Chapter 13 - The Girl in Green

A muscle in my thigh twitched almost unbearably. I wasn’t used to being this still.

I shifted to make my thigh stop screaming, and my shoes squeaked on the wooden floor. Dr. Jacobsen turned suddenly to look in my direction, then began walking toward me. Once he made it to the bookshelf where I was, the reference cage would be in full view.

If he found Ava, he’d find my phone and he’d take it away.

I made a decision.

Whatever happened, he couldn’t find that phone.

I stood and walked out from behind the bookshelf.

I was caught.

“Hi, Dr. Jacobsen. Um, I just came up here because . . .” I began.

My mouth went dry and my voice stuck in my throat.

“You do know students are not supposed to be in the stacks without a teacher, don’t you?” Dr. Jacobsen said.

I fought the primitive urge to push past him and lunge down the spiral staircase. I decided to lean fully into the new student thing. It had a quick expiration, which was approaching fast.

“I didn’t know. I thought maybe this was the library?”

My voice raised at the end, a small squeak that was functionally a confession. Dr. Jacobsen raised an eyebrow. It was clear he didn’t think much of this excuse.

“The library is on the first floor,” Dr. Jacobsen said. “You’re new, so I won’t tell Ms. Burton this time.”

He smiled that good-teacher I’m-on-your-side smile. He wasn’t sounding an alarm—for now.

The muscles in my thighs shook from the release of tension.

“Have you been looking at my research?” Dr. Jacobsen asked.

He gave me a sharp look and his big buddy veneer peeled away. The laptop was lit up, and the papers had been moved. I forced myself not to look toward the reference area where Ava was hiding.

“I just glanced at a few things.”

“What did you see?”

He looked down at the pile of folders strewn about the desk and picked up the top folder. Gay-Lynne Sims.

“Did you look at this?” he asked.

His voice was soft, almost kind.

“What’s with the guy in the white coat with the hammer and the . . . the . . . ?”

“Ice picks?”

“Ugh.” I felt my stomach flop. I hadn’t wanted to believe that what I’d seen in the file was true. It was so barbaric that some part of my brain had decided I’d misunderstood what I’d seen.

“They aren’t really ice picks,” Dr. Jacobsen said. They’re called orbitoclasts. Used to perform lobotomies. Come take a look since you’re interested.”

Dr. Jacobsen pulled out a chair and I hesitated. He had a strange conspiratorial glow about him, the clear urge to share the results of his disturbing research. I didn’t trust this look when I saw it in regular humans, much less in a teacher.

I took the chair across from Dr. Jacobsen. He sifted through the pile, landing on an old, yellowed drawing of a woman’s head and the brain inside. A dotted line suggesting “cut here,” as though a woman’s brain was a construction paper assembly project for first graders.

“Lobotomy was started by a European doctor who believed separating the white tissue of the brain could cure mental illness, but it was an American, Dr. Freeman, who pioneered a faster technique,” Dr. Jacobsen said.

“If you look here, there’s a thin circular eye socket bone that holds the eye in place. Dr. Freeman would slip an ice pick between eye and eyelid, punch a hole through the thin backing of the transorbital bone, and then cut through the frontal lobe like this.”

Dr. Jacobsen made a circular motion of the right hand, pantomiming brain scrambling. I felt my stomach rise in my throat, threatening to hurl my lunch all over his historical documents.

He turned back to the photo of the man in the white coat shoving ice picks behind Gay-Lynne Sims’s eyeballs.

“And that is Dr. Freeman right there.”

“That is so terrible,” I murmured, closing my eyes and forcing my stomach to settle.

“Isn’t it?” Dr. Jacobsen said. “He did this all over the country, operating in unsterile environments. He often did surgery out of the back of his van. The mental hospital that was in the building before this school was one of his most frequent stops.”

I couldn’t stop thinking about the Gay-Lynne Sims who’d been brought to this place. In her before picture, she’d looked skeptical and wary, probably too smart by half, given that she lived in a time when hygiene was prized above intelligence in girls.

What she hadn’t looked was afraid.

Maybe she’d been like me—watching the exits, biding her time until the opportunity to escape finally came around. Or maybe she trusted that nothing bad would happen to her. That eventually she’d be released, maybe even cured.

She couldn’t have been more wrong.

There had to have been a moment when her skepticism turned to raw animal panic. Was it when she first met Dr. Freeman?

Perhaps she’d trusted him, up until the moment orderlies had strapped her to the table. What must it have been like, to have her eyelids forcibly peeled back, to see Dr. Freeman moving toward her, holding the orbitoclast in his hand?

“I can’t believe you could just . . . do that to a person. I mean, that it was allowed.”

“Indeed,” Dr. Jacobsen said. “A long time ago, but even then, they knew there were terrible risks. People died during surgery. And so many of the women suffered permanent brain damage.”

Mostly women. Of course it was women.

I glanced down at the picture of Gay-Lynne, moments before the procedure, and I looked away quickly. Too disturbing. But I looked long enough to see that she’d been strapped to a clean white gurney in what appeared to be a large room, a bright circle of a surgical light illuminating her face.

This wasn’t done to her in the back of Dr. Freeman’s van. It had been done somewhere here in the building.

“Where did he do these lobotomies?” I asked. “There are no windows in this picture.”

Dr. Jacobsen snapped his head up and stared at me, eyes narrowed. I knew instantly that I’d said too much.

“Listen to me. This school is very old, and not all parts of the building are safe,” he said. “Do not go exploring.”

A hum of voices rose from the spiral staircase. Dr. Jacobsen must have left the door open. He looked down at his watch.

“Ah, dinner will be over soon,” he said. “You should go get something to eat, Jess.”

Ava. She was still up here. I summoned what courage I had.

“Aren’t you coming?” I asked.

“Oh no. I’ll grab something later. I have work to do.”

Dr. Jacobsen smiled tightly, and I realized I was being dismissed. I glanced toward the stacks where Ava still huddled. I had no choice but to leave her here alone. Who knew how long she would be stuck up here?

I stood and walked to the spiral staircase. I was halfway to the stairs when Dr. Jacobsen called my name.

“Jess?”

I turned back.

“Don’t let me catch you up here again, okay?” he said.

* * *

There was a set of armchairs near the top of the stairs. I perched in the armchair facing the door to the reference library, turned on my e-reader, and pretended to read. If Dr. Jacobsen came down from the tower and asked me why I hadn’t gone to dinner, I’d tell him I wasn’t hungry.

It was the truth. The words swam before my eyes, replaced by the face of Gay-Lynne Sims.

I couldn’t clear my brain of the sight of her on the table, ice picks shoved between eyeballs and eyelids. The moment she went from unruly to docile and childlike, recorded for history.

When Ava and I had gone up into the tower, a long slanting ray of light from the tall windows over the stairwell had bathed the slightly shabby patterned carpet with a late afternoon glow. That was long gone now, replaced by a somber early evening chill.

I closed my eyes for just a moment. I had to slow my breathing, to clear my mind of the frantic scroll of horrific images. I wanted nothing more than to stand up, to pound down the stairs and make a run for the door, to get as far away from this place as possible.

But Ava was still up in the tower with Dr. Jacobsen. I couldn’t just leave her.

When I opened my eyes again, Kenzie was sitting across from me. She was wearing a snow-white, deep V-neck sweater and the school scarf. She’d wrapped the scarf haphazardly around her throat, like a nest for the perfect egg of her head. I imagined dozens of influencers trying to fix their scarves in exactly the same way and never quite achieving this level of throwaway casual cool.

“I like your scarf,” I said.

“It’s just the school scarf.” Kenzie frowned. “Didn’t you get one? I could go ask Kimber to—”

“No, I got a scarf,” I said.

“Have you seen Ava?” Kenzie asked. “I’ve been looking all over for her.”

I tapped my foot nervously and glanced toward the research library door, thinking of Ava still trapped in the bell tower. I looked away quickly, but not before Kenzie followed my gaze.

“She’s up there? In the tower?”

I nodded. I couldn’t see the point in lying to Kenzie. “She’s hiding in the stacks,” I whispered. “Dr. Jacobsen is up there, but he doesn’t know that she’s there.”

Kenzie’s eyes widened. She leaned over and lowered her voice.

“Why is Ava up there?” she whispered. “Don’t tell me she’s . . .”

At that moment the door to the reference library squeaked open and Dr. Jacobsen emerged. He saw us, waved, and came over.

“Hello, Kenzie. Jess.”

His tone was teacher-conversational—friendly, slightly distant. As though he hadn’t shown me a picture of a girl having her brains scrambled through the back of her eye sockets less than an hour ago.

“Kenzie, I hope you’re helping Jess get settled in.”

Dr. Jacobsen gave me a pointed look, and I got the message. Settled meant compliant.

Docile. Things were not so different in this time.

Kenzie smiled easily, all dazzling white teeth.

“Of course,” she said.

“Good.”

Having made the requisite meaningless conversation, Dr. Jacobsen turned and made his way down the stairs.

When he was gone, Kenzie and I stood and made our way to the tower door. Kenzie tiptoed up the spiral staircase, but even her small steps reverberated in the narrow enclosure. I followed close behind, not bothering to be quiet.

“Ava?” Kenzie said tentatively.

Ava popped out from behind the stacks.

“Oh, thank god,” she said. “I don’t think I could hide here a moment longer. My thighs are burning.”

The three of us left the tower, and went down to dinner together, catching the last of a dispirited-looking vegetable stir-fry just as the kitchen staff was packing up for the night. The dining room was mostly empty, and it wasn’t until we’d found a table in the corner, away from the common room, that any of us spoke.

“So, what were you doing up there?” Kenzie asked.

I glanced at Ava. She shrugged.

“Barlow told me there were blueprints to the old building,” I said. “We went to take a look.”

Ava shot an accusatory glance in my direction.

“What?” I said.

“Don’t blame Jess,” Kenzie said. “You should have told me where you were going.”

“I thought that you’d be anxious if I told you we were planning on sneaking into the tower,” Ava said in a low voice.

“You know what makes me anxious?” Kenzie said. “I couldn’t find you anywhere. I looked all over the building, and I was worried that you were . . . gone.”

Kenzie’s lip quivered. The word gone hung in the air. It was clear they were thinking of Layla. For the first time I realized that it wasn’t just Ava who thought that Layla’s disappearance was suspicious. Kenzie did too.

“You need to tell me what’s going on,” Kenzie said.

Ava pursed her lips and glared at me. It was clear she hadn’t planned to tell Kenzie any of this, perhaps because Kenzie was rich, and Ava thought she wouldn’t understand. Or maybe she was being honest when she said she didn’t want to worry Kenzie. I’d noticed Kenzie had a tendency to be overly anxious.

Ava sighed and relented.

“Jess got her acceptance letter days before Layla left,” she said. “Her letter said that there was a sudden vacancy at the school. No one has left but Layla. So how did Burton know that Layla was going to have a ‘family emergency’ before it happened?”

One of the kitchen staff came toward our table, looking for our salt and pepper shakers, and Ava fell silent. Kenzie nodded and smiled at the woman. We watched the woman head back to the buffet table to refill and store the shakers.

“I don’t understand,” Kenzie said. “You think Burton lied about the family emergency? Then where is Layla?”

Ava glanced around the room to make sure no one was listening. There were only a few people who’d come down late for dinner as we had, and no one close to us.

“I think she’s still here, somewhere in the school,” she said.

“What?” Kenzie blinked in disbelief. “Why would she be here?”

“I don’t know,” Ava said. “Maybe Burton wanted to punish her. You know Layla hated Burton—and the feeling was mutual.”

“And you think Burton has her prisoner, somewhere in the building?” Kenzie said.

Ava nodded slowly. “That’s why we went looking for the blueprints,” she said. “I want to search the school for Layla.”

Kenzie looked at me.

“What do you think of this theory?”

I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. Everything about this conversation made me want to run. It seemed improbable that the headmaster would keep a student, even a disobedient one, prisoner in the school. But then again, Burton was not your everyday headmaster. She’d put a sharpened letter opener within reach and had dared me to use it. Maybe if I hadn’t dropped it, I’d be in some basement dungeon right now, alongside Layla.

For some reason, my mind went back to Gay-Lynne Sims. She probably never figured she’d have an ice pick shoved into her brain. Not in a million years. It’s hard to imagine the horror one person can inflict on another until it’s too late to escape.

“It’s possible,” I said.

“But there are laws,” Kenzie protested. “The headmaster couldn’t possibly . . .”

“I don’t think Burton cares much for the rule of law,” I said.

Kenzie sighed deeply. She wanted to think the best of people and I hated to crush that in her. I could see now why Ava wanted to keep all of this from Kenzie.

I turned back to Ava.

“What about the blueprints?” I said. “What did you find?”

“I’m not sure,” Ava said. “There was another part of the building that isn’t in the newer blueprint. It’s hard to read. Lots of strange abbreviations and symbols.”

Strange abbreviations and symbols. I thought about that first day when Star told me all about Kirkbride hospitals. Star had made an in-depth study of the building before she came here.

“What about Star?” I asked. “Maybe she could read the blueprints.”

“That’s a good idea,” Kenzie said. “If anyone knows this building, it’s Star.”

“What if she tells Burton?” Ava asked. “Star likes to follow the rules.”

“To the letter of the law,” Kenzie said. “But if I ask her to keep it secret, she will. We’re friends.”

I couldn’t imagine Star going to the headmaster with a set of blueprints, because it would mean she’d lose access to the blueprints. I knew she’d be excited to see them.

Also, I liked her.

“I trust Star,” I said.

Ava chewed on her lip and looked over to Kenzie. I understood Ava’s anxiety. Small schools like this one run rife with gossip. When you don’t have a phone, other people’s business becomes the default form of entertainment. But Star had cornices and tile work to keep her brain occupied. She didn’t need to spread rumors.

Kenzie nodded reassurance, and Ava sighed.

“If you think so,” Ava said.

Ava didn’t trust many people, but she trusted Kenzie. And me, for some reason—at least halfway.

“Star always studies down here after dinner,” Kenzie said. “So we just need to wait.”