Chapter Fifteen

Girl A

It doesn’t take us long to reach Quick’s office. The corridors are deserted, and we move quickly and quietly. We pause for breath when we reach Quick’s door. I’m nearest to it. I look at Victoria, and then at Annie.

“Okay, here goes…” I say. I knock. No answer. I knock again.

“Crap,” Annie says, “she’s not even home!”

I twist the door handle and push. The door is unlocked. It swings open and I step inside. Victoria and Annie join me in the office. I hear a disembodied gasp and realize that the sound is mine.

Principal Quick lays slumped across her desk.

A bottle of vodka stands next to her, half-empty and missing its cap.

“Principal Quick?”

She’s not moving. No sign of her breathing, either. We approach her desk together, cautiously. Tension hangs in the musty air of the office. It feels as though the principal may startle into life again any moment. Then I see an empty prescription pill bottle next to the vodka. There’s no label on the bottle, just the powdery residue of whatever tablets it contained.

I don’t want to touch her, but I have no choice.

I reach out and brush Quick’s hair away from her eyes. They’re glassy, and wide open. Her face is locked in a silent scream of pure terror. Her hair feels weird against my skin. I wonder if it’s still growing, even though she’s—

“She’s stone-cold fucking dead,” Annie says.

“Oh my God. Oh my God,” Victoria pants.

“Try the phone,” Annie says. “Call for help.”

I reach out and pluck the receiver from its cradle. I put it to my ear and can hear no dial tone, nothing.

“It’s dead,” I say, and wonder if that’s an inappropriate thing to say, given the macabre circumstances.

Annie marches over and takes the receiver from me. She puts it to her ear and listens intently. I guess she needs to try it for herself before she’ll believe me. She looks crestfallen and then drops the receiver onto the desk.

I see the clipboard on the desk next to Quick’s stiff, bony hand. She must have been looking at it before she died. I pick it up and start leafing through the pages.

“Emily?” Victoria asks. “What are you…?”

Each page has one of our psych profiles on it, and I start reading the notes written in Quick’s spidery hand.

“This can’t be right.”

“What is that?” Annie asks, sounding agitated.

“Profiles. Psych evaluations, the whole lot. Look, here’s Lena….”

Annie takes the clipboard from me. She reads in silence. I glance at Victoria, who bites down on her lower lip.

“It says she died of an overdose,” Annie says, sounding mystified. “Institutionalized since the rape and murder of her kid sister. Jesus, it says here Lena was pimping her own sister out to pay for her habit….”

At that, Victoria reaches across me and grabs the clipboard. “Let me see that,” she says.

Annie looks kind of relieved to let it go, and Victoria turns the page.

“This one’s you, Annie. Oh, fuck.”

Annie looks alarmed. “What?”

“Someone’s sick idea of a joke,” Victoria says, handing the clipboard back to Annie.

Annie examines the page through ever widening eyes. Then she looks up, and appears to be completely aghast at what she just read. “Enough,” she says. “Enough of this fucked-up place. I am out of here.”

“No,” Victoria protests, “we have to stick together, we—”

Victoria tries to stop Annie from walking away from the desk. Annie seizes her shoulders and pushes her away.

“Do not touch me! I am out of here! Fuck!” Annie turns tail and bolts out the door.

Victoria looks down at Principal Quick’s corpse in disbelief. “She was insane. That’s the only explanation. Quick brought us here to fuck with our heads until we were all dead.”

“Then…. Why kill herself before she finished the job?” I ask, and even as I do ask it I’m pretty sure I don’t even want to know the answer.

Victoria flips through the pages on the clipboard. Something in her body language changes. She stiffens. Then she looks at me, her eyes almost as stone cold as Principal Quick’s are.

“You tell me,” she says.

“You think…. Whoever this gray girl is?”

“You would know, wouldn’t you, Emily? What is it you’re not telling me?” Victoria brandishes the clipboard like a weapon. “This ‘on the fucking spectrum’ act of yours, it doesn’t wash any more. You know something and yet you’re still not telling.”

My head begins to spin. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“It’s all a big act.” Victoria holds up the clipboard. “You’re the only one without a file, Emily!”

I look at the files she’s holding. Victoria has folded back all the pages, to reveal the blank clipboard beneath.

“I did time here before,” I say. “Maybe there wasn’t any need for a new file.”

“Sure you did. And why exactly was that again?”

“I don’t…. I don’t remember.”

(And really, I don’t. I told you, I’m unreliable, I….)

“You know, that I do believe. Principal Quick’s little pet fuck up, aren’t you?”

Victoria tosses the clipboard onto the desk, careless of Principal Quick’s head lying there with her eyes fixed open in death’s stare. I turn the clipboard the right way around so I can read it. Then I quickly leaf through each page in turn, to check if what Victoria has been saying is true.

“Okay. There’s no file on me, but that doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist at all.”

Victoria’s expression is blank.

“It could be filed away somewhere else,” I say, and begin to look through the papers on Quick’s desk. Still no sign of my mugshot anywhere.

Then the cover sheet of Quick’s manuscript catches my eye. ‘Girl A’ by Mina Quick. I discard the clipboard, and flick through the first few pages of the manuscript.

“Quick was running some kind of experiment,” I say. “Look. ‘Girl A’. I think she might be the one who’s been stalking us, picking us off one by one.”

“You think? Let me see that.” I’ve piqued Victoria’s interest. She brushes me aside and begins to leaf through the manuscript herself.

“I think I saw her watching us from the clock tower. And she was at the pool too, I’m sure of it. She knows routes through the building that we don’t. What if she was in the basement when you fell down there? Maybe Principal Quick lets…or rather, let her roam free, after lights out. That’s why she said the clock tower is off limits. She stays up there during daylight hours. I’m sure of it. And maybe Quick thought this girl wouldn’t harm her, but….” I glance down at the principal’s dead body. And I feel cold.

“Emily.” Victoria’s jaw drops.

“What is it?” I move back to her side, so I can see the pages she has been reading.

Victoria scoops up the book and holds it to her chest. She backs away and I feel so confused at just how angry she looks right now. Angry, and terrified. “Keep the hell away from me,” she says.

But I am away from her, so I don’t understand what she means. The desk separates us, with Principal Quick’s dead body resting head down on it. This whole situation is so fucked up already and the last thing we need right now is more division. I pinch my forearm to make sure I’m not dreaming. My skin feels numb, and cold to the touch.

“No, we have to solve this together. You said so to Annie. We have to catch up to her. And Lena, right? We have to get together and figure out what to do next.”

And yet, even as I say the words, I can see Victoria withdrawing further into herself. Away from me.

“No, no, no,” Victoria says, and her voice is getting all high pitched and starting to freak me out. “It’s you, Emily. I don’t know how you’ve been doing it, I’m not sure I want to know, but….”

My ears start ringing, very faintly. Another out-of-body experience? Bring it on. My already pretty limited understanding of other human beings is being stretched to its absolute limit.

“What on earth are you talking about?” I ask her.

“It’s your name in Quick’s research, Emily. You’re ‘Girl A’.”

Victoria throws the manuscript at me. I have to dodge out of the way to avoid it hitting me square in the face. The sheaf of paper hits the wall behind me and drops to the floor.

“Victoria?”

But she’s already gone, leaving me alone in the office. Alone except for Principal Quick’s dead body. And the manuscript. I crouch down and gather up the sheets of paper from the floor. I carry the manuscript around to the other side of the desk so I can be as far away from Quick’s blankly staring eyes as possible.

I leaf through the pages until I see it. My name is there, just as Victoria said it was:

Case study introduction. Emily Drake—

(There’s some writing scrawled over this bit, in Principal Quick’s hand.)

(NOTE: TO BE REFERRED TO THROUGHOUT M/S AS ‘GIRL A’!)

—exhibits symptoms of acute dissociative disorder. Under hypnosis, she refers to a half-glimpsed fellow inmate – a ‘gray girl’ who lives in seclusion away from the rest of the girls. This ‘gray girl’ could be a manifestation of an alternate identity and further interviews under hypnosis will explore whether this persona is actually part of a dissociative identity disorder (see footnote1 about EXTERNALIZED multiple personalities) or merely a projection resulting from what this study will refer to as ‘dissociation de-realization disorder’ or DDD for short. Girl A’s case is difficult to pin down within the confines of established prognoses based on prior case studies in this field. Girl A is presenting something new and exciting to the field and treatment must be exploratory and experimental….

Is that who I am? Some new kind of medical definition? My mind feels fuzzy at the concept of having been hypnotized by batshit old Principal Quick. I wonder when exactly that happened. Of course, I wouldn’t know if she put me under, wouldn’t have any recollection. Would I? My mind flashes with a half-remembered memory of a pulsing light, accompanied by the ticking of a metronome. And then it’s gone, leaving yet more questions.

Was the principal writing all of this about me when I was last incarcerated at Greyfriars? She must have been. And, judging from the thickness of the manuscript, this was something she was working on for months. I can’t shake the feeling that whatever ‘exploratory and experimental’ treatment she gave me might have made me even worse. My behavior and my condition. Nor can I ignore the possibility that my out-of-body episodes could be a symptom of Principal Quick’s dubious brand of reformatory care. Is that why Jess and Saffy are dead, I wonder? Did they kill themselves because of some wacko treatment that Quick was subjecting them to? But my thoughts circle back to the ‘gray girl’. Where does she fit into all this? I’m wondering now if she really could just be the product of my disorder.

If that’s true, though, how did the other girls see her?

A sound pulls me out of my spiraling thoughts. A scratching, coming from behind the closet door. I listen intently, hoping against hope that I imagined it. That it is—

(What did Quick’s manuscript call it?)

—a projection, that’s it.

But the scratch-scratching continues and, even worse, it is accompanied by a sobbing, wailing sound. The voice is female, and anguished. My mind conjures images of Jess, all bloody, her fingernails ravaged from her climb up the hard, stone steps of the basement. The shrill wailing gives way to the eerie sound of a musical box’s chimes. I swallow hard. Can’t just stand here, doing nothing. What if it really is Jess trapped in there? But I saw her throat gashed open, all her life’s blood spilled over the tiled floor in the bathroom. It can’t be her—

(So, who is it then?)

—I think, as my hand falls to my side and brushes against the handle of the desk drawer. The key is still in there, I know it is. And I know I’ll have to take it from the drawer and unlock the closet door. Then I will have to face whatever is in there, sobbing and wailing and scratching, because I also know that if I don’t, the sounds are going to drive me insane. Far crazier than even Principal Quick could have bargained for.

I slide open Quick’s desk drawer and root around inside. But, before I can locate the key, I discover something else. I pull out a small, crumpled metal box. It has a metal handle poking out through a tiny aperture in one side. I hold up the box and turn the handle. It chimes discordantly. And all of a sudden, the wailing stops. The music chime echoes out into silence. The scratching on the door has thankfully stopped, too.

I place the music box onto Quick’s desk and find the key at the back of the drawer. Clutching the key in my right hand, I steel myself and then walk over to the closet door.

I knock gingerly.

“Hello?” I ask the silence, and of course no reply comes.

I insert the key into the lock and wonder why my hand is shaking so much. I turn the key in the lock barrel and I hear it click against the tumblers. Willing my hand to stop shaking, I clutch the door handle and twist it open. I push against the door and see into the closet.

There’s no one inside. Embarrassed relief quickly becomes concern that I’m imagining things again. The extract that I read in Principal Quick’s manuscript plays over and over in my mind. I’m about to shut the closet door when the music box chimes again. My mind conjures an image of the principal, dead as a doornail and sitting up in her desk chair. Turning the little music box handle, her staring eyes glistening with madness.

The music box chimes again and I try not to scream in terror.

I turn sharply around to see that Principal Quick is still slumped over her desk, exactly as she was before. A shadow momentarily moves across the wall behind her. I blink and it’s gone.

I rush over to the desk and pick up the music box. I turn the little handle. No sound this time. I shake it and still it doesn’t chime. I thrust it into my pocket and run to the office door, eager to be away from Principal Quick and the confusing mysteries she’s left in her wake.