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want to know our language. We wouldn’t tell them shit. They’d get extra red when we suddenly started laughing. We’d be like, “Yeah, we flipped it around on y’all bitches.” That made them start to accuse us of shit that we had nothing to do with. They was just mad that we wasn’t mad. They hated when a girl didn’t need them, their clique, and their bullshit.
    I fought, but Siri didn’t. I fought for her, took the punishments and never snitched on anything she did or that we did together. She wasn’t made for fighting.
    Siri was the only warmth in a cold, cold place. She was soft and loving. She was into fashion and looked like she belonged on a Benetton’s ad, draped in expensive angora or cashmere sweaters made of thick and colorful yarns. She wasn’t a conceited bitch. She was quiet and exclusively mine. When I heard music in my mind, Siri would hum along with it.
    Hearing her hum was real soothing and different. I mean, I was in love with music of all kinds, especially songs that made me catch feelings or remember memories. I was used to hearing the beat box, rhymes, and all types of voices and instruments. I didn’t have no right name for it, but Siri was like a professional “hummer.” Her voice massaged me, even when it was beneath a break-beat. She was the soundtrack to the film that I didn’t want to be starring in, but was. No matter who else I met, fought, or maneuvered around with, me and Siri had been inseparable since we met in the cold, dark dorm.

Chapter 5
    Chair was cemented to the floor. Ankles chained to the chair in the library. I’m a little girl, but I’m wearing the red jumper again, which means I had a recent violent episode and a stay in isolation—a small, tight cell, barely big enough for one, which the guards called the bottom . Normally, my age group, all girls up to age ten, wear baby blue jail jumpers. But no matter your age, if you fight, or fight back, they call it violence. Violent girls of all ages up till sixteen (cause at sixteen you can’t stay here in this lockup no more) get locked in the bottom, in a ten-foot by ten-foot cell, sometimes naked. No matter how long you’re in isolation, when you get out, the guard hands you a red jumper, and says, “Get dressed.”
    For two weeks after being locked down in isolation, everywhere you go, either your ankles or wrists or both sets, are chained and cuffed, while the other inmates are hands- and foot-free.
    Like everybody, I still had to go to class. But in each class there were a few seats reserved for girls with ongoing behavior problems like me. All seats were already cemented to the floors, but the hot seats were equipped with ankle cuffs so violent girls couldn’t move left or right, or even stand up straight.
    At the end of each class a guard posted outside would remove the cuffs, escort me to the next class, and lock me in the same type of chair all over again.
    The authorities thought they was embarrassing us “violent girls,” for fighting. The warden stayed preaching that nonviolence shit, like she had no idea what was really going on, who was sparking shit up or how to stop it. She claimed that if we kept wilding, she would put through the order to build classes with cages, one student to a cage, like we were wildlife, not humans.
    We young ones always did and thought opposite from the warden and them. Wearing red, in the eyes of many girls locked down, boosted my status, got me props, high fives, and favors. Some whowouldn’t speak to me before would try to get next to me when I was red, hoping my style and status would rub off on them. So those were the ones I yanked around like puppets.
    My eyes moved around the library, a space I had never been in before. I was searching for Riot. She sent me a kite asking me to meet up in here. She must’ve gotten red that I had got into another fight the day after I got ganged up with her. Although I wasn’t sure if her angle was gonna be that my fighting made