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distribution.”
    “Adjudication?”
    I answer that one, too, though he already knows the answer. He knows the answers to the next twenty questions as well, but that doesn’t stop him from asking them. I feel more like a criminal with each one, which must be the point.
    Once they’re done, and once I’m back in shackles, Officer Kohl takes me on a long walk down a series of gray corridors, all of them wide, all of them deserted. We pass through a couple of locked doors that require radios and requests, more buzzes, more clicks, until we reach my unit. Inside is a common room with cells branching off to the sides, a TV high on a wall, tables and chairs, a bookcase crammed with books and board games, and a short, stout, white female guard whose name tag reads OFFICER EMROCH .
    “All yours, Sheila,” Officer Kohl says, handing over a file with my name on it.
    Officer Emroch laughs a polite laugh. “Start the party.”
    There’s only one other person on the unit — that I can see, anyway: a white girl sitting in a chair, wearing what appears to be a dark-blue quilt with Velcro straps that fits her like a sack with holes cut out for her head and arms. The girl isn’t doing anything. Just sitting. She might be sixteen. I doubt she’s any older. She doesn’t look up when I enter.
    Officer Kohl unlocks all the cuffs and chains. I’m still standing there holding a stack of blankets and sheets and underwear.
    “That’s it, then,” she says to me. “You belong to Unit Three now.”
    Officer Emroch’s face falls as she watches Officer Kohl leave. I wonder if she’s lonely in here all day, nothing to do but hang out with quiet girls in quilt sacks.
    “Windas,” Officer Emroch says. “What kind of a name is that, anyway?”
    “English, I think.”
    “Huh,” she says. “Not one we’ve had in here before.”
    She takes a long look at me, as if trying to figure out if I might have some other ethnic identity I’m trying to hide from her. We’re the same height, but she’s easily twice my size.
    “All the others in Unit Three are at afternoon gym with Officer Killduff,” Officer Emroch says. She speaks in the same terse way as all the guards I’ve met so far. None of them seem to ever smile. “You’ll meet him when they come back here for showers, then free hour, then dinner. I’ll show you your cell and locker, right over here. You need to go ahead and make up your bed. You know how to do a military tuck? You can come out and sit with me and her after you’re done. No TV allowed until free hour, though.”
    She leads me over to an empty cell — Cell One — and gestures for me to go inside. I stop, though, framed by the door. I can’t seem to go any farther. The cell is the same as the intake cells I saw: eight feet by eight feet with dull-green concrete-block walls and a gray concrete floor. A narrow bunk is mounted to the far wall, with a thin mattress that’s fatter at one end for a kind of pillow. A stainless-steel sink sticks out from the wall next to the door, and on the other side of that is a stainless-steel toilet with no seat or lid. And that’s it. No table, no chair, no desk, no shelf, no posters, no window except the dirty rectangle of reinforced glass on the door. A fluorescent bulb high overhead crackles and hums and gives off a dull white light.
    Officer Emroch looks up at it with me. “That stays on,” she says. “Twenty-four/seven.”
    She nudges me into the cell the way Officer Kohl nudged me into Intake. “Come on, now. That bed isn’t going to make up itself, and you don’t want Officer Killduff to come back here and see you haven’t done it yet. He wouldn’t like that, and you don’t want to do anything he doesn’t like, I promise you.”
    She turns to leave. I hear her cross the common-room floor, hear the scrape of a chair, hear the creak of hard plastic as she sits down, hear her say something to the girl in the quilt. It’s a kinder voice than she used with me, but