The second man turns on the spray full blast. It’s freezing water, soaking my hair and my skin and taking my breath away.

I gasp and try to curl away like an animal. I can barely breathe. One shock after the next.

I’m an animal to them. A piece of meat. I shiver so hard I know there’s another word for it—convulsion, I think, but the next frigid blast makes me forget.

I can only pray and try not to think about what’s next. When the hose is off I cover what I can of myself and hope it’s over.

“A towel, please,” I beg. I can’t even hug my arms around myself because of the cuffs.

A woman’s voice answers. I didn’t see her come into the room, but she’s there in front of me, her lips pinched with disgust.

Tall. Her long, dark hair finished with a sweep of hair spray to give it volume. Her eyes are light blue and narrowed behind thin rimmed spectacles. She wears heels that click and echo in the room even though I can’t see them, her wide legged black pants are so long they nearly touch the floor.

I want to plead with her to help me, but I can’t make my voice work. My words are caught in my throat from the way she looks at me.

“No towel. You’ll have to earn it,” the woman tells me. There’s no kindness in her eyes. Nothing but blank, dead emptiness. She doesn’t see me as a person.

I’m not a person here.

I hug myself as best I can. My bones feel like they’ll snap. Fear tightens around my lungs, letting me breathe only in sharp, shallow gasps.

She drags me to another room with the same rough concrete floor. My toes are numb, barely feeling the cold beneath them. She flips on a light—a flickering fluorescent light, too bright. On the side of the wall, there’s a mirror. The woman’s hand on my arm digs in hard enough to bruise. There are boys in the other room beyond the mirror. Her hand is at my wrist. She releases the cuffs from my wrists, and when I open my mouth, I open my mouth to scream for help.

I can’t catch my breath. I can’t scream. Even if I did, who would hear me?

When I raise my hand to my mouth to cover my sob, the woman yanks it back down and shoves me into the seat attached to a narrow desk.

The desk is the first thing I’ve seen that belongs in a school. It reminds me of the desks in my homeroom last year. I never thought of those desks as something normal.

This one isn’t normal. It’s the only desk in the room, and it faces the one-way mirror.