Chapter 12 - The Girl in Green

At English class on Thursday morning, I stuck in my earbuds and continued listening to The Odyssey. The book was easy to follow, but I was tired, and I drifted.

“You keep calling her a local legend, but what if she’s real?”

I woke up with a start. One of my earbuds had fallen out. I recognized the voice even through the sleepy haze. Barlow. His voice had none of his usual cool self-possession. I was surprised at how emotional he sounded.

“She is real,” someone else said.

“She’s a ghost,” a girl said.

The room lit up with the sound of dozens of people talking all at once.

I peered around the corner of my armchair. Barlow was sitting bolt upright in his chair, focused intently on Dr. Jacobsen. People were looking between him and Dr. Jacobsen.

“What do you think, Dr. Jacobsen?” a boy named Jayden asked.

“Let’s talk about it in terms of the book at hand,” Dr. Jacobsen said. “The Odyssey.”

Jayden groaned. Dr. Jacobsen ignored him.

“You have to understand the origins of a mythology,” he continued. “So much of what happens in The Odyssey is hallucinatory, but if you imagine facing the dangers of early sea travel, you understand that storytellers would codify these dangers into monsters. Easier to make sense of. And remember, a whale is a monster to early seafaring people, and whales exist.”

“We’re not early seafarers,” Jayden said. “There are photos on the internet. Proof that the girl in green exists.”

I reached in my pocket for a phone that wasn’t there. I wanted to look for pictures of this girl in green. Apparently, she was well-known enough that people had seen pictures before they’d come here, or maybe Jayden was local too.

“Like everything on the internet is real,” a girl named Mae said.

Jayden rolled his eyes.

“So, to you, we’re like early seafaring people,” Barlow said. “We see a bear or a mountain lion and we invent a monster? Because we’re a primitive culture?”

“That’s not what I meant, Barlow,” Dr. Jacobsen replied. “I think you know that.”

“Then what did you mean?” Barlow said.

Dr. Jacobsen sighed. I had the feeling that he did not want to talk about this, but Barlow had boxed him in.

“Okay,” he began. “You know that this region of the country has a long history of importing mythology and music from Scotland that dates back to the seventeenth century. I think the girl in green is the local version of the Scottish myth of a glaistig.”

“Glaistig?” Jayden said. “What’s a glaistig?”

“A glaistig is a shapeshifter who appears as a helpless woman clad in green. She’s often by a stream, asking for help to cross the water. Once you’ve helped her across, she drinks your blood.”

Dr. Jacobsen said this last part in an old-school vampiric voice, like it was a big joke. A few people laughed. Others rolled their eyes.

“So, you’re saying there’s a glaistig here?” Barlow asked. “That it came all the way from Scotland?”

“Why is it a woman?” Mae asked at the same time. “It seems unfair to make it a woman. Women aren’t running around—”

The class erupted into wall of noise, everyone talking all at once.

Dr. Jacobsen waited for a moment and cleared his throat.

“The glaistig tale is a version of a witch story,” Dr. Jacobsen said. “It’s a reflection of the medieval fear of female sexuality and power. I’m not saying that the local legend reflects that particular fear . . .”

“Then what are you saying?” Barlow shot back.

“Just this: The girl in green has historical antecedents. Folklore doesn’t develop in a cultural vacuum.”

I thought of the story Tree had told me, that the girl in green was a girl who roamed the mountainside crying for a lost love.

With maybe a little murdering on the side. It tracked.

“So, if the local legend isn’t about the fear of female sexuality, what is it about?” I asked.

Barlow looked at me in surprise. I was also surprised to find myself asking a question. Normally I tried to lie low in class, but I was curious.

“Well, that is an interesting question, Jess,” Dr. Jacobsen said. “The first local reference to the girl in green that I’ve found comes from 1855, at the same time the first coal mines were being dug in this part of the state. Coal mining is environmentally destructive and very dangerous. Of course, the men who mine coal are very brave.”

Dr. Jacobsen glanced around the room and smiled tightly. I realized there could be grandchildren, or great-grandchildren of miners in the room, Barlow among them. I wondered if the Burtons had run the mine, even that far back.

“So?” Jayden said.

“It’s no accident that the girl is dressed in green,” Dr. Jacobsen said. “Or that she takes her vengeance against men, many of whom traditionally were miners. Green represents nature. The girl in green is a forest spirit bent on revenge for environmental destruction.”

Barlow wrapped his arm around his chest and leaned back in his chair. He bit his lip, probably to keep from saying anything else.

“I still say she’s a ghost,” Jayden said.

“Let’s get back to The Odyssey,” Dr. Jacobsen said.

* * *

Thursday afternoon, Coach Mullins sent Madison out to lead us on a run around the field, the parking lot, and the full length of the building. We had to do four laps, and judging by the stink eye Chloe, the muscular girl with the dark hair gave me, it was my fault. When we finished the run, Coach Mullins barked that we needed to work on upping our endurance. He looked directly at me as he said this. I would have cared more if I hadn’t been doubled over, frantically trying to catch my breath.

I managed to stay awake through dinner and a full hour of reading before I fell asleep.

* * *

After school on Friday, I returned to our dorm room to wait for Ava so that we could sneak into the tower. I stood at the window and looked out over the grounds. The boys were practicing soccer on the big field. Barlow ran in the middle of the pack, the focused sprint making sense of his long, elegant arms and legs. He looked up suddenly, as though some animal instinct told him I was watching. I waved, feeling stupid.

He raised his hand to his brow to shield his eyes. Then the ball rolled past him and he shot after it. I don’t know if he saw me or not.

Madison and a few other girls on our team were doing wind sprints off to the side on the smaller field. I was supposed to be out there with them. We didn’t have practice, but she’d made me promise to come out and work on my cardio. I thoroughly expected Madison to devise some sort of punishment for not showing up. If I had to get up tomorrow and run laps around the school, I’d do it.

I heard the door open behind me.

Ava stood next to me and peered out the window. We watched as Madison led a drill. It was hard not to be impressed with her aerobic stamina if nothing else. She looked like she wanted to jump into the boys’ soccer game and play forward. She would have been great.

“That Madison—a real go-getter,” Ava said. “Full of gumption.”

I snickered. I’d heard both these phrases come out of Coach Mullins’s mouth.

Soren kicked a wild ball off the main field toward the girls. The ball bounced once and rolled to Madison’s feet. She hooked a toe under the ball, lofted it in the air, and caught it in one arm. Soren trotted over to reclaim the ball from her. They stood there talking for a moment before Madison hurled the ball at his chest. Hard. Soren caught it and giggled.

“Hmmm,” Ava said. “I guess this is how jocks flirt.”

“Aren’t we jocks now?” I asked.

I’d never considered myself a sporty type, but I was on a team.

“Not by choice,” Ava said.

“Are they a couple?” I asked.

“Not yet,” Ava replied.

We watched Madison and Soren for a moment longer before Ava dove under the desk, searching for the hidden compartment, and pulled out my phone. I’d almost forgotten about it.

Ava pocketed my phone without offering it back to me, but I didn’t argue.

“Pictures,” she said. “Ready?”

I followed her out of the dorm hall, past the carved dark wood banister. Right below, on the first floor, was Ms. Burton’s office. A murmur of muffled voices came from below.

We took the stairs to the third floor. Remarkably, the landing was empty, though we could hear voices coming from the boys’ dorm. To the right, at the top of the stairs, behind a nook with a few armchairs, was a dark wooden door. The door had a handwritten sign taped across that said Students Not Allowed.

Ava carefully removed the sign from the door. She leaned over and rubbed the sticky part of the tape across the carpet, picking up stray dirt and carpet nap. She left the sign face down on the carpet.

“We didn’t see the sign,” she said. “It must have fallen off.”

I nodded.

The door was unlocked. I followed Ava through and pulled the door shut behind me.

The door opened into a dark-paneled closed box of a room. In the middle of the space was an iron spiral staircase that looked ancient and rickety. Each stair was narrow enough that we had to take the stairs one at a time. My first step echoed strangely in the small shaft.

We emerged at the top of the staircase into a square, two-story room. When I’d first seen the building from the outside, I’d noticed a decorative tower surrounded by white stone columns that ended in toothed edges like some fake medieval Disney World castle. I’d assumed there was nothing in that space. The central part of the room was open to a domed skylight so caked with years of dust and leaves that it gave a pale green glow to the room in the afternoon gloom.

Around the edge of the square room above our heads was a second-floor walkway held up by filigreed iron posts that matched the spindly spiral staircase. The second floor was surrounded by a wrought iron railing that looked like it might give way if you leaned on it. There were bookshelves along the walls on the upper walkway. On the bottom floor of the tower, under a widened spot in the walkway, there was a caged section filled with what looked like papers and reports.

“Book jail?” Ava said.

Her voice reverberated strangely through the hollow space above me.

The whole place had a long-abandoned feel except for one thing. On a heavily carved table in the center of the room sat an open laptop surrounded by a riot of books and reports.

Someone had been up here, and recently.

We had to hurry.

“I’ll start over there,” Ava said.

She walked around the table, through the cage door, and I followed. Behind the door was a wooden cabinet with long thin shelves. Ava pulled out a shelf and leafed through what looked like a set of old maps.

“What do you see?” I asked.

“Definitely blueprints,” she said without looking up.

There was only room enough for one person to stand by the cabinet with the blueprints and maps. I returned to the table in the open area.

On the table next to the open laptop was a haphazard pile of what looked like old records. Maybe they were from the county too. I picked up the one on top and started reading. It was yellowed from age, the type faded to pale gray.

At the upper left corner of the file there was a small black-and-white photograph of a woman held by a paperclip. She was in her early twenties or late teens with a mop of dark hair.

Gay-Lynne Sims was printed in pen on the border of the picture in neat block letters.

Underneath the picture, someone had typed, Patient is unruly, prone to frequent outbursts, disregards personal hygiene and refuses to maintain her appearance. . . .

I glanced back at the picture of Gay-Lynne. She seemed like a normal person to me. She looked smart. She wore a slight smirk that suggested she thought the proceedings might be ridiculous, but she was withholding judgment. I recognized that smirk. It was day one at Gardner-Betts, a let’s talk about behavioral expectations kind of look.

And sure, her hair was messy, like she hadn’t bothered with a brush for a day or two—sort of like me on a day I didn’t have to go into work.

“ ‘Disregards personal hygiene’?” I whispered. “What the hell? She forgot her lipstick?”

“I think I found it!” Ava said.

I heard the small click of my phone’s camera and looked up. Ava was busy taking multiple pictures of the blueprints.

“Hurry up,” I said quietly. “We should get out of here before whoever owns this laptop comes back.”

I flipped to the next page of the report. I wasn’t prepared for what was on the next page.

The same girl, strapped to a table looking drugged but awake. Her head was thrown back, neck elongated, rods protruding between her eyes and her eyelids.

There was a man in a white coat standing next to her, holding a hammer. It looked for all the world like he was going to hit the back of the rods with a hammer.

“What the literal fuck?” I whispered.

I turned the page and there was another picture of the same girl, her eyes bruised and puffy, her hair ornately styled. She was wearing a ridiculous flowered hat and a vacant look. On the cardboard beside her was typed, Patient has returned to a docile, childlike state. Mental capacities are limited, but her behavior is manageable and her demeanor, happy.

A hard lump of anger and regret formed in my throat and broke free in an ugly sob for the woman with the tangle of hair and the knowing smirk. Her look said she knew nothing good would come of her incarceration, but she couldn’t have imagined for a moment that whatever treatment they’d given her would reduce her to “a docile, childlike state.”

I couldn’t look at the woman in the flowered hat anymore.

I turned the page.

Coroner’s report.

Gay-Lynne Sims, age 19. Death from misadventure.

Misadventure. What the hell did that mean?

The door to the tower down below squeaked open, followed by the sound of footsteps on the metal stairs. I tried to put the papers back the way I’d found them, but in my panic I forgot how they looked.

Ava ducked down in the cage, but I didn’t have time to get there. I crept to the bookshelves under the walkway, and I was glad for the stupid deck shoes with quiet rubber soles. I hid behind the farthest one, hoping I was out of sight.

Footsteps on the stairs.

My heart pounded double-espresso overtime.

Someone stepped into the room and walked across to the table with the folders.

I opened my eyes, looking through a space in the bookshelf to see Dr. Jacobsen standing over the notes.

I inhaled sharply as Dr. Jacobsen moved the files around.

“You might as well come out,” Dr. Jacobsen said in a loud voice. “I know you’re there.”