Annette got out of bed and revealed herself to be about five feet tall. “That’s Miss Luz. I’ve been keeping stuff in your locker. I gotta get it out. Here’s some toilet paper-you gotta take it with you.”

“Thank you.” I was still clutching my envelope with my paperwork and photos in it, and now a roll of toilet paper.

“Did they explain to you about the count?” she asked.

“The count?” I was getting used to feeling completely idiotic. It was as if I’d been home-schooled my whole life and then dropped into a large, crowded high school. Lunch money? What’s that?

“The count. They count us five times a day, and you have to be here, or wherever you’re supposed to be, and the four o’clock count is a standing count, the other ones are at midnight, two A.M., five A.M., and nine P.M. Did they give you your PAC number?”

“PAC number?”

“Yeah, you’ll need it to make phone calls. Did they give you a phone sheet? NO? You need to fill it out so you can make phone calls. But maybe Toricella will let you make a call if you ask him. It’s his late night. It helps if you cry. Ask him after dinner. Dinner’s after the four o’clock count, which is pretty soon, and lunch is at eleven. Breakfast is from six-fifteen to seven-fifteen. How much time do you have?”

“Fifteen months… how much time do you have?”

“Fifty-seven months.”

If there was an appropriate response to this information, I didn’t know what it was. What could this middle-class, middle-aged Italian-American lady from Jersey possibly have done to get fifty-seven months in federal prison? Was she Carmela Soprano? Fifty-seven months! From my presurrender due diligence, I knew it was verboten to ask anyone about their crime.

She saw that I was unsure what to say and helped me out. “Yeah, it’s a lot of time,” she said sort of drily.

“Yeah.” I agreed. I turned to start pulling items out of my laundry bag.

That’s when she shrieked, “Don’t make your bed!!!”

“What?” I spun around, alarmed.

“We’ll make it for you,” she said.

“Oh… no, that’s not necessary, I’ll make it.” I turned back to the thin cotton-poly sheets I’d been issued.

She came over to my bunk. “Honey. We’ll. Make. The. Bed.” She was very firm. “We know how.”

I was completely mystified. I looked around the room. All five beds were very tidily made, and both Annette and Miss Luz had been lying on top of their covers.

“I know how to make a bed,” I protested tentatively.

“Listen, let us make the bed. We know how to do it so we’ll pass inspection.”

Inspection? No one told me anything about inspections.

“Inspection happens whenever Butorsky wants to do them-and he is insane,” Annette said. “He will stand on the lockers to try to see dust on the light fixtures. He will walk on your bed. He’s a nut. And that one”-she pointed to the bunk below mine-“doesn’t want to help clean!”

Uh-oh. I hated cleaning too but was certainly not about to risk the ire of my new roommates.

“So we have to make the beds every morning?” I asked, another penetrating question.

Annette looked at me. “No, we sleep on top of the beds.”

“You don’t sleep in the bed?”

“No, you sleep on top with a blanket over you.” Pause.

“But what if I want to sleep in the bed?”

Annette looked at me with the complete exasperation a mom shows a recalcitrant six-year-old. “Look, if you wanna do that, go ahead-you’ll be the only one in the whole prison!”

This sort of social pressure was irresistible; getting between the sheets wasn’t going to happen for the next fifteen months. I let go of the bed issue-the thought of hundreds of women sleeping on top of perfectly made military-style beds was too strange for me to deal with at that moment. Plus, somewhere nearby a man was bellowing. “Count time, count time, count time! Count time, ladies!” I looked at Annette, who looked nervous.

“See that red light?” Out in the hallway, over the officers’ station, was a giant red bulb that was now illuminated. “That light comes on during count. When that red light is on, you better be where you’re supposed to be, and don’t move until it goes off.”

Women were streaming back and forth in the hallway, and two young Latinas came hurrying into the room.

Annette did a brief round of introductions. “This is Piper.” They barely glanced at me.

“Where’s the woman who sleeps here?” I asked about my missing bunkmate.

“That one! She works in the kitchen, so they count her down there. You’ll meet her.” She grimaced. “Okay, shhhhh! It’s a stand-up count, no talking!”

The five of us stood silent by our bunks, waiting. The entire building was suddenly quiet; all I could hear was the jangling of keys and the thud of heavy boots. Eventually a man stuck his head into the room and… counted us. Then, several seconds later, another man came in and counted us. When he left, everyone sat down on beds and a couple of footstools, but I figured it wouldn’t be cool to sit on my absent bunkmate’s bed, so I leaned on my empty locker. Minutes passed. The two Latina women began to whisper to Miss Luz in Spanish.

Suddenly we heard, “Recount, ladies!” Everyone leaped back on their feet, and I stood at attention.

“They always screw it up,” muttered Annette under her breath. “How hard is it to count?”

We were counted again, this time with seeming success, and the payoff of inspections became apparent to me. “It’s suppertime,” said Annette. It was 4:30 in the afternoon, by New York City standards an unimaginably uncivilized time to eat dinner. “We’re last.”

“What do you mean, last?”

Over the PA system the CO was calling out numbers: “A12, A10, A23, go eat! B8, B18, B22, go eat! C2, C15, C23, go eat!”

Annette explained, “He’s calling honor cubes-they eat first. Then he calls the Dorms in order of how well they did in inspection. Rooms are always last. We always do the worst in inspection.”

I peered out the door at the women heading to the chow hall and wondered what an honor cube was but asked, “What’s for dinner anyway?”

“Liver.”

After the liver-and-lima-beans dinner, served in a mess hall that brought back every dreadful school-age cafeteria memory, women of every shape, size, and complexion flooded back into the main hall of the building, shouting in English and Spanish. Everyone seemed to be lingering expectantly in the hall, sitting in groups on the stairs or lining the landing. Figuring that I was supposed to be there too, I tried to make myself invisible and listen to the words swirling around me, but I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. Finally, I timidly asked the woman next to me.

“It’s mail call, honey!” she answered.

A very tall black woman up on the landing seemed to be handing out toiletries. Someone on my right gestured toward her. “Gloria’s going home, she’s down to a wake-up!” I stared at Gloria with renewed interest, as she tried to find someone to take a small purple comb off her hands. Going home! The idea of leaving was riveting to me. She looked so nice, and so happy, as she gave away all her things. I felt a tiny bit better, knowing that it was possible someday to go home from this awful place.

I wanted her purple comb very badly. It looked like the combs we used to carry in the back pockets of our jeans in junior high, that we’d whip out and use to fix our winged bangs. I stared at the comb, too shy to reach up and ask, and then it was gone, claimed by another woman.

A guard, different from the one Minetta had pointed out earlier, emerged from the CO’s office. He looked like a gay pornstar, with a bristling black crew cut and a scrub-brush mustache. He started bellowing “Mail call! Mail call!” Then he started giving out the mail. “Ortiz! Williams! Kennedy! Lombardi! Ruiz! Skelton! Platte! Platte! Platte! Wait a minute, Platte, there’s more. Mendoza! Rojas!” Each woman would step up to claim her mail, with a smile on her face, and then skitter away somewhere to read it-perhaps someplace with more privacy than I had yet observed? The hall’s population thinned as he worked through the bin of mail, until there were only hopefuls left. “Maybe tomorrow, ladies!” he shouted, turning the empty bin upside down.