Orange Is the New Black

was that I was in fact good. I wasn’t so good with chickenshit rules, but I was more than capable of helping other people. I was eager to offer what I had, which was more than I had realized. Judging others held littleappeal to me now, and when I did it, I regretted it. Best of all, I had found other women here in prison who could teach me how to be better. It seemed to me that my total demonstrated failure at being a good girl was more than matched by the urgency of being a good person. And that was something of which I hoped my grandmother would approve, and maybe forgive me, when I could not attend to her suffering.
    T HE DAY after Thanksgiving my grandmother died. I mourned quietly and with the sympathy of my friends. I felt like a wrung-out rag. I stared for many hours over the valley, lost in the past, and slowed to a walk on the track. I had never received a response to my furlough request. As Pop said, I had had nothing coming.
    About a year later, when I was home on the street, I got a letter from Danbury. Formal, a little stilted, it was from Rosemarie, and folded in it were two photographs of my grandmother. My cousin had sent them to me in prison, and I had looked at them hundreds of times when I needed to smile. In the first, my grandmother has just opened a festively wrapped present, an oversize black Harley-Davidson T-shirt. Her face shows undisguised horror. In the second, the gag gift is clasped in her lap, and she beams at the camera, her eyes bright with laughter. Rosemarie wrote that she hoped I was doing well on the outs, and that she had found these photos in a book in the library and recognized who it was. Rosemarie said she knew how much I loved my grandmother, and also that she was thinking of me.

CHAPTER 16
Good Time

    T he free world was getting closer. Despite my incident report in November, I was on course to serve thirteen months of my fifteen-month sentence and be released in March with “good time,” the standard federal sentence reduction for good behavior. In January I would be eligible to go to a halfway house in deep Brooklyn on Myrtle Avenue (known as “Murder Avenue” in the Camp). Prison scuttlebutt was that as soon as you passed a few drug tests and found a job, the halfway house would send you home—as long as they could claim your paycheck.
    Natalie would be waiting for me on Murder Avenue. I said goodbye to my bunkie the first week of December. The night before she left I was practically jumping out of my skin, asking her questions, leaning over from the top bunk to look at her lying below me for the last night. Natalie seemed to have willed herself into a state of calm. The next morning as she said goodbye to the assembled crowd of well-wishers, I was hopping nervously around the front door like a little kid. I wanted to be last. I was trying to keep my cool, even more than when Yoga Janet left.
    “Natalie, I don’t know what I would have done without you. I love you.” This was probably the most direct thing I’d ever said to the proud woman I had lived with so intimately for nine months. I was going to lose the battle with tears again. In the last month I had become the freaking waterworks queen.
    Natalie hugged me gently. “Bunkie, it’s okay, I’ll see you soon. I’m gonna be waiting for you in Brooklyn.”
    “That’s right, Natalie. Hold it down till I get there.”
    She smiled and walked tall out the door for the last time.
    Pop was also supposed to go to a halfway house in January. One reason she and I grew so close was that we were going home at the same time. For Pop, as well as Natalie, going home meant something very different than it did for me. Pop had been down for more than twelve years, since the early 1990s. She remembered a world with no cell phones, no Internet, and no probation officer to report to. She was nervous as hell. We spent many hours talking about what it would be like when she was released, first to a halfway house for six months and then to the house that she would share with her family. Her husband was in prison down south, due for release in three years. She planned to work in a restaurant and confided that she would like to buy and run a hot dog cart someday. She was nervous about computers, nervous about the halfway house, nervous about her kids, and nervous about leaving the place that, for better or worse, had been her home for more than a decade.
    I was nervous too, but not about going home. In the second week of