It was community service or four years.
I took one look through the brochures, all grinning kids in wheelchairs painting sunshine and rainbows over graffiti-covered walls, and pushed them back across the hole in the glass. I'd do my time, I told them. I'd rather die than put up with that crap.
Then I was transferred to Mineral City Women's Correctional Facility.
After a few months, I was begging for the mural brushes and paint.
And so it was that I found myself on a one-way bus to some little shithole of a town out in the country. Apparently, the place had some kind of farmer's market that had seen better days. Not that that sort of crap mattered to me in the first place – I wasn't exactly the kind of yuppie material that fretted about buying organic and local. I was just an inmate ready to do her time on the prison farm.
I knew something was off when the mayor welcomed me with open arms.
"You must be Anita," he laughed. Either he was a better actor than any of the stiffs on the big screen or something was horribly wrong (for the warden, more than right for me) here. "Welcome to Zephyr Town. Our town has been in dire need of a farmer for some time."
What I found out (and the warden didn't know) was that this wasn't a prison farm. There had been some kind of communication snafu (unsurprising really, given that the only way the warden communicated with this bumpkin mayor was via snail mail). The DA was under the impression that I was going to be working two years of hard labor under close supervision; the mayor thought I was here as some sort of professional independent farmer.
In fact, I wasn't even going to be working for anybody. This farm – all two acres of it – was to be mine. I couldn't help but grin until my jaw felt like it was about to fall off (or that could have been the effects of last week's fistfight. You never could know with these things). I could just imagine how pissed the DA would be once he found out I received prime real estate in place of a sentence. There was some good money to be made out of this, I was sure.
So I shook the mayor's hand, courteously bit back my smart remarks about the suit that made him look like a tripped out leprechaun, and graciously accepted the farming implements given me. This was perfect, really perfect. I was sure I could dust up a tidy profit out of this place in the two years I was to be on probation. I would keep a low profile, wouldn't make any trouble (not that there would be much trouble to make in this sorry backcountry). And after two years, I'd have saved up enough for my ticket out of here and back into the big city.
With the plan in mind, I didn't lose any sleep that night after the mayor finished giving the grand tour of the place (which took all of half an hour - I wondered if the whole town had as many people as the block I used to operate on).
Funny, you would have figured that after three months in correctional, I'd have realized my plans didn't have a habit of working out in the long run.