Free A Deeper Love Inside by Sister Souljah

up,” Tiny, number 10 of the Diamond Needles, said. She was thirteen and rocking the same yellow jumper as Riot. But still, she was our same small size like she could fit in with the baby blues. She was so petite, other than her two grapefruit-sized titties. She was next up for the rope and wanted her turn. As Tiny pushed off and jumped in, Riot pulled me back some.
    “The Real Bitches are trying to recruit Cha-Cha. No matter how she glares at you, don’t make a move. Got it?” Riot was talking to me without looking at me. She was surveying the movements on the yard.

Chapter 8
    We counted everything, and everything counted. We counted seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years. We counted asses in the shower and how many heads were in the gym. We counted off during head counts. We counted visits and visitors and the amount of days without visits or visitors. We counted days until hearing dates, court dates, and, of course, release dates. We counted the numbers of letters received or not received, days between connected phone calls, rejected phone calls, or no phone calls at all. We counted days since our mothers came or never came. We counted squares in the floor, lights in the ceiling, colors of uniforms. We counted the number of guards, staff, and workers. We even counted the teeth in our teachers’ mouth as they talked. We counted everything, and everything counted. We counted them. They counted us. We counted. They counted.
    There was a fork missing from the count in the kitchen, and one butcher knife. The alarms went off in the building. Guards charged through the halls, some ragged in riot gear. All inmates moving to the final activities of the day, and all inmates doing anything anywhere were paused as a trained reaction to the alarm. Special guards swept us up in a single-file line. The girls in the same hall area where I was standing were all escorted into the gym.
    “No talking,” they commanded us.
    “Spread out. Both hands up.” One guard demonstrated. We didn’t need any demonstration. This is how we always measured space between girls on the gym floor.
    “I didn’t tell you to put ’em down,” she barked. I knew that now she would make us hold that position for ridiculously long. In here, all adults, staff, teachers, and whatever guards were delighted by little acts of torture. There were girls of mixed ages in the gym lineup. I knew after counting fifteen rows of ten girls that they also had a lineup on the yard, maybe the slop house and in the dorm hallway in one of the larger buildings.
    “Put ’em down,” the guard ordered.
    Me and Riot’s eyes met. We were both scanning the rows, counting Diamond Needles. I seen number 7, Hamesha. She couldn’t be missed. She was an Indian with a long Indian braid, tucked inside her tan jumper, the color worn by fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds. I didn’t know her name before I had got ganged up, but I had seen her way before then at the hospital, which these people in here called the infirmary. She had the pretty face and the dirtiest job—emptying pots after inmate patients peed, vomited, or crapped. She got to wear gloves and sometimes a paper face mask. When she wasn’t collecting the shit that no one wanted to touch, she was mopping floors and wiping down counters with some stinky smelling stuff. She had walked past my hospital bed where I was lying and locked from time to time. She only spoke to me once saying, “You are the only one who misses your ma more than I miss meri ma. ”
    “Meri ma?” I repeated, with my dried-out lips.
    “My mother,” she translated.
    “How would you know that I miss my momma more?” I asked curiously. Besides, me and Siri were both bored.
    “I say you miss your ma more than I miss meri ma because I am still holding my missing her inside. You on the other hand can not stop screaming it out.”
    I realized Hamesha had heard me screaming the night before when I was giving the nurses hell. But hell was