When Amy got assigned to the electric shop, though, Janet had to lay down the law. If Amy didn’t stop writing her mash notes and acting like a lovelorn cow, Little Janet would stop talking to her. Amy seemed dejected but resigned. My read on the situation was that Amy was not in fact a lesbian and that this was basically a schoolgirl crush. I took one for the team, taking pity on Janet by taking Amy away with me on some of the housekeeping errands. I would not deny a fix-it request, even from someone I didn’t like. We must have hung a hundred extra cubicle hooks, which we would make out of C-clamps with a hammer, Amy spluttering and cursing the entire time.

Despite her foul little mouth and frequent tantrums, I found within myself a surprising reserve of patience for Amy and adopted a mild but firm approach. She was kind of like a SweeTart-sugary but also puckeringly sour. No one else was showing her any positive attention. Amy reacted with undying allegiance to me, loudly alternating between calling me her mom and her wife-both of which caused me to snort with mock outrage. “Amy, I am not old enough to be your mother, and as for the other-you’re not my type!”

Being helpful did make us more popular, and I got a lot more smiles and nods around the Camp, which made me a little less shy. After almost four months in prison I was still cautious, supercautious, and kept most people at arm’s length. Many times I fielded the sly question, “What is the All-American Girl doing in a place like this?” Everyone assumed I was doing time on a financial crime, but actually I was like the vast majority of the women there: a nonviolent drug offender. I did not make any secret of it, as I knew I had lots of company; in the federal system alone (a fraction of the U.S. prison population), there were over 90,000 prisoners locked up for drug offenses, compared with about 40,000 for violent crimes. A federal prisoner costs at least $30,000 a year to incarcerate, and females actually cost more.

Most of the women in the Camp were poor, poorly educated, and came from neighborhoods where the mainstream economy was barely present and the narcotics trade provided the most opportunities for employment. Their typical offenses were for things like low-level dealing, allowing their apartments to be used for drug activity, serving as couriers, and passing messages, all for low wages. Small involvement in the drug trade could land you in prison for many years, especially if you had a lousy court-appointed lawyer. Even if you had a great Legal Aid lawyer, he or she was guaranteed to have a staggering caseload and limited resources for your defense. It was hard for me to believe that the nature of our crimes was what accounted for my fifteen-month sentence versus some of my neighbors’ much lengthier ones. I had a fantastic private attorney and a country-club suit to go with my blond bob.

Compared to the drug offenders, the “white-collar” criminals had often demonstrated a lot more avarice, though their crimes were rarely glamorous-bank fraud, insurance fraud, credit card scams, check kiting. One raspy-voiced fiftyish blonde was in for stock fraud (she liked to keep me up to speed on her children’s misadventures in boarding school); a former investment banker had embezzled money to support her gambling habit; and marriage-minded Rosemarie was doing fifty-four months for Internet auction fraud.

I gleaned this information about people’s crimes either because they’d volunteered it or because another prisoner told me. Some people would discuss their offense matter-of-factly, like Esposito or Rosemarie; others would never utter a word.

I still had absolutely no idea why Natalie had been sentenced to eight years in this snake pit. We got along well and some evenings would spend companionable time together in our cube. I would sit on my bunk, reading or writing letters, while Natalie listened to her radio below. She would announce, “Bunkie, I’m going to get in my bed, listen to my music, and relax!” Every Sunday we cleaned the cube together-we would use her irreplaceable plastic basin filled with warm water and laundry soap. She cleaned the floor with one of her special rags taken from the kitchen, while I did the walls and the ceiling with Maxipads from the box that sat in the bathroom, getting all the dust and grime off of the slanting metal I-beams and the sprinkler system that ran over my bed. Then we would fix my bed together. No one who has been down a long time will let the junior bunkie make the bed, as I had been schooled on my first day.

I grew powerfully attached to Natalie in just a short time-she was very kind to me. And I could tell that being her bunkie conferred on me an odd credibility among other prisoners. But despite, or because of, the fact that we lived in the closest of quarters, I knew virtually nothing about her-just that she was from Jamaica and that she had two children, a daughter and a young son. That was really it. When I asked Natalie whether she had started her time down the hill in the FCI, she just shook her head. “No, bunkie, back in the day things were a little different. I went down there for a little while-an’ it was nothin’ nice.” That was all I was going to get. It was clear that where Natalie was concerned, personal subjects were off limits, and I had to respect that.

But in a world of women confined to such close quarters, juicy stories and secrets had a way of leaking out, either because the prisoner in question had at some point taken a blabberer into her confidence, or because the staff had done the blabbing. Of course, staff is not supposed to discuss personal information with other prisoners, but it happened all the time. Certain stories had a lot of currency. Francesca LaRue, a vicious and crazy Jesus freak in B Dorm, had been disfigured by extreme plastic surgery. A bizarre sight with balloonlike breasts, duck lips, and even ass implants, she was rumored to have performed illegitimate backroom cosmetic surgery procedures and to have “injected people with transmission fluid” to dissolve cellulite. I suspected the truth was plain old medical fraud. A clever and manipulative middle-aged blonde was rumored to have stolen tens of millions of dollars in an elaborate fraud scheme. One elderly lady had barely got her walker through the door before it spread like wildfire that she had embezzled big money from her synagogue. Most viewed this with disapproval. (“You can’t steal from a church!”)

Any story you heard from another prisoner had to be taken with about a pound of salt. Think about it: put this many women in a confined space, give them little to do and a lot of time-what else can you expect? Still, true or not, gossip helped pass the time. Pop had the best gossip, the most historical and revealing. It was from her that I found out why Natalie had been sent down to the FCI all those years ago: she had thrown scalding water on another prisoner in the kitchen. I was incredulous. “Bitch was fucking with her, and what you don’t know, Piper, is your bunkie got a temper!” It was very difficult to reconcile that kind of rage and aggression with my quiet, dignified bunkie, who treated me so kindly. In Pop’s words, though, “Natalie’s no joke!”

Seeing how puzzled and disturbed I was by this new facet of Natalie, Pop tried to illuminate some prison realities for me.

“Look, Piper, things are pretty calm around here now, but that’s not always the way. Sometimes shit jumps off. And down the hill-forget about it! Some of those bitches are animals. Plus you’ve got lifers down there. You’ve got your little year to do, and I know it seems hard to you, but when you’re doing serious time, or life, things look different. You can’t put up with shit from anyone, because this is your life, and if you ever take it from anyone, then you’re always going to have problems.

“There was this woman down the hill I used to know-little woman, very quiet, kept to herself, didn’t bother nobody. This woman was doing life. She did her work, she walked the track down there, she went to bed early, that’s it. Then some young girl shows up down there, this girl was trouble. She starts in with this little woman-she’s giving her shit, she’s hassling her all the time, she’s a fucking stupid kid. Well, that little woman, who never said boo to no one, put two locks in a sock, and she let that girl know what time it was. I never seen anything like it, this girl was a mess, blood everywhere, she was fucked up good. But you know what, Piper? That’s where we are. And we’re not all in the same boat. So just remember that.”