Orange Is the New Black

didn’t eat much. I trailed behind my two companions, drawing a bead on the woman who I thought was Nora.
    In the past eleven months I had occasional thoughts of Nora—bad thoughts. I wanted to be certain before I made a move. I had fantasized about confronting the woman I’d followed down the wrong path, the woman who had likely ratted me out. In my head I usually set the moment in a lesbian bar in San Francisco and imagined much smashing of bottles with pool cues and breaking of pug noses and general bloodletting. Now the real moment had arrived. What was I going to do?
    The short, curly-headed, and decidedly middle-aged woman received her lunch box and turned to head to a table. It was the same woman I had followed to Indonesia, to Zurich, to the Congress Hotel. If I had never met her, I wouldn’t be sitting here now holding a bag of lukewarm milk and wearing government clothing. It was the same French bulldog face ten years later—ten apparently long, hard years. She looked like hell. She glanced at me as she passed, and I saw the shock of recognition cross those flattened features. I held my breath, my pulse pounding.
    At the table with my companions, I hissed, “Jae! I think I see one of my codefendants!”
    Jae looked at me, very serious. Almost all drug prisoners have codefendants, and that can have a host of meanings, but Jae knew immediately from my tone that this was not a good thing.
    “What’s up?” asked Slice, catching that there was a problem.
    “Piper thinks she got one of her codefendants here, and she’s surprised.”
    “Where?”
    I indicated without pointing.
    They relaxed a little. “That old lady?” “Shee-it, Peeper, what kind of gangster is you anyway?”
    I glared at them. “Jae, I think that bitch ratted me out.”
    All levity ceased. Slice studied Nora. Jae thought for several moments, then spoke deliberately.
    “Piper, you do what you need to do, knowhatmsayin’, but knowthis—you will be in the SHU the rest of the time here. If it sucks like this here, imagine what the SHU is like. And fuck knows what else is gonna happen to you. You about to go home, to your man who you know loves you, he got his ass up in the visiting room every damn week. Is that bitch worth it to catch another case? I’ma back you up
to a point.
I’m telling you f’real though, I am not going to the SHU, but I respect that you gotta do what you need to.”
    Slice piped in, “I’m not going to the SHU either, not for some white girl I don’t even know. No offense, Peeper. But do your thing.”
    I did nothing. Jae kept a worried eye on me. Slice procured a full deck of playing cards from another prisoner and began to shuffle them. I couldn’t stand it, though. I took a break and lay on my bunk and stared at the cinder-block wall. The woman who had landed me here was finally within my grasp, and I was paralyzed. Would I really do nothing?
    I left my cell and stalked around the unit, which took about three minutes. Nora was nowhere to be found. Jae gestured me over. “C’mon, Piper, play with us.”
    Jae and her cousin riffed back and forth as we played cards. Slice was full of very funny accounts about the life of a bulldagger on the make in the FCI back in Danbury, including the story of being caught in the act in the middle of the night by a guard we all knew. “I froze, man, he’s got his flashlight on us, and it wasn’t the kinda situation where you can deny, know what I mean? And he just said, ‘Let me watch.’ Sooooooo…” and she indicated getting back to business. It was the same guy who had bird-dogged me for giving Pop an innocent foot massage. Filthy pig.
    By the time the dinner cart showed up after the four o’clock count, we were laughing our asses off. When we took the lid off the plastic trays, the stench made us slam them back on immediately. Jae spoke up, after a beat: “We’re gonna have to kill one of these bitches and eat her, or starve.”
    I was crossing the unit to return my tray when I saw Nora headed toward me. I squared my shoulders and adopted my most arctic ice-queen stare. As we passed, she looked at me uncertainly.
    “Hi,” she said, almost under her breath.
    I stalked by her.
    “What happened?” asked Jae, concerned.
    “Tried to say hello to me.” I shook my head, and we started playing cards again. “You know, the thing I can’t figure out is why she’s here and her sister isn’t.”
    “Her sister?”
    “Yeah, her sister’s my codefendant