I felt them all staring at my back as I walked away. They were pissed—I hadn’t seen anyone refuse Janet anything—but I wasn’t scared. Instead I felt a shiver of excitement, a sense of pushing something to a head. I felt alive.
An hour later, when I was leaving the laundry room, I heard a noise to my left. Mouse and Yoda were standing in a dark corner of the hall, where there was no camera. Mouse had on her mean smile and was smacking her hands together. Yoda’s face was blank, her ghostly blue eyes staring at me. They both rushed me at the same time. Yoda’s hands ripped at my hair, grabbed at my face and skin, punching me in the head, as Mouse beat my body with a sock full of batteries.
I pushed back, hit any part of them I could reach, bit their shoulders, pulled their shirts over their heads. It felt good to be fighting, our grunts and curses filling the air. The pain of the batteries hitting against my flesh only enraged me more. But then Mouse got a couple of good blows across my head, and I felt blood trickling down my face. The world turned dark, my head ringing as I hung on to one of them, trying not to fall. Then a loud yell from another female voice: “Guard!”
The blows stopped. I slumped to the floor, spitting out blood. Before they ran off, Mouse said, “If Janet tells you to do something, you do it.”
I was taken to the infirmary, patched up, then sent back to my cell, where I pulled my aching body up onto my bed and made a plan. The correctional officers had questioned me, but I said nothing. I hadn’t needed Pinky to warn me that you never rat anyone out, not if you wanted to live. I didn’t care about living at that point, but the last thing I wanted was for them to get locked up in the hole or moved to maximum. For one thing, I wouldn’t be able to get revenge.
When I passed Janet in the activity room the next day, she told me again to join them. Again I refused.
Yoda and Mouse found me in the kitchen later, when I was washing some pots. The other inmates cleared out. But this time I fought back with my own homemade weapon—I’d learned how to extract one of the blades from my safety razor, then melt it onto a toothbrush handle, making a “slasher.” My rage—at my family, at the system, especially at myself—boiled out. I sliced Mouse’s face and Yoda’s arm, and managed to break Mouse’s nose before a bunch of guards finally pulled me off.
As they threw me to the floor and cuffed me, I was still screaming, “I’m in for fucking murder, you bitches! Don’t ever fuck with me again!”
I spent twenty days in the hole. Twenty days staring at a wall, pacing and crying and trying not to think about Ryan. I’d stopped writing him but I couldn’t stop caring about him yet. I couldn’t believe that we were over, that I’d never be able to see him again in my life. It hurt so much, the pain welling up from deep inside my belly, making me sob in big heaving gasps of agony. I also thought about Nicole a lot, torturing myself with memories from when we were little and she used to follow me everywhere, begging me to “pway” with her.
Toward the end of my twenty days, I started getting spacey, losing track of time, and sometimes I’d imagine my sister was in there with me. I’d see shadows and try to reach out to touch her, but she always danced out of sight. I’d talk to her, and to Ryan, telling them how much I missed them. Then I’d just rock back and forth, my arms wrapped around my body, playing mental games to keep alert, like spelling things out loud or remembering lyrics to old songs, trying to hold myself together. But I feared that I was too broken now, that I was finally everything my mom always thought—a waste of a life.
Finally, I was released back into general population. I was treated different then, after that last fight. Mouse was sporting a red scar down her face and looked away when I stared at her. She was scared of me now. Even Janet gave me a wide berth from then on. It didn’t make me feel happy like I’d thought. I felt nothing, not sympathy, pain, or remorse. I’d done it, I was finally dead inside.