They needed a lot of hands, so in the first week of August I was summoned to a volunteer meeting. I would be manning the face-painting booth. When Saturday arrived, it was in fact hot as hell, but the Camp was humming with nervous energy. Pop and her crew were toiling to get the hot dogs and hamburgers ready. Volunteers were either milling around or getting our stations ready; there was a little pop-up canopy over the face-painting table, scattered with pots and pencils of rainbow-colored greasepaint. I was surprised at how nervous I was. What if the kids were badly behaved and I couldn’t handle them? I certainly wasn’t about to reprimand another prisoner’s kid-just imagine how that would go over. I anxiously questioned the other face painter, who was an old hand. “It’s easy. Just show them the designs and ask ’em what they want,” she said, totally bored. There was a sheet with line drawings of rainbows and butterflies and ladybugs.

The first children arrived for their big day. Kids had to be registered ahead of time, and they had to be dropped off at the visiting room and picked up by the same adult, who could not come into the Camp-the kids had to come alone. Many families had managed to get the kids there from long distances- Maine, western Pennsylvania, Baltimore, and farther-and for some of them it might be the only time they saw their mother this year. Being processed in through the visiting room must have been scary for the kids, who then could go racing into their mother’s arms. After hugs and kisses, they could take their mother’s hand and walk down the stairs by the dining hall and out behind the Camp, to the track and the picnic tables and the outdoors and the whole day stretching in front of them.

Our first customer shyly approached the face-painting booth with her mother, a coworker from the carpentry shop. “Piper, she wants a face painting.”

The girl was probably about five, with curly golden-brown ponytails and chubby cheeks. “Okay, sweetie, what do you want?” I pointed at the sheet with the designs. She looked at me. I looked at her. I looked at her mother. “What does she want?”

Mom rolled her eyes. “I don’t know, a rainbow?”

The rainbow in the picture was coming out of a cloud. It looked kind of hard. “How about a heart with a cloud-in blue to match her dress?”

“Great, whatever.”

I cupped her tiny chin in my hand and tried to keep my other hand steady. The final result was very big, and very… blue. Mom examined my handiwork and then gave me a look like What the fuck? But she cooed, “That’s so cute, baby, que linda!” and off they went. This was harder than it looked.

But it got easier. After the kids’ shyness around strangers wore off, everyone wanted their face painted. The children were well behaved, waiting patiently in line and smiling sweetly when it was finally their turn and they got to pick their design. We were busy for hours, until we all finally got a lunch break. I went and ate a hamburger with Pop and watched families dotting the grass and the picnic tables. The little kids were playing together. Gisela’s teenage daughters were flirting with Trina Cox’s teenage sons, who were frankly pretty fine. Some of the mothers looked overwhelmed-they were no longer accustomed to supervising their own kids in a normal, day-to-day way. But everyone was having fun. I got that feeling again, the feeling I had when Natalie’s GED scores had come back, that tornado feeling inside. So much concentrated happiness, in such a sad place.

After lunch I went back to the face-painting booth. Now some of the older kids started to approach.

“Can you do a tattoo? Of a tiger, or a lightning bolt?”

“Only if it’s okay with your mom.” Once I had secured maternal permission, I went to work “inking” thunderbolts and anchors and panthers on forearms and shoulders and calves, much to the delight of the postpubescent set. I showed off my own tattoo, which got gratifying oohs and aahs.

The younger of Trina Cox’s two boys approached me. He was wearing an immaculate white New York Jets jersey, with matching new hat and green shorts.

“That’s my team,” I said, as he took a seat in my tattoo parlor.

He looked at me seriously. “Can you do Olde English?”

“Olde English? You mean, like fancy lettering?”

“Yeah, like the rappers have?”

I looked around for his mother, but I didn’t see her. “I’ve never done that before, but I can try. What do you want it to say?”

“Um… my nickname, John-John.”

“Okay, John-John.” We sat knee to knee, and I held his forearm. I guessed he was about fourteen. “You want it lengthwise, or stacked?”

He thought about it a little harder. “Maybe it should be just ‘John’?”

“That sounds good. ‘John.’ I’m going to do it lengthwise, big.”

“Okay.”

Neither of us talked while I worked, bent over his arm. I was very careful, and tried to make it as cool-looking as I could, as if it really were going to be permanent. He was quiet, watching me and maybe imagining what it might feel like to get a real tattoo. Finally I sat up, satisfied. But was he?

I got a big smile. He admired his arm. “Thank you!” John-John was a sweet kid. He ran off to show his older brother, the football star.

In the afternoon, near the end of the scheduled activities, it was time for the prison-made piñatas stuffed with candy and little trinkets. Breaking them open was supervised by the jerk from the commissary, who was uncharacteristically nice to all of the kids. John-John, blindfolded, whaled on the Pokémon piñata I had decorated until it burst, giving up its goodies to the throng of children. Now the moment we had all been trying to put out of our minds was drawing very close: the end of the day and the goodbyes. Kids who had traveled from far away, gotten closer to their moms than they had been all year, and then eaten a bunch of candy could hardly be blamed for shedding tears when they had to leave, even if they were “too big for that.” At dinner the mothers appeared subdued and exhausted, if they came to the chow hall at all. I am just glad that I was too busy to think all day because afterward, curled up in a ball in my bunk, I also cried and cried.

ONE MORNING I checked the callout and saw that I had OBGYN next to my name.

“Oof, girl, the annual gynecologist! You can refuse the exam,” commented Angel, who was also checking the callout and always had something to say.

Why should I refuse it? I asked.

“It’s a man. Almost everyone refuses it because of that,” Angel explained.

I was horrified. “That’s ridiculous. It’s probably the most important exam most of these women could have all year! I mean, of course a prison for fourteen hundred women should bring in a female gynecologist, but still!”

Angel shrugged. “Whatever. I’m not having no man do that shit.”

“Well, I don’t care if it’s a man or not,” I announced. “I’m getting a checkup.”

I reported to the medical office at my appointed time, feeling smug about getting my money’s worth out of the system. My smugness evaporated when the doctor called me into the room that served as his exam room. He was a white man who looked to be in his eighties and whose voice quavered. He commanded me, irritated, to “take off all of your clothes, wrap yourself in the paper sheet, and climb up on the examining table. Put your feet in the stirrups and slide all the way down. I’ll be right back!”

In a minute I was stripped down to my sports bra, cold and freaked out. The paper sheet was inadequate covering for my body. I should have had a robe on, or at least my T-shirt. The doctor knocked, then entered. I blinked at the ceiling, trying to pretend that this was not happening.

“Slide down,” he barked, getting his instruments ready. “Relax, I need you to relax!”

Let me just say, it was horrible. And it hurt. When it was over, and the old man gone, departed with a bang of the door, I was left clutching that paper sheet around me, feeling just like this prison system wanted me to-utterly powerless, vulnerable, alone.