by A. H. Kim
This morning, I’m cleaning the last toilet in the bathroom when Deb and the rest of the janitorial crew show up for the first shift.
“Done?” Deb asks.
“Almost,” I say.
“Ya look tired,” Deb says. “Still can’t sleep?”
“Nope.”
“Sugar had that problem for a long time.”
“Yeah, ’cause she was a freaking cokehead,” Meatloaf Mary says. “That’s why they called her Sugar, you know.”
“Were we talkin’ to you, Meat?” Deb asks. She pulls the plunger from my caddy and wields the handle menacingly under Mary’s chin. Like she’s looking for an excuse to shove it into Mary’s brain stem.
“I was just tryin’ ta make conversation,” Mary says, shrinking back—as much as a two-hundred-pound woman can shrink.
“Anyway, turns out it was her meds,” Deb continues. “They had her on some kind of speed. It helped smooth out some of her craziness but fucked up her sleep.”
“Metamin,” Mary says. “Sugar was on Metamin. Cheap-ass shit. The drug company was selling it for next to nothin’ so BOP bought it by the truckload.”
“Sugar was on Metamin?” I ask.
“Yeah, you heard of it?” Deb asks.
“I’ve seen the ads,” I say.
I don’t know if I’m being paranoid, but I don’t like the way Deb’s eyeing me.
I can’t believe people are still using Metamin. Once Metamin-G came out, you couldn’t give the original Metamin away. Believe me, we tried. God Hälsa dropped prices for the original Metamin to rock bottom just to deplete the inventory. We figured pennies on the dollar was still real money.
The only people who wanted the original Metamin were hard-core speed freaks who ground up the bitter white tablets and snorted it like coke. We heard rumors that junkies were digging through dumpsters behind suburban elementary schools, searching for half-used bottles of Metamin that school nurses threw away once all their students switched to Metamin-G.
“So anyway,” I say, changing the subject, “can I go? It’s Tuesday, remember?”
“Get outta here,” Deb says.
“What da fuck?” Mary protests. “It’s still work hours. Why you always givin’ Blondie here special treatment?”
“Meat, feel free to show up before sunrise,” Deb says, “and I’ll be happy to give you the special treatment, too.” Deb puts the plunger handle between her legs like a dildo and fake-fucks Mary. The crew laughs while Mary scampers away.
Tuesdays are my designated day to visit commissary—or FedMart as we locals call it. My first couple months in prison, I quickly blew through my allowed commissary limit stocking up on the essentials: workout gear, toiletries and makeup, MP3 player and earphones. Before I got here, I wouldn’t have been caught dead in a Champion sweatshirt and sweatpants combo or pair of granny-white Reeboks, but now I wear them like they’re the latest from Atelier Versace.
Today, I need to stock up on groceries. I pull Juanita’s handwritten shopping list from my pants pocket: Fritos, refried beans, jalapeños and Cheez Whiz (for tongue-tingling tamales), shrimp-flavored ramen, peanut butter, honey-roasted peanuts and sriracha (for prison pad thai), and chocolate pudding cups, Oreos, mini-Snickers and a can of Coke (for an out-of-this-world molten lava cake). Juanita doesn’t get any financial support from the outside, so I promised I’d get the ingredients if she’d do the cooking. We plan to invite some of the gals in our unit over for an evening of international cuisine and Texas Hold’em.
I hand the shopping list over to my friend Sandy, the commissary clerk, who collects the items from the storeroom shelves and piles them on the counter.
“You sure you can handle all that?” Sandy asks.
“Yeah, I’m cool,” I say. I take off my sweatshirt, put my purchases inside and tie the sleeves together. The bundle looks like Santa’s bag of presents.
“Is that all for today?” she asks. “Sorry we don’t have any new stuff right now.”
I look up at the display case of items behind the Plexiglas. My eye catches on a clear glass bottle with a shiny golden cap. It’s Maybelline Kissing Potion—something I haven’t seen since the 1980s.
I lick my lips just remembering.
It was a gorgeous autumn afternoon. One of those impossibly perfect days you see in college admissions brochures. Gold leaves, blue sky, the whole package.
I’m sitting by myself in the top row of bleachers. St. Albans is playing Sidwell Friends in the last game of the season. I hear someone in the row below say that Coach Adrian has come to watch the star forward even though underclassmen never make varsity.
I see my sister, Eva, headed toward the St. Albans side of the field with a swarm of her National Cathedral School girlfriends. They’ve changed out of their school uniform of white polo shirts and plaid kilts into their after-school uniform of ripped sweatshirts and acid-washed jeans. It’s the era of Flashdance fashion.
Eva pulls a clear glass bottle of Strawberry Swirl Kissing Potion from her back pocket and pouts while she rubs the slick roller ball around her pencil-thin lips. I can smell the sickening sweetness from fifty feet away.
Eva passes the Kissing Potion to the girl on her right, who rolls it over her own lips before passing the bottle to the next girl. And so on and so on.
Gross, I think.
Eva and her girlfriends sit two rows below me. Most of the girls have feathered blond hair, but one girl in particular stands out: a perfect Heather Locklear clone with an L.L.Bean canvas tote monogrammed with her initials in lime-green script. She’s clearly the alpha girl, the queen bee of the swarm.
Alpha Heather pulls out a six-pack of Tab from her tote and offers them to her friends. The fluorescent pink cans are quickly dispersed and shared. I sneak down to the far edge of the NCS contingent but don’t dare get too close.
“You’re Evie’s little sister, aren’t you?” the girl nearest me asks. Unlike the rest of the swarm, she’s more Demi Moore than Heather Locklear. I notice her black nail polish is chipped around the edges.
I smile and nod, delighted to be noticed.
“You’re adorable,” she says, giving me an appraising once-over.
She offers me her can of soda. I see a glistening circle of Kissing Potion around the stay-tab opening. I’m simultaneously frightened and thrilled. I put my mouth to the cold metal and take a sip. It tastes bitter and strange. I pass the can back to the girl and smile, my lips sticky and smelling faintly of strawberry.
I keep my eyes fixed on the soccer field but don’t see a thing. My heart is beating with the excitement of sitting among these heavenly creatures who know things and do things I can’t even imagine. I pretend to watch the game and strain to hear the conversations around me. All the girls are fixated on St. Albans’s star forward.
“He looks like that guy from The Blue Lagoon,” one girl says.
“Did you actually see it?” Eva asks. “Wasn’t it rated R?”
“Oh my God, Evie,” Alpha Heather says. “It’s on cable!
“Speaking of which,” she continues, “I found a stash of pornos in my dad’s dresser the other day. I’ll invite you all to watch when my parents leave for Bermuda.”
The swarm buzzes over this news.
“Evie, don’t hold out on us,” Alpha Heather says. “Is Golden Boy as delicious naked as he looks in those soccer shorts?” She sticks out her pink, wet tongue and swirls it around.
The other girls start giggling.
“Come on, you guys, don’t get gross,” Eva protests.
I’m smiling with the rest of the girls when Eva spots me sitting there at the end of her row. I feel like a deer in the crosshairs. I wonder if she can smell the Kissing Potion on my lips.
“Elisabeth Lindstrom, what are you doing here?” Eva yells.
My face flushes with a mixture of
anger and shame. I avoid making eye contact with my Tab-sharing seatmate as I slink back up two rows to sit by myself.
Like a wolf pack that bonds more tightly after ejecting its weakest member, Eva and her friends seem to close ranks after my departure.
Alpha Heather reaches into her bag, pulls out a pack of Fruit Stripe gum, takes one for herself and passes the pack along. The girls crumple up the wrappers and toss them through the cracks of the bleachers to the ground below. A swift wind picks up the wrappers and blows them away like tiny tumbleweeds.
I sit glumly by myself. I pout my lips so I can smell the hint of strawberry.
I return to watching the game on the field. Soon, everyone is standing up and cheering Golden Boy as he breaks away from the rest of the field and scores another goal just under the buzzer, giving him a hat trick for the game and St. Albans’s first league championship in a decade.
The crowd is jumping up and down as Golden Boy strides over to the St. Albans side of the field and looks up into the bleachers. He makes eye contact with one lucky girl and motions for her to join him, and she runs down the bleachers and jumps into his waiting arms. It’s a prep school mash-up of Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” video and the closing scene from An Officer and a Gentleman.
Golden Boy and his chosen girl are surrounded by ecstatic St. Albans teammates as they parade around the field in victory. Eva and the other NCS girls start packing up to leave, but their stolen glances tell a different story. What they wouldn’t give to be that lucky girl. In boys, envy can transform into ambition and even inspire greatness, but in girls, it almost always spirals into insecurity and petty jealousy.
I see that jealousy in Eva’s eyes as I sit beaming atop Golden Boy’s wide shoulders. The cheering of the crowds is nothing; it’s the hateful silence from Eva that’s deafening.
What can I do? I’m eight years old and completely in love. No one could be cooler, more heroic or handsome, than Golden Boy.
And best of all, he’s my brother.
* * *
When I get back to our cube from commissary, Juanita’s wiping down our footlockers with soapy water. She always keeps our place spotless, but she’s particularly meticulous when she’s getting ready to cook. Juanita reminds me of my beloved housekeeper, Maria, in that way.
“Back already?” she asks.
“The line wasn’t too bad today.” I toss my Santa bag of junk food on Juanita’s bunk and help her dry the lockers with maxi-pads.
“Yeah, women usually hold back this time of year,” Juanita says. “Not everyone has your megabucks. They’re saving up for the Christmas stuff that comes in after Thanksgiving.”
“What Christmas stuff?” I ask, throwing the used maxi-pads in the garbage.
“Last year, the warden let us have turkey jerky, tinned oysters, Dove ice cream bars, mint-flavored Oreos, even Little Debbie Christmas Tree Cakes. And that’s just the food part. You should’ve seen the fancy soaps and lotions and sparkly nail polishes on offer. It was like a regular Avon lady party.”
When Juanita’s done cleaning, I unknot the sleeves of my sweatshirt and dump out the contents on her bunk.
“Chica, you must have spent a fortune!” Juanita cries out.
“Nothing’s too good for my brilliant bunkie,” I reply.
Juanita crawls onto her bunk, shoves the rest of the junk food over to the side and opens the bag of mini-Snickers. She gestures for me to join her.
“You heard from your sister-in-law lately?” she asks. She nibbles on a chocolate and offers me the bag. I decline.
“She still sends me her weekly letters,” I say, “but she hasn’t sent any emails lately—ever since I told her about the BOP monitoring all my communications. After all, she wouldn’t want to do anything that could get me or my family in more trouble.”
“Some things are better said in person,” Juanita agrees. We both laugh.
“We’re a good pair, I think,” Juanita says, leaning up against me.
“The best,” I say, pulling the bottle of Kissing Potion from my pocket and savoring the artificial sweetness.
hannah
fourteen
The temperature gauge on the dashboard reads forty-five degrees, but it feels colder. The weak December sun is barely visible behind the mist-shrouded mountains. The trees that were so full of rich color the last time I visited are now barren and lifeless, black sticks against gray sky. The SUV is moving fast, and the Alderson Prison Camp sign passes in a blur.
“Hey, I think that’s a bad word,” Claire shouts from the back seat.
“What’s a bad word?” Ally asks.
“Prison,” Claire whispers.
Claire’s kindergarten teacher reported to Sam and me at our first parent-teacher meeting that Claire is reading two years above grade level. I stare out the car window and pretend I didn’t hear the girls’ exchange. It’s uncharacteristic of me, normally so encouraging and attentive to my nieces, to ignore Claire’s observation. As Sam pulls the car into the parking lot, I think to myself that nothing about today will be normal.
“Hurry, girls,” he says, “there’s already a line.”
I get out of the passenger side and unbuckle the girls from their booster seats. I cautioned Claire and Ally in advance that there are lots of rules at Mommy’s camp. Claire eagerly chimed in, “There are lots of rules at my school, too. No nuts. No bad words. No touching other people if they don’t want to be touched.” I’m pretty sure the opposites of those things are true at Alderson.
“Hurry up, girls!” Sam repeats.
I pull out my Ziploc bag of change—still heavy with ninety-two dollars’ worth of quarters and dimes—and make sure I have the BOP forms and my driver’s license before joining Sam and the girls at the end of a long line of people eager to spend time with their beloved sister, mother, daughter or wife before Christmas. When we finally get to the front of the visitors’ building and wait to be called in by the guard, Claire looks up at Sam.
“Daddy, oh my God, I almost forgot,” she says, “did you remember your driver’s license? Because if you didn’t, they’ll make you go back to the car.”
Sam smiles at his bright little girl and nods, showing her his license as proof.
“You don’t have any scrunched-up tissues or mints in your pockets, do you?” Claire asks. “Because if you do, they’ll make you go back to the car.”
Sam shakes his head no and pulls his pant pockets inside out to show her.
“Did you remember to put your license plate number on the form?”
Sam shows Claire the form before he leans over to me and whispers, “I think you scared the pants off our Claire here.” I shrug in apology.
After we enter the visitors’ building and complete the security routine, the guard at the front desk says, “Go ahead and sign in, but you’ll have to wait awhile for your inmate. The place is on lockdown.”
“Lockdown?” I ask. The guard ignores my question and gestures for us to move along. Sam heads to the bathroom—he drank a lot of Red Bull during the drive—while I lead the girls to the back room to snag one of the big tables.
“Is this really Mommy’s camp?” Ally whispers to Claire, who doesn’t answer. For once, Claire doesn’t know any more than her little sister. My heart aches seeing my young nieces take in their new surroundings. I know what they must be thinking: This doesn’t look like any camp we’ve ever been to. Where is the beading table? The paint easels? The camp counselors ready to lead us in a round of I-Spy or the Chicken Dance?
“Who wants to get a treat from the bending machines?” I call out. When Claire was just three, she mispronounced the phrase “vending machine” during a family trip, and the term has become part of the Min-Lindstrom lexicon. Claire and Ally jump up and down with excitement, reminding me how easily young children can get distracted: “Woe is me... Oh, look
, a butterfly!”
“This bending machine has hamburgers, cheeseburgers, breakfast sandwiches and fried-chicken sandwiches,” I say, “and this one has candy, chips and cookies.”
“Oh, I want M&M’s!” Claire says, “Definitely M&M’s.”
“Me, too,” Ally agrees.
“But wait, girls, there are two more machines on the other side of the room.”
“I want M&M’s,” Claire whines.
“Me, too,” Ally echoes.
My first impulse is to force the girls to look at the other machines, which contain yogurt and string cheese and pieces of prison-grade pie. How can the girls possibly make an informed decision if they don’t know what all their options are? Then again, what does it matter? With ninety-two dollars’ worth of change and four hours to kill, Claire and Ally could do several circuits of the vending machines. Anyway, what kind of kid would choose string cheese over M&M’s?
I put five quarters into each of the girls’ sweaty little palms and then lift them up, one by one, so they can insert the coins into the vending machine slot and push the buttons. Claire and Ally squeal in amazement as they watch the silvery metal spiral slowly turn and eject a bag of M&M’s into the waiting hopper. The second time is apparently no less thrilling than the first.
We wait anxiously for over an hour before we finally see Beth walking down the hill. Claire stands up and screams, “Mommy!” Claire and Ally run to the front window and eagerly press their noses against the glass. Beth flashes a brilliant smile to her daughters, and the three of them are nearly face-to-face, separated only by a pane of glass, when Beth turns and disappears behind an unmarked door.
“Where did Mommy go?” Claire asks, her face panicked.
“Let me show you,” I say. Claire and Ally follow me to the front room of the visitors’ building. “This is where your mommy will come out,” I explain. The three of us sit on the two hard plastic chairs near the unmarked inmate entrance door: Ally in my lap, Claire in her own chair. When Beth emerges from the door, the girls are ecstatic. Beth gives her daughters a warm embrace, but she looks shaken.
