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Brook knows that she’ll get her words on her tenth birthday, just like every other child in the world. She stays up until midnight for the first time in her life, staring at a hello kitty alarm clock her mom had bought her for her sixth birthday. She had hated it with a violent passion she didn’t know she was capable of until that moment. It spends most of its time dead and buried underneath old sheet music, but tonight she replaces the batteries and places it on her nightstand so she can count down the minutes.
Five minutes.
Four minutes.
Three minutes.
Two minutes.
One—
The clock turns twelve, and Brook’s breath catches in her throat. Her arm begins to hurt, mild at first but within minutes it develops into a searing ache like hot water in her veins. Her skin itches and boils and stings, and she considers screaming, but it’s over before the thought turns to action. There’s no soreness or heat in her arm; if it weren’t for the dark scrawl, it would've seemed like nothing happened at all.
In the dim light of the hello kitty alarm clock, Brook bends her head over her arm and reads:
“Bitch, look around you. We in the prison business complex.”
----
The next day her mother takes her to the library.
She leaves her at the entrance with a lecture on the value of figuring things out for herself and the time she’ll be back. Once alone, Brook practically skips up to the front desk where a grey-haired woman sits, idly playing with the beads on her bracelet. A yellowing piece of paper taped to the side of the desk declares “RING BELL IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS.” Brook stands on her tiptoes and slams her hand on the bell.
“Do you have any books on the prison business complex?”
The librarian smiles kindly and walks her through where she has to go and what books she would be able to understand. Brook nods, taking it in, then rings the bell again. “Do you have any books on the different situations its ok to use the word bitch in?”
Unfortunately, the librarian has no books about that.
----
Brook finds a table at the back of the library. She spreads a dictionary and four different books across the surface of the table before picking one up at random. She spends hours reading about watered-down horrors of the prison industrial complex. She reads about the other insidious horrors, related and unrelated. Most importantly, she reads about people who try and stop them. Sometimes they don’t succeed. But sometimes they do.
She has to look up the word filibuster in the dictionary. She thinks about talking that long. She thinks about caring about a cause that much.
Her fingers feel twitchy and her stomach feels fizzy for the rest of the day, but what her mother comments on when she picks her up is how Brook just can’t stop smiling.
----
That night, Brook thinks about what she knows about soulmates. She’s heard that if your words don’t sound like a reaction to finding your soulmate, then you’re probably going to hear your words first. This is good knowledge to have, because it gives Brook a chance to prepare her response.
She goes back to the library the next day.
This time, she cracks open the biggest thesaurus she can find and goes to the word brook. She reads the synonyms aloud just to hear how they roll off her tongue, and halfway down the list she finds one she likes.
Rivulet. Riiiivulet. Rivuuulet. Rivuleeeet.
It’s perfect.
But she’s never been satisfied with just one word, not as a response to small talk and definitely not as the first thing she’s going to say to her soulmate. She keeps flipping the pages.
She leaves the library with the sentence “Rivulet undergoes metamorphosis into aspiration, devotion, and rapture.” rolling and rollicking in her head like a stone in a washing machine. Like a beautiful diamond in a beautiful golden washing machine.
----
Years later she sits with her parents in the dining room. Her mother regales the table with stories from her day and her father carefully separates each stalk of broccoli on his plate. Brook fiddles with the edge of her fork.
“I’ve always lived by the policy that hard work is the only way to success,” her mom continues, carrying on a thread of conversation that Brook has lost track of. “This whole idea of soulmates convinces people that they can find someone who’s meant for them and never have to worry about working at love.”
Her mother’s eyes lock on her. “Brook, love takes work. You can’t cheat your way with a couple of words on your arm. Real love—the kind that lasts—is something that you have to dedicate yourself towards. If it hurts, that means it’s worth having. “
Her mother keeps talking, and her father stays silent.
Sometimes Brook thinks about the fact that her parents aren’t soulmates. She thinks about it like one might look at modern art—like they know it’s important, but aren’t sure what it’s supposed to mean to them.
----
She dates boys who aren’t her soulmate, but they called her bitch the first time they met so she figures they’re kind of close. They come in to her life with admiring looks and leave with rolled eyes and disparaging sighs. Brook doesn’t let it hurt her that much. They’re allowed to dislike her—they’re not her real soulmate.
Some of her activist friends don’t like it when she says stuff like that.
“Brook, seriously, you need to get over this soulmate stuff,” Rhiannon says to her as they sit at a Panera Bread, picket signs tucked underneath their table. “The entire idea of soulmates really limits the amount of love people give to the world. Maybe the reason none of the guys you’re with stay is because you’re still holding out for the idea of a soulmate. If you want to love someone you’ll work to love him, whether he’s your soulmate or not. And if you don’t want to love someone, you won’t, whether he’s your soulmate or not. Love goes beyond words on an arm, y’know.” Rhiannon takes a long swig of her lemonade.
It’s the same kind of things Brook’s parents say, but it sounds softer and nicer. More romantic, if denouncing the idea of fated love can be romantic. Still, she thinks, tracing words on her arm with her finger, just because she doesn’t have to fall in love with her soulmate doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to meet him.
“Yeah, I totally know what you mean,” Brook says. She takes a bite of her pasta and smiles.
Rhiannnon sighs dramatically. She always loves to push her viewpoints on people, and is usually disappointed when someone gave up without too much of a fight. “Uh, anyway, I know this guy who knows this other guy who’s looking for volunteers to, like, live in a tree or something. You wanna check it out?”
Brook says yes.
----
One year later, she gets arrested.
She knows she should be more frightened of prison. But there’s no way to be more in the prison business complex then being in actual prison, right? And Meadow looked at her like she was so badass and the handsome boy who designed all the flyers clapped her on the shoulder and said that she was a true believer in justice. Besides, prison probably wasn’t even that bad. She’s used to spending long times away from home from her summer camp days and she heard that women were more communal than men anyway. She sees no reason why that wouldn’t carry over to prison.
It might even be a good experience for her.
----
She spends half of the first night crying and the other half wondering if the attractive dark-haired guard would be the one to say her words. As she wipes the tears off her ruddy cheeks, she figures that it wasn’t too bad of a start. One of her first friends here, a blonde girl with the last name Chapman, helped her through the worst of it anyway. She thinks she can handle this.
Then Chapman tries to pimp her out for a blanket.
Then she has sex with a woman who shoves her crotch in Brook’s face with no warning and gropes her in public and won’t talk to her after a week.
Then a nun, of all people, yells at her to shut the hell up.
Then, just when she feels her seams might be unraveling, Brook meets her soulmate.
---
She’s in the lunch line talking to Chapman. Her days as an activist gave her experience with talking to people who she knows don’t like her very much. She doesn’t actually mind that much; it’s better than talking to no one at all.
“I may starve to death.” At Chapman’s look, she adds, “I’m a vegetarian obviously.”
“You know, and I respect that,” Chapman says, “but under the present circumstances I’m pretty sure that even Paul McCartney would be all up in a tuna casserole.”
Brook ignores that. “Look, that salad bar? It’s just frozen peas and iceberg lettuce. I need nuts, I need legumes.”
Chapman begins talking to one of the food servers about some kind of newsletter. Brook eyes the unappetizing food on her tray, saying nothing until the food server offers her a slab of pork.
“Soso?”
“No,” she says, “Pigs are smarter than dogs.”
Chapman looks at her. “Do you eat eggs?”
“Depend on how they were raised.”
“So, no.” Chapman’s mouth is a thin, mocking line, and Brook feels a familiar ire rise up in her stomach.
“Ok, make fun of me if you want, but the agribusiness in this country is completely—“
“Bitch, look around you,” The inmate behind her cuts her off, “We in the prison business complex. If a cow breaks me outta here, I’ll stop eating meat that day.” She picks up her tray and leaves.
Brook’s anger is now just a cold, heavy shock. As her soulmate walks away, all she can think of is that she never knew that there was going to be a third sentence.
----
Later that day she’s in the laundry room with Leanne and Angie, folding clothing methodically while obsessively replaying the lunch line encounter in her mind. She always thought she would yell from the rooftops when she met her soulmate, but instead she's fighting against the urge to tell two people she works with every day. They don’t care about her or even pretend to tolerate her most of the time, she reminds herself, throwing a pair of pants into a laundry bin with more force than strictly necessary. They don’t deserve to know this new secret part of her. Besides, they wouldn’t appreciate being interrupted; they’re in the midst of remembering a rap battle Leanne had with another inmate.
“Yeah, why the fuck should I listen to what that bitch has to say about class.”
“I’m pretty sure her mother was a crack whore anyway,” adds Angie, tossing her lank brown hair over her shoulder.
Leanne says something in return, but Brook isn’t paying any attention.
She wasn’t there for the rap battle and doesn’t know anyone named Poussey. She has more important things to worry about.
----
A week after their first meeting, Brook sees her soulmate in the library.
Their eyes meet and Brook stares. Her soulmate raises her hands, and Brook can’t tell if it’s meant to be placating or defensive.
“Yo, look” she says, “I’m not giving out any cigarettes. You want one you gotta talk to someone else.”
Brook turns around and leaves.
----
Why did she panic? She wasn’t usually nervous meeting new people.
“Hey Chang?” Brook calls, laying on her bunk. Her arms flail over the sides—she thinks herself a perfect picture of deep thought.
“What do you want,” Chang asks flatly.
Brook turns over, propping her head on her hands, and watches Chang mix something strange in a bowl.
“Do you have a soulmate?” She asks
“No. Don’t need one,” Chang replies. She dips a finger in the mixture, tastes it, then goes back to stirring.
“Do you want one?”
Chang grunts and shakes her head. Brook’s lived with Chang long enough to know that the conversation is over, so she rolls back over. Even the rejection of a infamously surly inmate stings a little. Less so than before, but that also worries her; is she becoming numb? She has been feeling less like herself lately. Separated from her life. Grey. Empty.
She thinks of being yelled at. Being ignored. Being dragged to the showers and forced to undress, feeling as if she didn’t have control over her life or her body. The emptiness deepens.
She presses her hand against her forehead. She doesn’t want to be with her soulmate when she’s like this. Until she can be the person her soulmate needs her to be, she’s not going to say anything to her. In the meantime, maybe she can find something that makes her feel like herself.
---
She starts a hunger strike, and for a while she’s herself again; bold, passionate, and fighting for a cause. Then, almost as soon as it began, the hunger strike spirals out of control. The ship is sinking, and some jump while Sister Ingalls ties herself to the mast. This isn’t how she thought it would go, she thinks, alone in her bunk. This wasn’t how it was supposed to turn out.
She closes her eyes and waits for sleep.
----
Weeks pass. She doesn’t feel better. She smiles and chats anyway.
----
One day she feels good. A tiny uptick in a downward graph. She thinks this might be a sign of change to come.
----
The next day she feels awful. She sleeps for hours, and nobody notices. The weeks continue.
----
She needs someone to talk to. Someone to listen. She finds Norma.
----
Brook is sitting in the television room, talking with the other members of Norma’s following, when her soulmate sits down next to her. Greetings rush up her throat but trip over her tongue as she reminds herself of her promise: no talking until she’s absolutely ready. Instead, Brook beams at her, already impossibly and inescapably fond.
Meanwhile, Leanne tries to wrestle the conversation away from snorting cocaine.
“I’m serious, you guys. We need to set the rules.”
“For me it’s less about, like, rules, and more of what happens when I look at Norma,” Brook interjects.
Her soulmate angles her body towards her.
“Oh yeah what’s that about? I mean, it’s like less than magic but more than a hug.”
“The way I see it, it’s the armor you put on every day,” Brook says, articulating thoughts that had been bouncing around ever since she first talked to Norma. She continues, “The armor it takes to get through every day. It gets heavier and heavier as you live your life, you know? Especially in here. But when you look at Norma, you can take that armor off. Because it’s safe. You’re safe. And you’re crying because it feels so good to take that armor off. And you realize how tall you can be without it. How light.” She feels tears prickle at the corners of her eyes, and blinks them away. She sees the inmates staring at her in the aftermath of her speech and her cheeks almost flush.
“Yeah, yeah what she said,” her soulmate says breathily, and the embarrassment vanishes. “I mean, maybe what’s so special about this…whatever, is that there aren’t any rules.”
Brook nods fervently, and almost directs her next statement at her soulmate before remembering to tear her eyes away.
“I’ve always had trouble with organized religion anyway, and honestly I think the more this becomes a capital “R” religion the less time we seem to get with Norma.” Her eyes bounce from inmate to inmate, but she can still see her soulmate out of the corner of her eye.
“Yeah, and we’re all here to be with Norma, right?” her soulmate says.
“That’s fine,” Leanne says, “but we still need to deal with the rest of the world and how they see us. And when you come in late and you call it a fucking club, you make us all look like a joke. We need to know who we are, or they’ll think we’re a joke.”
Brook bristles. No matter whom she talks to, it seems like there’s always someone ready to tear her down.
“I know who I am. I’m someone who’s sometimes late,” she says.
“Look, Soso, I know not committing is, like, your thing. You couldn’t commit to saving the world. You couldn’t commit to eating pussy. You couldn’t even commit to being 100% Asian. So why don’t you go off and not commit somewhere else? Nobody wants you here anyways.”
Her stomach drops. Angie says nothing. The other inmates say nothing. Her soulmate says nothing. Every second of silence sounds like another tacit agreement being thrown her face.
Brook gets up and leaves.
----
One day it’s all too much. She does it without thinking, confronts Leanne and lets the angry words pour out of her mouth like bile. Afterwards she can still taste it in the back of her throat, mixed with the sickly sting of regret.
She sees her soulmate, sees her hold back Leanne when she charged at her. She lets the thought that maybe one person cared about her fuel her. She lets her lonely, angry heart spill out on the floor with the words “chickenshit followers” wrapped around it like barbed wire.
Then her soulmate, the one person who was meant to love her in the entire world, tells her “I can’t help you now”.
Shame and sadness boils in her stomach. She really is too far-gone. If even her soulmate can’t love her—can’t even care enough to help her—then something is wrong with her on a fundamental level. She is going to be this lonely forever.
She decides to go to the doctor.
----
Later, Brook wakes up. Blinks her eyes. There is a girl. Her head was on this girl’s shoulder. She swallows. Her throat is scratchy. This girl should mean something. She doesn’t know what. Someone called her something. What was it?
“Benny?” she asks, her voice sounding far away.
“We checked out those foils man, you took like a hundred benadryls,” the special girl says.
“The good news is that your allergies are squared away for like, a decade,” says another. They laugh. They keep talking. Her ears ring and her eyes hurt. Why do her eyes hurt? Her mind is fogging again. As she feels herself being pulled to the side, an arm around her shoulder, she slips back into sleep.
----
Brook sits in the yard, knees tucked under her chin and arms wrapped around her legs. The warm breeze tosses strands of hair into her face, tickling her nose.
Over the past couple days she’s collected bits and pieces of information about Poussey. Her name, for one.
Two, that she defended Brook when she wasn’t present, picking fights with Leanne about how they pushed her away. That she called her by her first name.
Three, that she jokes loudly and laughs louder and has a contagious, captivating smile. That she’s lonely anyway.
Four, that she found Brook in the library and convinced her friends to save her.
Five, she’s known for making the best hooch but equally known for drinking it all.
Six, that she confronted Norma’s group again and laid the onus of Brook’s suicide attempt at their feet. That her hope for miracles and meaning meant less than her sympathy for the struggling girl on the library floor.
Seven.
Seven, Brook thinks, watching Poussey talk with Taystee from across the yard, that maybe she needs a soulmate who’s a little empty, as long as she can love fully.
----
There’s a hole in the fence. There’s a lake.
She takes her hand. They drift.
----
Eventually, Poussey stands up and pulls Brook to her feet. The water is actually pretty dirty and her thighs feel itchy, but Brook ignores it all to stare at the way the dappled sunlight reflects off her soulmate’s hair, her arms, the tips of her ears. She feels a big rush of emotion rising in her throat that she can’t name. Suddenly Brook realizes she’s still holding Poussey’s hand; she releases it.
“C’mon, I’ll introduce you to the group,” Poussey says, motioning with the same hand to the throng of black girls splashing at the edge of the lake. “Properly, y’know, when you aren’t totally fucked up on Benadryl.” She looks at her, clearly waiting for a response.
Brook thinks of the sentence she prepared so many years ago and almost laughs at the absurdity of it. The dreams of an ten-year-old overexcited about using long words means nothing to the woman about to speak to the person who makes her think life might be worth living.
“Thank you for saving my life.” Brook says instead, but can’t help but add, “It turns out I might actually kinda like living.” She bites her tongue after that. She might be one to babble, but somehow the space between them feels too important to fill with inane words.
Poussey, for her part, has no such qualms.
“But—what the FUCK, holy shit—but you can’t be—“
“I am!”
“Shit, shit, how in the fuck—“ She trails off into mumbles, then swallows thickly. “But you’ve talked to me before.”
“Not to you. I’ve talked in your presence, but I always made sure it was directed at someone else.” She shrugs a shoulder.
“Not sure you wanted me for your soulmate?” Poussey smirks humorlessly, but at Brook’s panicked look she adds, “Hey, it’s fine, I get that soulmates and shit is a big deal to some people and I’m not—“
“No!” Brook interrupts, loudly. A pair of inmates turn their heads toward the noise, and she continues quieter, “No, it wasn’t you. I wasn’t sure I could be the person who could be with you. I just felt angry and lonely and really, really empty. I wasn’t the person I thought I would be when I met my—“ her voice drops to a whisper—“soulmate. Well, that was the reason after a while. At first I was just really fucking surprised and panicked.” She smiles, and is relieved to see Poussey smile back.
“Yeah, ok.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Poussey claps her hands in front of her chest and releases a huge breath. “I actually thought for the longest time I was gonna meet my soulmate in war or some shit. My dad was in the army, and for a while that was my plan too, so it just kinda made sense. But then all that went to hell and I was arrested and I figured with my luck in love I wasn’t gonna meet my soulmate until I was seventy and stopping an old lady with Alzheimer’s from getting hit by a bus.”
“Sorry, am I not wrinkled enough for your wildest fantasies?”
“Yeah, get back to me in fifty years and then we can talk,” Poussey smiles. “But for real though, I’m glad I didn’t have to wait that long to hear my words.” She hesitates, then says:
“Uh, so what were your words? I’m sorry but I honestly can’t remember the first time I said anything to you.”
Brook laughs and holds out her arm in invitation. Poussey holds it gently, long fingers delicately curved around her elbow and wrist, pinky brushing her pulse point. Brook’s heart leaps in her chest. She loves Poussey’s fingers. She loves looking at them and she loves feeling them on her skin; she wants to hold them, play with them, feel them between her palms. For however long she can. Forever, if Poussey lets her. All too soon, however, Poussey drops her arm.
“Fuck. That ain’t exactly the most romantic shit I ever said.” She sends Brook a confused look. “When did this even happen?
“In the lunch line. I was talking about how I wouldn’t eat meat because of the horrors of the agribusiness in this country.”
“Well, ok then.”
“It’s actually really awful if you look into it.”
“Yeah, I’ll take your word for it.” She glances away nervously, and Brook’s heart seizes with the fear that Poussey doesn’t want her for a soulmate anymore.
“I’m sorry that you were stuck with that shit. I’m sure that’s not what any ten year old would want,” Poussey says. She clears her throat, eyes set on some far out point on the horizon. “It’s ok if you’re disappointed. With them. Uh, or with me.”
“No, I like them.” Brook smiles shyly. “And you. Really.”
Poussey nods shortly and runs a hand over the curve of her head, bending her neck and looking up at Brook through her lashes. A hint of a smile teases the ends of her lips. Brook thinks her heart might burst.
Her mother always said how soulmates cause people to avoid work. But standing in the lake, Brook thinks that she’s never wanted to work so hard at something in her life. She wants to learn Poussey’s body like she learned the keys of the piano, inexperienced and dedicated and kind of messy. She wants to know about her past and her family and her hopes for the future. She wants to fill up her emptiness with the exuberance of Poussey’s being and, paradoxically, she wants to hollow herself out and give it all to Poussey. She suspects Poussey may have some issues of her own, and she wants those too. She doesn’t care if it’s hard or if it hurts, because it’s definitely worth having.
It doesn’t hurt though.
It feels so light.
----
They run, laughing and hand in hand, until they’re six steps away from the group.
Five steps
Four steps
Three steps
Two steps
One—