Orange Is the New Black

for them. That’s a promise.”
When pigs fly
, I thought gloomily.
    When the Yankees went down in flames after a seven-game series, and the Red Sox were facing the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series, the crowds in the TV room were actually smaller. But Carmen DeLeon was there front and center, grinning and rooting for the Sox. And the series was surreally easy, a four-game sweep. I couldn’t trust it—after each victory I felt my anxiety mount. At the end of game four, after the final out by the Cards, I started to shake uncontrollably. Rosemarie, also a lifelong Sox fan, grabbed my knee. “Are you okay?”
    Carmen looked at me in amazement. “Piper’s crying!”
    I was amazed too. I do love the Red Sox, but my reaction shocked even me.
    I calmed down enough to watch the postgame celebration dry-eyed, but alone in the bathroom between B and C Dorms, I started to cry again. I went outside to stare at the half-cloaked moon and cry alone, out loud. Huge, shuddering sobs. I wasn’t crying because Iwished I was home celebrating, but I was completely taken aback at the level of my own emotion. I had joked that I had to do hard time in order to break the Curse so the Red Sox could win, and now I felt that there was some strange truth to that. The world I knew had changed right there in the bottom of the ninth.

CHAPTER 15
Some Kinda Way

    T he garage girls liked to hang out in the visiting room together in the evenings during the week. I was chilling with them, surrounded by prisoners who were crocheting industriously, watching
Fear Factor
with their headsets on, or just talking. Pom-Pom was doing some sort of art project with colored pencils, probably a birthday card. Suddenly a woman rushed into the room, wild-eyed.
    “The CO is destroying A Dorm!”
    We followed her out into the hall, where a crowd was gathering. The new CO on duty that night was a pleasant, seemingly mild-mannered, and very big young guy. He, like a huge number of the prison guards, was former military. These folks would finish their commitment to the armed services and have several years in on a federal pension, so they’d end up working for the BOP. Sometimes they’d tell us about their military careers. Mr. Maple had been a medic in Afghanistan.
    The CO on duty that night was fresh from Iraq and had just started work at the prison. It was rumored that he had been stationed in Fallujah, where the fighting had been brutal all spring. That night someone from A Dorm had been giving him trouble—some sort of backtalk. And something snapped. Before anyone really knew what was going on, he was down in A Dorm pulling the contents of the cubicles apart, yanking things off the walls, and ripping bedding off mattresses and turning them over.
    We were scared—two hundred prisoners alone with one guard having a psychotic break. Someone went outside and flagged down the perimeter truck, which got help from down the hill. The young soldier left the building, and A Dorm residents started to put their cubes back together. Everyone was rattled. The next day one of the lieutenants came up from the FCI and apologized to A Dorm, which was unprecedented. We did not see the young CO again.
    N EWLY Z EN thanks to Yoga Janet, well fed by Pop, and now proficient in concrete-mixing as well as rudimentary electrical work, I felt as if I were making the most of this prison thing. If this was the worst the feds were going to throw at me, no problem. Then when I called my father on the prison pay phone to talk about the Red Sox, he told me, “Piper, your grandmother is not doing well.”
    Southern-proper and birdlike but possessing a stern, formidable personality, my grandmother had been a constant figure in my life. A child of West Virginia who grew up in the Depression with two brothers and then raised four sons, she had little idea what to do with a young girl, her eldest grandchild, and I was scared of her. I remained in awe of her, although as I got older, we developed an easier rapport. She spoke frankly to me in private about sex, feminism, and power. She and my grandfather were dumbstruck and horrified by my criminal misadventures, and yet they never let me forget that they loved me and worried about me. The one thing that I feared most about prison was that one of them would die while I was there.
    I pleaded with my father on the pay phone—she would be fine, she would get better, she would be there when I came home. He didn’t argue back, just said,