Haunted Organic (2014 Watty Award Winner)

Six: 1952

"C'mon in Giraffe-Boy." she said, grabbing his arm and pulling him into her room.

"I'm Emerald."

"Josie," he said, absent-mindedly, look around.

"I know, Giraffe-Boy."

Josie got it. "Giraffe-boy." Because he was tall. Original. Like he had never heard a tall joke before. She already annoyed him. He wished he hadn't come here at all.

He stepped inside her door, and she shut it behind him.

Emerald's room was not at all what he expected.

"She's a slob," he thought.

There were stacks of unpacked boxes, clothes matted into a ball on the floor, scuba equipment lobbed into the corners, stacks of books, notebooks, ocean maps and a jar of pens and sharpies on her nightstand. There was a whole work table with plastic mannequin heads, and masks hanging on them. Old molds were heaped on top of one another on one end, a basket brimming with paints and brushes on the other end.

Josie walked over and looked at the masks. Some were bloody, some with gashes cut into the cheeks, some screaming in horror, some looked like they were covered in charred flesh. One had a cleaver poking of out the top of its skull, with brain matter running down on side of its face. They were all gruesome. He had no idea how she slept in this room, with all these gory eyes following her around.

"I like horror movies," she said bluntly, watching his face.

She pointed to a tray of fake teeth, some perfect, some broken, some decayed and rotted, black and ground down to nubs.

"Girl's gotta have a hobby," she said, with more than a tinge of sarcasm in her voice.

On the other side of the room, there were photos haphazardly tacked up onto the walls, a woman on a boat, surrounded by sharks, dead and hanging from hooks, their blood puddling at her feet. There were articles from magazines, newspapers. Josie recognized her dad in many of the photos.

"Where's your dad?" Josie asked, more to fill the void than anything.

"At the lab. He's been working on the disappearance of the small fish along the coast," she told him, "He thinks it's global warming..."

Emerald made a point of dramatically rolling her eyes.

Josie didn't say anything. He waited, not wanting to be the first one to mention the monster in case she was playing him, ridiculing him, setting him up, recording their conversation.

He remembered the prank Grotty played on him in science. Wasn't everyone out to set him up?

"You know it's Bangkok, right?" she said, incredulously.

"What do you know about Bangkok?" he asked her.

And with that, Emerald walked over to a plush blue curtain that covered one wall and drew it back. It was a whiteboard, huge, filling up the wall, on it were maps, photos, newspaper clippings, old pages torn out of textbooks, underwater photos, and scribbled notes written in different colored sharpies, with arrows linking those notes to different photos of people and places.

It was truly the most impressive thing Josie had ever seen.

"You can't tell the adults," she said conspiratorially. "Grown-ups are brain dead. They think you're crazy when you talk about sea monsters."

"Tell me about it," Josie mumbled, getting closer to the board to get a better look. It was the truest statement he had ever heard.

"How?...How do you know about Bangkok?"