Orange Is the New Black Read Online Free PDF

few minutes.
    “So… any news on your case?”
    “Nope.”
    “Well… this sure is a long one.”
    Every now and then she would apologetically drug-test me. I always tested clean. Eventually Miss Finnegan left the department to go to law school, and I was transferred to the equally mild-mannered Miss Sanchez. She had long Frito-chip fingernails painted Barbie pink. “You’re my easiest one!” she would say every month, cheerfully.
    Over more than five years of waiting, I thought about prison in every imaginable way. My predicament remained a secret from almost everyone I knew. Initially it was too terrible, too overwhelming, andtoo uncertain to tell anyone what was happening. When the extradition delay struck, the situation grew too weird to broach with friends who didn’t know: “I’m going to prison… someday?” I felt that I just had to gut it out in silence. My friends who did know were mercifully quiet on the subject as the years dragged on, as if God had put me on hold.
    I worked hard at forgetting what loomed ahead, pouring my energies into working as a creative director for Web companies and exploring downtown New York with Larry and our friends. I needed money to pay my huge ongoing legal fees, so I worked with the clients my hipster colleagues found unsexy and unpalatable—big telecom, big petrochemicals, and big shadowy holding companies.
    With everyone but Larry, in my interactions I was partially absent. Only to him could I reveal my fear and shame. With folks who knew nothing of my criminal secret and looming imprisonment, I was simply not quite myself—pleasant, sometimes charming, but aloof, distant, perhaps even indifferent. Even with close friends who knew what was happening, I wasn’t fully engaged—I was always observing myself with an unstated foresight, a sense that whatever was happening now didn’t matter much given what was to come. Somewhere on the horizon was coming devastation, the arrival of Cossacks and hostile Indians.
    As the years passed, my family almost began to believe that I would be miraculously spared. My mother was certainly logging a lot of hours in church. But never for a minute did I allow myself to indulge in that fantasy—I knew that I would go to prison. There were times when I was pretty damn depressed. But the revelation was that my family and Larry still loved me despite my massive fuckup; that my friends who knew my situation never turned away from me; and that I could still function in the world professionally and socially, despite having ostensibly ruined my life. I began to grow less fearful about my future, my prospects for happiness, and even about prison, as more and more time passed.
    The main reason was Larry. When I was indicted,we were definitely in love, but just twenty-eight and freshly arrived in New York, we were not thinking about the future beyond where we would move when the guy we were subletting from reappeared from London. When my criminal past reappeared, who could have blamed him if he had sat me down and said, “I did not sign up for this crazy shit. I thought you were good crazy, not scary-crazy”? Who could predict how a nice Jewish boy from New Jersey would process the information that his ex-lesbian, boho-WASP girlfriend was also a soon-to-be-convicted felon?
    Who knew that my extroverted, mercurial, overcaffeinated boyfriend would be so patient, so capable, and so resourceful? That when I cried myself into hyperventilation, he would hold my head and comfort me? That he would guard my secret and make it his own? That when I moped for too long, letting the poor-me blues clamp around my ankles and drag me down to very bad places, he would fight to get me back, even if it meant terrible battles and tough days and nights at home?
    In July 2003 we were in Massachusetts at my family’s beach shack. On a beautifully sunny day Larry and I kayaked out to Pea Island, a speck of rock and sand set in a small cove off Buzzard’s Bay. The