“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.
When I turn left at the end of the hallway, a woman is waiting for me. She is roughly in her sixties, with close-cropped gray hair and a sturdy build—there’s something vaguely familiar about her, but I can’t put my finger on what it is. Unlike the guards, she’s dressed in a pair of navy blue scrubs. Like everyone else I’ve met so far at this prison, she isn’t smiling. I wonder if it’s against the rules here. I should check my contract. Employees may be terminated for smiling.
“Brooke Sullivan?” she asks in a clipped voice that’s deeper than I would have expected.
“That’s right. You’re Dorothy?”
Much like the guard at the front, she looks me up and down. And much like him, she looks utterly disappointed by what she sees. “No high heels,” she tells me.
“I know. I—”
“If you know, why did you wear them?”
“I mean…” My face burns. “I know now.”
She reluctantly accepts this answer and decides not to force me to spend my orientation barefoot. She waves a hand, and I obediently trot after her down the hallway. The whole outside of the medical ward has the same chemical smell as the rest of the prison and the same flickering fluorescent lights. There’s a set of plastic chairs lined up against the wall, but they’re empty. She wrenches open the door of one of the rooms.
“This will be your exam room,” she tells me.
I peer inside. The room is about half the size of the ones at the urgent care clinic where I used to work in Queens. But other than that, it looks the same. An examining table in the center of the room, a stool for me to sit on, and a small desk.
“Will I have an office?” I ask.
Dorothy shakes her head. “There’s a desk in there. Don’t you see it?”
So I’m supposed to document with the patients looking over my shoulder? “What about a computer?”
“Medical records are all on paper.”
I am stunned to hear that. I’ve never worked in a place with paper medical records. I didn’t even know it was allowed anymore. But I suppose the rules are a little different in prison.
She points to a room next to the examining room. “That’s the records room. Your ID badge will open it up. We’ll get you one of those before you leave.”