Marydale sat in the chow hall, a tray of peas and hamburger crumbles before her. The halogen lights made everything white. Even the bright orange of her uniform bleached out beneath the glare.
Across the room she felt Gulu watching her.
A woman at the next table called out, “Hey. New girl. Do I know you? I never seen you in the yard.”
Marydale said nothing.
“I hear you’re Gulu’s baby,” the woman added.
Another woman at the neighboring table muttered, “More like Gulu’s bitch.”
Marydale drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. She tried to picture Kristen’s apartment, then the distillery, but the images felt like pictures torn from a magazine, flat and well lit but unreal and unreachable.
The two women rose, moved to her table, and sat down on either side of her. Marydale glanced back and forth.
“Me and Jazz are playing poker,” the older women said. She had dark circles around her eyes, and Marydale could not tell if it was eye shadow or diabetes. “We need four to play.” She reached into her sleeve and pulled out a stack of paper slips, each adorned with a hand-drawn card.
“You and your cheating cards,” Jazz said. “How do I know you don’t have them all marked?”
“You want to play or no?” the other woman asked. “We play with whatever. Peas.” She pointed her fork at Marydale’s tray. “That’s like a hundred pennies from your commissary. We’ll settle up later.”
“She always cheats,” Jazz said, wrapping her long dark ponytail around her wrist and then letting it slide off. “And what about you? You cheat at cards?” She nodded to Marydale.
“I don’t want to play.” Marydale showed her empty hands. “I don’t know how.”
“I’ll teach you.”
Marydale jumped at the voice directly behind her ear. The two women laughed. Marydale turned. Gulu stood behind her, her prison-issue jeans hanging off her hips, and her tight gray T-shirt outlining more muscle than breast. Marydale remembered Gulu doing bench presses in the open-air gym in the yard, the rain beating down on her face as she breathed out and pushed up. One hundred one. One hundred two.
“She’s sneaky, isn’t she?” the older woman—Marydale thought her name might be Leena—said.
Gulu swung her leg over the bench across from Marydale. “This is my girl,” she said, pointing her chin in Marydale’s direction. “She’s been my girl for a long time.”
Marydale made a move to rise, but Leena clamped her hand on Marydale’s shoulder.
“You talk to your Jane?” Gulu pressed the tip of her tongue to her top lip and sucked it back.
Marydale let her face settle into a stony stare, but her heart was racing. Gulu sat across from her, but that was close enough. The guards wouldn’t see, and Gulu would be careful. Leena kept her arm around Marydale’s shoulder. Touching was forbidden, but from behind it would look like a friendly gesture. If the guards balked, Leena would apologize. If Marydale tried to rise, Gulu and her friends would catch her ankles under the table.
Leena dealt. Gulu raised Jazz’s bet by rolling two peas across the table, her thumb squashing them slightly, leaving a streak of moisture on the plastic surface. “Scholar’s got some posh girl, but I don’t think it’s gonna last, do you, Scholar? Not much you can do for her in here.”
Marydale didn’t touch the cards in front of her. “I don’t have anything to bet.”
“You will. I got a feeling you’ll be staying for a while,” Gulu said. “Scholar put a fork in Aaron Holten when he touched her girl back in the day.” Gulu had added a few small prison tattoos to her neck. They looked like liver spots.
“You butched out on the outside, too?” Jazz asked Marydale, then dismissed her own question. “Who even gives a shit, right?”
Leena said, “You did a Holten? You’re down for a dime. I hate that family. Buck Holten down at PD in Burnville called INS on my brother, Brian. Brian was born here. Brian don’t even speak Spanish.”
“I heard one of the new fish saying she’s scared of you,” Gulu said to Marydale. “You got snake eyes, she said. All flat like you’ve done hard time.” Gulu’s smile was all low, sleek curves like the back of a coyote moving through sheep. “Scholar thinks she’s getting out, but I think she fits right in.”
Gulu and the young woman folded. Leena won and the deal went to Gulu. Gulu and her friends kept talking, running over old gossip like diners at the Ro-Day-O. Still, there was something in the way they projected their conversation. It was a scrim over other, more subtle communications. Out of the corner of her eye, Marydale saw Gulu slip something from hand to hand. Marydale stood up. “Inmate, where are you going?” a guard yelled.
Marydale felt something touch her hip. She tried to brush it away.
“Guard!” Gulu cried. “She’s got contraband!”
The tiny packet lay on the ground by her shoe. Marydale froze. They would charge her with possession, smuggling contraband into a secure facility, maybe dealing. In her mind’s eye, Marydale saw Kristen disappearing like a figure on the horizon. Time slowed down, and she was watching Aaron Holten fall again, every dust mote in the barn illuminated by the bulb hanging overhead so that he fell, not through darkness, but through a glowing snow of stars.
Then the guard was at her side.
Leena rose and bumped into her. “Watch it, guera!” she said. To the guard, Leena added, “She’s trouble. Don’t let her get near me!”
But when Marydale looked down, the packet was gone.
The guard gave a cursory pat to Marydale’s pockets and the back of her sports bra.
“Clarocci, watch it!” the guard said to Gulu.
Gulu leaned over. “Don’t worry. I’ll find a way to make you stay.”
Marydale said nothing. She heard Gulu inhale deeply.
“You going on the rag soon,” Gulu whispered. “I can smell it. Does your girl know how you get before your rag? All pent up?”
A guard called time, and the crowd rose. Some women lined up for the yard. A few lined up to return to their cells. Gulu stepped close, and Marydale felt Gulu’s hip bone against her ass.
“It’s hard in here. You probably got a whole box of toys up in Portland. Got no relief here. Eh, Scholar? You think your girl’s going to do you in the bathroom at visitors? She a little slut like you are?”
“Fuck you,” Marydale said without looking at Gulu.
Leena glided by, flashing Marydale and Gulu a quick glimpse of the contraband in her fist.
“What the…!” Gulu hissed.
Leena glanced over her shoulder. “Waste not, want not. Anyway, she cut a Holten. I owe her one.”