Chapter 11 - The Girl in Green

I woke up late to the sun streaming in through the large windows. Ava had already gone down to breakfast. I threw on some clothes and went downstairs. Dr. Jacobsen and the hiking group came in from the trail just as I made it to the foyer. Barlow was toward the end of the group, sandwiched between Soren and Kel. I knew Kel from math class. Barlow tilted his head, listening intently to something Kel was saying. I realized I was staring at Barlow’s profile and I turned away, but not quickly enough.

“Jess, we missed you this morning,” Dr. Jacobsen called out in a way-too-cheery voice, as though accidentally attending one hike made me an automatic member of his club.

“Sorry.”

Barlow glanced toward the door and back to me with a lopsided grin. It annoyed me intensely.

I had the stupid urge to make a run for it, just to show him, but there were too many people milling about to even think about trying the front door again. The main entrance wasn’t my best option anyway. Most schools have limited ways in and out, but this building was so spread out that there had to be at least a half dozen other emergency exits. I just had to find the right one.

I had to be patient and ignore distractions.

Distractions like Barlow.

I grabbed a cup of coffee and a bagel before I went to my morning math class and dutifully factored for what seemed like days. In English, Barlow caught my eye and gave me a quizzical look. I looked away and pretended I hadn’t noticed.

It wouldn’t matter once I was gone.

After English, I went down the stairs. Instead of turning toward the dining room, I wandered in the opposite direction, past the common room, down the long hallway on the right side of the building, alongside rows of classroom doors and teacher offices.

There had to be another way out. I imagined the emergency doors would have fire alarms, but somewhere toward the end of the hall, past all the classrooms, there had to be a room or two that was empty, or being used for storage.

Star had said all the rooms had windows. Fresh air and sunlight for mental health.

All I had to do was find an empty room, pry open a window, then wait for the perfect opportunity to escape.

I followed the geometric border on the left side of the hall, stepping from rosette to rosette, falling into a meditative state. The hall took a short 90-degree turn, turned again, and continued on.

I reached a place in the hall where the rooms were smaller. Some of the doors were clearly marked as offices. I tried the handle on an unmarked door—locked. I rattled the ancient brass handle in frustration.

I tried the next door down. Also locked.

“What are you doing?”

I turned. Barlow was a few steps behind me, his shaggy head turned to a quizzical angle.

“Nothing,” I said reflexively.

“Nothing?” He quirked an eyebrow.

“What are you doing?” I asked. I had the feeling he’d been following me—again.

“I’m on my way to the library,” he said.

“So am I,” I said. It seemed like the easiest excuse for being in this hall. I had no idea what else might be in this wing of the building.

Barlow fell in step alongside me. I sped up, hoping to shake him, but he easily matched my stride.

We walked along together, the muffled sound of our sneakers echoing along the tile. We turned yet another corner and the hallway stretched on.

We walked past a door that was cracked open, ever so slightly. I made a mental note of where the door was for later. It could be my ticket out of here.

“I know some people in town who would kill to be at this school,” Barlow said, out of the blue.

“Is that so?” I replied absently. “Why?”

I cast a glance back at the open door, before I could stop myself. Barlow followed my gaze. I had to be more careful. He didn’t miss much.

“If you do well here, you’re pretty much guaranteed a college scholarship somewhere,” he said. “DC is a very hard school to get into.”

“Can’t be that hard,” I cracked. “They let me in.”

Barlow laughed, and the sound echoed down the hall, amplified by the space. I glanced over at him. He looked down to the floor with an expression more thoughtful than bemused, and more than a little sad.

“You must have really impressed Ms. Burton. How did you do it? Straight As? All the extracurriculars?”

I sighed, thinking about my application. How I’d written the full unvarnished truth about my travels through the juvenile justice system, thinking that the truth would completely disqualify me.

Instead, it brought me here.

“My grades were shit,” I said. “I wrote a good essay.”

Barlow stopped dead in mock surprise.

“You wrote a ‘good’ essay?” he said. “It must have been a phenomenal essay, an absolutely platonic ideal of an essay, if you blew the competition out of the water with shit grades.”

“It was just . . . different,” I said. “I’m sure the headmaster gets bored reading the same old . . .”

I stopped mid-sentence. We were dancing uncomfortably close to my time at Gardner-Betts. Once I admitted I’d been in juvenile detention, the obvious next question was what had I done to end up there? I didn’t want to talk about it—ever. Certainly not with Barlow. I hadn’t forgotten about the knife in his pocket.

“What was this essay about?” he asked.

I shook my head.

I wouldn’t tell him.

My heart sped with the memory. The thought of the dull steak knife in my hand—and all the blood.

Barlow studied me. I’d seen this on him before, the sharp look of focus in his eyes, the slight tilt of his head. It was the same look he’d had that day in the fog, when he’d been listening for the thing in the trees. A hunter’s look.

It unnerved me.

I turned away and strode down the hall. He trailed after me.

“Why do you care?” I asked savagely.

“I’m just trying to figure out why you don’t want to be here,” he said.

I didn’t answer.

We reached the library. It was a long rectangular room that projected back from the building. The tile continued on here, but there were dark blue carpet runners between rows of industrial shelving, presumably to dampen the noise.

Just inside the double doors was a long, tilted glass display case next to pictures of old guys, photos of the building under construction, and a map of the building.

“This is interesting,” I said.

I leaned over the map and studied it. The shape of the building was symmetrical, almost like a bird with long crooked wings on either side. I looked for anything that would help me find my way out, but the text was maddeningly small and difficult to make out.

“Looking for exits?” Barlow said. “I think you’ll need the blueprints for that.”

“Blueprints?” I said. “There are blueprints here?”

“Yeah, in the reference library in the tower.”

I looked up from the map.

“Why would there be blueprints of the building in the tower?”

“There was a huge flood here about ten years ago,” Barlow replied. “It swept through the county courthouse. Ms. Burton volunteered to keep all the remaining records until they could find a safe place for them. Guess they never did.”

I couldn’t believe my luck. I didn’t need to search for an escape route—I could just find the blueprints.

“Thanks,” I said with way too much enthusiasm.

Barlow narrowed his eyes. “You do know that the tower is off limits to students? It’s not like you can just—”

“Does it flood here a lot?” I said quickly, trying to change the subject.

“Sometimes. There’s a stream through town that turns into a raging river if we get more than a couple inches of rain.”

I thought back to the diner and the strangely high curbs that lined the main street of town.

“It floods a lot in Austin too,” I replied. “It’s because it’s all limestone. Nothing to keep the water from running off.”

I felt a sudden sharp wave of homesickness for the heat I’d spent all summer complaining about. For the big yellow house, the garage apartment, and Michaela. For Mom.

“You miss it?” he asked softly.

It wasn’t as much a question as a statement of fact. Maybe he’d read it in my face, or maybe he just assumed that I was trying to break out of this place so I could get back to Austin.

“I do.”

“I’ve never been anywhere but here,” he said wistfully.

“Really?”

“See that guy in the hat, with the handlebar mustache?” he said, pointing to one of the photos in the display case. “That’s my great-great-great-grandfather.”

I leaned over and studied the picture. The man in the photo stood beside the partially constructed hospital, one leg up on a pile of bricks, like a hunter on safari standing triumphantly with a foot on a freshly killed elephant. He was tall and had Barlow’s broad shoulders, but the resemblance ended there. He had a hard face, thin lips, a squint of pale eyes. The photo was dated 1911.

I shuddered involuntarily, not at the picture, but at the name underneath.

Calvin Burton.

“Scary-looking guy, right?” he said. “Apparently old Calvin was a force of nature—but he got stuff done.”

“Calvin Burton,” I murmured. “So that means you’re related to . . .”

“The headmaster?” he said. “Yeah, she’s my second cousin.”

Barlow was related to the headmaster. I should have known. He’d been following me around like it was his job to keep me from leaving. Maybe it was.

I leaned closer and studied the picture. Maybe I didn’t see Barlow in his face, but there was something of Ms. Burton in the set of Calvin Burton’s jaw and hard-as-ice eyes. Calvin Burton looked like the kind of guy who would put a knife in your hand and dare you to use it. The kind of guy who would send men into an unsafe mine and then build a statue to honor the ones who didn’t make it back.

And Barlow was a Burton. I couldn’t trust him.

“I know you probably think she’s a hard-ass,” he said.

“Probably?”

“You know, she didn’t have to come back here,” he said. “The town was dying before she reopened the school. And then The Guesthouse opened, and now there are plans to build a—”

“Oh, I get it—your cousin is the local hero,” I said.

Barlow raised an eyebrow.

“Did you ever have a job, Jess?”

Apparently, Barlow had mistaken me for one of the rich kids floating around the school.

“Of course I’ve had a job,” I snapped. “I was a barista. It wasn’t great, but you know.”

“Barista,” he snorted. “How hard was it to get that job?”

I shrugged. “Not that hard,” I said.

I thought about Bob, my manager at the corporate coffee shop. When I was late, or my shirt wasn’t perfectly white, Bob would threaten to sack me, but we both knew he wouldn’t. Because of Michaela, I’d lived nearby. All the other employees seemed to live in Pflugerville or far east Austin. Bob was always calling me to cover shifts at the last minute.

“Then you don’t know what it’s like to grow up in a place where there are no jobs and no ways to get out,” Barlow said. “Honestly, barista sounds like a pretty cushy job. Just slap some whipped cream and chocolate sauce on a cup of coffee and the tips roll in.”

I ignored the slight. Aside from his belief about the tips, he was right about the job. Not that it was easy—it wasn’t—but that it was inherently ridiculous to spend all day covering coffee with whipped cream.

“So, Burton is your hero,” I said.

“The school I went to before wasn’t . . . great, so yes, she is,” he said. “Everything changed in town when she reopened DC.”

I looked up. Barlow had leaned over and was looking intently at the pictures in the case. It gave me a moment to study his profile. That epic nose bump, generous lips, and shaggy hair. He really looked nothing like the old Burton or the headmaster. I’d never thought about what it would be like to grow up in a town where you pretty much knew everyone, and there were twenty people in your high school—thirty tops.

It would suck.

“The schools I went to before were not so great either,” I said.

Calling Gardner-Betts a school was stretching things. The other places were called behavioral schools. Emphasis on behavior, not school.

Barlow straightened.

“So now you have a chance to start over,” he said. “We both do.”

I snorted. “Where have I heard that before?” I said bitterly.

Barlow held my eye for longer than felt comfortable. I wanted to look away, but I didn’t want to give him that victory. He could think what he wanted about the headmaster and her support for the community. She hadn’t put a knife in his hand.

Barlow shook his head, before turning and walking out of the library.

“See you around, Jess,” he said.

* * *

When classes ended, I went to the dining hall hoping to find something to eat. I’d been in the library during lunch and I was starving. All I found were apples and oranges and a big bowl full of protein bars. I grabbed an apple and a bar and headed to my room to change for field hockey.

Ava was there, flopped on her bed, reading a paperback.

“Don’t we have practice today?” I asked.

“Not today,” she said. “Coach Mullins alternates between soccer and field hockey. The boys have the coach today.”

I didn’t envy them. Field hockey was fine, fun even. Coach, not so much.

I ripped open a protein bar and ate a huge mouthful. Cherry vanilla.

“How does that taste?” Ava said, without looking up from her ubiquitous paperback.

“Like chewy cough syrup,” I said.

Ava laughed.

“A crony of Burton makes these bars,” she said. “I imagine she’s getting a kickback for stocking them in the school.”

“Okay, so we’re a test market,” I said.

“Pretty much,” Ava said.

I swallowed the thick lump of cherry vanilla and set the bar down on the desk. Since I’d left the library, I’d been thinking about something Barlow had said. Not about the headmaster and all she’d done for the community, or even about how we both had a chance to start over.

No.

Barlow told me there were blueprints for the building in the reference library in the tower. I could spend all my spare time checking for unlocked doors and windows, but if I had the blueprints, I’d know where all the possible exits were. I just had to find the right one.

“Whoa, you look like you’re a million miles away,” Ava said. “What are you thinking about?”

“Barlow told me something today,” I said slowly. “He says there are blueprints to the building in the reference library.”

Ava sat up abruptly. She tossed her paperback haphazardly, and it fell face down on her bed, pages bent.

“Barlow told you this?” Ava said.

I nodded.

“Why are there blueprints?” she asked.

“Something about a flood,” I said. “He said the town records were stored there temporarily, but the county never took them back.”

Ava bit her lip and frowned.

“That’s interesting,” she said.

“I thought so.”

“If we could look at the blueprints, we might find where they’re keeping Layla,” she said. “Or where she’s hiding.”

Truth was, I was less interested in finding Layla than I was in finding a way out of this place. Unlike Ava, I didn’t think that Layla was still here in the building. But if Layla had accidentally stumbled upon a way out, she might not have had time to gather up all her stuff.

“We need those blueprints,” Ava said.

I nodded. Ava wanted to know where Layla went, and I was looking for an escape route. I was convinced we were looking for the same thing.

I bit into the apple. Better than the protein bar.

Ava looked away for a moment, thinking. “Burton holds a faculty tea every Friday at four. It’s just for the teachers who stay over the weekends.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen what Burton serves at her afternoon tea,” I said. “Whiskey, straight.”

“Good,” Ava replied. “We’ll be less likely to be interrupted in our search if all the teachers are drinking. We’ll take your phone. We can take photos of the blueprints and no one will ever know we’ve been there.”

“I’ve never read blueprints before. What if we can’t read them?”

“We’ll figure it out,” Ava said absently. “Once we have them in hand.”

I wasn’t so sure.

Ava bit her lip. “I wish we could go sooner,” she said. “I just think we’d get caught if we went today.”

It was Wednesday now. Layla had been missing for three days already. I didn’t think Layla was here in the building, but I’d almost gotten lost in the forest my first day here. She could be wandering around in the woods, disoriented and dehydrated. More likely, she’d simply escaped. If she was from here, she’d know her way around.

“No one looked for her outside?” I asked.

“No,” Ava said. “Because the headmaster told everyone she had a family emergency. No reason to look.”

I shrugged. I didn’t think we were going to find Layla. All I hoped for was an unguarded exit somewhere and a moment when I could shake Barlow off my trail. I resolved to keep my water bottle full and to stockpile protein bars. I didn’t love the taste, but they’d keep me alive until I made my way down the mountain.