Have you ever been on a walk in the woods? I think you have been. You've been on a stroll there, listening to birds chirping all around you, leaves crunching beneath your feet as you walked along. Perhaps you were hoping to spot a fox or a deer, or you wanted to get away from people for one moment out of your busy day. I've been to big cities before; I know what it's like to wish for a breath of fresh air.

Yes, I see now. You have been to the woods.

If I were to tell you, without skipping a single gruesome detail, how many people die in the woods, you wouldn't fancy your peaceful nature walks so much. In fact, you'd need to keep your mouth shut tight, unless you're willing to pick your jaw up from the floor. I could tell you everything about the dead, paint a picture with their blood so vivid you'd almost feel it staining your hands, and next time you'd go to enjoy the green, bushes and trees and birds singing their songs, you wouldn't feel so comfortable.

I can promise you that much.

There are the suicides, of course. You can hang yourself from tall trees pretty well. If I strain hard enough, I can almost hear the creaking of old-rope nooses cutting through the quiet, and I'll see the bodies hanging. Men and women, children on bad days. Their legs kick in the air, their hands grasp at the nooses they or someone else tied for them, and they try to save themselves from the death they were condemned to without knowing their fates are already sealed. They try to scream with their damaged vocal chords while they rot for eternity, but there's no sound.

There never is any sound.

And the murders, of course. How could I forget the murders? It's the classic tale I know you've heard before: serial killer, jealous ex-wife, drunken madman, you name it, kills victim, probably eats their organs if we've run into a real savage one there, and needs to get rid of the body. Where do these bodies go? Rivers, pig pens… forests. The woods have been around for centuries and how many bodies do you think were dumped there in such a long time? How many people do you think were killed, eaten by large wildlife they were unfortunate enough to run into, or murdered by a stalker hidden in the shadows?

I'll tell you. Thousands and thousands of people. Thousands and counting.

I used to live next to the woods, in a small house in the countryside. My parents loved to take me for walks there. They never understood why I came back crying so often. Why I couldn't sleep at night or why I refused to let go of their hands whenever we went there. I could see them. The ghastly limbs of bodies buried long ago sticking out of the soil, smelling of dead earth and sulfur, and the corpses swinging from tree branches, the spirits wandering everywhere without a purpose, some in clothing that hadn't been in fashion for decades, displaying their gruesome wounds and empty eyes for only me to see. Have you ever felt a sudden cold whenever you visited the woods? Chances are you walked straight through a dead man.

All in all, it's safe to say I didn't make many good memories in the woods. I was happy when we moved away to a bigger town near the coast and the woods couldn't traumatize me any longer. I closed that terrifying chapter of my life and never returned for a reread.

When I learnt the prison I was being sent to was located right in the middle of the woods, though, I wasn't amused.

And I'll admit the panic attack I had on the bus there wasn't my most flattering moment.

Our guards, no, our caretakers, had to feed me a small dose of Xanax to get me under control. Calm down, Miss Bailey, you'll be fine. I wasn't so sure of that back then. I could feel the eyes of my fellow soon-to-be-inmates prying into my back and I could hear the question all their minds collectively entertained as they watched me: Are we headed for Juvie or the madhouse?

In hindsight, I could have known beforehand I'd be faced with old pain again, aged wounds being ripped open like the bodies of the spirits I saw in the woods. The name of the prison, forgive me, correctional facility we were heading for had seared itself into my brain right from the moment I'd first heard it uttered. Lonewood Medium Security Juvenile. It implied the presence of woods. I could've realised that earlier if I'd taken the time to do some research and it would've reduced my anxiety.

I had not, however, done any research, because I'd kind of been too busy freaking the fuck out over going to literal prison. What else was I supposed to do? Like any other kid, I had access to television, the Internet and a Netflix account. I'd read stories online, watched TV shows and sub-par documentaries about life in prison, and based on that, I'd created a mental picture of the experience in my head. Among my expectations of juvie were thugs on steroids, Top-Dog type chicks with a bunch of tattoos and Texan accents all ready to slam-dunk my head into a toilet, and pasty-faced smartasses who boasted about their attempts to dig their way out of their cells with nothing but tablespoons.

If that was the crowd I had to survive in, I was in for a very bad, horrible, absolutely no-good time.

But the kids I shared a bus with looked... normal. Not very different from me or the bunch of unruly sixteen-year-olds I went to class with before my sentence. I could have met any of them in a store or a parking lot, could have made awkward eye contact with a smile before getting on with my day, and I wouldn't have thought anything of them, and they wouldn't have thought anything of me, either. Though they all looked distinct, I wouldn't have been able to point at one of them to shout 'that's a juvie kid, that's a criminal.'

Dissimilar as our personalities and backgrounds might have been, I do remember the collective look of horror we shared as our bus neared Lonewood with its fearsome, dark gates and guard towers. The old corpse only I could see, hanging from the gnarly branch of a willow tree next to the entrance, only added to the overall charm of the building. An aged building, I noticed, with moss and ivy creeping up the brick walls and many, many windows, mucky and barred to keep inmates, correction, wards like us from breaking them and escapinh. It reminded me of a nineteenth-century asylum and I'd soon pictured myself being lobotomized. That silly fear had stayed with me for the rest of that first day, from the moment I received my 'uniform' to dinner to my meeting with my cellmate.

It was a relief to find out that I would not, in fact, be lobotomized at any point during my year-long stay. Or shoved into a toilet by a Texan bitch on steroids, for that matter. Not if I stayed out of trouble.

The real horrors in juvie were the classes.

In my first few days in juvenile prison, I allowed myself to believe the hardest thing to deal with would, as always, be my little spectral problem. Not for a second had I thought I'd be in immediate danger of joining the numerous spirits roaming Lonewood's sterile, dark halls. But I would die of boredom and frustration, a fate brought on by dull math and English teachers who lacked a sense of humour, long seminars on drug use, never-ending informational sessions on gang violence and obscure STDs, and a whole bunch of uninterested teenagers who didn't have good behaviour on their resumes.

When I was still in regular high school, I was friends with this guy named Chris, who had been quite remarkable in a peculiar way. He wore a baseball cap he never parted with, and though he was intelligent and liked to belittle me when I failed to understand how electromagnetism worked, he hated school with a burning passion because it interferes with my creative growth. That his idea of being creative consisted of dissecting frogs and decorating his bedroom walls with their skin was a detail he often left out. I believe Chris was disturbed in a lot of ways, in addition to being the guy responsible for me ending up in prison.

Looking back now, I don't think I actually liked Chris much. That doesn't matter, though. What I was trying to tell you is that he despised school, same as I. He would sit with me at lunch, shoving soggy ham-cheese sandwiches into his big mouth and talk about how school was like prison in so many ways, spraying sandwich everywhere.

It was only when I found myself going to school in an actual prison that I began to see the striking similarities that Chris, wise sage that he was, had pointed out. Days dragged on and on, all filled with impatient teachers, noisy, disrespectful classmates, too much homework I could never bring myself to focus on, and an abundance of spirits I could see from the corner of my eye.

The only difference was that in Juvie, there was no escaping all of it. So when I'd been in godforsaken Lonewood for one month with eleven still to go, and one of my annoying classmates began arguing with our math teacher, all I did was roll my eyes and tap my fingers on my table, not knowing that day would be the one that would mess up my life unimaginably.

I didn't care about starting arguments or causing trouble. I knew some girls in Lonewood swore by it, as if the idea of being a disruptive nuisance empowered them, but I just found it all unnecessarily exhausting. What I cared about was making it to dinner with my sanity still intact and there were three principles I needed to live by to ensure that happened: stay quiet, follow the rules whenever possible, and ignore the dead among the living.

That day, I forgot about principle number three. Which was arguably one of my more questionable life choices.

The arguing girl, whose name I thought was Liz, was a smartass, I knew that much. I wasn't sure what she'd been arrested for, but I knew it had had something to do with computers, and that made her a smartass. She thought she was better than every poor teacher unfortunate enough to be stuck with us. The math teacher, friendly as she tried to be, was never spared. Whenever Liz spotted but a single flaw in her explanation, she'd run one hand through her black curls while the other shot up in the air to signal she wanted to say something. The end result was always a loud argument and that particular day was no different.

To tell you the truth, I felt like throttling Liz right then and there. I never understood much of math, and what little focus I possessed had been disturbed by her incessant smartassery. I tried to concentrate on my notes, messy, scratchy words scribbled in the little notebook I'd been given, but each time my eyes were drawn to Liz, who was using elaborate hand gestures while accusing our teacher of knowing jackshit about fractional exponents or whatever the hell kind of nerdy math concept it was.

That's when my eyes met those of the Bloody Boy.

I blinked a couple times, wondering why he was staring at me. The spirits of the dead didn't regularly pay me attention. Most ignored me, unable or simply unwilling to communicate with me. Spirits only sought to communicate when they had something important to say or do, which didn't occur often. But the Bloody Boy kept looking me in the eyes, a hazy smile on his face, as if I'd done something that amused him.

I didn't know who the Bloody Boy was. All I knew was he'd attached himself to Liz, meaning they were connected in some way. He followed her around like a faithful lapdog, trailed after her wherever she went. Even to the bathroom; I'd learnt the hard way that ghosts don't give a flying fuck about basic privacy principles. The black-skinned kid with the ever-present, creepily peaceful smile on his face couldn't have been much older than nine, and I'd taken to calling him the Bloody Boy because of the gaping bloody bullet hole in his chest, right where his heart had once been.

"What?" I breathed, so soft no one would hear it. I spoke out of habit, asking a rhetorical question, not actually expecting an answer. Ghosts were always quiet, unable to produce sound. I was grateful for that, at least. I could deal with seeing ghosts, but if they could have kept me awake at night with perpetual wailing, I would've begged one of my fellow inmates to smuggle me onto Lonewood's roof and push me off so I could just die and enjoy some peace and quiet a long, long time ago.

To my surprise, however, the Bloody Boy moved.

His right hand travelled to his ear, his index and middle finger held up, and his left hand stayed in place by his waist, the index and middle fingers on that hand raised, too. With a jerky movement, as if stabbing an imaginary foe, the Bloody Boy thrust the fingers on his right hand forward, then proceeded to use that hand to tap on the outstretched index and middle finger of his left one.

I recognized the gesture, though the memory of it lay buried deep in the darkest recesses of my brain. With a frown, I looked away from the Bloody Boy and turned back to my notes, puzzled. The gesture had looked like sign language, which I'd learnt a long time ago to try and communicate with the ghosts I encountered in my life. But I'd never found a ghost who actually understood sign language, much to my disappointment, and I'd let the skill grow rusty as a result, something I now cursed myself for in silence.

With my pencil, I began sketching the sign the Bloody Boy had flashed, hoping it would jog my memory, and with every line I put on paper, I remembered a little better. I could see the online course I'd taken years ago come back to me, the instructional videos I'd watched to perfect the skill playing in my mind once again, and I could see what Liz's dead boy tried to tell me.

Watch out.

But what for?

The phrase stuck with me until class ended and I was 'free'. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what the kid had been trying to tell me. Had he been messing with me? That couldn't be right. Contrary to popular belief, ghosts didn't mess with you. If they communicated anything at all, no matter what or how, they had a reason for it. A damn good one.

I had to watch out for potential threats. But what kind of threats? I was in prison. No matter how friendly I tried to be to others, no matter how much I kissed the asses of the most infamous and dangerous girls on the block, I was never truly safe. There could always be someone looking to hurt, threaten or abuse you if you got unlucky or in their way. Danger always lurked in the darkest corners of Lonewood. Was someone out to get me, and if so, who? What did the Bloody Boy know that I didn't?

I kept watching Liz as she rushed out of class at top-speed, still flushed from her argument with the teacher. The Bloody Boy skipped after her, happy to follow and unbothered by my eyes prying into his bloodied back, always drawn to the hole left by a bullet that had passed clean through his tiny body.

He didn't look back.