Criminal by Terra Elan McVoy

wife’s been in the hospital and I think he’s just lonely and scared.”
    I nodded, not sure what to say, and stepped down to the first rung of the two-rung ladder between my bunk and hers. I followed what Priscilla was doing and pulled the bottom sheet of my bunk straight, stretched the blanket over that as best I could. I pounded the pillow twice with my fist, knowing that no amount of pounding was going to ever make that pillow fluffy. Not fluffy enough to make me forget Dee’s head wasn’t on another one, next to mine. I thought of my bed at Cherry’s house, with five pillows and a down blanket as thick as my bicep. A bed I had thought before was cold and unkind.
    Priscilla reached over my head. “Doesn’t make sense to have a sloppy place,” she said, pulling things military straight in just a few seconds. “Not a lot of space here. Need to keep it nice. Here—” She handed me the small plastic bucket and a clean but worn-thin rag. “Tuesdays and Thursdays, I just give things a general wipe down—walls, the floor. Toilet, of course.”
    I looked over at the shiny metal pot in the corner opposite our beds. There was a narrow table that served as a desk, with arow of books along the back, and this provided a small amount of shield between the toilet and the open bars of our cell, but I still couldn’t picture myself using it, even with my morning urge to pee coming on. I just couldn’t do it—not with someone else so close in here. I went ahead and wiped it down before she could even ask me, though. Gary had told me a long time ago that the best way to make it inside was to be accommodating, but not scared. Confident, but not cocky. At the time I’d thought, Some kind of life lessons to give your stepdaughter , but now I was scrambling to remember anything else he told me.
    We got the cell in good enough shape, I guess, before it was time for breakfast, though I still hadn’t finished with my half of the floor when Archie came back with his cart, collecting our rags and buckets.
    â€œThe grits are just as nasty as they look,” Priscilla murmured behind me as we moved down the hall in line behind the others. “And at lunch, make sure to get pickles if they have them. May be the only vegetable you see for a while.”
    The cafeteria was like a cafeteria at school, for the most part: a line where you got your food spooned onto a divided plastic tray and then lines of picnic-style tables, with benches bolted to the floor instead of chairs. Every eight feet or so a guard stood, watching everyone. But just like a school cafeteria, the place was full of chatter. Our block, Priscilla told me, was all girls betweenthe ages of eighteen and twenty-five, and it definitely sounded like it. Black girls and Asian girls and Latino girls and white girls, fat girls and skinny girls, girls with tattoos and scars, girls with skin smooth as a makeup ad. All of them—or enough of them, at least—talking together. Gossiping about boyfriends and family, what was on TV yesterday, who’d been visited by who. I don’t know what I’d expected—fighting and meanness, like in the movies. I didn’t know whether to be glad and relieved by how regular things seemed or to feel even more horrified. Was I going to get so used to being in jail that it became a social hour for me too? So much so that I’d forget dinners at Bird’s, with Jamelee? That I would forget Dee?
    Dee. I pictured him as I tried to cut the cardboard-tasting hash browns with the edge of my plastic spoon—the only utensil they gave us. Where was he now? Had he really made it out of the state? Or had they found him anyway because of what I’d said? I didn’t want to be here—didn’t want any of this to have happened—and I certainly didn’t want to be in jail while Dee ran around free. At the same time I knew, if they caught him, it would