Orange Is the New Black

stature, the identical button nose, and the same mellow-with-a-touch-of-hyper way of looking at the world. It gave me goosebumps. Delicious sang all the time. All. The. Time. She would rather sing than speak. As soon as I got to B Dorm, she asked me, “Y’all got any gangsta books?” When I told her about my friend Candace on the outside, and how they were like twins, Delicious looked at me as if I were the weirdest person she had ever met.
    For the party, Boo had prepared a game for us to play. She made up a rhyme that was a riddle about every invitee, and the game was to guess the identity of the riddle’s subject. This was an irresistible novelty, and soon we were laughing at each other, although Boo had refrained from being really mean at anyone’s expense.
    She lives right here
Between you and me,
And when you see her
You think of the sea.
    When Boo read that rhyme, I had to bite my lip to hide my smile while I looked around quickly. Most people looked confused, but a few were smirking, pleased with themselves for getting it right away.
    “Who is it?” asked Boo. A lot of shoulders were shrugged, which irked her.
    “It’s Piper!” shouted Sheena and Amy in triumphant unison.
    “I don’t get it,” Trina pouted at her girlfriend. “That don’t make no sense.”
    Boo was exasperated. “‘She lives right here between you and me’—that means she lives in B Dorm. ‘And when you see her, you think of the sea,’ that’s her tattoo. Get it?
See, sea
? The fish?!”
    “Oh yeah!” Lili Cabrales grinned, “That’s my Dolphin!”

CHAPTER 10
Schooling the OG

    I had learned a lot since arriving in prison five months ago: how to clean house using maxipads, how to wire a light fixture, how to discern whether a duo were best friends or girlfriends, when to curse someone in Spanish, knowing the difference between “feelin’ it” (good) and “feelin’ some kinda way” (bad), the fastest way to calculate someone’s good time, how to spot a commissary ho a mile away, and how to tell which guards were players and which guards were nothin’ nice. I even mastered a recipe from the prison’s culinary canon: cheesecake.
    I made my first effort at cooking for someone’s going-home party, preparing a prison cheesecake according to my coworker Yvette’s Spanish-and-hand-gesture instructions. Unlike a lot of prison cookery, most of the necessary ingredients could be bought at the commissary.
Prison Cheesecake
    Prepare a crust of crushed graham crackers mixed with four pats of margarine stolen from the dining hall. Bake it in a Tupperware bowl for about a minute in the microwave, and allow it to cool and harden.
Take one full round of Laughing Cow cheese, smash with a fork, and mix with a cup of vanilla pudding until smooth.Gradually mix in one whole container of Cremora, even though it seems gross. Beat viciously until smooth. Add lemon juice from the squeeze bottle until the mixture starts to stiffen. Note: this will use most of the plastic lemon.
Pour into the bowl atop the crust, and put on ice in your bunkie’s cleaning bucket to chill until ready to eat.
    It was a little squishy the first time; I should have used more lemon juice. But it was a great success. Yvette raised her eyebrows when she tasted it. “
¡Buena!
” she proclaimed. I was very proud.
    Prison cuisine and survival techniques were all well and good, but it was time to learn something more productive. Pleasantly but persistently, Yoga Janet had been inviting me to join her class, and when I wrenched my back, she iced it while I lay prone on my bunk. “You really should learn yoga with us,” she gently chided me. “Running is too hard on the body.”
    I wasn’t going to give up the track, but I started descending to the little gym for yoga class several times a week. Larry laughed when I told him. He had been trying to get me to try yoga at a fancy downtown studio for years, and he found it both entertaining and annoying that it had taken incarceration to get me into Downward Dog.
    The field house gym had a rubber floor. At first we used undersize blue foam mats, but with great effort and persistence Yoga Janet got proper orange yoga mats donated to the Camp from the outside. Tall and calm and down to earth, Janet managed to create the sense that she was teaching us something important and valuable without taking herself too seriously.
    Camila from B Dorm was always there. Alongside all the many misfit toys at Danbury, Camila