There’s a man at the security check-in all the way down the hall, guarding a second barred door. He’s in his forties with a short, military-style haircut and wearing the same crisp blue uniform as the dead-eyed woman at the front desk. I looked down at the ID badge clipped to his breast pocket: Correctional Officer Steven Benton.

“Hi!” I say, in a voice that I realize is a little too chirpy, but I can’t help myself. “My name is Brooke Sullivan, and it’s my first day working here.”

Benton’s expression doesn’t shift as his dark eyes rake over me. I squirm as I rethink all the fashion choices I made this morning. Working in a men’s maximum-security prison, I figured it was better not to dress in a way that might be construed as suggestive. So I’m wearing a pair of boot-cut black dress pants, paired with a black button-up long-sleeved shirt. It’s almost eighty degrees out, one of the last hot days of the summer, and I’m regretting all the black, but it seemed like the way to call the least attention to myself. My dark hair is pinned back in a simple ponytail. The only makeup I have on is some concealer to hide the dark circles under my eyes, and a scrap of lipstick that’s almost the same color as my lips.

“Next time,” he says, “no high heels.”

“Oh!” I look down at my black pumps. Nobody gave me any guidance whatsoever on the dress code, much less the shoe code. “Well, they’re not very high. And they’re chunky—not sharp or anything. I really don’t think…”

My protests die on my lips as Benton stares at me. No high heels. Got it.

Benton runs my purse through a metal detector, and then I walk through a much larger one myself. I make a nervous joke about how it feels like I’m at the airport, but I’m getting the sense that this guy doesn’t like jokes too much. Next time, no high heels, no jokes.

“I’m supposed to meet Dorothy Kuntz,” I tell him. “She’s a nurse here.”

Benton grunts. “You a nurse too?”

“Nurse practitioner,” I correct him. “I’m going to be working at the clinic here.”

He raises an eyebrow at me. “Good luck with that.”

I’m not sure what that means exactly.

Benton presses a button, and again, that ear-shattering buzzing sound goes off, just before the second set of barred doors slides open. He directs me down a hallway to the medical ward of the prison. There’s a strange chemical smell in the hallway, and the fluorescent lights overhead keep flickering. With every step I take, I’m terrified that some prisoner will appear out of nowhere and bludgeon me to death with one of my high-heeled shoes.