“Honey, just keep thinking about putting one foot in front of the other. It’ll be easier that way, trust me.”
She walks me down a hallway. I keep my chin up. I don’t know why. There’s no one here to put on a face for. But four years of training are hard to shake.
In booking, a man takes my mugshot. “Look at the line. Now to your left. Now to your right.” Click-click, boom—just like that, I’m in the system.
A second officer rolls each of my fingers in turn across a glass scanner. The pads of my fingers are still dark with whatever they put on me for the GSR swab, and I notice that the scanner has trouble with the right index, the trigger finger, so much so that he has to do it twice. I watch the screen flash green on the second try and feel something turn over inside me, a slow, awful fl
