When Pop told me a story like this one, I would hang on every word. I had no way of verifying whether it was gospel truth or not, like most things I heard in prison, but I understood that these stories held their own accuracy. They described our world as it was and as we experienced it. Their lessons always proved invaluable and inviolable.

Mercifully, the closest I got to fighting did not involve a slock (the formal name for a weapon made out of a combination lock inside a tube sock), but rather, roughage. Whenever something other than cauliflower and iceberg lettuce appeared on the salad bar, I went to town. One day there was a bunch of spinach mixed in with the iceberg, and I happily began to select dark green leaves for my dinner. I hummed a little melody under my breath, trying to tune out the din of the dining hall. But as I carefully plucked the spinach, avoiding the lettuce, words began to emerge out of the noise, near my ear.

“Hey! Hey! Hey you! Stop picking! Stop picking in that!”

I looked around to see where the shouting was coming from and at whom it was directed. To my surprise, a beefy young girl in a hairnet was glaring at me. I looked around, then gestured with the salad tongs. “Are you talking to me?”

“Hell, yeah. You can’t be pickin’ out the greens like that. Just fill up your plate and keep moving!”

I looked at my salad bar adversary, wondering who the fuck she thought she was. I vaguely recognized her as new, a reputed troublemaker up in the Rooms. Just the other day Annette, who was still stuck up there, had been complaining about the disrespectful mouth on this eighteen-year-old kid. I knew from Pop that the salad bar was among the least desirable kitchen jobs, because so much washing and chopping was involved in the prep. So it was usually done by the low woman on the culinary totem pole.

I was furious that she had had the nerve to step to me. By now I felt like I was pretty firmly established in the Camp’s social ecology. I didn’t mess with other people, I was friendly but respectful, and hence other people treated me with respect. So to have some kid giving me shit in the dining hall was enraging. Not only that, but she was breaking a cardinal rule among prisoners: Don’t you tell me what to do-you have eight numbers after your name just like me. To get into a public battle with a black woman was a profoundly loaded situation, but it didn’t even occur to me to back down from this punk kid.

I opened my mouth, mad enough to spit, and said loudly, “I don’t eat iceberg lettuce!”

Really? I asked myself. That’s what you’re going to throw down with?

“I don’t care what you eat, just don’t be pickin’ in there!”

Suddenly I realized that things had quieted down quite a bit in the dining hall and that this unusual conflict was being watched. All clashes between prisoners were sporting events, but for me to be in the mix was freakish. I was transported back to my middle school’s parking lot, when Tanya Cateris had called me out and I knew that the only choice was to fight or prove to every person in school that I was chickenshit. In suburban Massachusetts, I went with chickenshit; here that just wasn’t an option.

But before I could even draw breath to assert myself with Big Mouth and raise the stakes, Jae, my friend from work and B Dorm, materialized at my side. Her normally smiling face was stern. I looked at her. She looked at Big Mouth, not saying a word. And just like that, Big Mouth turned and slunk away.

“You okay, Piper?” said Jae.

“I am totally okay, Jae!” I replied hotly, glaring after Big Mouth. Disappointed, everyone turned back to their food, and the volume went right back up to its usual level. I knew that Jae had just saved me many months of trouble.

NOW THAT I had my headset radio, I couldn’t believe how much easier it was to carve some enjoyment out of the day. With a pair of white sneakers purchased from commissary, I began jogging around the track every evening. I could tune out the pandemonium of B Dorm at will, and go much farther around the quarter-mile track now that I had music in my ear.

Rosemarie tipped me off to WXCI, 91.7, the radio station of Western Connecticut State University. I had forgotten about the pleasures of college radio, the exquisite randomness of what got played, the twenty-minute between-songs banter of nineteen-year-olds, the smack of music I’d never heard against my brain cavity. I was in heaven as I went around and around that track, giggling at sophomoric radio skits about Dick Cheney and listening to the new bands like the Kings of Leon that I’d been reading about in my copies of SPIN but had never actually heard in the endless repeat of classic rock vs. hip hop vs. Spanish radio that is the soundtrack of daily life in prison.

Best of all was a recurring weekly show, 90s Mixtape, which compiled the best songs from every year of the 1990s, one year every week. The 1991 top ten included Pavement, N.W.A., Naughty by Nature, Teenage Fanclub, Blur, Metallica, Nirvana, and LL Cool J. Those songs made me think of Larry and of the trouble-seeking girl I had been when they were first released. Running around the track, I relived every song I had heard in the background when I was running around the globe, a careless and ignorant young girl, launching myself into trouble so deep that it put me on this prison gravel eleven years later. No matter how stupid, how pointless, how painful my current situation was, as I listened to Mixtape every week I couldn’t deny the love I still felt for that reckless, audacious fool who was still me, if only in my mind.

MAY 17 was Larry’s and my anniversary. The wretched fact that we were separated and it was all my fault was impossible to deny, but when I found the right Hallmark greeting in the free collection handed out via the chapel, I felt a tiny bit better.

Joking aside, the sentiment was all true.

I spent an evening in my bunk composing what I would write on the card. It was our eighth anniversary of dating. I told him how quickly that time had passed, a quarter of our lives spent together. How all the risky choices we had taken together were the right ones, and how I couldn’t wait to come home to him, the only man for me. I promised to keep counting sunrises until I could be where he was, anywhere that might be.

ONE DAY when we got to work, DeSimon stepped out of his office and locked the door. “Today we’re going to practice with the lift,” he announced. What the hell did that mean?

The lift turned out to be a mechanical hydraulic lift. I tried to figure out what it might be used for-all of the buildings were pretty low-lying, and the FCI itself was only a few stories tall. DeSimon shed some light on my question. There were a handful of area lights around the grounds that were hundreds of feet high. The lift was used when a bulb or fixture on one of them needed attention. “Oh, hell no!” said Jae, who was trying to get transferred to the warehouse. “No motherfuckin’ way are you getting me up on that!” The rest of the crew were in agreement with her.