Chapter 14 - The Girl in Green

We’d finished dinner and bussed our trays by the time Star showed up. She sat at a table on the opposite side of the room and didn’t seem to initially notice us. The three of us walked over to her table and sat.

Star looked up and lifted her headphones expectantly.

“Can you keep a secret?” Kenzie said sweetly.

“That depends entirely on the context,” Star replied. “I can’t tell until I know what the secret is.”

Ava stood up and pushed away from the table, ready to bolt.

“This is stupid,” she said. “We should just . . .”

Kenzie put a hand on Ava’s arm to keep her from leaving.

“We have the blueprints to the building,” I said quickly. “But you can’t tell anyone.”

Star got a bright look in her eyes. It was almost greedy. “I can keep a secret,” she said. “Where are the blueprints?”

Ava slid back into her seat. “On her phone.” She tilted her head in my direction.

Star looked down to my chest. She’d seen me tuck my phone into my sports bra on the first day I was here. She’d been the one to tell me to hide it.

“How did you get blueprints to the building?” she asked. “They aren’t online. I’ve checked.”

“There are blueprints to the building in the research library in the tower,” I said.

Star gave me an appreciative look. She didn’t ask me how we’d gotten up there or even how we knew where to find the blueprints. She didn’t care. It was enough that we’d found blueprints.

“But you’ll have to come up to our room to look at them,” Ava said sharply. “The phone doesn’t leave our room.”

Star turned her reader off and placed it carefully in her bag. She stood up from the table.

“I need to go to my room and get a sketch pad,” she said. “I’ll meet you there.”

“Don’t you have a sketchbook in your bag?” Kenzie asked.

“I carry around a small notebook in case I need it,” Star said. “I have a bigger sketch pad in my room. If I’m going to copy the blueprints, I’ll want a larger surface for a more detailed drawing.”

“Just don’t tell anyone what you’re doing, okay?” Ava said.

Kenzie shot Ava a look.

The four of us left the dining hall and walked up the stairs to the second floor and the girls’ dorm. The three of us waited in the hall while Star collected her supplies.

“Are you sure it’s a good idea to have Star copy the blueprints?” Ava whispered. “What if someone finds them?”

“Star is always drawing pictures of the building,” Kenzie replied softly. “No one is going to question it.”

“The battery in my phone will run out eventually,” I whispered. “Better to have her copy the blueprints . . .”

I stopped as Chloe and the girl with the puffy jacket who’d been on the hike walked down the hall toward the stairs.

“Hey, Kenzie,” the girl who’d been on the hike said. I really had to learn her name. “Did you finish the reading in history? I couldn’t . . .”

“Too late for homework talk,” Ava said sharply.

Chloe raised an eyebrow.

“What’s up with you?” she said.

“It’s Friday night,” Ava said.

“We know that,” the puffy jacket girl said in a tone of mild exasperation.

Ava could be abrupt. I liked her sharpness—it felt honest to me—but I could tell not everyone felt the same way.

“They’re showing a movie in the common room,” Chloe said. “Are you going, Kenzie?”

Star emerged from her room carrying a pen case, another case that appeared to hold protractors and other tools, and a giant sketch pad.

“Maybe later,” Kenzie said breezily. “We’re working on an art project together.”

It was a good thing that Kenzie was so nice. She had a way of diverting attention that was undeniable. Nothing to see here. Move along.

“See you down there,” puffy jacket girl said.

The two of them headed for the stairs and we walked in the other direction toward our room.

Once we were in our room, Ava pulled up the photos of the blueprints and gave the phone to Star. She sat at my desk and went to work, drawing.

Ava flopped on her bed, next to Kenzie. I sat on my bed, sneaking glances at Star’s work, trying not to crowd her.

“What were you and Dr. Jacobsen talking about?” Ava asked. “I thought I heard something about brain surgery.”

“He had files from the hospital,” I said. “Patients who had lobotomies.”

“Ugh—creepy,” Ava said.

“Dr. Jacobsen is all about local history and folklore,” Kenzie said. “I guess that includes the old asylum.”

“Still weird,” Ava said.

“He thinks the girl in green legend is about some earth mother goddess revenge fantasy thing,” I said. When I thought about it, Dr. Jacobsen would have fit right in with mom’s urban witch earth-first friends. Nature fighting back against the destruction and all.

Except for his obsession with brain scrambling. That was weird. And yes—creepy.

“The girl in green,” Ava spat out. “What a joke.”

I thought back to class when Barlow had argued with Dr. Jacobsen about the girl in green. He seemed to think she was real. Barlow was definitely—something. Every time we talked, he seemed hell-bent on annoying me, but when I thought about him, that wasn’t the first thing that leapt to mind. It was the way his dark curls lapped the side of his too-serious face, as though waiting for someone to brush them aside.

I didn’t need to be thinking about Barlow. I needed to focus on my exit strategy.

We fell silent, waiting on Star. It took a good thirty minutes for her to finish two different sketches, during which time I imagined the battery on my phone draining away. Finally, she switched the phone off and spread two drawings out on my bed, side by side.

I leaned over one of the drawings. Star had done everything in mechanical pencil, presumably so she could erase mistakes, though I couldn’t tell if she’d changed as much as a single line. Star had brought out a variety of straight edges and curves while drawing, and everything looked precise. I hadn’t looked at the original blueprints, but I imagined her drawing was very close, only scaled up.

“What did you want the blueprints for?” Star asked.

I exchanged glances with Ava. Ava was already mad that we’d told Kenzie about the blueprints, and I understood. The fewer people who knew our plans, the better. Ava wanted to find Layla, but I just wanted to find a way out. We weren’t going to find either without Star’s help.

“We want to know how the building has changed over time,” Kenzie said. “For instance, are there any rooms that were closed off or hidden away during the renovation?”

Star seemed to take this at face value.

“That’s very interesting,” Star said. “There’s an entire section of the basement that was closed off, although you probably knew that.”

“How would I know that?” Ava asked.

“No main stairway access to the basement,” Star said. “You wouldn’t build something like this without a basement.”

Ms. Burton’s office was behind the main staircase. I thought about my first day here. The tile underneath the staircase didn’t quite match the rest of the foyer. It was a slightly brighter white. I’d noticed it at the time.

“First off, I didn’t draw the wings of the building, just the central building,” Star said. “Anyway, the wings of the building remained unchanged in both blueprints, except for an addition to the library. You’ll note that the headmaster’s office is bigger in the more recent blueprint, but there is no L-shaped room in either version.”

“What does that mean?” Kenzie asked.

“It means the office was expanded around the time of the renovation, but it’s not on the blueprints,” Star said. “Kirkbride buildings are symmetrical. No architect would put an L-shaped room in a Kirkbride building.”

“She must have added the fireplace,” Kenzie said. “It takes up most of the far end of the office.”

I remembered running my hand over the smooth stone, Burton expressing regret that she couldn’t use the fireplace. “That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Burton told me that the fireplace was very old and that it leaked. She said she couldn’t use it.”

“So Burton was lying about her office,” Ava said impatiently. “What does it matter? I want to know about the basement.”

“The basement is interesting,” Star said. “This is how the basement of the school looks now. . . .”

She held out her sketch of the basement. It was less than half the size of the upstairs. Instead of the grand staircase, there were small stairs at the end of a service hallway near the kitchen. They led down to a large section labeled boiler room.

She put the first sketch down and held up the other sketch.

“And this is how the basement looked when it was a hospital.”

It was another blueprint of the basement. The boiler room was in the same place but a square at the end was marked as a medical incinerator. The wall at the end of the boiler room was at the same place as in the previous blueprint, but it showed double doors leading to the grand staircase, and a foyer roughly the same size as the one on the first floor. There was a set of double doors directly opposite the doors to the boiler room that led to a space marked as a surgical wing. There were triage and recovery rooms in the surgical wing. A nurses’ station.

A large room called the operating theater.

I shuddered, thinking of Gay-Lynne Sims. This had to be where she had the feral part of her brain scrambled.

Right underneath the common room and the headmaster’s office.

“So that part of the building was demolished?” Kenzie asked.

“Oh, it’s still there,” Star answered. “It would be too expensive to demolish. I believe they simply walled off the surgical wing.”

Star pointed to a thick line alongside the medical waste incinerator.

“The wall is already there. They probably just filled in the double doors. I doubt they even pulled out the old incinerator.”

“Really?” Kenzie said. “They just shut up a space and left it?”

“What else would they do?” Star asked. “Just walling off the space would be the cheapest way to close off that section of the building.”

I leaned over the drawing. In the closed-off part of the hospital, past the operating room, a corridor ended at a wall. But Star had drawn two dotted lines extending out from the wall.

“What is that?” I asked, pointing to the dotted lines.

“I’m not sure,” Star said. “It could be a storage room or a supply tunnel.”

“Why is it there?” Kenzie asked.

“I don’t know,” Star said. “But I do have some guesses. Often these old hospitals had to store bodies until spring when they could be buried. There was a tuberculosis hospital in Louisville where so many people died, they used a mortuary tunnel to take the dead out of the building, so—”

“That’s horrible,” Kenzie burst out.

I shuddered, thinking of all the bronze plaques in the graveyard below, some of them with death dates and first names only. Had those forgotten people been dragged out in a tunnel under the mountain? And what about Gay-Lynne? She had died here of “misadventure.” It was possible she’d been carted down the mountain like a sack of old potatoes and dumped in the potter’s field below.

But if there was a tunnel, there was a way out.

“How do we get into the old hospital?” Ava asked.

Star turned away from the blueprints and looked at Ava, considering.

“I’m not sure,” Star said. “It’s possible that the doors on the blueprint here still exist, though I’m not sure why they wouldn’t put that in the plans.”

Star pointed to the old blueprints, and the double doors that led from the boiler room into the foyer and the surgical wing beyond.

I hoped the doors still existed. If Star was right and the dotted lines leading past the operating room represented a service tunnel, it was my way out of here.

Star took the drawings and carefully placed them in between blank pages of the oversized pad.

“These are rough drafts,” she said. “I’ve taken notes, and I should be able to come up with a more thorough copy soon. I may need to look at your phone again.”

“Of course,” I said.

I worried about my battery life, but I wasn’t going to say no to Star. Honestly, I couldn’t imagine her improving on the drawings she’d already done.

Star tucked the pad under her arm and left the room.

Ava took the phone and crawled under her desk to put it back into the hiding place. “You really don’t think she’ll tell anyone, do you?” Ava said.

“Star?” Kenzie replied. “No, she won’t. She’s not like that.”

“I think Star wants to know what we find down there,” I said.

Kenzie made a face. “You’re not really going to try and go into the old hospital, are you?” she said. “It sounds dangerous.”

Dr. Jacobsen had said that parts of the building weren’t safe, but that was the kind of thing I’d expect him to say.

Ava sat in her desk chair and faced us both.

“And what if Layla is down there?” Ava said sharply. “Do we just leave her?”

Kenzie looked down at her hands folded in her lap. Her lip quivered, and I realized that she felt ashamed. Maybe she was afraid of the dark or whatever else could be down there.

Ava’s face softened.

“You don’t have to go,” Ava said. “Jess will come with me.”

I’d only been here a couple of days and already Ava assumed I was on board with all her plans. Maybe she knew that I was looking for a way out and the basement was the most likely place. Or maybe she just assumed that because I’m big, nothing much scares me. She wouldn’t be the first person to think that.

“I’ll go with you,” I said, mostly to keep Kenzie from feeling bad about it. “So how do we get down there? The door to the boiler room is at the end of the service hall by the kitchen. How do you expect to get past the kitchen staff?”

I didn’t want to get caught again. Dr. Jacobsen had warned me once—and cut me slack. Next time he’d tell the headmaster.

“Sunday morning,” Ava said resolutely. “Burton goes to church in town. Most of the teachers go home for the weekend. The kitchen crew comes early to make food for Sunday supper, but then they have the rest of the day off. There’s only a skeleton crew around.”

“Okay, so Sunday morning,” I said. “We go to the boiler room and look for a way in.”

“But it’s going to be dark down there, and your phone is almost dead.”

I went to the closet and pulled out my backpack. I reached to the bottom of the pack past extra underwear and bras, a thick cotton-poly blend sweater that I now realized was fake—a cheap knockoff compared to my school-issued thick wool sweater. You don’t learn these things in Texas.

My hand found the thick vinyl of my makeup bag. It was filled with stuff I mostly never used—a pretty palette of glittery eyeshadows, only one of which actually looked good on me, foundation, lip gloss and mascara, matte red lipstick that made me look glamorous but wore off almost instantly. And also, a black-and-red phone charger that looked exactly like a fat tube of lipstick. A corporate coffee patron had left it, and she had never come back for it.

“You’re a genius!” Ava exclaimed.

She took the phone, plugged it into the charger, and stuck it back in the hiding place under her desk.

“Kenzie, will you keep watch for us?” Ava asked.

Kenzie nodded tightly. I could tell she wasn’t thrilled with this plan, but she wasn’t going to fight Ava over it. I knew she was relieved that she didn’t have to go under the school.

“Until Sunday,” Ava said.

“What if Layla is down there?” Kenzie said. “I hate to think of her down there for another day.”

“It can’t be helped,” Ava said. “We’d get caught if we tried it tomorrow.”

Layla wasn’t down there. I was pretty sure she’d found the tunnel to the valley below and had escaped. And if she’d gotten out of here, so could I.

Two days away. I could make it that long—or so I told myself.