Chapter 20 - The Girl in Green

My head spun as I got to my knees. I grabbed the corner of a nearby table and braced myself as a wave of dizziness washed over me.

“Are you okay?” the security guard asked.

“I came down for a snack,” I said. “I guess I tripped.”

The last thing I wanted was for him to wake the nurse—or Burton.

He threw a glance back toward his office with a reluctant look. I hadn’t seen the security guard before, but seeing him up close, I realized he wasn’t much older than me. For all I knew he was a student at the local high school, working a night job. He didn’t want to deal with me.

“Okay then, well, get to bed,” he said in what I imagined he thought was his tough voice.

I made my way up the stairs, clutching the railing. I made my way down the long hallway in the low light to my room and opened the door slowly, so as not to wake Ava.

Across the room, Ava’s measured breath broke the silence. She was in deep sleep mode. I wanted to wake her, but I didn’t know what I would say.

I put a hand on my cheek and gasped from unexpected pain.

Ava sputtered and stirred, and went back to sleep.

My cheek throbbed. I looked over at Ava’s sleeping form, and a great wave of fatigue and nausea hit me.

I slumped with my back against the headboard and stayed perfectly still, watching the door, until I fell asleep.

* * *

I woke to the first solid beam of sun I’d seen in days. I didn’t have to look at a clock to know that I’d slept in. It was late, and the bed across from me was empty.

Ava had already left for classes.

I was surprised that she hadn’t woken me. Ava had said that we needed to be as inconspicuous as possible. Being late to class was definitely conspicuous.

I lifted my hand to my face and gently prodded the tender skin. The side of my cheek was sore where I’d connected with the table.

I padded down the hallway to the white-tiled bathroom. As I emerged from one of the stalls, I caught sight of myself in the long mirror over the row of sinks. My cheek and eye were a puffy angry red that suggested I’d have a black eye in a couple of days. When the water hit my face, a shock of renewed pain clouded my vision.

Nothing I could do about it now.

I certainly wasn’t going to make a visit to the nurse’s office.

I went back to my room and changed, then went downstairs to the dining hall.

No one there. I was late—really late.

Why didn’t Ava wake me up?

I walked cautiously to the spot where the girl in green had leaned against the wall the night before. Nothing.

What did I expect, footprints?

The girl in green was a ghost.

A clatter of industrial trays and the low murmur of voices came from the pass-through to the kitchen. The smell of bacon and stale coffee lingered in the air.

Breakfast had been cleaned up, but one coffee dispenser was still there, along with the ubiquitous protein bars. I drank a cup of old coffee and choked down a chocolate-flavored protein bar.

I was so late, I’d missed history entirely. I went straight to English and eased into an armchair by the window, hoping to go unnoticed. With any luck, once silent reading time started, I could sit and look out the window and not have to deal with anyone.

No such luck. I was in the process of getting out my e-reader when I heard my name called.

“Jess, could I talk to you for a minute?” Dr. Jacobsen said.

I craned my head around the edge of the armchair. Dr. Jacobsen was at his desk. His eyebrows were raised in concern verging on alarm. I didn’t know that I looked that bad.

I walked toward his desk, trying out various explanations for my developing black eye.

“Are you feeling all right, Jess?” Dr. Jacobsen asked.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Why?”

“You have quite the shiner,” he said. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

I reached up and touched my left cheek. It was still sore.

Dr. Jacobsen tilted his head quizzically. I realized that he was waiting for an answer that I didn’t have. Gay-Lynne’s urgent, pleading face flashed through my mind like a warning.

Don’t tell.

“Field hockey,” I said.

“Field hockey?” he repeated slowly.

“I got hit with a stick.”

“Do you need to go to the nurse’s office?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said, a bit frantically.

The nurse’s office was a tiny closet-like nook nestled next to Burton’s lavish office. The nurse herself was a sour, middle-aged woman whose face only lit up when Burton approached. I didn’t want to explain the black eye to her, and I certainly didn’t want her getting Burton involved.

“I really would like the nurse to check you out, just to be sure,” Dr. Jacobsen said, a bit more insistently.

“I’m really okay,” I said. “I don’t think that . . .”

“I can take Jess to the nurse’s office,” Barlow’s voice came from behind me.

I turned. Barlow leaned against the chalkboard. I met his eyes, expecting him to smile, but he looked only slightly less alarmed than Dr. Jacobsen.

“Would you mind?” Dr. Jacobsen said, looking relieved. “Thank you, Barlow.”

Everyone was staring at me and my black eye, and I decided that it would just be easier to go with Barlow. I followed him out of the room into the hall, and we headed down the stairs to the main foyer.

“I’m not going to the nurse’s office,” I whispered. “Not in a million years.”

“Of course not,” he whispered back. “I can take care of you. There’s a bathroom near the library that no one ever uses. We can go there.”

Barlow sped down the stairs and scanned the foyer. He turned toward the library and waved me on. There were a few students in the library, but no one looked up before we made it to the bathroom. It was a small bathroom with a lock. We couldn’t stay long, and we were in danger of being caught together, but at least it was private.

The bathroom had hexagonal black and white tile and a white hanging sink that had to be at least seventy years old. Only the toilet was industrial and newish.

“The bathroom that time forgot,” I said.

“Everyone has forgotten this bathroom,” he said. “That’s why it’s so useful.”

Barlow pulled the door shut behind us.

“Dr. Jacobsen was right,” he said. “You’re going to have quite a black eye in a couple of days.”

I turned to look at myself in the mirror. My whole left cheek was red and swollen, the beginning of a bruise spread up to my eye. I hadn’t expected it to look quite as bad as it did, or I would have put on makeup.

I turned back to Barlow. He took a step forward and gently touched the side of my face and I winced.

“Does it hurt?” he said.

“It’s fine.”

“You’re very tough,” he said.

I shrugged. It’s not the first time I’ve heard that. It was the reason I was here.

He studied my face intently. “Look into my eyes,” he said.

“Look into my eyes? Are you trying to hypnotize me?”

“I wish,” he said, giving me a lopsided smile. “Now look up at the light.”

I looked up toward the ancient overhead fixture, confused by the request. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Looking to see if your pupils contract,” he replied. “I’m checking you for a concussion.”

I looked away from the overhead light and back to his face. Barlow stood less than a forearm’s length away, his hand cupped softly around my bruised cheek, a look of concern in his face. He was so close I could see the golden ring around his irises. Shades of gold melding into copper brown.

Tears welled in my eyes and I fought back a sudden urge to cry, but not because of the pain. Pain, I was used to. I wasn’t used to kindness from a boy. It hit me like a sledgehammer.

“Jess, are you okay?” he asked softly.

“Fine,” I said quickly. I wasn’t going to cry. Not here, not like this. “So how do you know so much about concussions?”

“My mom,” he said. “She’s an ER nurse. She’s taught me a lot. I could field strip an EpiPen or do stitches if I had to.”

“Stitches?” I asked. “How did you learn that?”

“She had me practice on chicken skin,” he said.

The idea of sewing raw chicken skin made my stomach lurch.

“Franken-chickens?” I said.

Barlow laughed. I laughed too, with the ridiculousness of the image, or the tension of being so close to him in such a small space.

As quickly as we’d started laughing, we stopped, suddenly aware that we were hiding out in a bathroom by the library. We were not invisible, and the clock was ticking.

“How did this happen?” he asked.

I shuddered, thinking back to that moment in the dark. The small, tragic girl in a faded hospital gown, those pleading eyes. I hesitated, thinking he wouldn’t believe me.

Then I remembered. He’d seen the girl in green too.

“I saw her,” I murmured. “I saw the girl in green.”

A look of fear akin to animal panic skittered across his face and disappeared just as suddenly. What had happened to Barlow in the woods that day had stayed with him at a visceral, reach-for-your-knife level.

I knew that feeling.

“Where did you see her?”

“In the dining hall,” I said. “I tripped in the dark and hit a table.”

Barlow frowned and chewed on his lip. “She’s never been in the school before,” he said slowly. “Why would she be here, in the school?”

“Because she died here,” I said. “She died in the basement, in the old hospital.”

Barlow frowned and took a step back. “Died here?” he said. “How do you know that?”

“I recognized her,” I said. “I saw her picture in the reference library. Her name is—was—Gay-Lynne Sims. She had a lobotomy here seventy years ago.”

I couldn’t get the image out of my head. Gay-Lynne Sims, in that horrible surgery room, strapped to a table, hands held down, head in place so she wouldn’t move at the moment the doctor inserted the orbitoclast under her eye socket.

“That can’t be. The girl in green is old—much older than the school, or even the hospital,” he said. “Some people think she’s always been here.”

“They’re wrong,” I said.

Barlow shook his head in disbelief.

“You heard Dr. Jacobsen,” he said. “The girl in green first showed up when the mines were dug here.”

“I know what I saw.”

Barlow leaned back against the sink and crossed his arms. Stubborn. He was more willing to believe something Dr. Jacobsen had read in a book about Scottish folklore than me. But I’d seen the girl in green last night, and I knew without a doubt that she was Gay-Lynne Sims.

There was only one way to prove it to him. I had to show him the old medical records and photos of Gay-Lynne Sims. If he’d really seen the girl in green, as I had, he would recognize her face too. It was undeniable.

But that meant we had to either sneak back up to the reference library or ask Dr. Jacobsen for the files.

I didn’t like either option. And now that Ava and I had found the clean operating room with modern surgical tools, I liked the second option even less.

Why was Dr. Jacobsen so interested in old brain surgery?

“I can prove it was her,” I said. “After school.”

Barlow stared at me levelly.

“Okay,” he said. “After school.”