“That’s Clara,” McKenzie said, “She is lucky she is my girlfriend, or I wouldn’t let her get away with interrupting me and being rude to my new roommate,” McKenzie was laughing as she said this and she turned, smiling to Clara, and kissed her deeply on the mouth. I wondered if the girl could taste the cum the brunette girl had spit back in McKenzie’s mouth. When their kiss broke, McKenzie looked over at me, must’ve seen what I was thinking about, and smiled and laughed.
“Odessa here thinks I am a slut,” she said and crossed her arms over her big breasts. She smiled at me, no hint of anger or accusation. But I put my hands up.
“No I…” I started.
“Why is that?” Clara asked.
“Well, my beloved Clara, I met my new roommate when she walked in on me getting a blowjob and now she sees me kissing you,” McKenzie said, coming right to the heart of the matter. I felt my eyes like, bug out of my head. What was going to happen? But Clara laughed.
“Was it Beth?” she asked and McKenzie just nodded, “Odessa, lighten up. Some things are currency here and some things are love. Just keep it separate. Besides, Beth’s given me a blowjob before, she’s good,” and she pecked McKenzie one the lip again. I didn’t really have a response to that. Each second in this place was weirder than the last.
“I’m Prisha,” the sexy Indian girl next to me said while McKenzie and Clara finished their lip lock. I turned to her and she was giving me a faint, shy smile, “I think your trial was a travesty.” She said. It was, somehow, the nicest thing anyone could say to me at that moment. I felt like tearing up.
“Odessa,” I said, shaking her dainty hand. I could smell her perfume as we touched and I looked deeply into her eyes.
“So I saw Bethany Barber push you into the lunch room a little earlier,” Clara said, knocking me out of the reverie Prisha put me in. I wondered if this was the kind of head over heels feeling people in movies talk about what they, like, fall in love. I don’t know, I was getting ahead of myself.
“Yeah…” I said now, sullenly, thinking back to my experience earlier in the day. In the shower. The baton. My face felt hot and I got nauseous again. McKenzie reached forward and put her hand on mine.
“I can tell that she gave you her special treatment,” McKenzie said sympathetically. I looked up at her. The other girls at my table actually looked concerned. They knew what had happened.
“She just…” I started.
“Oh we know what she did. She got Prisha too,” McKenzie said. I looked over at Prisha, but she was staring at her feet, pretending not to notice, “she gets like a third of the girls who come in. Luckily I got here before she started working here and Clara avoided her. She spends like 90% of her time over on the FTM side of the prison, so we don’t see her much. Just watch out, because once she gets you, she won’t stop.” I didn’t know if I felt relieved that other people had been through what I went through, or terrified that it might happen again. But I looked over at Prisha and I was happy I at least knew someone I could talk to about it. If I needed to. But now I wanted to change topics.
“So, what are you in for?” I said, feeling weird. The other girls laughed.
“I know you were a singer, but were you an actor too?” McKenzie asked, “That is a movie question.”
“Don’t tease her too bad, look she is all red again,” Clara said, and I knew I was blushing. But the good natured teasing was okay, way better than what I would have expected in a male prison. “I have 12 years left on 15 for fraud. I made up fake number for my boss at the strip club I used to work to help him trigger relief portions of his mortgage.” Clara said matter-of-factly.
“30 years for selling drugs,” McKenzie said, and I was surprised. She didn’t look at all scary, or what I thought of when I thought of drug dealers that got lots of time, “I sold high end weed that I grew hydroponically in my garage.” I guess that explained it. I looked over at Prisha.
“Life for murder,” was all she said. She didn’t elaborate. She didn’t say anything else. The other girls pretended they didn’t notice. They seemed used to giving Prisha her space. But I was feeling, all of the sudden, like I needed less space. These girls all seemed great. They could totally be my friends. But I was still wary; I’d seen too many movies to know whether or not I was being put on.
We spent the rest of our free time that day getting to know one another. I learned that McKenzie was a born and bred in California, she was older than I thought at 32, and she’d done a little work in the t-girl porn industry when she first turned 18 (don’t try to look her up, she used a fake name). I learned that Clara was from Mississippi and moved to California when she was 18 to try to become an actress. She worked at a strip club (as an accountant) while she searched for roles. She was the oldest in our group at 33. Finally, I learned that Prisha was the daughter (not that they recognized her as that) of a wealthy Indian industrialist family and that she’d come to America to transition and go to school when she got in trouble. She stood to inherit her family’s entire fortune because she was the only living relative of both her mother and father. She was the closest in age to me at 25.
When we’d all met, the girls took me around and showed me all of the other cliques, pointing them out from afar. I was told the groups that I could talk to, the people to avoid, and the little bits of gossip that always show up when this many girls are together. What I was most surprised by, though, was the fact that as I walked around the prison, I would occasionally see girls kissing each other. Rarer, but not that rare, I would look into cells and see girls performing sex acts in the bunks. I didn’t know if these girls were exchanging “currency” like Clara said or dating, but it was strange to see. The guards either didn’t notice or, more likely, pretended not to notice. But it was all very surreal.