Chapter 10 - The Girl in Green

After field hockey, I headed back to the room. I felt groggy and discouraged, ready to face-plant. I sprawled on top of my bed and closed my eyes, the late afternoon sun making me sleepy. It was a bad idea to nap now. Sleep in the sunlight, rise in the sunlight was my one nap rule. Sleep too late and I’d wake in the dark, disoriented. But I told myself I would just close my eyes for a moment.

I woke to a sense of wrongness, an unbidden passage of time. It was dark outside, not the twilight dark of early evening, but the undistinguished dark of night. Something smelled good.

“You missed dinner,” Ava said. “I brought you something.”

I rolled over. Ava was at her desk, doing homework.

I sat up. At the edge of my desk was a cup with a spoon in it, and something wrapped in a paper napkin.

I was starving. I picked up the cup. Beans, but they smelled like bacon. “No offense, but is this vegetarian?” I asked.

Ava turned around in her chair to face me.

“The sign said vegan, so I guess so,” she replied. “Most of the food was gone by the time I decided to get you something, but the soup beans and cornbread were still out.”

“Soup beans?”

I stirred the beans. Little pieces of what I imagined to be smoky tempeh floated up. I took a bite. Comforting and familiar, which was good, because I was starving.

“Thanks,” I said. “These are like borracho beans, minus the jalapeños.”

“Sure,” Ava said. “Whatever that means. I’m glad you like soup beans, because there are almost always soup beans in the kitchen. That and macaroni something.”

I put the spoon down and took a bite of the cornbread. Nicely crusty, and not too sweet, which was how Mom made it.

Mom. She’d almost certainly made it to Chicago by now, unless she’d stopped along the way.

Ava put her mechanical pencil down and leaned over the back of her chair.

“Can I ask you something?”

There was something in Ava’s tone of voice that made me look up from my cup. A serious-question tone of voice. I didn’t really want to talk about my past with Ava. I didn’t know her that well.

And yet, I’d been thinking about the past and Oliver more than I had in a while. I was thinking about . . . knives. The headmaster’s sharpened letter opener had brought things back to me.

Barlow’s knife.

The thing in the woods.

“Within reason,” I replied.

“You got here so late,” she said. “Weren’t you already enrolled in another school?”

I sighed in relief. It wasn’t the question I’d imagined. Ava had a disconcerting ability to see straight into my soul, and I’d been expecting her to ask me just exactly when my life had gone off the rails.

I set the cup down on the desk.

“I was signed up for online courses,” I said. “I promised my mom that if I got accepted to DC, I’d go here. I got wait-listed back in June, but I didn’t think anything would come of it.”

“Wait-listed?” Ava frowned and chewed on a thumbnail. “So, when did you actually get accepted?”

“The letter came maybe a week ago,” I said.

It seemed strange that it was only about a week ago when Mom had ripped open my acceptance letter. It felt like a lifetime.

“What did the letter say?” she asked.

“Um, I don’t know. I have great academic potential—blah, blah, blah. . . . Also, a place opened up suddenly and . . .”

“ ‘A place opened up suddenly’?” Ava echoed. She had been in her usual slouch, but now she sat bolt upright, and shook her head slightly as though she couldn’t quite believe what she’d heard. “Your letter actually said that? ‘A place opened up suddenly’?”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“Was it on e-mail? Is it on your phone?”

Ava glanced toward her desk where my phone was still hidden.

“No, it’s not on my phone,” I said quickly. “I got an actual letter in the mail. Why do you want to see it?”

Ava stood up and paced the small space between the beds. “No one else has left recently,” she said. “Only Layla. And she’s only been gone two days. But you say your letter came a week ago.”

“Are you sure she’s only been gone two days?” I asked.

Ava stopped pacing and rolled her eyes at me. Of course she knew what day her roommate vanished. But it didn’t make any sense.

“I wish you had that letter,” Ava said.

“You said Layla went through family court,” I said. “Maybe the state only paid for a limited time at this school. Burton might have gotten notification that Layla was being transferred.”

I thought of my six weeks at behavioral horse camp. It was expensive. I imagined DC was too.

“You seem to know how it all works,” Ava said dryly. “Were you in a state school?”

I pursed my lips. I’d said too much.

Ava shrugged her shoulders. “Even if Layla had been transferred to another school, she would have taken her things. Her purse was here. Her earrings were here,” Ava said. “Layla took her earrings off every night and left them in a bowl by her bed. She said they got tangled in her hair while she slept, but she’d always put them back in the moment she woke up. She’d never have left without her earrings.”

“But what if she ran away?” I asked.

I kept circling back to that. It was the only thing that made sense.

“And told everyone she was going a week in advance, so Burton could send you an acceptance letter? I don’t think so.”

Ava pursed her lips, a grim look on her face. I glanced out the window into the dark and shivered. I didn’t like where this was going. Burton played mind games, but I couldn’t imagine she’d harm a student.

“Okay, so if Layla didn’t run away, and she didn’t leave with her family, what happened to her?”

“I don’t think she ever left,” she said. “Scratch that. I know she didn’t leave.”

Ava dropped in the chair by her desk. I waited for her to say something else, but after a moment she turned around, picked up a pen, and went back to working on a homework assignment. Conversation over.

I had so many questions. Ava was right, the timing of my acceptance letter was—odd. But if Layla hadn’t left, she’d still be here, somewhere in the building. Nothing about this made any sense.

Why would someone hide a student—or worse?

There had to be a reasonable explanation.

I’d gotten the sense that Layla was a bit of a troublemaker—a runner, like me. But Burton had let me know that she had the upper hand. I had to think that she’d done the same to Layla.

It really all came down to one question.

Where was Layla?

I missed Mom. So much had happened in the space of a day, and I imagined texting her everything. About the thing in the fog. About Burton handing me a sharpened letter opener.

My phone. It was still under the desk, in Ava’s hiding place.

And Layla. I was here because she wasn’t. I was sure of that. It was just the order of events that didn’t make sense.

After an hour or so of reading, I took my gallon bag of toothpaste and deodorant and walked to the shower room at the end of the hall. I brushed my teeth next to a red-headed girl. I took a shower and put on one of the few things I’d brought from home, an oversized black T-shirt I usually slept in.

By the time I got done with my shower, a woman wandered through the halls yelling “lights-out” in an oddly large voice.

Lights-out.

I lay in bed, in the dark, wide awake. I was strangely conscious of Ava’s presence in the bed across from me. I stayed there, listening as her breath lengthened and she fell asleep. An eternity passed while I stared out the window into the dark of night, a dark so total that it felt hallucinatory.

I couldn’t sleep.

* * *

I woke in complete darkness.

Where was I?

In a strange bed, far from home.

Something in the darkness outside called to me.

I put my feet on the floor, hard tile cold under the balls of my feet. I walked to the window, feeling a pull.

The sky, the ground below, all black. There was a profusion of stars in the sky over the tree line, more stars than I’d ever seen. A looming, claustrophobic brightness of stars.

Nothing else visible, as though the world were made of darkness and only the stars in the night sky had an answer for oblivion. I stared at the ground below looking for the thing I couldn’t see. I could feel it waiting in the dark. Watching.

The floodlights came on suddenly, casting the soccer field in an unearthly brightness.

Motion detector. Something had moved and triggered the lights.

I scanned the edge of the field until I saw a shadow slip into the tree line. I stood there, staring at the spot in the trees where the shadow had been. Willing whatever it was to reappear, terrified that it would. Unable to move.

I couldn’t see it, but I knew it could see me.

I stood, waiting for what seemed like an eternity—but was probably less than a minute—before the lights went out and I crawled back into bed.