"What happened to you?"
Dane noisily flipped a page of the worn book she was holding and I read the words on its spine: Federal rules on criminal procedure. I had no idea how she could stomach such dry literature and why she wanted to study criminal law after getting out of Lonewood was something I thought I'd never understand.
"I fell." A nonchalant statement. I examined my cellmate, who lay stretched out on her top bunk, and let my eyes roam over her injuries. An abrasion stained her right cheek and dried blood painted the fingernails of her scraped hands a dull red colour. I imagined it hurt.
"You fell?"
She slammed her book shut and put it down, her eyes drifting to find the ceiling and resting there with a glassy stare. "I fell twice."
I had no trouble believing basketball could be a dangerous sport, especially in prison. I personally never fancied getting a mouthful of concrete and made a mental note to never take my chances with prison sports if I wanted my body to remain damage-free. "You should get those wounds checked out. Disinfected."
"Or what?"
"Or you'll soon be showing up in the infirmary with a whole tribe of bacteria trying to eat your face, and you might lose your hearing right along with it, because the nurses are going to scream loud as hell when they look at you."
Dane snorted. "I can't even tell if you're joking or not," she said before presumably mumbling a few choice words about flesh-eating bacteria in Spanish. "Doesn't hurt much, though, but thanks for your concern. Missed you at the game earlier."
I shrugged, unwilling to discuss what had kept me busy. "You've already got your girlfriend there to support you. I'd be useless on the sidelines." The awkward smile I managed to conjure up worked its hardest to highlight the airy undertone I was going for.
Dane frowned at the ceiling. "Too hard on yourself, Winston."
I gave her a baffled stare upon hearing the new nickname, but she didn't elaborate, leaving me to chase after an answer myself. "That nickname doesn't even make sense, does it now?"
Dane reached for her discarded book, unimpressed, and stated in the most matter-of-fact tone possible: "Churchill."
Church. Churchill. I groaned. If you're going through Hell, keep going! Dane had also spotted the damned quote in Doctor Jones' office and it had cursed me with my worst nickname yet. Never before had I felt such a strong desire to dig up an old British prime minister's corpse and feed it to angry piranhas.
"That's not funny," I said, crossing my arms.
"Blame Doc," came the easy-going reply, confirming my suspicion. "I got the idea in his office and an excellent idea it was."
I would've begged to differ if our conversation straying towards the doctor's office hadn't brought back memories. I saw Liz in front of me, telling me go ask Daniela and leaving me to fend for myself with a cheeky smile, as if the task she'd handed me was as easy as kindergarten math. The picture of Counselor Taylor came back to haunt me like his ghost had done, cutting into me sharply.
I realised that Dane, who'd been in Lonewood for four years now, had probably known the counselor when he was still alive. How much of him did she remember? Would she be able to recall the sound of his voice, his eerie eyes, the bleached teeth bared in that small smile?
There was no harm in asking.
"Off-topic question," I said, loud enough to immediately grab hold of my cellmate's wandering attention. "Do you remember this counselor who used to work here? Matthew Taylor?"
Propping herself up on her elbows with some effort, Dane closed her eyes for a second. But I'd already seen the recognition shining in them. "Ojo maligno," she mumbled, so softly I had to strain to hear it. The little Spanish I'd been taught in school hadn't fled my mind completely and figuring out the meaning of those words wasn't too difficult for me. Ojo maligno. Evil eye.
"I don't mean to pry," I continued, my eyes locking with hers, "but it's... someone I know told me he died during a riot two years back, and seeing as you were there–"
Dane cut me off. "A word of advice, Bails. Next time you see Liz, just make out with her instead of letting that overactive brain of hers feed you morbid fairy tales about the past."
I had to give Dane this much: she wasn't nearly as slow and stupid as some of our fellow inmates seemed to think. Not that she was the sharpest tool in the shed, but she definitely deserved more credit than she got on a daily basis. There was more to her than met the eye. And yet, when she said those words, she'd seemed so small, so unlike a hardened delinquent and more like the frightened teenager she really must've been.
"Fairy tales?" I asked. "You mean what Liz told me isn't true?"
"No." Dane's eyes were a pretty hazel colour, radiating amusement and mischief and something pleasantly warm on good days. But at that moment, all that warmth had dissipated, leaving nothing but a dull iciness I'd rarely seen before staring me down. "There really was a riot and Taylor really did die. I just mean it's not worth discussing."
"Why not?" The question escaped my lips before I could stop myself. With my gaze nervously trained on my cellmate, I braced for the worst: an outburst of anger directed at me or a string of filthy curses in Spanish.
It never came.
Dane sat up straight on her bunk slowly, surprisingly calm. "Look," she said, defeat sneaking into her tone. "You weren't there, but those riots... that time of my life in general... it was drugs and violence and being miserable all the fucking time. Bad shit, I'm telling you, Bails. So if you don't mind, I'm not down for a trip down memory lane and talking about dead counselors."
I saw where she was coming from. The past could be a sensitive subject and I decided to respect Dane's desire for privacy. I wasn't Liz with her waterfalls of questions and constant search for knowledge about everything and everyone. I'd spent only one agonizing month in Lonewood so far, but Dane had been trapped within those unforgiving walls for four whole years. I could only imagine the horrors she'd seen, the hazards she'd battled and the risks she'd taken during that time, all while I'd still been sitting in my bedroom, watching YouTube videos on my smartphone with a big bag of popcorn beside me and not a care in the world.
"I'm sorry," I apologized. "I was just curious. If you don't want to think about the past, I'll drop it." I wasn't interested in forcing Daniela Guerrero's skeletons out of the dusty closet she kept them in. I'd have buried them six feet under upon observing them, anyway.
"We're good, Bails. You're my friend." Dane rolled up the sleeve of her right jacket, exposing her wrist. Bloodstained fingers moved to lightly touch the gang tattoo there, the gagged skull. "But you know what this means, don't you? What it stands for. Sometimes it's better not to speak."
And so the living become the dead.
"I understand," I told her with a nod, and her coldness receded, as if it had never existed in the first place. She lay back down, patting around for her book absent-mindedly. I remembered I still had one question left to ask.
"Dane?"
"Hm?" she raised an eyebrow, made a noncommited noise.
"Suppose I needed to get my hands on some oddly specific contraband," I began. Hesitant at first, but my voice grew more sure with each word leaving my mouth. "Something big. A board game. Who would you refer me to?"
A mischievous smirk broke out on Dane's face. "Surely this is all hypothetical, right?"
"Monopoly beckons," I answered with too wide a smile, wallowing in my lie.
Dane gave my question some thought, dog-earing the pages of her borrowed library book in the process. I imagined the librarian spiralling into madness upon noticing her treatment of the tome. "Well," she said, "I'm not sure if she'll help you, but your best bet would be Kim Jong-un."
I had no fucking clue what that was supposed to mean.
"This might be hard for you, Dane," I replied, "but do you think you could give me an actual name instead of a nickname?"
This question demanded even more thought, as if my cellmate had genuinely forgotten that regular, full given names were a real thing on our planet.
"Sarang Kim," came the tentative answer after that short pause. She pulled a face. "Or Kim Sarang? I think it's Kim Sarang. I dunno, Bails. The Koreans, they put their last names first, right? Or was that a Japanese thing?"
"They do that in both countries."
"For real? Ain't that convenient. Do you know who I'm talking about, though?"
I recalled my little outing to the TV room on the day Liz' brother first warned me about the Counselor of Doom trying to kill me. A small group of loud Korean girls had claimed the space as theirs, like fearsome dragons selfishly hoarding treasure in their lair. I'd suffered through a boring old movie because of them and they hadn't even offered me one of the numerous KitKat bars they'd somehow amassed.
"I've got a vague idea," I said. "She must be one of the Clint Eastwood cultists."
I'd never before seen that much confusion in a person's features. Dane looked at me as if I'd confessed to being mad into BDSM out of the blue.
"I mean, the... The Koreans. I know the Koreans, and... Yeah." Cursing Liz and her eloquence for not being by my side, I prayed Dane would just let it go without another word.
To my relief, she did just that. "Right," was all she said, though her face betrayed she was still questioning my sanity a little. Her attention shifted to her book. "Ask Kim Jong-un for a bag of potato chips, too, while you're at it. I don't know where she gets that shit, but the stuff is so good it would be a shame if you didn't try it."
I had different priorities, but I did take note of the advice. With a nod, I decided to stop harassing Dane for the day and started towards the small, steel desk in our cell, where I kept two short pencils and a washed-out notebook. I wanted to write down the name Dane had given me, just in case; I don't know if you trust yourself to remember everything important, but I liked the comforting thought of writing everything that mattered down, because I tended to forget if I didn't.
Careful not to tear or damage the crumpled paper, I flipped through the notebook in search of an empty page, eyes skimming over scribbled notes about everything and nothing: impulsive complaints about the bad quality of prison food, little story ideas that popped up in my mind, and half-hearted, painfully unsuccessful attempts at motivating myself to actually do my homework for once.
My flipping came to a sudden halt when I saw letters in a handwriting that wasn't my own, sporting a foreboding crimson colour. My heart pounded in my chest and I gripped the notebook so tight my knuckles turned whiter than fresh snow.
I couldn't write in red. I owned two grey pencils, nothing more. In fact, the phrase glaring at me from the pages hadn't been written down with a pencil at all. The red was too dark, the words were too splotchy and a vague, metallic scent forced its way into my nostrils.
With trembling hands and eyes wide open, what had been written. Here comes a candle to light her to bed, and here comes a chopper to chop off her head!
I could've vomited right then and there. My grandmother's old children's song.
Chip chop chip chop the last man is dead.
Was this Taylor's new tactic? Would he stop harming me physically and start tormenting my psyche instead, biding his time until he'd driven me mad, until I took my own life so he wouldn't have to end it for me? I'd allowed myself to feel safe, if only for a moment, and now I paid the price.
The ghost was still out there and it wanted something from me. My life.
Its message, I figured, was a warning. It wanted to let me know it was still out there, let me know I couldn't be safe, not now, not ever.
Or was I reading all the signs wrong?
Maybe the ghost was just toying with me, just playing, roping me into its sick games. But even then, the lyric seemed to me an ominous threat. That was the only fact I was sure of, though I was also fairly certain my late grandmother and her stupid song could absolutely go fuck themselves.
I tore out the bloody page, hid it on my body as well as I could. There was no time to waste. I had to dispose of that page, inform Liz of the threat, and find myself a Ouija Board. Fast.