The girl with the short black hair is looking at me from across the room. She's got dry blood under her nails and on her boots and gloves. Her eyes have dark bags under them, giving away that she hasn't slept in days. She smiles at me. I nervously smile back. Even her smile is intimidating. It makes her look like she knows something that no one else does. She's got this kind of atmosphere around her that makes you remember her, that keeps her in the back of your mind.
She looks like an ordinary person. Narrow face, blue eyes, pointed ears and a rounded nose, framed by sharp black spikes. The one thing that does make her stand out is the scar. It's an ugly reddish-pink colour that contrasts completely with her pale skin. It stretches out from the base of her ear, over her cheekbone and dips down her pointed chin.
She yawns and leans back against the wall of her cell. I slump on my bench in the hallway. Her eyes flicker over her surroundings, lazily wondering what she can do to get out of this one. She'd been in trouble before, obviously. She's a bad person. Only bad people get put in jail, right? Only bad people go against the rules, or question them. She hugs her knees to her chest. Her wandering eyes land on me again. She smiles.
It's been a long time since she first came here. About two years, if I remember correctly. She smiled back then too. No matter how many people laugh at her, threaten her or shout at her, she just smiles and sometimes, she laughs. Her laugh is quite strange, but it's melodic. It's calming, and she sounds like she's just having fun with a friend, not being told that she now has a death sentence. Sometimes I wonder if she does have friends, or if it's just her. I like to think that she does.
Most people who come here never get out, let alone come back. She's been here too many times to count. Most people here are gruff, hulking brutes with no control of their temper. Some are theives. Most of the people here look scary, or their manner is aggressive. The scary thing about her is she's so different. She's small, thin, and looks like she would break if you touched her. She looks like she doesn't belong here. Like she's lost, and she doesn't fit in. But she must belong here. She's a bad person, and bad people belong in jail, right? Or dead. Bad people are only good when they're dead, they say.
I don't know exactly what she's done, but it must have been bad. You don't hear the guards as excited to force someone into a cell if they've done next to nothing. The guards like the prisoners they think will break easily. This girl seems to be indestructible.
They say she's being taken away tomorrow. They say she's finally going to get what she deserves. Death. I know I should be happy. They're telling me good news. One less bad person in the world, right? But it feels wrong. I don't know. She doesn't seem like a bad person. Bad people wouldn't smile at me, right? It's not that I'm not comfortable with prisoners being killed, it's happened plenty of times before. But this one's different.
They've taken her. She was dragged down the hallway an hour ago and there's been no noise since. She smiled at me when she was going. She didn't scream or cry or shout like the others did. She just got pulled along. Smiling, like she was going somewhere fun.
Later on, there was a dark figure running across the horizon. I like to think that it was her.
That she's free.
