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  “Hey, so listen, you know how you told me about how you got charged with, um…selling to that drug dealer…uh…Lazarus, the guns or whatever?” she asked.

  “Um, yeah, can you please shut the hell up. You are the only one who knows about that,” I said, glancing around furtively.

  “Okay, I know, sorry, shhh. Okay, listen. Well I saw his homeboy Tre, and he said that Lazarus is realllll­lllll­lly mad that you snitched on him. Cuz, um, his you know, his house got raided and stuff. So, anyway, I guess Lazarus wants to kill you. Well, not like ‘kill you’ but like, hurt you or your family or something really bad and—”

  “Hold up,” I interrupted. “Slow down. Are you fucking kidding me right now? They raided his house?” I stood up and started pacing back and forth with her. “Son of a bitch.” Things had obviously gotten worse after my arrest.

  “Yeah, no, it’s bad, like, three people got arrested and alllll­lllll­ his drugs were taken and stuff. Luckily, he wasn’t home.”

  Yeah, luckily. Now he’s free to murder my family.

  “Okay, so, anyway, guess what the craziest part is?” she said, her eyes looking like they were about to pop out of her head. “Lazarus has a wife, it’s his son’s momma and”—she lowered her voice to a whisper—“she is sitting right over there.” She was pointing somewhere behind me. I slowly turned my head to follow her finger and when I saw where she was pointing my blood ran cold.

  It was Daniels.

  I turned back around to face Brandy and before I could say anything I watched her face suddenly twist into confusion. Her hand reached up to her heart and she muttered something, but I couldn’t make out what she’d said. It all happened so quickly. Her eyes rolled back into her head and she crumbled into a pile on the floor. Her head made a crack as it bounced off the ground. Brandy began convulsing and I instinctively fell to my knees next to her to hold her. When I realized I should call for help, I hopped back to my feet and ran toward the intercom. I quickly looked back as I slammed the metal button on the wall and realized she had stopped seizing.

  Her arms fell limp, her legs were twisted into an unnatural position, and her eyelids relaxed down but didn’t close. They were staring straight at me, but there was no life behind them. I was shaking in panic as I jammed the emergency button on the wall to alert the correctional officers. “Yes?” the woman on the other end said calmly.

  “Please hurry, I need help! My friend…I think she just fucking died.”

  13

  “Babe, wake up, the detectives want to talk to you,” my boyfriend said, waking me from a glorious sleep. He was supposed to be on duty that day; why the hell was he waking me up? He knew better. I hated mornings, and it had taken me forever to get to sleep last night. I also hated when he got me up before my alarm went off.

  “What the hell? I already talked to the detectives yesterday when they were here,” I grumbled from beneath the covers.

  My boyfriend was a deputy for the county sheriff’s office. There had been a break-in at our home a few days ago. Someone had come in the back door and stole his badge and two hundred dollars from his wallet. They also took three guns from the gun safe, including his off-duty weapon. The police had been here all day yesterday, dusting for fingerprints and asking us a bunch of questions. So why the hell were they here again at the crack of dawn?

  “Please, you need to get up and get dressed. They just have a couple more questions,” he said, gently placing his hand on my back. I could feel the anger rising from the depths of my soul.

  I was suddenly very hot with rage. “God damn it, what is going on?” I said, kicking the covers off me and storming to the closet. “Why do they have to question me again? I already gave them all the information I have,” I said, ripping a shirt off the hanger and angrily pulling it over my head.

  Something was off. He wasn’t responding to me. “Hello? I’m talking to you? I have to work in four hours and I hardly slept last night; it would have been nice to have some kind of warning that they were coming. Why are you being so weird?” I asked, pulling the pants up over my hips. He didn’t say a word. I watched a single tear stream down his cheek and I froze.

  A wave of panic swept over me. “Are you crying?” I asked, stepping closer to him. He put his hands up to keep me at a distance. “What the hell, Eliot?” I said. “Why aren’t you responding to m—” I was interrupted by our bedroom door flying open. Suddenly there was a man in the doorway.

  He held his badge up, and his other hand rested on his gun. He was staring into my eyes and I immediately knew something was wrong. This wasn’t the way my boyfriend’s friends from the sheriff’s department usually looked at me. This was different. “I need you to step into the living room, Miss Johnson. Now,” he said, holding the door open and stepping back to make room for me.

  I looked at Eliot and he was staring at the floor, avoiding me. What the fuck? I stepped out of the bedroom and into our living room, and our puppy bounded toward me with her tail wagging to greet me. Eliot blocked her path and scooped her up, taking her into the bedroom and shutting the door behind them. He just…left me out here?

  I noticed there were five deputies in our house in addition to the man at our door, and they were all staring at me. “Please have a seat,” the man said, ushering me toward the couch. “I’m Detective Kallin. I have a few questions I’d like to ask you, if you don’t mind.”

  “Shoot,” I said casually, not immediately recognizing how inappropriate my choice of words was.

  “Actually, if you don’t mind, I’d like to do it out front. It’s gorgeous outside today and you have a beautiful porch.” He smiled at me. Why the hell would he care about my porch? I wondered, slowly standing up from the couch.

  “Uh…yeah, okay. We can do that,” I said reluctantly.

  I stepped onto my porch and in my peripheral vision I noticed a man standing at the side of my front door. He lunged at me the moment my foot hit the ground outside and grabbed my arms, pulling them behind me. I felt the heavy metal handcuffs wrap around my wrists and looked around at everyone in horror. “You have GOT to be fucking kidding me.”

  * * *

  —

  I had replayed the day of my arrest over and over a thousand times since I’d been here. I would think about the moment I was handcuffed, and how the natural manipulator within me believed, even then, that I could con my way out of it.

  I had hidden my addiction for so long. I had done so many unbelievable things day in and day out—and I’d gotten away with all of it. I’d thought that I was invincible, that because my boyfriend was a cop, I was untouchable.

  This morning we had gotten the call that Brandy died after spending two days in the hospital. One minute she was here, walking and talking, and the next…she was a lifeless pile of skin and bones, dying of a heart attack. She was only twenty-nine years old, just two years older than me, and her heart just…stopped.

  She was the first person I’d known to die from addiction, and the fact that it could have just as easily been me had been haunting me all day. I had spent countless hours stewing about how unfair it was that I was humiliated and thrown in a cage when what I really needed was psychological help.

  But today, part of me was thinking that maybe my arrest was exactly what I needed to save my life. I had never looked at it that way before. Life is fleeting, and maybe the universe knew I was headed toward being a crumpled pile on the floor—and sent the sheriff’s department to save me that day.

  I had been lying in my bed most of the day, questioning my entire existence and wondering what the future held, when the public defender phone rang. As per usual, the girls trampled one another in hopes of it being their attorney.

  “Yeah, hold on a sec,” I heard Gemma—allegedly a member of some female Mexican mafia—say in frustration. “Johnson, it’s for you.”

  I headed toward the ph
one, nervous and unsure of what to expect.

  “Hello, this is Tiffany.”

  “Yeah, listen. I don’t gotta a lot of time. I’ll do the talking, you do the listening.”

  “Oh, okay, um—”

  “So, I talked to the state attorney’s office. They added up your scoresheet and they wanna give you fifteen years.”

  I sucked in all the air around me.

  “That’s a joke, right?”

  “Quiet. We go before the judge next Monday, where you will be sentenced. You have the right to refuse their offer. Just to warn you, though, they don’t like it when you refuse their offer; it’s more paperwork. There’s a good chance the offer will be even higher the second time, so, just something to think about. Okay?”

  “Um, yeah. Okay, so what you are saying is if I—”

  “Listen, I got a meeting. I gotta go, talk to you next week.” Click.

  A crowd of girls had gathered around, evidently bored and hoping to catch up with the latest gossip from the outside world. They must have been able to tell from my expression that the call had not gone well.

  “What did he say?” my friend Rebecca asked. It felt like my brain had been put into a blender. Despite my best efforts to piece together what he had just said, I was having trouble processing it.

  “Who’s your attorney?” a girl named Jenny asked.

  “Martin,” I said, staring off into the distance, trying to imagine how old I would be when I got out of prison. Forty-two. I would be forty-two years old.

  “Ugh, I fucking hate Martin. I had him last time I was here.”

  “Trying to have a conversation with him is like pulling teeth,” Rebecca said. “So what did he say?”

  I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. If I said it out loud it would make it real. I ignored the twenty eager eyes staring at me, and I walked away. I needed Jessie to hug me and tell me everything was going to be okay. She had a way of making even the darkest days seem a bit brighter.

  “What’s the matter, babe?” she asked, sitting down next to me on the bed and putting her arm around me. “Is it Brandy?”

  I shook my head and tearfully filled her in on what my asshole attorney had said. When I finished, she grabbed the sides of my face with both hands and stared deep into my eyes.

  “Listen to me. You will not go to prison for fifteen years. Do you hear me? You won’t. The first offer is always ridiculous—they try to scare you. I promise. Worrying about what is gonna happen next week won’t do a damn thing. Okay? It won’t lessen your time, it won’t change the outcome, it will just make you fucking crazy. So stop. You are going to be fine,” she said, smiling. I believed her. I hugged her tighter than I ever had. I was so grateful to have her with me. To help me through the hard shit.

  “Thank you, that actually makes me feel better,” I said, sniffling, my rigid muscles loosening a bit.

  “You’re welcome, Tiff. I mean it. I want you to know something…” she began, and then she took a deep breath and continued, “I love you, like, a lot, okay? And I really want to make you my wife when we get out of here.”

  My face twisted in confusion and I subconsciously pulled away. “Listen, don’t be scared. I know you’ve never been with a woman before, so this is probably overwhelming for you. But this feels…real. And I know you feel it too,” she said, pulling my arms back.

  I snatched them out of her grasp and stood up. “Um, hold up. I need you to pump your brakes here, Jessie, okay? I mean, for Christ’s sake. I just found out I’m gonna be in prison until I’m a hundred and four years old, and you are picking out wedding cakes and trying to name our children? Like…what?”

  I was also thinking, How the hell could she love me anyway? It hasn’t even been two months. She doesn’t know what I look like in normal clothes. She’s never seen me with makeup on. She doesn’t know what shows I like or the music I blast when I’m in the car. Love?

  “Baby, come here. Sit.”

  I crossed my arms, suddenly feeling very uncomfortable. I mean, I liked her, don’t get me wrong. I liked her a lot. But marriage? “I’m good. I’m gonna just stand here for a minute and process this,” I said.

  She stood up and I noticed her face was suddenly flushed. “Tiff, I know you are having a bad day, okay? The wife of the man who’s got it out for you is two cells over, we just found out about Brandy, then your attorney scared you, so I know you are under a lot of stress, baby. Don’t let all of that distract you from what’s real. You need me now more than ever.” She stepped closer. “I know that I have loved you since the moment I saw you, all right, and I know you love me too, so—” She stopped talking and leaned in to kiss me. I did a move from The Matrix and swooped backward to dodge the kiss.

  This enraged her. She reached out and grabbed the back of my head and forced me to kiss her. She held my face to hers so tightly that our teeth were mashing together. I pushed her away from me in stunned disgust and watched as she smiled and wiped her lips. “I’m gonna give you some time to get your damn mind right,” she said, exiting the room.

  I stood there shocked for a moment, feeling completely violated and fairly certain that what she had done was somehow a form of rape. I suddenly decided I no longer wanted her in my room. I didn’t want to be trapped in here with a creepy violent lesbian rapist. With a sudden rush of adrenaline, I decided to push the button and tell the guards what she had done.

  I turned around to head toward the button and bumped into someone who had been standing an inch behind me. I couldn’t believe this psycho was back already. I looked down expecting to see Jessie staring back at me.

  Instead I found myself face-to-face with Daniels. “Hey, bitch,” she said, before sucker-punching me square in the jaw.

  14

  I had only been in one fight in my entire life (unless you count the knock-down, drag-out fights my little sister and I had every day of our childhood). But as far as being in a physical altercation with a stranger, it had happened only once. I was hammered, and I was defending my little sister’s honor at a bar—long story.

  Anyway, even though Daniels was an itty-bitty nugget of a person, that shit hurt! In fact, she hit me so hard that everything suddenly went black. I could hear everything around me, but for a split second I couldn’t see a damn thing. She didn’t just hit me once either; she took advantage of my momentary blindness and got three hits in before my sight returned and I snapped into action.

  Here’s the thing. When I say snapped into action, what I really mean is pushed her onto the floor and grabbed the closest thing to me to use as a weapon to beat her with. My arms were moving before my brain could catch up, and unfortunately for me, my weapon of choice was…a pillow.

  I shit you not. Unbeknownst to me, my body made an executive decision to grab a motherfucking pillow and hit her with it. I turned an MMA fight into a pillow fight in two seconds flat. Halfway into her pillow beating I realized how ridiculous this was, and how confused she must have been. But it was too late, I was already going to town. I’m pretty sure I also yelled out things like, “Yeah, bitch, this will teach you to sucker-punch me!”

  She suddenly wiggled out from under me and stood up. I didn’t move a muscle. I clutched my pillow with all my might, preparing for her retaliation. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” she asked, breathing heavily before turning and running out of the room.

  That was a very good question.

  I was out of breath like I’d just run a marathon, and my hands were shaking uncontrollably. I sat down on my bed trying to process everything, and once my adrenaline had subsided, the pain began creeping in. Above my right eyebrow I felt a dull, steady ache. I reached my hand up to the spot and sure enough there was a lump beginning to form. Suddenly, I was overcome with the realization of what I’d just done.

  I’d hit the bitch repeatedly—with a pillow. A friggin’ pillow. Like
, how the hell could I even attempt to brag about this shit later? “Yo dawg, you shoulda seen me, I swung that pillow so hard. Feathers were flying and the cotton on the pillowcase ain’t soft, bro, she’s hurtin’ for sure. Ain’t nobody wanna come around me, I’ll pillow-swipe ’em so fast, dude.”

  Damn it.

  “Everybody to your bunks, now!” Deputy Knox came flying into the dayroom followed by four other corrections officers with a determined bound in their steps. I lay down in my bunk and slowly pulled the blanket up to my neck and pretended to be sleeping. (I used to do this all the time when my mom would angrily storm up the stairs to my sister’s and my room after we’d done something stupid. So naturally, this seemed like a good idea now.)

  I could hear their sneakers squeaking on the floor as their keys jingled on their hips. I tried to listen and hear which direction they were headed, but my head had begun pounding at this point and it hurt to concentrate that hard.

  “Who the fuck was just fighting in here?” Knox yelled from the center of the pod.

  Shit shit shit. I’m fucked. I’m so screwed. I listened and waited for someone to rat me out. There was silence. “I said, who the hell was fighting. Y’all do not wanna try me tonight.”

  Silence.

  “Okay, this how y’all wanna do it? That’s fine. Open cell five!” she yelled.

  My cell.

  The door popped open and I heard her getting closer and closer. I was afraid she was going to see my heart pounding through the blanket. Her footsteps suddenly stopped, and I could feel her demonic presence in our cell. I thought I might shit my pants.

  “Now y’all hos wanna play dumb, huh?” The hair on the back of my neck stood up. “See, y’all wanna sit up in here, keep quiet, pretend you sleepin’, but what y’all don’t realize is I been doin’ this for a long time. Now see—AY! You under the blanket, wake yo’ ass up before I tase you awake, ho.” Okay, she was definitely talking to me. I slowly pulled the blanket down and my eyes locked with hers. “Why you hiding?”