Lexi closed her eyes and tried to make it all go away.
Finally, a guard came to get her, unlocked the cage, and herded her forward. She stood numbly beside him as he pressed her fingers onto an inked pad and rolled her prints onto paper. They positioned her in front of a camera, snapped a picture. Then someone yelled next! and she was moving again, shuffling forward into the loud, pulsing, clanging heart of the prison.
The guard led her into a room. “She’s all yours.”
Two female guards came forward. “Strip,” one said, resting a plump hand on the walkie-talkie on her belt.
“H-here?”
“We can do it for you—”
“I’ll do it.” Lexi’s hands were shaking as she unhooked her belt and pulled it free from the loops.
The guard took the belt from her, coiling it in her hands as if it were a weapon.
Swallowing hard, Lexi unbuttoned her pants and stepped out of them. Then she kicked off her black flats and unbuttoned her white shirt. It took every scrap of bravery she possessed to reach behind her back to unhook her bra.
When she was naked, the heavier of the two guards came forward. “Open your mouth.”
Lexi followed one humiliating instruction after another. She opened her mouth, stuck out her tongue, lifted her breasts, coughed, wiggled her fingers, turned around and bent over.
“Open your cheeks.”
She reached back and held her butt cheeks open.
“Okay, Inmate Baill,” the guard said.
Lexi straightened slowly and turned to the guard again. She couldn’t look the woman in the eyes, so she stared at the dirty floor.
The guard handed her a stack of clothes: a pair of scuffed white tennis shoes, khaki pants and shirt, a used white bra, and two pairs of discolored underwear.
Lexi dressed as quickly as possible. The bra didn’t fit right and the underwear itched and she needed socks, but of course she said nothing.
“Be careful who you hang around with, Baill,” the guard said in a voice that didn’t match her gruff exterior.
Lexi had no idea what to say to that.
“Let’s go,” the guard said, indicating the door.
Lexi followed the woman out of the reception area and into the prison again, where the noise and the pounding and the catcalls seemed deafening. She kept her eyes downcast and followed, feeling the floor literally shaking beneath her feet from the hundreds of women stomping on the cell block before her.
Finally, they came to her cell, an eight-by-ten block of space hemmed on three sides by concrete walls and on the fourth by a solid metal door that had a small window, probably so the guards could look inside. The cell had two bunks with thin mattresses, a toilet, a sink, and a small desk. On the lower bunk sat a scrawny white girl with a cross tattooed on her throat. At Lexi’s entrance, she looked up from her magazine.
The door clanged shut behind Lexi, but she could still hear the stomping and the catcalling going on in the cell block. She crossed her arms across her chest and stood there, shaking.
“I got the bottom bunk,” the girl said; her teeth were brown and ruined.
“Okay.”
“I’m Cassandra.”
Lexi saw now how young her cellmate was. The lines in her face and the circles under her eyes aged her, but Cassandra probably wasn’t much past twenty-three. “I’m Lexi.”
“This is receiving. We won’t be cellmates for long. You know that, right?”
Lexi didn’t know anything. She stood there a minute longer, then she climbed up onto her rickety bunk that smelled of other women’s sweat. Lying on the coarse gray blanket, staring at the dirty gray ceiling, she couldn’t help thinking of her mother, of that one terrible prison visit.
Here I am, Mom. Just like you after all.
Sixteen