A Girl Named Veronica
Her long hair swayed from side to side as she moved in what seemed like slow motion. Her broad smile exposed her snow-white teeth and a two teeth gap on the upper ridge. Amid the smile, tears cascaded down the chicks with ease to the mouth. Her face was bewildering, a combination of a bitter and psyched mood. On one side, one could see a happy person and, on the other, a demon, a ghost even, a tormentor. Time would tell. By her sides were two figures guarding her as they escorted her to a cell? Inmates in other cells watched from their cubes through the cell grills, and no one said a word.
Everyone was tired. It was a sad day for prison. Although many people had died before in prison, no one anticipated the death of the most feared gang leader in the prison. She had been found dead after getting electrocuted at the prison’s power control room. Even as Valentina was guided to the cell, she could notice the bitterness in other women’s eyes. Had she made a mistake of coming back? Why were people not clapping and shouting her name? Had they not noticed that it was her, perhaps her new hairstyle confused them. It had just been two weeks since she left. Of course, most of the inmates she had left must have been still around. She tried to wave to them, but no one responded. The more she got ignored, the more she smiled harder, and the more tears flowed.
Finally, she was inside a cell. ‘Be a good girl Valentina’ one of the wardens told her. ‘We don’t need any trouble from you V.’ V is the name that people gave her in the facility, inspired; she had decided to tattoo the letter on both sides of her chicks. She sat on her bed, glaring fiercely on the three other girls that would be her roommates for the next five years or whatever period, depending on the time they were going to serve. They looked back at her with the same gravity. Even more fiercely, their eyes were red with rage. She felt it; inside, she felt a sudden flash of cold, a fear that engulfed her spirit and her whole body except her face. She still stared back at them with fierceness. Her name meant ‘strong,’ and she equaled that. There was no way she was going to back down from this stare. They would, and she wasn’t going to give them an easy way out. Although she was breaking down inside, she was not going to show it on her face. The four girls stood up in a moment and paced towards her; she promptly knelt and lowered her head on the ground and covered her head with both hands. She received a beating that went on for two minutes nonstop. But she never let out a yell. She was strong and enduring. She understood that the moment she decided to go back to prison, this would come, a punishment for betrayal.
When Valentina joined a gang of ladies that robbed jewelry, she had no idea that they would be caught. They had been in the business for two years, and they had collaborated with the police to ensure that they would never go to jail. Then one day, with her five-member crew, they advanced their theft to a bank robbery. When they got caught, there was no bargain. The police could not help the situation, and so V and her clique were locked in North Gates women penitentiary. While serving their jail term, they continued with their clique, which they called the Wingers and whose gang leader was a Jamaican lady called Brianna. Although V always felt like she deserved to be the gang leader, she never showed it openly. So when the gang decided to escape from prison. V had her secret escape plan. She wanted to prove that she was smart than Brianna was and that if it was her who made decisions for the gang and that things would not have gone south as they had under Brianna’s leadership. Interestingly, she planned to escape and go back again to claim the leadership title, to show that she was better than Brianna.
Once she was out, she had sworn to herself, not ever to go back. She would escape to a new country, maybe to Africa and start a new life. She rubbished the idea of going back to prove herself and rather settled on staying in the country for some time until there was no much noise about her escape. As she waited for things to calm, she started having almost ghostly nightmares. Her past came to haunt her through dreams. The ghosts of people they had killed in their past and all the evil they had been involved in came back with a shade of darkness that almost paralyzed her life. For every time her mind wandered away from sanity, she found herself in a sea of demons that tormented her a great deal. It was so serious that she would sleep at night in her bed and wake up in the morning in the woods badly injured without a clue of how she got herself there. This went on for weeks, and she started to have similar encounters during the day. Her dreams of living in the country were now cascading down to the abyss, and eloping was just a dream. She decided to go back to prison to ease the torments, to be part of something big, she thought. She felt that by going back, maybe, and just perhaps her demons would leave her. That the cells would give her peace, and she would unseat Brianna. This feeling gave her fulfillment. So she woke up and headed to the police to surrender.
And yet here she was, in a cell with the same people she had betrayed. She realized that Brianna was missing in the room, but she could not ask any questions. Maybe she had been moved to another cell, or perhaps she had escaped as well. This would have been a total waste of time, coming back to prove nothing. She hoped that Brianna had just been transferred to another cell. V breathed fire with so much bitterness as she wiped the blood on her face. But she got it, everyone on the team got punished like that when they did something wrong in the group. The next few minutes were spent on the three girls’ hate stares against V until one of the girls could not hold it anymore. ‘How could you betray us because of you Brianna is dead, because of you we are still in this damned filthy facility?’ V sat there, staring at the three girls without blinking. It was as if she was transfigured to a real ghost, her hair so untidy. Fresh scars all over her face and the fresh wounds inflicted on her by her clique members. For a moment, she was lost in a world of nothingness. At the moment, she saw a little girl in a white dress going to church one Sunday morning and returning home to a burnt house and dead parents. She saw the child service put her on child support. She saw the little girl soak in black smoke. As she soaked, her white dress became dirty. She choked and was unable to breathe; when she was almost suffocating, she woke up. And that girl was Valentina. It was her.
And here she was in the middle of a crisis. She tried to think about what her purpose in life was and could not fathom it. Was she just meant to suffer and die? Of course, life had been good when they were robbing jewelry. But now she was stuck, and it seemed like there was no coming out. She doubted her sanity; she doubted her very own existence. Now that she wanted to be a leader, at least to feel like she was in control. If not for herself, at least she wanted the accomplishment of being in control of other people. She did not just want to be made a leader. She wanted to take it from a person. Not being passed to her like a button in a race. No, she was no Valentina for nothing. She was a strong woman. And she wanted to prove it. On the other side, she wanted to end the nightmares. She hoped they would go away, and she might get back her peace. Maybe she would lead her group and get out of prison and go back to their ‘good life.’ All that seemed futile; everything she wanted might just have been a dream. What she now needed was to be put under medication to clear her past.
Valentina fell, and the warden who guarded their door called for help, and she was rushed to the psychiatry room in the penitentiary. As she headed there, she saw the image of the little girl in a white dress again. She was now grown and was wearing a black dress; she was moving through the smoke, but there was no visible difference in the smoke’s effect on the dress. The grown girl had two options to run and get outside the black smoke zone or to soak and suffocate.