The Check-In

“Watters, you gotta convince him, man.”

“I know,” I say, slipping into my worn-out running shoes.

“If you don’t, we’re all fucked.”

“I know, Tim.”

“And he has to make the decision. If the C.O. sends him, he’ll be back—”

“Jesus Christ, I know, Tim. He has to say he feels unsafe here. And that he can’t come back. It’s not my first day. Just let me go do this.”

“Sorry,” Tim says. He’s taller than me, skinny and lurchy, like a twelve-year-old who never outgrew his awkward phase. “I know this sucks for you. But I think of all the guys in this unit, you’ve got the best chance of convincing him.”

“I’m honored,” I reply sarcastically.

“He might actually listen to you.”

“He might. Then again, he might not.”

“Uh, Watters?”

“What is it, Tim?”

“You should probably put your boots on.”

I glare his way. “My boots? You gotta be fucking kidding me.”

“It’s more a statement than anything else. You’re going to be rolling right past those guys. Might as well show ‘em that you’re ready.”

“Even if I’m not?” I ask as I lace up my boots.

Tim sighs, because there’s nothing he can say. “A bunch of us will be around, right in the area. So if something goes down—”

“Just stop talking, Tim.”

“Alright, man. Go get ‘em. You’ll be great.”

“Tim, let me be very clear about something.” I finish tying up my boots and stand, feeling ridiculous that I’m wearing this cumbersome footwear. “No part of this is great. Not one single part.”

And before he can say another stupid thing that will just piss me off even more, I leave our cube, walking out into one of the two hallways that run the length of Echo Bravo unit, one of twelve units at Federal Correctional Institution Oakton, a low-security federal prison in rural Indiana. There are no cells here; everybody lives in a two-man ‘cube’ with five-feet high cinder block walls and an open doorway. Even when we’re locked down, we still have a decent amount of space to roam. The unit is about the length of a football field with one large TV room, four small TV rooms, a bathroom with showers, an ice machine room, and a laundry room. There’s even a small library stocked with enough books and magazines and board games to last a boring weekend.

I try to stroll casually down the corridor, but I know all eyes are on me. Even the guys who aren’t directly involved in this situation know what’s up. The unit is large, but news travels fast.

An inmate is never supposed to tell another inmate what to do. If you do, you’re ‘a cop.’ But sometimes, when an inmate won’t do what he is supposed to do, a guy like me will be sent into the trenches, not to bark orders or deliver instructions, but to convince. Difficult news is never easy to hear, but is easiest heard from friends.

Around the corner is a group of guys—all familiar faces, but hostile—loitering near one of the small TV rooms. Although I can’t see him, I know in that room is my best friend, Benny.

For the next four seconds, an unspoken dialogue occurs between us. These are all guys I’ve gotten along with because at a prison like this, guys like me and guys like them can be friendly. Friends, even. At this moment, however, we’re enemies. In an hour, we may be back to being friends…but now, we are not on the same side.

As they stare me down, I take a deep breath and turn to the officer’s station, a small office where the evening guard sits to do ‘work.’ Or something like that. I knock on the door, and without looking up from his computer, he waves me in.

“I need to get in that room,” I say. Might sound rude, but people here have no time for pleasantries.

“Why?” Still isn’t looking up from his computer.

“Because I need to get him to check in.”

“Is he not safe on the unit?”

I let out a frustrated sigh. “You know the answer to that.”

“Don’t worry about it.” His eyes are still locked onto the screen. YouTube, maybe. “I can get him to the hole. Don’t need you.”

“If you do it, he’ll be out of there in three days and right back here. In this unit. And then it’ll be worse.”

He shrugs. “I give a fuck?”

“Won’t you be working in three days?”

He finally looks in my direction. Not that I really care, but when you’re living in a closed environment, you can’t help but learn the shift rotations of the guards, which varies per unit. Today was the first day of his week, which meant that Benny would get out on his last day.

“In three days, you will be dealing with a shitstorm. I promise you that. This place is ready to blow. You won’t be spending your shift watching YouTube or betting on basketball or whatever the fuck it is you’re doing over there. You’ll be packing out half this unit.”

The C.O. judges me a moment. “Watters, right?”

“Yup.”

“You can convince him to check himself in?”

“I can.” This isn’t a lie—but it isn’t the truth, either.

“Because he really doesn’t want to go.”

“I know.”

“Keeps screaming about being set up or some bullshit like that.”

“I know.”

“Was he set up? Does someone have it out for him?”

I shake my head. “No. He fucked up. Let me get him out of here. It’ll be best for everyone.”

The C.O. thinks for another minute, eyes wandering the room before locking in with me again. “Okay. Fine. But if you can’t do this and I have to deal with bullshit in three days, it’s on you. You got me? I’ll put you in the hole just because I fucking feel like it.”

“Trust me,” I say. “If shit goes down in three days, you’re sending me anyway.”

It was never my intention to be friends with Benny. On the street, I was the dumb one in my friend group. The people I hung with had “Dr.” placed in front of their names or were working towards that end. I hate idle chit-chat, unavailing dialogue about the weather or what Taylor Swift’s new album might sound like. I would rather discuss the mystery theme of Elgar’s Enigma Variations or what one would see inside a black hole if one could survive the experience of passing the event horizon. And Benny just wasn’t that guy.

And I should have known this was going to happen. The first time I met him he was in my cube talking to Tim, the unofficial leader of our incarcerated demographic. Tim was giving him a rundown of the unit—which tables were okay to sit at in the TV room, which toilets in the bathroom were pissers and which ones were shitters. Tim’s most important declaration: We were all safe here. No one would attack any of us, unless we did something to draw the ire of one of the more dangerous groups on the compound.

At the end of Tim’s spiel, he asked Benny if he had any questions.

Benny did.

“Can you tell me where I can get some suboxone?”

In a vacuum environment like prison, making friends is light years easier than losing friends. I learned that the hard way when I arrived. At first, guys appear to be helpful and kind and altruistic—but then, after a while, they all want something in return. Something that someone like me—a criminal, not a convict—isn’t willing to do. And then there are problems. And problems in a vacuum are bad.

At first, I kept my distance from Benny, just as I kept my distance from any new guy who I wasn’t sure about.

I suppose I should say, I tried to keep my distance from Benny.

I didn’t understand why at the time, but Benny kept coming down to my cube. At first, I gave him one-word answers, brought up topics that I assumed would be over his head. But no matter what I threw at him, he appeared interested. Like he, too, had wondered what was on the other side of a black hole.

It only took a few days before I found myself looking forward to Benny’s visits. Perhaps because I found him attractive, despite my best intentions. Perhaps because he cracked me up, like the time he was explaining his Mexican heritage and declared himself the “sexiest anchor baby in all of America and Brooklyn.” Benny was just so Benny, and unapologetically so. He would often enter our cube by proclaiming, “I’m here, I’m queer, and I have no fear.” It made us all laugh, but the more I got to know him, the more I learned that statement wasn’t a joke. So many people say they don’t care what other people think, but Benny meant it.

And he loved his drugs. His favorite was the aforementioned suboxone, a medication used to ween addicts off heroin. They come in little strips that dissolve under the tongue. Sometimes Benny would mix a strip with warm water in a toothpaste cap, then snort it. Sometimes Benny would put the strip directly onto his eyeball, which I absolutely hated. He said it hurt, which, duh, and his eye would turn red and water up, and Benny would scoop up the overflow of tears with his fingers and drink them because waste not, want not, I guess.

And I went along with this whole production because I was fond of Benny. And I remembered how when the world found out what I did, I had people who stayed in my corner, who supported me despite the atrocities I had committed. And that saved me when I was at my lowest. And I hoped that one day I’d be able to pass that feeling on.

I would never support his drug habit, but I would be his friend. And for several months, this was our friendship. But his behaviors had worsened over the last several weeks, culminating with today. I should have known this would happen, should have seen the writing on the wall. But the chance of a real friendship in such a dreadful place was too much to pass up. Like everything else, relationships in prison were complicated.

The evening C.O. wordlessly unlocks the door to the small TV room that had been standing in as Benny’s temporary solitary confinement. As I enter, I feel the glares of the dozen or so Detroit guys who are lurking around the room, staring through the large windows like a gaggle of children on a field trip to the zoo. A few of them mutter something that I cannot hear nor understand.

“Ten minutes,” the guard says, locking the door behind me.

Benny turns my way, a far cry physically from the person who arrived at FCI Oakton only one year prior. A skeleton of his former self, dark circles round his eyes that seem as though they had lost their twinkle, their zest for life that had been there for as long as I’d known him. His skin is pale and clammy with perspiration, despite the cool temperature in this little room.

“Oh look,” Benny says, his voice sounding as though it was coming from somewhere far away. “It’s Jubas.”

“Judas,” I say.

“Don’t correct me, Agua,” he responds, a slight slur to his words. His eyes lazily drift down to my feet. “Why the fuck do you have your boots on?”

“Tim thought I should send a message.”

Benny rolls his eyes. “Fucking hail-belly.” This almost makes me laugh—Tim, who is from Arkansas, had uttered something particularly redneck one night, and Benny immediately shot back with “Fucking hillbilly.” Although with his slight accent and general inability to pronounce most vowels correctly, it came out as “hail-belly.”

“You know Tim.”

“So wha, you’re down here to fight these fuckers?” Benny asks.

“I don’t want to fight anybody.”

“This is so stupid. Like, how did this even start?”

“You stole from them.”

Benny gestures wildly with his hands, another sign of just how inebriated he is.

“One stupid-ass alarm clock!”

“Benny, it doesn’t matter if you stole one stupid-ass Kool-Aid packet. It’s the idea of what you did. We are the low men on the totem pole here and you stole something from the one gang at Oakton we’re not supposed to fuck with.”

He waves his hand dismissively in the direction of the dozen guys watching the fishbowl.

“They’re fucking pussies. They’re not going to do anything. No one here ever does anything.”

I sit down on the bleachers. “That’s a way of looking at it. But maybe you’re just a tool to remind everyone of the power they hold. That they’re not to be fucked with. They are going to retaliate, Benny. Whether it makes sense to any of us or not.”

“So wha? Are they gonna get me in my cube, Agua? Shank me in the showers?”

“I’m saying that if I were you, I wouldn’t find out. I’m saying that in their crew, there’s at least one guy who is willing to go to the hole, whose family will get a cool five hundred, even a grand for his time. A guy that has nothing to lose.”

“Okay,” Benny says, standing, pacing the room, facing away from me. “So whaddya want me to do? Give the alarm clock back?”

“I know you already sold it.”

“Apologize?”

“That’s not what they want.”

“Then wha do I do, Agua? You know everything—tell me.”

“You know what you need to do.”

He faces me again, and I discover why he’d turned away in the first place: Tears streak down his cheeks like brown rivers.

“No, I wanna fucking hear you say it,” he says, his voice choked with grief, like he’s doing everything he can to keep what he’s feeling deep down inside. “I wanna hear you say that you’re gonna throw me away for those fucking assholes. Like you and I aren’t friends.”

“Jesus, Benny,” I say, standing. I want so badly to put my hand on his shoulder, the side of his arm, to brush the tears away from his face. To hug him. “Is that what you think we’re doing?”

“It’s what you’re doing, Agua.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Say it. Fucking say it. Tell the person who would do anything for you what he’s supposed to do.”

I take another step closer to Benny, ensuring that my back was to the Detroit guys, lower my voice and say,

“Benny. I love you. I love you more than I could possibly explain right now. But you have to check in. So everything is equal. So they don’t retaliate against you or me or Tim or one of our guys. If you don’t, that is what they will do.”

Benny locks eyes with me, his pupils dilated, his right eye bloodshot. I know him well, and I can tell by the look on his face that I have won, that he’s going to do what I’ve asked him, what we all need him to do. But tragedy stains this victory, and I cannot experience the relief I know I should feel. Because I know he’s going to resent me for this. And I don’t know what will happen after. I am keeping myself and everyone like me in my unit safe, but I’m also probably throwing away one of the best friendships I’ve ever had…not just in prison, but in my life.

“I’m going to be in there for months,” he finally says, his voice cracked and broken.

“I know.”

“I won’t be able to visit with mi familia.”

“I know.”

“And when I do get out, they’re going to put me in another unit.”

“I know.”

“We’re not going to see each other like we do now.”

“I know.”

“They might even ship me. And we’d never see each other again.”

“I know. But what do you want me to do?”

“Be my friend, Agua,” he says, his voice rising in intensity. “Stand up for me. Don’t throw me away like I’m garbage.”

“You’re not garbage,” I say as a loud knock on the door reminds me of where I am. I turn and give the C.O. a ‘one minute’ gesture. “But you know I can’t do that for you.”

“So,” Benny says, an undercurrent of finality in that one syllable. “This is it? ¿No mas?”

I shake my head. “No mas.”

“Okay.” Benny wipes the tears from his face, gives me one last pleading look, then walks past me to the door, which I hear click open a second later.

“I need to check in,” Benny says from behind me.

“Do you not feel safe on the unit?” the C.O. asks.

“No. I do not.”

“Alright. Let’s go.”

I stand there for an indeterminate amount of time—a few seconds, a few minutes, who knows—until a firm hand lands on my shoulder, squeezes the muscle there. I’d flinch out of fear, but I am so drained of sensation and emotion, fear seems impossible.

“You did good, Watters.” The voice, deep and gravelly, belongs to Fats, head of the Detroit gang.

“Did I?” I scoff.

“You did was what needed for the greater good, which is always the most important thing.”

“Yeah.”

“And the peace will continue. Because of you.”

He’s right, of course. I’m a hero.

But all I can think of is the friend I’ve lost, and how I’d sacrifice everyone’s peace to have him back.

© 2026 R.N. Wolf

rnwolfwrites@gmail.com