Orange Is the New Black by Piper Kerman Page A

cautiously placed my laundry bag on my bunk and looked around the room. In addition to the steel bunk beds and lockers, everywhere I looked there were hangers with clothes, towels, and string bags dangling from them. It looked like a barracks.
    Annette got out of bed and revealed herself to be about five feet tall. “That’s Miss Luz. I’ve been keeping stuff in your locker. I gotta get it out. Here’s some toilet paper—you gotta take it with you.”
    “Thank you.” I was still clutching my envelope with my paperwork and photos in it, and now a roll of toilet paper.
    “Did they explain to you about the count?” she asked.
    “The count?” I was getting used to feeling completely idiotic. Itwas as if I’d been home-schooled my whole life and then dropped into a large, crowded high school.
Lunch money? What’s that?
    “The count. They count us five times a day, and you have to be here, or wherever you’re supposed to be, and the four o’clock count is a standing count, the other ones are at midnight, two A.M. , five A.M. , and nine P.M. Did they give you your PAC number?”
    “PAC number?”
    “Yeah, you’ll need it to make phone calls. Did they give you a phone sheet? NO? You need to fill it out so you can make phone calls. But maybe Toricella will let you make a call if you ask him. It’s his late night. It helps if you cry. Ask him after dinner. Dinner’s after the four o’clock count, which is pretty soon, and lunch is at eleven. Breakfast is from six-fifteen to seven-fifteen. How much time do you have?”
    “Fifteen months… how much time do you have?”
    “Fifty-seven months.”
    If there was an appropriate response to this information, I didn’t know what it was. What could this middle-class, middle-aged Italian-American lady from Jersey possibly have done to get fifty-seven months in federal prison? Was she Carmela Soprano? Fifty-seven months! From my presurrender due diligence, I knew it was
verboten
to ask anyone about their crime.
    She saw that I was unsure what to say and helped me out. “Yeah, it’s a lot of time,” she said sort of drily.
    “Yeah.” I agreed. I turned to start pulling items out of my laundry bag.
    That’s when she shrieked, “Don’t make your bed!!!”
    “What?” I spun around, alarmed.
    “We’ll make it for you,” she said.
    “Oh… no, that’s not necessary, I’ll make it.” I turned back to the thin cotton-poly sheets I’d been issued.
    She came over to my bunk. “Honey. We’ll. Make. The. Bed.” She was very firm. “We know how.”
    I was completely mystified. I looked around the room. All fivebeds were very tidily made, and both Annette and Miss Luz had been lying on top of their covers.
    “I know how to make a bed,” I protested tentatively.
    “Listen, let us make the bed. We know how to do it so we’ll pass inspection.”
    Inspection? No one told me anything about inspections.
    “Inspection happens whenever Butorsky wants to do them—and he is insane,” Annette said. “He will stand on the lockers to try to see dust on the light fixtures. He will walk on your bed. He’s a nut. And that one”—she pointed to the bunk below mine—“doesn’t want to help clean!”
    Uh-oh.
I hated cleaning too but was certainly not about to risk the ire of my new roommates.
    “So we have to make the beds every morning?” I asked, another penetrating question.
    Annette looked at me. “No, we sleep on top of the beds.”
    “You don’t sleep in the bed?”
    “No, you sleep on top with a blanket over you.” Pause.
    “But what if I want to sleep in the bed?”
    Annette looked at me with the complete exasperation a mom shows a recalcitrant six-year-old. “Look, if you wanna do that, go ahead—you’ll be the only one in the whole prison!”
    This sort of social pressure was irresistible; getting between the sheets wasn’t going to happen for the next fifteen months. I let go of the bed issue—the thought of hundreds of women sleeping on top of