A LOUD BUZZER sounded, and the corridors of Pod C suddenly swelled with a cacophony of shouts and cries and laughs and grunts. My fellow detainees were being herded back to their cells before lights-out. I lay very still on my bottom bunk, hoping they wouldn’t notice me as they streamed past the open door of my cell. Their voices were guttural and their language foul. “Who da fuck dat?” I heard someone say, and I braced myself, but no one ventured in.

The clamor died down a bit. Someone started to sing, and someone else roared for her to shut the fuck up. Then the cage doors shut with a booming clash of steel up and down the corridor. A minute later everything went dark.

The night sounds in Pod C were softer. Sobbing, snoring, and sex sounds. And in my cell, a different sound that only I could hear. The hum of the wheels turning inside my brain as I worked through what I was going to do next.

Exoneration first. Then revenge.

I MADE MY prison debut in the morning, after roll call, when the doors clanged open up and down the block. The women swarmed out of their cells, voices buzzing loudly as they made their way to breakfast. Theirs were a sea of brown faces, African Americans and Latinas. Not a white face to be seen, and I realized why. White women made bail.

I let them pass before I stepped out and joined the end of the line crowding into the cafeteria. I kept my face a tight mask, tamping down every reflex to smile or show interest or any other emotion. Supreme boredom was the look I was aiming for in repose. But when some of the women turned and stared at me, I ramped it up to that face I’d practiced in the prison transport van: fierce, fearsome, a force to be reckoned with.

The cafeteria—or mess hall? the barracks term was probably more accurate—was a long, low-ceilinged room with regimented rows of metal tables and clamped-on metal chairs. Raised voices bounced off the concrete floor and boomeranged through the metal furniture until the decibel level was high enough to rival a Tribeca dance club. I went through the line and loaded up my tray with dry yellow lumps of scrambled eggs, sausage patties floating in a pool of grease, and fruit cocktail out of a can. Then I looked around for a place to sit. There were no empty tables, but I spotted a table with two empty seats at the end, and I took one of them.

There were four other women at the table, and they all stopped eating to stare at me. I resumed my look of bored indifference and shoveled a lump of egg into my mouth.

The woman at the far end of the table suddenly leaned around the woman beside her and stabbed a fork in my direction. The three other women stopped eating to watch. The fork was plastic and didn’t concern me, but the woman holding it did. She was small and dark, Latina, with a purple bandana over her hair and a hard, wiry body coiled tight with energy. Even if I hadn’t noticed the deference shown to her by the other women, it was obvious to me that this one was the alpha female. “What are you?” she demanded, fork pointed like a laser.