Chapter 18 - The Girl in Green

I was at a breakfast table with Ava, plus Elise and Izzy from field hockey, when Ms. Burton entered the dining hall, striding purposefully toward us. She looked like she was on her way to a hunt—thigh-skimming olive drab coat trimmed in shearling, sturdy lace-up leather boots with rubber caps. Mentally, I put a hunting rifle in the crook of her arm.

I felt Ava tense alongside me. I felt a sudden urge to bolt, and it took my brain a second to catch up to my limbic system and register fear.

We’d been in the old hospital the day before. Ms. Burton had to know about the operating room. For all we knew, she had surveillance cameras in the operating room or by the staff entrance at the end of the service corridor.

I shot a glance at Ava.

“Jess, your schedule has changed,” Ms. Burton said crisply. “You’ll start with history now, instead of math. You’ll still be with Ms. Grant, but we’re putting in a review session.”

Ms. Burton handed me a half sheet of paper with my new class schedule. She turned and left.

“Schedule change?” Elise said. “Why is your schedule changing? You’ll still be in field hockey, won’t you?”

“I blew a math test,” I said, scanning the paper. “I missed a lot of math—a lot. I’m getting bumped down a grade level.”

“No after-school tutoring then?” Izzy asked.

“Not yet,” I replied.

“You can miss English or history, but math will get you in the end,” Izzy said.

I wondered how Izzy had come across this bit of academic wisdom, but it seemed rude to ask. I couldn’t be the only student here who’d fallen out of the scholastic system. Maybe not even the only one to go to juvie.

“From the look on Burton’s face, I thought she was going to put you on academic probation,” Elise said.

“Academic probation?” I sputtered. “Aren’t we already on lockdown?”

Elise raised an eyebrow in surprise. It probably had never occurred to her that she was in what was essentially a fancy cage.

“No, we’re not,” she said. “I was worried because you can’t do any extracurricular activities when you’re on probation. And we have Sweetwater next Saturday.”

I turned to stare blankly at Elise. I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Sweetwater?” Izzy said.

“You know, the game with Sweetwater Academy?” Elise rolled her eyes.

Ava got a sharp look in her eyes.

“Home or away?” she demanded.

“Away,” Elise said.

“Ugh, away game,” Izzy said. “You know Coach Mullins is going to be even more of a hard-ass than usual.”

Ava had a far-away look in her eyes, and I could tell she wasn’t thinking about the game. But at least she was speaking to me.

Elise and Izzy left, but Ava stayed rooted to the spot. She leaned close.

“Maybe Sweetwater has internet,” she whispered. “We could take your phone and smuggle out the proof.”

I sighed. Ava’s previous frostiness had vanished, and I’d returned to being her co-conspirator. At least in her mind. She still wanted to go back into the old hospital and take a video of the operating room to show the world.

I didn’t see how she planned to do that before Saturday. Ava had been right—Sunday was the only day of the week when the school was short-staffed. If she tried any other time, she was likely to get caught, and that reassured me. Ava could be reckless, but she wasn’t stupid.

* * *

I went to history right after breakfast. Sitting in class, listening to a teacher talk about the American experiment, was much easier than beginning the day with relentless factoring.

At lunch, I went looking for Star. I was dying to tell her about getting into the blocked-off part of the building. She’d been right about everything on the blueprints, including the service tunnel. That had been an educated guess on her part.

Thankfully, she was sitting alone when I came in. The fewer people who knew about the old hospital, the better.

I put my tray down across from her. She was reading and didn’t initially notice me.

It took a second, but she looked up and removed her headphones.

“We got into the old hospital,” I said in a low voice.

Star’s eyes widened. She wasn’t one for big emotional displays, but I could tell she was excited.

“How did you get in?” she asked. “There wasn’t any sign of a door on the blueprints.”

“The medical incinerator was rusted through,” I said. “We crawled through it to the other side.”

Star stiffened. I didn’t know if the idea of crawling through bone ash bothered her, or if it was the thought of some legacy part of the building destroyed. I might have guessed the second.

“And once you were in, how was the building?” she asked. “Was it well preserved?”

“It was like Dracula’s crypt,” I said. “You don’t really think about the architecture when you’re worried about vampires.”

Star wrinkled her nose. Maybe she could joke about other things, but the building, no. And then I realized what was different about the basement.

“There was a lot of cracked linoleum,” I said. “But everything seemed to be exactly as it was on the blueprints. Nurses’ station, operating room.”

“Cracked linoleum,” Star spat out. “I knew it. They could have restored the old hospital, but instead they walled it off. I’m sure it was a cost-saving measure. The restoration was supposed to be complete.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“I’ve talked to Ms. Burton about the restoration,” Star said. “I wrote my application essay about the building.”

So Star was also a fan of Burton. It was something to keep in mind.

“And we found the service tunnel,” I said.

“You did?” she said. “Where did it go?”

I didn’t want to tell Star about the voice we’d heard in the dark. I didn’t know how I could explain it in a way that would make sense.

“We didn’t go down the tunnel,” I said. “It went down at a very steep angle. I had the feeling that it went down a long way.”

“Interesting,” Star said.

I thought about the too-clean operating room and the surgical tools.

“Star,” I said slowly. “I think someone else had been down there recently. I just don’t know how they got there.”

Star frowned. “Not up the tunnel?” she asked.

If the idea of someone being in the old hospital bothered Star, she didn’t show it.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “But they certainly didn’t go in through the incinerator.”

“So how did they get down there?” she said.

“That’s what I’m wondering.”

Star nodded.

“Hmmm,” she said. “I’ll have to think about that.”

* * *

By the end of school, fog had settled into a low mist—enough to be unpleasant, but not enough to cancel practice.

I was already on the field, passing a ball back and forth with Elise, when Ava showed up.

“Line up!” Coach Mullins bellowed.

We ran laps around the school and did drills to improve our speed and cornering. When I groused, Madison said that I was big, but slow and uncoordinated. She called me She-Hulk.

After I hurled a wild ball all the way down the field and outside, I caught Coach Mullins staring at me. It was like I was a piece of meat, and not in any sexual sort of way—which, okay, terrible, but at least would make sense. Coach Mullins looked at me like he was imagining taking a chunk out of my thigh and eating it. Like Madison, he was probably weighing my size and intimidation factor against my middling athletic ability. But unlike Madison, he was dead behind the eyes.

Izzy had been right about Coach Mullins. He was even more of a hard-ass than usual. He kept us on the field late. By the time we were ready to leave the field, the sky had turned a bruised purple underneath the clouds, and every part of my body was sore.

Ava sidled alongside me as the others ran toward the locker room.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” she said in a low voice. “I think I know how we can get back in before Sunday.”

“Okay?” I said, for lack of anything better to say.

How? was the obvious question here, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. The thought of crawling back through the bone ash of the medical waste incinerator to find a chunk of scalp belonging to a dead girl filled me with dread bordering on physical revulsion. We’d been lucky enough to get in and out of the old hospital without anyone noticing the first time.

I doubted we’d get that lucky again.

“We have to go late—I mean, really late,” she said. “You can’t tell me that the night guard doesn’t nod off between three and five in the morning.”

“But we’d have to be awake then too,” I said. “I don’t see it happening.”

We had my phone, but I wasn’t going to waste my limited battery life on setting an alarm.

“Girls, hustle!” Coach Mullins bellowed.

“Fine. I’ll figure it out myself,” Ava said.