ONE
Freddie
If you're going to be stupid, you've got to be tough.
That was my first hard-won life lesson. And, as with most life lessons, I hadn't learned it willingly.
I had to have my freedom taken away from me to harden me up. I had to spend my days in a cage inside a cage inside a cage.
There was a perpetual chill there, something that burrowed under the skin, whittled away at the bone to settle in the marrow, making you sure that you would never feel warm again.
I still felt it, even clad in my own clothes again for the first time in a decade. Jeans of the boyfriend variety skirted the heel of my open-toe wedge sandals. On top, I had a simple white tee under a lightweight jacket. My aunt would call it a windbreaker. And me, well, I didn't know what to call it. And I didn't really even know if it would be in style anymore. Or if I would walk outside and everyone would know where I had been for the past ten years.
The embarrassment - long buried because there was no one around to judge without being considered a hypocrite - welled up stronger than it had been on the day when I had first shuffled shackled feet through the cinderblock walled halls.
I wondered as I accepted my old wallet from a male guard behind the desk - a man wholly disinterested in the enormity of his position, of his daily impact - if it was something I would ever get used to. The prickling, uncomfortable sensation of eyes on me, seeing me for what I was. At least on paper. And on paper was all that really mattered, wasn't it?
A felon.
Ex-con.
Just another part of a debilitating statistic.
"And sign here," the man behind the glass that wasn't glass at all demanded, pushing the paperwork toward me, the pen attached to his side of the desk with a bunch of interconnected rubber bands tied together.
A precaution against pen theft? Or fear that one of us might jab it through the soft of his eye and into his brain?
Like we'd risk our freedom before it was even fully granted to us.
"Hope we don't see you again." It was a phrase that was likely meant to sound hopeful or supportive. But it always came off as condescending. And maybe there was some fairness in that. Seeing as eighty percent of us who walked out these doors as free women would return in the next five years.
And while I never would have thought of myself as someone who would go to jail at all a decade ago, I had a sneaking suspicion that I might very well be shackled and shuffled back in within the next year. Though, next time, rightfully so.
"The bus stop is at the end of the street," he added, a plastic pre-paid debit card to me. On it, I knew I would find the money I had earned from the prison job I had been working for the last few years, minus what I had spent at the commissary. I was crossing my fingers that it would be enough to get me back to my hometown, back to Navesink Bank where my brother would be welcoming me into his life.
I'd never taken a bus - save for the ones that would shuttle me to school when I was younger - in my life. There was going to be a learning curve to figure out how to get from where I was now - in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania - to the coast of New Jersey. A Google search a week ago had told me it would be over six hours if the drive was straight through. I would likely be getting into Navesink Bank sometime around dinner time.
I could have made my life easier by having one of my brothers pick me up. Guilt was what had me telling them that I didn't know my release day yet, that I would let them know as soon as I did. They already did too much for me. Putting money in my commissary so I could buy extra tampons or pads on heavy months when what the prison supplied as though it was freaking contraband was nowhere near enough to get me through, could get extra socks or panties, soap, toothpaste, shower shoes, deodorant, Tylenol. If there was one thing you learned quickly, it was how important personal care items were in prison.
On top of the generous monetary contributions they made every week without fail, there were the trips they made out to see me. Not as often as when I was first sent away, but at least a couple times a year.
And now I was going to be leaning on them while I got back on my feet as well.