Unlike at my real home, which would always be the only real place for me, here I wasn’t the invisible middle child. I was the baby, and I had ten big sisters.
True, I wasn’t old enough to catch a prison job, internship, or assignment. Still I made my own hustle using what I already had, to get what I wanted and to play my part in the clique. I didn’t want to stay the baby or the son forever. I wanted to even up.
So, in the C-dorm, where I had influence, I listened and learned. I sorted through and counted up the opportunities available for festival day. I had done my research and found out that there was a talent competition for us prisoners. The prize was a gift basket that had all the shit every girl in here needed every day, but most couldn’t afford to get or ran out of too quick. Plus it had some stuff we never even dreamed of getting our hands on until we hit time served and walked out of this miserable joint.
The prize basket contained the latest technology that many of us never seen or heard of. We were used to cassette tapes and cassette players. While we were locked up, it switched. So the fact that the prize basket contained a CD player, along with a DVD player, CDs and DVDs donated by entertainment companies made it ten times more valuable. The basket also had three phone cards, which added up to 180 minutes, or three hours, of phone talk and stuff like lotions, soaps, deodorants, perfume, and hair products, as well as a stationery set with stamps, and some books and magazines that was supposed to be the good ones. I knew for sure that whoever won that first-place basket could open up a business in here and work each item in trade or sale or use for about a year, no doubt. I even considered that the DVDs and CDs didn’t even have to be sold. If they were mines, I would open up my own version of Blockbuster and rent out the DVDs and CDs so they kept making money for me year-round. Even the books and magazines would hold weight, especially if they chose the right ones that girls from the hood would sweat, and probably weren’t available in the library. The shit that wasn’t being discussed was that whoever won that basket would need an army to keep it, even if they won it fair and square. The first-place winner would turn into a target in seconds, no doubt.
Riot wasn’t in agreement about the prize basket or the competition. She said the authorities were “slick” and the robots were dumb. “Watch how they kill each other to get their hands on that first prize.”
Riot said that the authorities paid for all that shit in the basket with money they made off of us. She also told me that the authorities would use the basket to keep the inmates in check and use the talent show to show the state what a good job they had done in controlling us, and how happy we all were to be in prison. So happy that we are up here singing and dancing for our captors.
“That’s what you’re gonna do, right Porsche? Dance for the authorities at the festival?” Riot asked me.
“No,” I answered back swiftly. “I’m the producer and choreographer for the seven girls that are gonna grab first place. I’m gonna teach them the dopest moves. When they win, they’re gonna pay me my fee.”
“Pretty smart,” Riot said. “How much you pulling?”
“One DVD player and whatever DVDs come with it. I’ll open my own movie house. Only the Diamonds will get in for free,” I said. We both laughed a little. Riot hugged my shoulders. I was working my way up to being even.
Aside from the reason I gave Riot about why I wouldn’t be dancing in the show, there was the fact that Momma had said, “One day someone will pay you a million bucks to move your hips like that.” Before Riot ever brought it up, I had already decided not to dance with the seven girls who I had selected after auditioning them. Prize basket or not, nobody in this fucking place could afford my dance performance.
It was windy on the yard, but we managed to get up a game of double Dutch. For us, it wasn’t an average afterschool-type game. After all, there was a rope involved. That meant there was a guard posted nearby, close enough to us for her to be one of the players. But she wasn’t playing. Now, I don’t know if it’s all right for a woman to weigh three hundred pounds, but this guard was pushing it and it was not the kind of fat that folded over then dropped or hanged. Hers was packed on her body like how frozen freezing ice cream is packed in the barrel in the ice case in the corner store. It was fat pretending to be muscle. Funny thing is, we knew for a fact that she could run like a lightweight. A bunch of us witnessed her dashing across the yard to break up a brawl, her heavy hands pulling bodies apart, then tossing them. Young ones got hurt more than they would have without her “help.” Her grip only choked and crushed. So we requested the rope, played nice with it, and would return it to her five minutes before it was time to leave the yard.
One, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety. Two, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety . . .
We counted it out, all nine of us singing together. There was seven Gutter Girls and two Diamond Needles, Riot and Tiny. Or should I say there were seven Gutter Girls and Three Diamond Needles, since I was in both gangs, the one I started and the one I joined on the low.
It was my turn and I was killing it. “Turn faster!” I called out as I danced between the two ropes, lifting my feet like lightning. I started crisscrossing em, and then paused, amazing myself by picking the beat back up in time to avoid losing a second of rhythm or tripping. I was gonna keep the Gutter Girl Gail’s who they used to call Greedy Gail, arms turning two ropes until they were slim and sore. Siri showed up and went wild cheering for me. Both crews had to give it up to me when I bent down between the ropes and jumped out the next set from the squatting position! I’m supposed to be able to do it like dat. I’m a dancer, and rhythm and movement is my expertise.
I leaped up from my squatting, returned to skipping, then suddenly switched to the one-foot hop. As I spun while hopping, I caught a glimpse of Cha-Cha on the yard mean-mugging me. I kept hopping, and didn’t miss a beat.
Riot had told me many weeks ago that “Cha-Cha has been neutralized.” When I asked Riot what that meant, she said, “It means she won’t fuck with you no more.”
To me, that meant that Cha-Cha didn’t want to fight no more cause it wasn’t like she was some powerful bully and I was her scared victim who she beat up. Most of the time I got the best of Cha-Cha in our past brawls, which is most likely why the bitch kept sweating me for a rematch. I once twisted her right arm so hard I thought I broke it, but it was only sprained. I had punched out one of her teeth and lifted a patch of hair from her scalp. Honestly, she got two good shots off on me. She kicked me hard in my ribs, and pulled back one of my fingers trying to pop my bone out. I got loose from her grip quick enough before she could do any permanent damage. Still, my finger got hurt and throbbed and swelled a couple of days before it went back to the same way it was before.
It had been two months of Cha-Cha acting like I was dead. When she saw me, she wouldn’t even lift her eyes or move the muscles on her face. Now she was sending off a fighting stare.
My mind started shifting. My eyes were focusing on her ugly face. It made me miss a beat and finally I was out.
“Damn, I thought you would never give up,” Gail said, her arms collapsing and her side of the rope going limp.
A Gutter Girl named Brianna sucked her teeth before asking me, “What the fuck was you thinking? You were like a possessed witch inside the ropes.”
Everyone laughed. I didn’t get red about it. She was my girl. I knew she didn’t mean me no ill will. Besides, I had taught her to read and write. That’s how I hooked her for the Gutter Girls. She was steady drawing pictures and mailing them out. They weren’t even beautiful pictures, just some crayon-type shit. Siri said to me, “She can’t write.” Instead of embarrassing Brianna, I went by her bed and said, “Let’s put some words on your drawings, like a storybook. I have good handwriting. Tell me what you wanna say. I’ll write it down neatly.” We got tight like that.
“Get your hands up,” Tiny, number 10 of the Diamond Needles, said. She was thir
teen and rocking the same yellow jumper as Riot. But still, she was our same small size like she could fit in with the baby blues. She was so petite, other than her two grapefruit-sized titties. She was next up for the rope and wanted her turn. As Tiny pushed off and jumped in, Riot pulled me back some.
“The Real Bitches are trying to recruit Cha-Cha. No matter how she glares at you, don’t make a move. Got it?” Riot was talking to me without looking at me. She was surveying the movements on the yard.
Chapter 8
We counted everything, and everything counted. We counted seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years. We counted asses in the shower and how many heads were in the gym. We counted off during head counts. We counted visits and visitors and the amount of days without visits or visitors. We counted days until hearing dates, court dates, and, of course, release dates. We counted the numbers of letters received or not received, days between connected phone calls, rejected phone calls, or no phone calls at all. We counted days since our mothers came or never came. We counted squares in the floor, lights in the ceiling, colors of uniforms. We counted the number of guards, staff, and workers. We even counted the teeth in our teachers’ mouth as they talked. We counted everything, and everything counted. We counted them. They counted us. We counted. They counted.
There was a fork missing from the count in the kitchen, and one butcher knife. The alarms went off in the building. Guards charged through the halls, some ragged in riot gear. All inmates moving to the final activities of the day, and all inmates doing anything anywhere were paused as a trained reaction to the alarm. Special guards swept us up in a single-file line. The girls in the same hall area where I was standing were all escorted into the gym.
“No talking,” they commanded us.
“Spread out. Both hands up.” One guard demonstrated. We didn’t need any demonstration. This is how we always measured space between girls on the gym floor.
“I didn’t tell you to put ’em down,” she barked. I knew that now she would make us hold that position for ridiculously long. In here, all adults, staff, teachers, and whatever guards were delighted by little acts of torture. There were girls of mixed ages in the gym lineup. I knew after counting fifteen rows of ten girls that they also had a lineup on the yard, maybe the slop house and in the dorm hallway in one of the larger buildings.
“Put ’em down,” the guard ordered.
Me and Riot’s eyes met. We were both scanning the rows, counting Diamond Needles. I seen number 7, Hamesha. She couldn’t be missed. She was an Indian with a long Indian braid, tucked inside her tan jumper, the color worn by fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds. I didn’t know her name before I had got ganged up, but I had seen her way before then at the hospital, which these people in here called the infirmary. She had the pretty face and the dirtiest job—emptying pots after inmate patients peed, vomited, or crapped. She got to wear gloves and sometimes a paper face mask. When she wasn’t collecting the shit that no one wanted to touch, she was mopping floors and wiping down counters with some stinky smelling stuff. She had walked past my hospital bed where I was lying and locked from time to time. She only spoke to me once saying, “You are the only one who misses your ma more than I miss meri ma.”
“Meri ma?” I repeated, with my dried-out lips.
“My mother,” she translated.
“How would you know that I miss my momma more?” I asked curiously. Besides, me and Siri were both bored.
“I say you miss your ma more than I miss meri ma because I am still holding my missing her inside. You on the other hand can not stop screaming it out.”
I realized Hamesha had heard me screaming the night before when I was giving the nurses hell. But hell was my true feeling and all I had to give at that moment.
• • •
The female guards and many female staff poured into the gym. Row by row we were body-searched, fingers moving through our hair, hands moving around our necks, shoulders, arms, armpits, fingers, chest, breast, stomachs, asses, private parts, thighs, knees, calves, ankles, toes. As each row was completed, the lead searchers called out, “All clear!”
When all 150 of us were confirmed “All clear,” the gym door clicked open and the warden walked in, backed up by four more guards. She dismissed the special guards. She must’ve felt more safe after the gymnasium body search turned up nothing.
Warden Strickland was a black woman. Her feeling was the opposite of Momma. I mean she was in good body shape, and normally wore either pants suits or skirt suits, but she seemed like a woman who had never been touched by a man, hugged by a small child, or loved by a mother and father. Her skin seemed hard, her eyes empty. Even her hair was stuck in one inflexible position, as though she sprayed it with holding hair spray every morning and never once rinsed or washed the chemical out. Her strut seemed overdone, like she had to move that way to prove she was the warden, but all of us already knew that.
“Ladies, there’s one fork and one butcher knife missing from the kitchen supply cabinet. If you make it hard on me, I’ll make it unbearable for you. Nobody will leave this facility and no one will be allowed in until the fork and knife are found. That means my staff, who already have worked a full shift, your teachers, the officers, no one can go home until the weapons are recovered. You’re punishing them. You’re punishing me. Now, I’m punishing you. If I don’t get the fork and knife back immediately, I will cancel the upcoming Annual Family Festival. Why? Because if you don’t help me, I won’t help you.”
A gasp ran through the gym and echoed off of the high walls. A whistle blew. “You have ten minutes. Keep your hands to yourselves. Talk to each other. Then, send the one who is trying to separate you from your fun and families on family festival day up front, where I’m standing. The guilty one will definitely be disciplined, but you will not pay for her poor violent and selfish decision.”
The prisoners’ talk started out as a murmur and rose to a roar. I thought to myself, The warden is sneakier than any one of us inmates. The lineup was broke up now as everyone took the ten minutes granted by the warden as a break.
Riot strolled over. “Lay back. It’s not us,” she said.
Hamesha broke her line and followed Riot. She was way calmer than everyone else. She looked in me and Riot’s eyes, then stood beside us but didn’t say nothing.
Tiny popped up out of nowhere. “I know you didn’t see me right?” she asked all of us. “I was standing between those two tall girls in the yellow.” She used her head to point them out. “So what do you all think?” Tiny asked.
“She won’t cancel. She wants us to believe that she will. The festival is for her, not for us. Watch, the stupid robots will believe the warden. In a few minutes they’ll all cave in and start snitching on one another.”
“But they searched us all already,” I said.
“Yeah, and while they were searching us in here, and the rest of us on the yard, you better know they were searching our beds, cells, and belongings,” Riot said, and we four fell silent.
Brawl broke out. Instead of everybody rushing forward to where the fists were swinging, everyone except the fighters fell back leaving a huge space in the left corner that exposed three inmates. Guards raced in and attempted to yank them apart. When Warden ordered the guards to halt, the girls scuffling on the floor suddenly peeled themselves off of the other. They must’ve been shooken by the silence that surrounded them. Normally the inmates would’ve been mobbing up and cheering or choosing sides and jumping in during a breakout brawl. But the threat of the festival cancelation held everyone spellbound. No one wanted to be mistakenly included in anything that could be cited as wrong behavior. Besides, when the guards start grabbing on any one of us, if we didn’t settle, and surrender, it was the stick or the shock of the taser.
We all knew that the first punishment for the brawlers would come from the warden. If the festival got canceled because of them, the second but worse punishment would come from within. The enraged girls on lockdow
n would hit like bullets being fired from all directions—on the yard, or in the slop house, or in the gym, places where we all gathered in groups, gangs, and cliques, where payback was a bitch, revenge was the truth and our unspoken law.
The three brawling girls were on their asses in front of the warden, their jumpers crooked and one of em ripped opened.
“Does this have anything to do with my missing utensils, or is it that you three just wanted to make sure I canceled the festival?”
“They’re going to the bottom,” I said casually to Riot.
“Cause they’re stupid,” Riot agreed.
“The warden said only the one who took the fork and knife would be punished,” Tiny said.
“Did you believe her? Look how the warden caused them to fight, and watch what she does next,” Riot said quietly.
The whistle blew. We froze in place.
“Hands out,” one guard commanded.
We all spaced ourselves.
“No more talk,” the guard barked.
The warden took one step forward. “Sit,” the warden said, and we all sat down in perfectly spaced neat rows. We were all silent, nothing moving but our eyes. I could hear their hearts beating furiously. I could feel it, too.
My heart was racing for different reasons. Me and Riot, Tiny, and a whole group of us of all ages and different gangs and cliques were all “state property.” We were the ones who nobody showed up for—in court, at medical offices, or interviews and hearings and, even worser, for visitations. Riot’s and Tiny’s parents were murdered. My parents and family were considered dead because they were all a no-show. My body began to tremble beneath my jumper. The thought of having been abandoned and forgotten was too violent. I perspired as I watched the warden. The idea that, according to them, she was my legal mother made me feel nauseous. Now I was sick and tense like the rest of them, not because of the fucking family festival where no one from my family would show. Not because of four hours and fifteen minutes of freedom, or the “best meal we having for the whole year.” It was something more deeper than that going wrong inside of me.