Orange Is the New Black

give me up in a hot second. I closed my eyes. I was dead.
    The next morning at the shop, an eerie air-raid siren went off. I almost vomited. Shirley looked faint. Levy appeared completely unconcerned. Usually the siren was used for “recalls”—sending us back to our housing units for either emergency or special practice counts. But this time nothing happened; the alarm went off for many excruciating minutes until it just stopped. Shirley went outside to smoke a cigarette with trembling hands.
    At lunch I found Nina and told her what had happened, deeply rattled.
    She rolled her eyes. “Jesus Christ, Piper. Let’s go look for it after lunch. You’ll just give it to DeSimon and explain. They ain’t gonna lock you up.”
    But the Dumpster was empty. Nina frowned, and looked at me.
    I wanted to cry. “Nina, you don’t think the siren this morning…?”
    Although she was concerned, this struck her as hilarious. “No, Piper, I don’t think the siren this morning was for you. I think the garbage is gone, and the screwdriver’s gone, and if the evidence is gone, then they can’t prove shit. Most likely nothing at all’s gonna happen, and if it does, it’s your word against Levy or Shirley, and let’s face it, they’re wackos, who’s gonna believe them?”
    ·  ·  ·  
    O NE AFTERNOON I returned to B Dorm to find my neighbor Colleen in a state of great excitement.
    “My girls Jae and Bobbie just got here from Brooklyn! Pipestar, you got any extra toothpaste I can give them, or any other stuff?” Colleen explained that before she’d been designated to Danbury, she had spent time with her two friends in the Brooklyn Metropolitan Correctional Center, aka a federal jail. Now her pals had just arrived off the transport bus. “They’re both real cool, Piper, you’ll like them.”
    On my way to the gym, I saw a black woman and a white woman standing out behind the Camp building in the early spring drizzle, staring up at the clouds. I didn’t recognize them; I decided they must be Colleen’s friends.
    “Hey, I’m Piper. Are you guys Colleen’s friends? I live next to her. Let me know if you need anything.”
    They lowered their faces from the sky and looked at me. The black woman was about thirty, pretty, and solidly built with high cheekbones. She looked like she had been carved out of supersmooth wood. The white woman was smaller and older, maybe forty-five, and had coarse skin like a coral reef and eyes with as many shades of blue as the ocean. Right now they looked aquamarine.
    “Thanks,” she said. “I’m Bobbie. This is Jae. You got any cigarettes?” Her heavy New York accent suggested many late nights and many cigarettes.
    “Hi, Jae. No, sorry, I don’t smoke. I’ve got toiletries, though, if you need.” I was getting wet, and it was cold. Still, I was curious about these two. “Kinda crap weather out here.”
    At this they looked at each other. “We ain’t felt the rain for two years,” said Jae, the black woman.
    “What?”
    “In Brooklyn there’s a little rec deck they take us up on, but it’s covered over, barbed wire and shit, and you don’t really see the sky,” she explained. “So we don’t mind the rain. We love it.” And she put her head back again, face up, as close to the sky as it could get.
    ·  ·  ·  
    I N THE electric shop things were changing. Vera, the woman with the most experience, left to go to the only women’s Boot Camp program, in Texas. Boot Camp (an early-release program that has since been eliminated) was six hard months in the Texas heat, where rumor had it that you were housed in a giant tent and required to shave your pubic hair to make insect detection easier.
    Vera’s departure to Texas meant that the leadership in the electric shop shifted to Joyce. Joyce was a reasonably confident replacement, having learned from Vera how to do the electric work that was required on a frequent or daily basis—changing eight-foot-long fluorescents, replacing the ballasts of light fixtures, installing new exit signs and fixtures, and checking circuit boards.
    Levy soon became the unifying factor in the shop: the rest of us united against her. She was insufferable, crying daily and complaining loudly and constantly about her measly six-month sentence, asking inappropriate personal questions, trying to boss people around, and making appalling and loud statements about other prisoners’ appearance and lack of education, sophistication, or