SEVENTEEN

At the prison on the mountain, the staff brought in a woman who took a few girls into a room where they sat cross-legged on floor cushions. The lady was rich enough that she wore diamonds and told the girls she’d traveled to India and the Far East, studying different techniques for altering one’s consciousness. A girl asked what that was supposed to mean, but the lady said never mind, she’d show them if they were willing to close their eyes and listen. She spoke in a soft voice, told the girls to picture themselves far from the prison walls, letting their imaginations take them somewhere they felt completely free. She suggested the beach, described the white foam and lapping waves, soft sand under their feet, until a girl called out that most of them had never been anywhere near an ocean.

Then the lady told the girls to pretend they were birds flying over their mountains and valleys on a day with no clouds so they could see every grassy pleat, indigo lake, and river twine. The towns below were pastel and bone-colored formations squaring churches and plazas. Cattle-freckled pastures, the plastic-sheeted nurseries where orchids and roses are grown for export; cars and buses taking people from their jobs to their families.

“A busy world, a peaceful world,” the woman said. “You are a part of that world.”

She instructed the girls to imagine themselves light, almost weightless, carried by their long feathers, hollow avian bones.

“Now return to your lives in the present.”

She had them note the hard ground beneath their cushions, discomfort and tension in their hips and knees. The stiffness of their spines from cold seeping into the old unheated prison-school building so they existed in a permanent low-grade shiver.

“Remember where you are right now,” she said, as if they could forget. “Take in your heaviness, your loneliness, how far you are from everyone who cares about you. Think about what brought you to serve your time. It is your crime and the decisions that led to it that will keep you shackled to toxic soil and prevent you from soaring as you are meant to do.”

Some of the girls sighed, bored by another obvious tactic to get them to feel regret. Talia wondered why the staff cared so much about contrition when they were already being punished. She asked to use the bathroom. The meditation lady gave her a disappointed stare but nodded.

“I have to go too,” said Lorena, who was there for setting her bedroom on fire after her mother wouldn’t let her go to a party.

Soon everyone was saying they had to piss. A group effort to reclaim what little power they had on that mountain, or just to make their day more interesting. Later, Sister Susana called Talia to her office. She’d heard Talia initiated the bathroom revolt during the meditation workshop.

“You want me to be sorry for having to do what is only natural?”