The Story of Yi, Part 2.

When she was old enough, Yi was shown a different way to make money. She had to earn her keep, the adults insisted, and she had little more than her looks.

Luckily, people would pay a good amount of money for her looks, even if they were marred by a ruined eye and a permanent bruise.

Less luckily…no one had told Yi that was she was doing wasn’t legal. She didn’t know to ask the well-to-do gentleman whether or not they were officers, or to let them lead – to leave herself loopholes.

She was taken to prison, charged with prostitution, and no one came to bail her.

Yi couldn’t understand that. The police were wrong, to have arrested her; she was only doing as she was told, and trying to bring in enough money to make ends meet. Her arguments fell on deaf ears, and her pleas ignored entirely.

Her family was wrong, too; family didn’t let their own be locked behind bars, though when it came to living in a cell, there was no real difference to her home life that she could pinpoint. There was no privacy, always someone watching… Just like home.

In both places, she was powerless.

But here, there was one difference that it took some time for Yi to latch to. Before her was a world of ‘right’. There was no family, no love. Right and wrong, fair and unfair… Love was the divisive line between those concepts, and her perception of love had always been skewed.

Using the plastic cutlery from the dining hall, her cell mate’s ankles and wrists were cut through, tied by the hair to her bedpost. She was wrong, Yi had decided, to be looking at her with so much judgement and hate, when she had committed crimes not even for survival’s sake! She knew what her cellmate’s conviction was. Assault, against a former lover – low and disgusting.

Yi’s court date was set, and she was moved to solitary confinement…but even alone, she could feel herself being judged by those who were so much more wrong than she.

She could feel their eyes, permeating concrete walls.