The Story of Tinkerbell

Tinkerbell Gets Busted

When I was through, the judge gazed down on me from his high dais, his pale brow furrowed with compassion. "I think you're a good kid," he said. "You have your college degree, you work hard...you've just fallen into a really bad situation. If it were up to me, I wouldn't send you to prison at all, but unfortunately, my hands are tied by mandatory minimum sentencing laws." He sat in his silly robe and sentenced me to twenty-two months—the absolute shortest time he could give me—with a recommendation for the four-month boot camp program for drug offenders. Whether I was ultimately eligible for boot camp would be determined by the Department of Corrections.

He didn't bang his gavel after he handed down my sentence. All he did was shuffle his paperwork call the next case.

The front door of the courthouse led to the warm, sunny September day in the real world, but the sheriffs grabbed my arms and hauled me through the back door, into the dingy, institutional bowels of the penal system where I would be spending some of the longest months of my life.

They stripped me of my clothes and left me naked, shivering, and covered in cold sweat in a bare concrete cell for twenty minutes. They handed me some granny underwear and a black-and-white striped uniform: some "tough on crime" politician's idea of a mean joke. Decked out in my new duds, they stuffed me into a cell and shut the door behind me with a solid clang.

I stood blinking as my eyes adjusted. It was a long, dark dormitory with steel-framed beds lining the walls. Women sat or sprawled on them in rumpled sheets, all of them silent, all of them staring at me.

I shifted on my feet, clutching my armful of folded bedding.

A black girl with chubby cheeks who looked like she belonged in juvie instead of big girl jail, jerked her chin to the bed opposite her. "That one's free. Cadence got out yesterday."

"Thanks." I wandered over to it. The mattress was thin and lumpy, covered in tarp-like plastic that crinkled as I sat.

"What's your name?" the black girl asked.

"Grace. But you can call me Tinkerbell."

The weird silence was suddenly filled with snorts and laughs. "Tinkerbell, what kind of fucking name is that?"

"She looks like a Tinkerbell, look at her hair."

"What you in for, Tink?"

"Delivery of heroin," I said.

There was a chorus of hissing breaths. My face went hot. Was heroin delivery some sort of taboo crime, like child molestation? Was I about to get beat down in some crazy criminal ritual, like on TV?

But no one moved. A blonde girl regarded me brightly. "They're shipping you off to Purdy then?" She had a strange lisp and didn't look a day over twenty-one, but something about her mouth made her seem much older.

"Yeah," I said. "I got twenty-two months, unless I get sent to boot camp."

The blonde girl smiled, showing completely toothless, pink gums. "I'm going to Purdy, too. I was dealing meth. Maybe we'll be in boot camp together."

I smiled back, my lips sliding self-consciously over my full set of well-cared-for teeth. "That'd be cool. What's your name?"

"Kasey," she lisped. Her voice made my scalp tingle nicely, like it does when you pop bubble wrap, or when your crush looks at you in a certain way.

The rest of the day wasn't so bad. I sat on my bed and read a dog-eared copy of Clan of the Cave Bear. I'd already read it, but it was the only book in the pod. The other girls gossiped about their boyfriends and kids as they played cards and dominoes. A pregnant girl spent most of her time standing on her iron headboard and peeking out the single window, narrow and tinted, that ran along the ceiling of one wall. She was watching for her man, who was supposed to come visit. But when the daylight started to fade and visiting hours ended, he still hadn't shown up.