Orange Is the New Black

are at midnight, two A.M. , five A.M. , and nine P.M. Did they give you your PAC number?”
    “PAC number?”
    “Yeah, you’ll need it to make phone calls. Did they give you a phone sheet? NO? You need to fill it out so you can make phone calls. But maybe Toricella will let you make a call if you ask him. It’s his late night. It helps if you cry. Ask him after dinner. Dinner’s after the four o’clock count, which is pretty soon, and lunch is at eleven. Breakfast is from six-fifteen to seven-fifteen. How much time do you have?”
    “Fifteen months… how much time do you have?”
    “Fifty-seven months.”
    If there was an appropriate response to this information, I didn’t know what it was. What could this middle-class, middle-aged Italian-American lady from Jersey possibly have done to get fifty-seven months in federal prison? Was she Carmela Soprano? Fifty-seven months! From my presurrender due diligence, I knew it was
verboten
to ask anyone about their crime.
    She saw that I was unsure what to say and helped me out. “Yeah, it’s a lot of time,” she said sort of drily.
    “Yeah.” I agreed. I turned to start pulling items out of my laundry bag.
    That’s when she shrieked, “Don’t make your bed!!!”
    “What?” I spun around, alarmed.
    “We’ll make it for you,” she said.
    “Oh… no, that’s not necessary, I’ll make it.” I turned back to the thin cotton-poly sheets I’d been issued.
    She came over to my bunk. “Honey. We’ll. Make. The. Bed.” She was very firm. “We know how.”
    I was completely mystified. I looked around the room. All fivebeds were very tidily made, and both Annette and Miss Luz had been lying on top of their covers.
    “I know how to make a bed,” I protested tentatively.
    “Listen, let us make the bed. We know how to do it so we’ll pass inspection.”
    Inspection? No one told me anything about inspections.
    “Inspection happens whenever Butorsky wants to do them—and he is insane,” Annette said. “He will stand on the lockers to try to see dust on the light fixtures. He will walk on your bed. He’s a nut. And that one”—she pointed to the bunk below mine—“doesn’t want to help clean!”
    Uh-oh.
I hated cleaning too but was certainly not about to risk the ire of my new roommates.
    “So we have to make the beds every morning?” I asked, another penetrating question.
    Annette looked at me. “No, we sleep on top of the beds.”
    “You don’t sleep in the bed?”
    “No, you sleep on top with a blanket over you.” Pause.
    “But what if I want to sleep in the bed?”
    Annette looked at me with the complete exasperation a mom shows a recalcitrant six-year-old. “Look, if you wanna do that, go ahead—you’ll be the only one in the whole prison!”
    This sort of social pressure was irresistible; getting between the sheets wasn’t going to happen for the next fifteen months. I let go of the bed issue—the thought of hundreds of women sleeping on top of perfectly made military-style beds was too strange for me to deal with at that moment. Plus, somewhere nearby a man was bellowing. “Count time, count time, count time! Count time, ladies!” I looked at Annette, who looked nervous.
    “See that red light?” Out in the hallway, over the officers’ station, was a giant red bulb that was now illuminated. “That light comes on during count. When that red light is on, you better be where you’re supposed to be, and don’t move until it goes off.”
    Women were streaming back and forth in the hallway, and two young Latinas came hurrying into the room.
    Annette did a brief round of introductions. “This is Piper.” They barely glanced at me.
    “Where’s the woman who sleeps here?” I asked about my missing bunkmate.
    “That one! She works in the kitchen, so they count her down there. You’ll meet her.” She grimaced. “Okay, shhhhh! It’s a stand-up count, no talking!”
    The five of us stood silent by our bunks, waiting. The entire building was suddenly quiet; all I could hear was the jangling of keys and the thud of heavy boots. Eventually a man stuck his head into the room and… counted us. Then, several seconds later, another man came in and counted us. When he left, everyone sat down on beds and a couple of footstools, but I figured it wouldn’t be cool to sit on my absent bunkmate’s bed, so I leaned on my empty locker. Minutes passed. The two Latina women began to whisper to Miss Luz in Spanish.
    Suddenly we heard,