asks me while ignoring Blade.

  The pit is a giant stone circle at the center of campus in front of the chapel. Every night there’s a lit fire there, which seems like a pretty bad idea given the sheer number of serious pyromaniacs around here. But so far, no one has burned down anything (except for last year’s Bard arsonist, and she wasn’t technically a student). This is probably because the pit is the only place on campus whose purpose is purely social. There are stone benches around it, and it’s too dark to study. The only other gathering places are the library and the dining hall, and both of them are heavily monitored by Bard faculty. The pit is monitored, too, just at more of a distance.

  “I don’t think I feel like it,” I say. Parker will be there, her underlings having probably already scouted out the best seats, and besides, the pit is the perfect place for a ghost story. And the last thing I need at this point is a ghost story. I can still see those red eyes I saw in the forest, and I don’t need anything else around here to feed my bogeyman imagination, thanks.

  “Besides, I want to find Ryan,” I add.

  “Suit yourself,” Hana says.

  “I’ll come,” Blade offers. Hana seems less than enthused, but Blade doesn’t seem bothered.

  “Fine.” Hana sighs, sends me a look that says “see what you’ve done — now I’m alone with chicken-sacrifice girl,” and trudges off to the pit.

  I turn and start down the path that will lead me to the gym, so I can talk to Ryan. It’s starting to get dark, and I suddenly wish that Hana had tried harder to convince me to go with her. The sun has long since sunk behind the trees, and the sky looks pink and blue at once. The lamps along the path flicker on while I walk, giving everything a kind of creepy glow. Even the icicles in the trees cast weird shadows on the ground. It’s so cold, my breath comes out in white puffs.