Piper Chapman hated the desert from an early age. During her only visit, a Chapman family road trip through the Southwest en route to Disneyland, she was miserable as the SUV slowly made its way through the barren landscape. Unlike her brothers, she could not stomach reading in the car, and, given the stilted silence that ensued during outings that forced her parents together for "quality time" with the kids, staring out the car window was her only real entertainment. She was so frustrated by the unchanging desert scenery, miles upon miles of dust and rock with huge spaces between objects on the horizon, that she felt a palpable sense of relief wash over her as the minivan crested a hill into the dense citrus groves of the San Joaquin Valley. She never wanted to experience that emptiness again. Even when traveling during those years with Alex, she always steered their movements toward crowded places: cities filled to capacity with jostling bodies or tropical paradises teeming with dense greenery.
But her months in prison had changed her perspective on lots of things, and the appeal of uninhabited space was one thing that she had reconsidered in her post-Litchfield life. Driving through the abandoned ranch land of West Texas toward New Mexico, Piper felt exhilarated. At first it had seemed that there was not much to look at: no trees, no mountains, no buildings, and, thankfully, no people. The total absence of those things, the absence of anything else that might enclose a person within a defined space, thrilled her to the core, even years after her release from prison. As her vision acclimated to her new surroundings, her eyes began to pick out the strange array of living things that roamed within this arid grassland. The desert slowly became populated by the prickly pears, armadillos, and lanky roadrunners that thrived along the banks of the arroyos. And the land that had once seemed so monotonously brown began to reveal green and purple undertones that set off the bright blue expanse of sky overhead. This place was not empty so much as it was open. Piper still had no idea where she was actually heading, but the beckoning line of dusty highway offered a glimmer of hope that she had done the right thing when she sold all her shit, climbed into her car, and left her life behind.
...
"You have a good eye. I see that you walked straight over to one of my favorite pieces in the store"
At first the customer was startled by the sudden approach, but, after looking up at Alex's smiling face, the older woman warmly returned the smile and relaxed slowly into the compliment. It still amazed Alex when people bought that line, a classic salesman's ploy rolled out so often to sell everything from mattresses to, as in this case, overpriced art pottery.
The customer, obviously flattered by the personal attention, awkwardly pulled off the enormous, SPF50+ sunhat worn by the most melanoma-obsessed tourists, to reveal a damp mop of gray hair underneath. Alex liked her job well enough, but she still missed the days when her work involved flirtation with women to whom she was actually attracted. Granted, retail sales rarely, if ever, involved sleeping with the customer, but Alex firmly believed that even the most mundane tasks could be improved by the occasional presence of young, hot women.
Moving in for the kill, she leaned toward the woman, as if sharing a private confidence between two old friends. "I should probably not be telling you this, especially since we aren't even done cataloguing it, but we just received a very special piece from this same artist. I think that my boss just priced it, so, if you are interested, I could give you first crack at it before one of the local collectors pounces."
The woman flushed slightly at the proximity. "Oh well, I am not really a collector. My husband and I are just here in Santa Fe for vacation, and I have heard so many great things about the local pottery."
"I don't know what makes somebody an official 'collector', but you obviously recognize beauty when you see it. Look, just let me show you the piece, and, if I am right about you, I think that you will be as moved by it as I am."
Alex placed a hand on the woman's sweaty back, gently guiding her to the display case that housed the big ticket items. At the mention of the word "husband", she knew that she had to move fast because the sudden appearance of a thrifty spouse was the one thing that could ruin her pitch. After years at the store, she had easily sold more than her weight in ceramics, but these final, tense moments before locking things down still provided the day's only real excitement. Even though her life had changed so completely since the arrest ended her career as a recruiter for the cartel, Alex still loved the thrill of getting one over on a sucker.
The rest of the morning unfolded like any other. After closing the sale, Alex took her morning break and bought herself a coffee at Holy Spirit Espresso. She sat outside to drink her coffee and smoke a cigarette, her last remaining vice and the only one that she had resumed after Litchfield. The tourists paid no attention as they passed her on the street, hustling back and forth between the O'Keefe Museum and the Palace of the Governors. After this morning's success, she knew that she was unlikely to encounter another easy mark today so she felt in no hurry to return to her post. She just sat there in the sun, eyes focused on nothing in particular, trying to piece together a life from the remnants that her piss-poor decisions had left her.
...
As if playing some paranoid version of the game Clue, Alex had spent months trying to guess the details of her own death: incinerated in her apartment by an arsonist, stabbed in an alley by a stranger disguised as a mugger, or, more recently, beaten to death in the shower by an inmate. So many violent scenarios had played out in her head, but she had been wrong about all of it. Aydin was going to shoot her in the greenhouse with the gun that he just pulled out of his waistband. She barely moved when she saw him approach, weakly protesting, "You don't have to do this."
"Yeah, I do," he retorted, and she fell silent. Why fight him when she had nothing left? Anger flared in her chest when she thought about the course of her life over the last decade. Growing up poor, she had to be the tougher and smarter than the average, never letting her guard down, to make a place for herself. She clawed her way to the life she wanted, but, just as quickly, stronger forces, from death to the cartel to the justice system, laid claim to everything that she had earned. Piper had still been hers, even in prison, but now she was also gone, transformed into a stranger. Alex was not going to beg for a life that had always twisted out of her control. She was done.
Deciding to experience her final seconds in the world without struggling, Alex just stood placidly before Aydin, even as the door opened noiselessly behind him. Unsettled by Alex's blank expression, he did not notice Lolly as she made her way into the greenhouse by creeping delicately across the floorboards. Once directly behind Aydin, Lolly raised the shard of glass stolen from a broken window days before, and she quickly reached up to drag it across the man's throat, releasing a steady stream of his arterial blood into the air.
Alex shut her eyes out of instinct when blood splattered against her, and she backed away blindly until her body hit the greenhouse wall. She remained in that position as she heard Aydin collapse to the floor with a gurgling sound. He writhed wordlessly with his boots scraping against the floor until a thick silence descended upon the greenhouse. When Alex finally opened her eyes, Aydin lay motionless in a blood-drenched heap. Lolly had somehow managed to avoid the mess, and she was now standing over Aydin, tentatively poking him with her foot. Deciding that it was safe, she dropped her weapon and declared triumphantly, "See. I TOLD you that toothpick guy was bad news."
Alex could only nod dumbly in agreement. Lolly strutted around the body, clearly proud of her last minute intervention. While Alex was deeply grateful, it was hard to celebrate her narrow escape knowing that she and Lolly were implicated in the death of a guard. The wheels in her mind began to turn as her eyes settled on the shovels hanging neatly in the cage at the back of the greenhouse. If they could just sneak out without anybody noticing...
The alarm rang out in the greenhouse, followed shortly by the voices of guards barking orders in the distance. Alex shook her head in disbelief as she realized that some OTHER disturbance on the grounds had triggered lockdown protocol, and it would not be long before guards arrived to clear the greenhouse. She felt the sudden urge to bolt, but one look at her blood-stained clothes excluded that option. Fatigue overwhelmed her as she strained to conjure a feasible exit strategy out of thin air. Spooked by the alarm, Lolly implored, "What are we gonna do now, man?"
Alex had no idea. She was so exhausted from trying to manipulate every aspect of her life for so long that she wanted nothing more than to rest. She dragged her fingers through her hair before telling Lolly, "YOU are going to get the fuck out of here while you still can." She slid down to the floor, ignoring Lolly completely from that point onward, until her savior stomped reluctantly out of the greenhouse, slamming the door behind her. Left alone, Alex closed her eyes again and waited for the uncertain future to unfold before her.
...
Piper arrived in Albuquerque later than expected, well past midnight, and she booked herself into a chain motel off Interstate 40. She decided to stay there rather than Santa Fe because the motels were markedly cheaper, and she was struggling to maintain her ever-dwindling bank account. As she emerged from her room in the late morning, the daylight provided a full explanation for the price discrepancy. Green mountains beckoned on the horizon, but, in her immediate vicinity, a single story smear of box stores and housing developments spread out in all directions, like some suburban fungus that threatened to consume the surrounding landscape.
Wanting to exercise a bit after days in the car, Piper walked along the shoulder of a decidedly pedestrian-unfriendly boulevard to a local cafe. After ordering a coffee and some pancakes, she settled back into the booth with her phone and planned her itinerary for the day. She knew that she wanted to check out Santa Fe, especially the Georgia O'Keefe museum, so she would try to get there before noon. Until now, she had only seen a couple of O'Keefe paintings on display at different museums. There had been a huge O'Keefe retrospective at the MOMA when she was living in New York, but she rarely visited museums in those days. Piper could not help smiling to herself as she remembered her failed attempts to talk Alex out of bed during museum hours.
"Look, if we leave now, we can get there an hour or two before closing. I know that you hate this stuff, but these retrospective exhibits are rare."
Alex rolled her eyes. "Pipes, I JUST woke up, and I am not scrambling across town this early to stare at a bunch of thinly disguised pussy paintings."
"Actually, O'Keefe really resented the common interpretation of her flower paintings as sexual. She insisted that those works functioned primarily as meditations on color and shape."
"Whatever you say, professor, but your argument just make me LESS interested." A sly grin crossed her face as she looked up at Piper from the bed. "Besides, I can think of better ways to show my appreciation for the beauty of the female anatomy."
Piper could still picture her girlfriend stretched languidly across the mattress, with rumpled black hair and hooded eyes, making no effort to comply because she knew how this argument would end. Considering her options, Piper repeatedly reached the conclusion that staying in bed with Alex Vause was also a singular experience so she was not too disappointed when the retrospective closed.
She had not seen or heard from Alex in more than three years, and more than a decade had passed since their New York days, but Piper had learned over the subsequent years to live with the constant, low-level eruption of these memories. She could never be sure if lingering feelings for Alex, or the way that Alex had just vanished so completely from her life, enabled these moments from the past to bubble up into the present. It really made no difference either way so Piper returned her focus to the day ahead, and, after settling her check, she braved the dangerous walk back to her car for the drive to Santa Fe.
...
Settled into their bunks for the lockdown, Piper snorted derisively when Big Boo shouted to her across the dorm, "Hey Chapman! Word on the street is that your ex killed a guard." She shrugged it off as rumor on a chaotic day that included a walk-out by the guards and a mass escape through a hole in the perimeter fence. More importantly, she was not going to panic when her employees would relish the opportunity to see her squirm.
Then the lockdown continued into the next day. Inmates were confined to the dorm except for meals and strictly assigned shower times. Extra guards, including the veterans from the walk-out, patrolled the dorms with a focused ferocity. Bunks got tossed, inmates were pulled aside for strip searches, and dozens of women were thrown into SHU at the slightest resistance. Gossip about a guard murdered in the greenhouse circulated widely, but Piper clung to the hope that Alex was not involved. With so many women in solitary, an empty bunk could mean anything.
Then Gerber arrived to clean out Alex's bunk, and she stopped pretending. Alex had killed a guard, and she had been sent to max. The truth seeped into her brain, forcing Piper to envisage how scared Alex must have been to really harm anybody, especially a guard. Nobody had been there to help, and the thought of Alex, all alone and on her way to max, unleashed a blind fury within Piper. She ran up to Gerber, bringing her face within inches of his, and screamed, "What the hell do you think you're doing, you prepubescent little shit? Get the fuck out of her cube!" Within seconds, half a dozen guards had tackled her to the ground.
Piper went willingly to the SHU because a stay in solitary changed nothing. It did not change how her mind would seize up, overcome suddenly by the riddle of what had happened in the greenhouse. It did not change how Piper replayed her actions on a continuous loop, picking apart every selfish decision, every lie, that had set Alex on this path. It did not change how she dreaded sleep because dreams of Alex forced her to relive her loss every time that she blinked into wakefulness. Piper waited listlessly for the seconds to pass in her tiny cell just as she would anywhere else so she felt no relief when a guard appeared at her door to gather her into the transport van.
Rather than being led to the dorm, she was herded into the rec room where she was seated at a table across from half a dozen people, including Caputo and Berdie. The others were unfamiliar, but Piper pegged them as lawyers by their formal suits and briefcases.
One of them addressed her immediately, "Ms. Chapman, thank you so much for joining us. We have convened an informal panel to review the events that led up to the unfortunate altercation between Ms. Vause and Aydin Solak on prison grounds last Tuesday. Ms. Vause has indicated to us that you met Mr. Solak on several occasions while traveling in Europe, and we thought that you could provide some additional background information..."
Piper remembered Aydin. He had traveled with Fahri, never saying much, but he had always leered at Piper and Alex like they existed as a couple to titillate Kubra's cronies. Her face flushed with outrage as the details of Alex's "unfortunate altercation" came into focus.
Piper spoke up with stony-faced clarity, "Are you honestly telling me that you corporate fuck faces had your heads so far up your asses that you hired a hit man from a drug cartel as a fucking prison guard? That Ms. Vause, as you so politely refer to her, was attacked by that guard in this goddamn shit hole under everybody's noses? Based on what you've told me, you've spoken to Ms. Vause so I guess that she survived. Phew! No harm, no foul, am I right? And now you want ME to help YOU understand how it is that you fucked up so badly?" Piper inched up in her seat , cooing with mock enthusiasm, "Tell me how I can help!"
The lawyer barely reacted to Piper's outburst. "Before we go on, let me assure you that Ms. Vause is alive and well, and she has been very helpful to our investigation." He glanced at his notes before continuing, "We understand your anger, Ms. Chapman, and we share your frustration. Our human resources handbook clearly mandates background checks for all prison employees in accordance with local, state, and federal regulations. We are appalled by the alleged hiring of a known felon, and we are working hard to identify those responsible."
Piper was infuriated by the corporate doublespeak, but, before plowing back into her polemic, she paused to reflect on who had been the true menace. "It's all in your head," she had reprimanded Alex, disciplining her like a toddler. It had given her a thrill to belittle her girlfriend's fear of Kubra as proof that prison had made Piper street-smart. She rubbed her eyes wearily at the memory. No, she was not the right person to scream at random bureaucrats for not protecting Alex Vause. Feeling depleted of righteous indignation, Piper answered the rest of the questions with mechanical efficiency. When the panel adjourned for the day, Piper greeted Berdie as she passed, "I am surprised to see you here."
"Well, the higher-ups have been re-evaluating most of the recent personnel decisions so I'm back. Just in time for...whatever this is supposed be," she said, waving her hands at the lawyers. "You doing okay, Chapman? I know that this must be a lot to handle."
Piper sighed, eyes glistening, "I am just glad that Alex isn't in max." Hearing her own words, she realized that Alex could be anywhere, and fresh panic surfaced. "At least, it doesn't seem like she would be sent to max, right? That asshole came here to KILL her. But why isn't she here? Where the fuck is she?" She was practically screaming at this point so Berdie grabbed Piper in a bear hug to pacify her.
Berdie spoke in a soothing tone, "Chapman, you need to RELAX before you end up back in the SHU. Don't jump to any conclusions. This whole thing sucks, but I can't discuss Vause's file with you. It's against protocol" At the same time, Piper felt Berdie slip a piece of paper into the pocket of her sweatshirt. Whispering in her ear, Berdie added, "If you ever want to talk about Vause...in private," she paused briefly, "you come to my office, and we can discuss things." Then Berdie let go of Piper and continued on her way, as if nothing had passed between them.
Clutching the note in her pocket, Piper jogged to her dorm as quickly as the guards would allow. Other inmates filled the halls, and she realized for the first time that the lockdown had ended. Finding the dorm mostly empty, she immediately unfolded the paper with trembling fingers. She recognized the handwriting.
Pipes,
I have no idea whether you even care at this point, but I want to let you know that I am safe. Finally. I am sorry that I can't say anything more specific. I keep trying to tell you that you don't want you to end up like me, and I hope that this shit storm finally convinces you. Please stay out of trouble.
Alex
When Piper finished reading, she dropped her head into her hands, letting the note flutter to the floor. She choked out sobs of relief. She could let Alex go knowing that she was protected. Piper's stomach still turned at the memory of how she had treated her girlfriend in those last weeks, but the guilt fueled her belief that Alex had finally gotten a chance for a real life, as long as she stayed far away from Litchfield.
As memories of the lockdown faded, the inmates fell back into the daily routines of life in prison. The executives at Whispers Inc. decided quietly that the sweat shop had become financially untenable due to the "unstable security environment" at Litchfield. Although the closure meant the abrupt demise of Piper's panty enterprise, she had lost her appetite for crime so she returned willingly to the tedium of electrical. After months of failing her girlfriend so completely, she wanted to honor Alex's last request: Piper was going to stay out of trouble. She owed Alex that much, at least.
...
By mid-afternoon, business had slowed to a crawl so Alex retreated to the storeroom to pack shipments for on-line orders. She heard the bell on the front door ring once, but she assumed that her boss could handle things up front. Within seconds, she could hear him engage a couple in conversation about their excellent taste in ceramics. She smirked at the familiar line and returned to the task at hand until she heard the bell ring again. Her boss was still occupied so, after putting the finishing touches on an outgoing package, she emerged from the back, ready for battle.
Her boss had already maneuvered the couple over to the expensive merchandise at the back of the store, leaving a single woman bent over the jewelry case near the entrance. While Alex could only see her from behind, she understood at once that this customer was no sagging baby boomer looking to unload some retirement savings. Her body was smooth and lean, with tanned limbs on full display in cut-offs and a white tank top. Of course, she was blonde, still Alex's preference and a perennial weakness. Not quite believing her amazing luck for the day, Alex slid herself beside the woman, leaning an elbow on the jewelry case as she purred, "See anything you like?"
The woman jerked up from the case at the sound of her voice, as if recoiling from an electric shock, and Alex found herself staring into the brilliant blue eyes of Piper Chapman. The surprise of the encounter immobilized both women instantly, and Alex took the brief opportunity to cycle through every possible emotion that could be ascribed to this moment. Unable to pick one, Alex just maintained her relaxed position against the counter, looking simultaneously awkward and oddly casual.
Piper whispered "Alex? Is it really you?". She reached her hands toward Alex's face, as if to touch her, and, just as suddenly, dropped her arms back to her sides. Alex remained locked in her rigid pose, and Piper responded by nervously shifting her weight from side to side, an old habit familiar to her ex. Piper raised her voice as she repeated, "Alex! Can you hear me?"
She was not quite yelling, but Alex could see her boss glance over briefly before continuing his sales pitch. Although Alex had no idea how to begin this conversation, she wanted desperately to avoid a commotion. She pushed herself up off the counter with considerable effort, and, once upright, she was able to really see Piper. Alex let out a defeated sigh as a subdued longing roared to life within her.
Still unsure of what to say, she struggled to form her words in a measured tone of voice. "Piper, this is truly fucking crazy, and I am sure that you have a lot of questions. I don't know how much you understand about my current situation, but I CANNOT talk to you about this right here, right now." Extending a finger toward the exit, she continued, "I can meet you right outside that door, after I get off work at six, and we can talk some more. Okay?" Alex stopped speaking as her thoughts clouded again with bewilderment. Now she could only point at the door.
Piper raised her hands in a sympathetic gesture of surrender. "Okay. I get it. I will come back when you are ready. I...I don't want to cause you any trouble." Alex slowly relaxed her outstretched arm as Piper made her way to the exit. Before disappearing through the door, Piper turned back to Alex and smiled tenderly, "It's good to see your face." Then she was gone.
Alex was staring at the door, muscles trembling from nerves, when another customer entered the store to wander amidst the vases. She did what any professional would do. She approached the man, introduced herself with a smile, and assured him that she would be back to assist him within moments. After securely locking herself into the bathroom, she leaned back against the wall to steady herself, at last allowing the tears to roll down her cheeks. Eventually, Alex rolled her gaze upward with a trace of a smile on her lips as she muttered, to nobody in particular, "Are you fucking kidding me?"
