Hard Time Read Free

young, crew-cut blond man behind a half-circle reception desk.
    “Ryan, this is Anne Goodhouse, the new librarian.”
    Ryan smiled and shook my hand. He looked like a guy from back in Charleston, the varsity football type or an eager young Marine, pre-deployment. “Welcome aboard, Anne.”
    “Thank you.”
    He took my things, swiveling his chair and jangling keys as he stowed them in one of the cubby lockers banked behind him. “You’re Karen’s replacement, huh?”
    “I am.”
    “The boys took a real shine to her.”
    Did they?
Karen was never one to paint herself in flattering colors, but she’d given me the distinct impression the inmates had loved her as they might a rash.
    “I’m sure you’ll do just fine,” Ryan told me. “You let me know if you need anything.”
    “She needs a panic button,” Shonda pointed out. Her raised eyebrow added,
You’d have remembered that if you weren’t so busy flirting.
    “Course.” He unlocked a metal drawer and rummaged for what looked like a pager. He clicked something on his computer, pushed the device’s button, clicked some more and typed, and finally handed it to me. I clipped it to my belt loop, praying I’d never find occasion to use it.
    Shonda led me through a heavy metal door and into a short corridor with the turning of a key—one of about a million on her overloaded ring. “You’ll be holding most of your programs in classroom B, and you can use office four when you’re not leading a session. You can’t keep too much there permanently—it’s shared by a bunch of externals—but we’ll clear out a filing cabinet for you.”
    “Great.”
    “It’s got a computer and printer and scanner, and a land line.” Another key turned and another door swallowed us, another white hall. “No cell phones on the inside, not for external staff. Sorry.”
    “I’ll live.”
    “Your clearance’ll get you into the office wing, the break room and kitchen, the restrooms, and the admin wing—we call that the green zone. No unescorted inmates allowed. It’ll also get you into the dayroom and the classrooms—that’s the orange zone, shared by staff and inmates. You’ll be restricted from the yard, cells, gym, and so forth—red zone—as well as all blue-zone areas, which are security personnel only.”
    “Okay.”
    “Don’t panic if you can’t remember all that—the doorways are painted to tell you what zone you’re entering.” She tapped the metal doorframe we were about to go through.
Orange.
My stomach flipped. My legs longed to spin me around, march me back out into the sunshine. I could hear noises through the steel, random shouts and muted clanging.
    “We’re entering the dayroom,” Shonda said, inserting one last key and punching numbers into a bank of buttons. “It’s the best-staffed area in Cousins. Inmates are allowed to move freely between here and their cells, provided they’re currently what we call ‘compliant.’ They earn movement privileges, through good behavior.”
    This was meant to reassure me, but I all I felt was cold, cold, icy cold.
    “They’re gonna talk to you,” Shonda told me, finger poised over the keypad. “Don’t you pay them no mind. You’ll have an officer in front of you and behind. Keep your eyes forward. Smile or don’t, just try to look confident. Fake it if you need to.”
    Oh, I’d need to.
    “You don’t seem the shimmying type, but I’ll tell you anyhow, walk like God or your mama never gave you no hips or butt.”
    “Sure.”
    She shot me a maternal look and added, “No external staffer’s been assaulted in the dayroom in over ten years.”
    Yay.
    She jabbed the final digit, and the red light above the keypad blinked green and beeped.
    Shonda stepped inside. I followed.
    The air stayed behind, its clearance strictly green-zone.
    The dayroom was long, lined with cells doors along one side and loomed over by two rows of the same, up on a second level beyond a railing. No bars—each door was