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me look bad, or made her look bad. It didn’t matter, though. I live in the C-dorm with the bad young bitches, Riot lived in the B-dorm with the eleven to thirteens. Even though I had linked up with the Diamond Needles, I still had to hold it down in my dorm no matter what.
    The library was kind of empty, except for the librarian who was weaving in and out of shelves pushing a wheel cart loaded down with all types of books. There were three inmates reading quietly but all separate from one another, and an inmate who was seated behind the front desk. She caught my eyes more than the others. A beige-tan jail jumper she was wearing, which meant she was aged fifteen or sixteen. Puerto Rican, that’s what she was. I could tell. Her butterscotch complexion and the tan jumper she wore were close in color. She cut her black-black hair short and had it styled nice. I noticed how the older girls up in here try to keep that fashion flow. She had dark eyes and long lashes. Her eyes weren’t big and round but were wide and curved nicely. More than that she was wearing gold earrings, small ones that didn’t dangle but the gold was real. It stood out to me, of course. How did she manage to have ’em, when jewels were forbidden? How did she manage to wear ’em and anybody could see ’em and then look at themselves not having none to rock? She had clout. That was my conclusion. I exhaled, tired of waiting on Riot. It didn’t matter, though. I couldn’t move, couldn’t leave. Once I requested the library, I had to remain here and wait out the whole hour till the guard reappeared to release me.
    Butterscotch stood up. She was tall. Not doofy-tall, or man-tall, a nice height, like Winter. She was slim but had that nice figure, the type that made men on my Brooklyn block call out, “Mami, let me talk to you a minute.” She was coming my way. Her strut was nice.Maybe five and a half years from now, when my eight-year sentence is served out, I would have a strut more meaner than hers.
    “Can you read?” she asked me as she laid a book on my desktop. I didn’t answer her. She was pretty, her voice was nice, and her tone wasn’t shitty or bossy, but still she had insulted me. So, fuck her. She strutted back to where she came from.
    Her question Can you read? reminded me of Ms. Jenkins, my first grade teacher. I learned my letters in kindergarten, but Ms. Jenkins taught me to read. The first day of class she said, “If you can’t read or write, you can’t do anything.”
    We were all little and quiet, and if the rest of the kids were thinking like me, they were probably only half-listening and dreaming of being at home with Momma. When I was little, whenever I wasn’t at home, I always felt like I was missing out on something, maybe even something big.
    Ms. Jenkins made herself clear. She taught us one sentence: “I will be responsible for myself.” She made us each write it a hundred times, and repeat it ten times, and recite it on our own five times. Close to the end of our first day of first grade, she handed out a paper and gave us a quiz on our little lesson. She collected the papers ten minutes after she handed them out. Then she gave us each someone else’s paper to correct.
    Next she sent us up to the blackboard in groups of four. She said we were playing a game called Challenge. She called out a word, and we had to write the word on the board swiftly. The winner was the student who wrote it on the board the fastest and who spelled the word correctly.
    Her teaching style jerked us out of our dreams and made us feel pressed. As our long day with one teacher in one classroom came to an end, Ms. Jenkins pulled out a tin can of goodies and gave every student who scored 100 on the quiz, a foil-wrapped candy, like mini Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, or Hershey’s Chocolate Kisses. She gave the winner of the Challenge game an unusual and pretty pencil case that was see-through on one side with a slide-down cover. It was filled