“Excuse me, Mr. Corrections Officer, I really need to go to the bathroom,” LaDonna insisted. “And it’s not just number one!”
“That explains the nasty-ass smell back here,” Eve said.
“Squeeze your cheeks together, ladies,” said Poff. “We’re making a scheduled stop, and we’re almost there.”
Ten minutes later, they pulled up to a small sheriff substation, where they were unloaded from the van at gunpoint so they could shuffle into a restroom on the side of the building. Poff watched them closely as Vozenilek—which Cara could now read on his name tag—took the keys from his belt, unlocked each woman’s right wrist, and quickly locked them into a windowless bathroom with a single toilet and an eye-watering smell of ammonia.
“Transport bathroom breaks are the worst,” Eve said resignedly.
“Dibs,” LaDonna said.
As Eve provided a free hand to help with the buttons on LaDonna’s jumpsuit, Cara turned away to give them privacy.
“Don’t worry, Goldie, you’ll get used to it,” LaDonna said.
Cara doubted that, especially as LaDonna began to loudly and unselfconsciously empty her bowels. She thought longingly of the TOTO bidet toilet with the heated seat in the primary bathroom of what used to be her home. Did state prison toilets even have seats, or were they all filthy, metal, wall-mounted horrors like those in processing?
After LaDonna flushed, Eve sat and pooped as well.
“Your turn,” she told Cara when she was done.
“I don’t think I need to go.”
LaDonna washed and rinsed in the rust-ringed sink using what was possibly the last powdered-soap dispenser in existence. “No telling how long it’ll be before we get there and how long they’ll make you wait once we do. Do yourself a favor and force out whatever you can.”
Neither woman had squatted or put toilet paper on the seat, so Cara didn’t either, not wanting to give them more fodder for their make-believe reality show. She tried not to think about the superbugs hitching a ride as she popped the snaps on her jumpsuit and sat directly on the seat—something she had never done before on any public toilet.
Concentrating all of her willpower, she produced a small trickle of pee.
“This reminds me,” Eve said. “We’ve gotta do an episode on going to the bathroom in prison.”
“And the brutal constipation Goldie is going to have until she learns to poop on command!”
Cara wasn’t about to tell them how hard it had been even while sequestered, due to her notoriety, in her own cell.
The two of them laughed their heads off until they were interrupted by the rap of a gun butt on the door.
“Let’s go. Now!”
Back in the van, she discovered they’d been joined by a fourth transportee, a rail-thin girl with bleached-white hair, acne scars, and a sullen expression. She had taken LaDonna’s first-row seat on the driver’s side.
“She’s even whiter than you, Goldie,” cracked LaDonna as she took the empty bench across from Cara and behind Eve.
“She can play your assistant on the show,” Eve added.
The new arrival didn’t ask what they were talking about. Cara noted that LaDonna hadn’t reacted at all to losing her seat—apparently, there was no pecking order in transport-van seating.
They turned onto a side road and quickly slowed to a crawl. For the first time in her life, Cara was thankful to be in bumper-to-bumper, destiny-delaying traffic. From her cage, she saw the cars ahead of them making U-turns. When the van reached a roadblock where two sheriff’s deputies were directing traffic, Poff pounded the steering wheel in frustration and then rolled down his window.
“Where are you headed?” asked the nearest deputy.
“Chowchilla,” said Poff. “These ladies have a date with the warden. We just need to get back to 99.”
“Cal Fire just closed this road due to a brushfire. You’ll need to keep going up 41.”
“Highway 41? That adds?—”
“A hundred miles,” groaned Vozenilek.
