Amy pushed open the door to the last stall. It was cleaner than the rest, or at least less filthy. Toilet paper in the dispenser. No visible human waste. That was a start. “What about this one?” Amy asked her daughter.

Dakota took a few tentative steps up behind her and peered into the toilet bowl. “There’s something in there,” she said, pointing limply to the pale pink water in the bowl.

Amy didn’t have time to explain to her daughter the effect of beets on pee. “Just flush it,” Amy said. She turned and walked over to the row of white sinks and waited. She heard the toilet flush and felt a little bit of the tension bleed from her shoulders. They would be on the road soon. Erik’s sister would have wine waiting. Erik’s sister always had wine waiting.

“Mom?” Amy heard her daughter ask.

What now?

Amy turned and saw her daughter standing in the stall, the metal door swung open. Dakota’s face was white, blank, her hands balled into fists. The toilet was overflowing, water spilling over the lid onto the floor, forming a puddle that seemed to almost have a tide. Only there was something in the water. It swirled with veins of red. It looked almost menstrual. And for a second Amy thought, Did Dakota get her period?

The bloody water streaked down along the outside of the white toilet bowl, onto the floor, under Dakota’s sneakers, and toward where Amy stood frozen. There was something in the toilet, something that had bobbed to the surface and now sat at rim level. A piece of something raw. Flesh. Like some maniac had skinned and drowned a rat. It sat on the edge of the bowl for a moment and then slopped onto the floor and slid forward, skimming Dakota’s sneaker and disappearing under the next stall.

Dakota shrieked and scrambled forward out of the stall into Amy’s arms, not even looking back when her iPod slipped from her hands and landed at the base of the toilet with a deadening splash.

Amy forced herself to swallow the warm saliva that rose in her throat, marshaling her will not to gag. It wasn’t a rat. It was definitely not a rat.

“Mom?” Dakota said.

“Yes?” Amy whispered. The iPod was still playing. Amy could hear some tinny pop song coming out of the half-submerged white earbuds. Then, just like that, it stopped.

“I don’t have to go to the bathroom anymore,” Dakota said.

C H A P T E R 2