I rubbed my eyes. Did I just see what I thought I saw? About a minute later a black woman emerged from the cubicle.

“Lili! Cabrales! Lili Cabrales! Get back here this minute and clean this up! LILIIIIIIIIIIII!!!” People were not happy to be awakened this way, and a smattering of “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” broke out across the big room. I ducked my head back out of sight-I didn’t want either woman to know that I had seen the whole thing. I could hear someone cursing quietly. I cautiously stole a glance: the black woman quickly cleaned up the puddle with an enormous wad of toilet paper. She caught me peeking and seemed sheepish. I flopped back down on my bunk and stared at the ceiling. I had fallen down the rabbit hole.

The next day was Valentine’s Day, my first holiday in prison. Upon arrival in Danbury, I was struck by the fact that there did not seem to be any lesbian activity. The Rooms, so close by the guard’s station, were bastions of propriety. There was no cuddling or kissing or any obvious sexual activity on display in any of the common rooms, and while someone had told me a story about a former inmate who had made the gym her own personal love shack, it was always empty when I went there.

Given that, I was taken aback by the explosion of sentiment around me on Valentine’s Day morning in B Dorm. Handmade cards and candy were exchanged, and I was reminded of the giddy intrigue of a fifth-grade classroom. Some of the “Be Mines” that were stuck on the outside of cubicles were clearly platonic. But the amount of effort that had gone into some of the Valentines, carefully constructed from magazine clippings and scavenged materials, suggested real ardor to me.

I had decided from the beginning to reveal nothing about my sapphic past to any other inmate. If I had told even one person, eventually the whole Camp would know, and no good could come of it. So I talked a lot about my darling fiancé, Larry, and it was known in the Camp that I was not “that way,” but I was not at all freaked out by women who were “that way.” Frankly, most of these women were not even close to being “real lesbians” in my mind. They were, as Officer Scott put it, “gay for the stay,” the prison version of “lesbian until graduation.”

It was hard to see how a person could conduct an intimate relationship in such an intensely overcrowded environment, let alone an illicit relationship. On a practical level, where on earth could you be alone in the Camp without getting caught? A lot of the romantic relationships I observed were more like schoolgirl crushes, and it was rare for a couple to last more than a month or two. It was easy to tell the difference between women who were lonely and wanted comfort, attention, and romance and a real, live lesbian: there were a few of them. There were other big barriers for long-term lovers, like having sentences of dramatically different lengths, living in different Dorms, or becoming infatuated with someone who wasn’t actually a lesbian.

Colleen and her bunkie next door got lots of Valentines from other prisoners. I got none, but that evening’s mail call yielded plenty of evidence that I was loved. Best of all was a little book of Neruda poems from Larry, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. I resolved to read a poem every day.

I WAS finally able to shop commissary on February 17, when I bought:

XL sweatpants, $24.70, given to me in error and which they would not let me return

A stick of cocoa butter, $4.30

Packets of tuna, sardines, and mackerel, each about $1

Ramen noodles, $0.25

Squeeze cheese, $2.80

Pickled jalapeños, $1.90

Hot sauce, $1.40

Legal pads, pens, envelopes, and stamps, priceless.

I desperately wanted to buy a cheap little portable headset radio for $42.90. The radio would have cost about $7 on the street. At the base pay for federal prisoners, which is $0.14 an hour, that radio could represent more than three hundred hours of labor. I needed the radio to hear the weekend movie or anything on television, and to use down in the gym, but the officer who ran the commissary brusquely told me they were out of radios. No mas, Kerman.

Because I could count on money from the outside world, I could buy items to return to each person who had helped me upon my arrival-soap, toothpaste, shampoo, shower shoes, packets of instant coffee. Some women tried to wave them away, “Don’t worry about it, Kerman,” but I insisted. “Please, forget it!” said Annette, who had loaned me so many things in my first several weeks. “You’re like my daughter! Hey, did you get any new books today?”

The books continued to pour in at mail call. It had gotten to the point where I was embarrassed, and also it made me nervous; it was a clear demonstration that I “had it like that” on the outside, a network of people who had both a concern for me and the time and money to buy me books. So far no one had threatened me with anything more intimidating than a scowl or a harsh word, and no other prisoner had asked anything of me. Still, I was guarded against getting played, used, or targeted. I saw that some of the women had little or no resources from the outside to help make their prison life livable, and many of my fellow prisoners were seasoned hustlers.

One day right after I moved into B Dorm, a woman I didn’t know popped her head into my cube. Miss Natalie was absent, and I was putting still more books away in my small footlocker, which was threatening to overflow. I looked at this woman-black, middle-aged, ordinary, yet unfamiliar. My guard went up.

“Hey there, new bunkie. Where’s Miss Natalie?”

“Um, she’s in the kitchen, I think.”

“What’s your name? I’m Rochelle.”

“Piper. Kerman.”

“What’s your name?”

“You can call me Piper.” What did she want from me? I felt trapped in my cube. I was sure she was sniffing around.

“Oh, you’re the one with the books… you got all them books!” In fact, I had a book in my hand and a pile of them on top of the locker. By now I was scared as to what this woman wanted from me and what she was going to do to me.

“D-do you want a book?” I was always happy to lend a book, but only a few people took me up on it, checking my haul at every mail call.

“Okay-whatcha got?” I scanned the selection. The collected works of Jane Austen. A biography of John Adams. Middlesex. Gravity’s Rainbow. I didn’t want to assume that she wouldn’t want any of these books, but how could I know what she liked?

“What kind of stuff do you like? You can borrow any of them, take your pick.” She looked through the titles uncertainly. It was a long, slow, squirmy moment for both of us.

“How about this one? It’s really, really fantastic.” I seized up a copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. I felt racist on every level of my being by picking “the black book” from the stack for Rochelle, but there was a good shot that she might like it, might take it, and might leave me alone, at least for the moment.