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Shit while Bonnieopened a soft drink labelled “Freedom of Choice: Big Gulp Brand” and topped up her bottle. The four of us joined the line of visitors waiting to be buzzed in the front gate at one o’clock.
    “It’s busy today,” Thurma said. “A lot of people come when there’s a social. The food’s good. Better than those machines in the visiting room.”
    I eavesdropped while we waited: one woman bragged she’d been partying all week because a judge had reduced her husband’s sentence to two “lifes” instead of four.
    “Don’t say fuck. You’re not old enough to say fuck,” another admonished her adolescent son; her younger one, in a stroller, kept pointing at the razor-wire glinting in the sun, saying, “Pri-ttee, pritt-ee, pri-ttee.”
    Two bikers joined the end of the line and talked about a party over the weekend at Scutz Falls. One of them kept leering at Carmen, the other, wearing a T-shirt that said, “I May Not Go Down in History, But I May Go Down on Your Daughter,” asked Bonnie how old the baby was.
    “Old enough to know better,” said Bonnie.
    Carmen ignored the bikers and explained the visiting procedure to me in Spanish. Some guards would let visitors in early, give them time to store their purses or wallets in a locker and be scanned by the metal detectors, but there were others, like the one on duty today, she said—the one she’d nicknamed Roll-Over—who believed rules were not meant for bending. Sure enough, it wasn’t until one o’clock sharp that Roll-Over rose with a yawn, belched, stretched, adjusted the thin belt that held his fat belly from sagging any further and buzzed us in.
    I let Bonnie and Baby go ahead of me in the line because I needed to use a washroom, but both the men’s and the ladies’ in the identification area had out-of-order signs on the doors.
    “It’s to prevent you from flushing anything at the last minute, in case they decide to search you,” Carmen explained.
    I watched Bonnie walk through the metal detector, and then saw Roll-Over pointing her towards a door marked No Entry Staff Only.
    “It’s because of that Treat,” Thurma said when I asked what was happening. Bonnie was about to be “skin-searched,” she said, which meant she’d have to take off all her clothes, squat over a mirror and cough. If the man you were visiting had been causing problems inside, or was a gang member like Treat, you would more than likely be subjected to an internal search.
    “They know she ain’t packing,” said Thurma. “It’s a humiliation score. They hurt you, it hurt your old man more. That’s the way they play it around here. You can tell who’s been stirring up shit inside by who gets to squat, spread their cheeks and crack a smile out here. They do it to her every time.”
    Suddenly I had an urge to flee from this place, from the company of these women for whom life meant stealing cars, squatting over mirrors, swallowing uppers and downers by the fistful, wiping their baby’s noses with Popsicle wrappings: I felt, as my mother would say, out of my element.
    “Whom are you here to see?” Roll-Over asked when it came my turn to sign in.
    “Angel Corazón,” I said, scribbling my name. I wrote “None” beside the space reserved for “Relationship to Visitor”.
    Roll-Over’s fat eyes glanced from the visitor’s book to his computer and back again. I crossed out “None” and wrote “Friend’s husband’s brother,” but this still didn’t seem to satisfy him. When I said this was my first visit, a wary smile cut into his face like a knife mark in bread dough waiting to be punched down. He asked me to remove my jewellery and said I’d have to leave my comb in a locker (the sharp end, he said, could be used as a weapon). After I walked through the metal detector, he tugged at my hair to make sure I wasn’t wearing a wig and asked me to remove my footwear (his fancy word for shoes), which he bent back and forth to make sure nothing