Chapter 2: You Learn the Routine

Penny went quiet.

“I’m sorry,” she said, seeing my reaction. “If I said anything wrong.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “You didn’t—you didn’t say anything wrong.”

“It sounds like if you had to go somewhere, you just expected it?” Penny asked. “Having to be in those?”

“Pretty much.” I nodded, still thinking about it. “You, um ... you learned the routine.”

“Yeah,” I then added, more to myself than to either of them. “You learn the routine.”

“I guess I never really thought about it that way.”

“Most people don’t.” I gave a small shrug. “It’s one of those things that sounds strange until you’ve actually lived it. Then it just becomes part of your day ... part of your life. You don’t even realize it unless someone points it out to you.”

“Did you have to wear them for long?” she asked.

“Sometimes.” I shifted slightly in the chair. “It depended on where I was going. If they were just taking me somewhere inside the prison, it could be pretty quick. Other times, if it was transport or court, you could be restrained for hours.”

“Hours?” Charlotte asked.

“Yeah.”

“That sounds awful.”

I shrugged.

“It wasn’t exactly comfortable.”

“Were you embarrassed when people saw you?” Charlotte asked.

I thought about that for a moment.

“Sometimes. Especially at first.”

“Even though everyone around you was in prison?”

“Yeah. I mean, you’re surrounded by people who know what prison is like, so you’d think it wouldn’t matter.” I gave a small smile. “But it still did.”

“How?”

“You just feel exposed, I guess. You’re walking through somewhere with your hands cuffed, and everyone can see it. Sometimes people stare. Sometimes they don’t. You try not to think about it,” I told her. “It was just worse when you were around people you knew.”

I glanced down at my wrists.

“That was probably the part I hated most. If someone I knew saw me being taken somewhere, I always felt ... embarrassed. Ashamed, I guess. I wasn’t exactly proud of the choices I’d made. It just made everything feel a little more real when someone I knew could see me like that.”

Penny nodded slowly.

“You must have hated wearing them.”

“I did.”

There was a brief pause.

“Honestly,” I added, “the first time sucked.”

Charlotte smiled sympathetically.

“What was it like?”

“The first time?”

“Yeah.”

I nodded.

“I remember being nervous more than anything. I didn’t really know what to expect. I’d seen other women being cuffed, obviously, but it’s different when they’re actually putting them on you.”

“What did you think?”

“That I didn’t like it.” I laughed softly. “Pretty much immediately.”

“Was it painful?”

“Not really. Not if they were fitted properly. It was more the feeling of not being able to use your hands normally. You notice that right away.”

I looked down at my own cuffs.

“You reach for something and realize you can’t. You go to adjust your clothes or fix your hair or scratch your face, and suddenly you have to think about how you’re going to do it.”

“So. you couldn’t move around normally?” Penny asked.

“Not really. You could walk, obviously, but depending on what you were wearing, you had to adjust how you did things.”

“Like what?”

“Getting through doors. Sitting down. Getting into a vehicle.” I pointed toward the stairs. “Climbing those,” I added with a little smile.

“All those things you normally do without even thinking about.”

I shrugged.

“When you were cuffed, you just had to slow down and be a little more careful.”

Charlotte glanced at the restraints around my waist.

“Did they ever put you in something like what you’re wearing now?”

“Not exactly like this.” I told her again. “The prison had different ones for different situations. These are more old-school. They’re the kind of restraints they used to use for really serious offenders—people they considered a high risk ... dangerous.”

Penny glanced down at them again.

“So. they’re not something they would have used on everyone?”

“No. Not usually.” I shook my head. “What I wore was generally a lot simpler. These are much more restrictive.”

“But the basic idea was the same?”

“Yeah. Your movement was restricted, and you couldn’t just take them off yourself.”

Penny nodded.

“Did you ever get used to having them on?”

“Yeah. Like I said, you eventually get used to them.” I shrugged. “Not that you ever liked wearing them. You just stopped thinking about them as much.”

“How long did that take?”

“I don’t know. A while.” I smiled faintly. “At first, I was conscious of them constantly. Every little movement reminded me they were there. Eventually, you stopped noticing every second of it.”

“So, it just became normal?”

“Normal isn’t quite the word.” I thought about it. “More like familiar. You knew what it meant when an officer came to your cell and told you to get ready. You knew what was coming. After enough times, you didn’t have to think about it anymore.”

“Did they have to explain why you were being restrained?” Charlotte asked.

“Usually, yeah. Sometimes it was obvious. If you were going to court or being transported somewhere, you knew why. Other times they’d just tell you where you were going and that you needed to be secured.”

“I guess you couldn’t really discuss it.”

I shook my head smiling.

“Not really. You could ask questions, but it wasn’t like you could say, ‘I don’t feel like wearing cuffs today.’ If they decided you needed them, you wore them.”

Penny looked down at my wrists again.

“Did you ever have to sleep in them?”

“No. Not in prison anyway.” I shook my head. “When I was back in my cell, I wasn’t normally restrained. Like I said, they weren’t keeping me cuffed twenty-four hours a day.”

“That makes sense,” Charlotte said.

“Most of the time, once you were back where you were supposed to be, they took them off.”

I paused.

“That was always a relief.”

Penny smiled slightly.

“I can imagine.”

“It was.” I looked down at my hands again. “Even if you’d only had them on for a couple of hours, when they came off, you noticed the difference immediately.”