Rules for Visiting Day
A Story About Prison, Secrets, and What Friends Don't Ask

About this book:

Ten-year-old Maya has a routine: clear plastic bags, exactly twenty dollars in quarters, no metal zippers, no lip balm, and a story rehearsed so often it feels like truth. Every Saturday, she and her mother drive two hours north to Crestview State Correctional Institute, where her father waits behind glass and steel. At school, she tells Sophia they're visiting an uncle's farm upstate—cows, quiet, a long drive. But the lies are getting heavier, and Sophia is asking questions Maya can't answer without breaking the one rule her mother insists on: *don't bring the outside in, and don't take this place home.*

In the visiting room, time is measured in vending machine quarters and the seconds before a guard says "that's it." At recess, it's measured in gummi worms and the distance between a chain-link fence and the razor wire Maya sees in her dreams. As the months stretch toward a parole hearing that might change everything, Maya navigates the widening gap between the girl who knows the sound of a sliding security gate and the friend who thinks a farm can be quiet. The wall she's built in her head is cracking—and the truth is pressing against it from both sides.

*Rules for Visiting Day* is a tender, unflinching portrait of a childhood shaped by incarceration, the secrets children carry to protect the people they love, and the quiet courage it takes to finally say: *this is where my father is. This is who I am.*