Twenty minutes later a woman arrived. She looked to be in her early fifties. From the look on her face, Deborah thought she looked very angry. She walked straight toward Deborah. “Young lady, what do you have to say for yourself? How old are you?

Deborah blushed. “Umm, I…” She wasn’t about to tell this woman she was a death row inmate. She hoped the age question was rhetorical. She was thirty when the attack happened and she spent the last twelve years on death row, but she wasn’t going to tell her age in front of this stranger. “I’m too old to be having accidents,” she said.

She had to walk the walk of shame through the halls to the parking lot. She followed the woman outside toward the parking lot in silence. She kept her head down as she walked toward the car. As she walked she felt the poop slide around in her panties and against the inside of her leg.

“How could you disgrace yourself so badly?” said the woman. “I could imagine a first grader having an accident, but you? You’re eighteen years old and a senior. She led Deborah to a maroon Taurus and opened the passenger side door.

Deborah was about to get in, but the woman grabbed her by the arm. “Don’t sit down,” the woman said. She opened the back door. Deborah watched as the woman stripped the plastic off the dry cleaning laid in the back seat. She put the plastic on the passenger seat. “You can sit down now.”

Deborah sat. It felt disgusting enough to have poop in her pants, but when she sat down it was worse. The poop was soft enough that it squeezed into empty spaces inside her panties. Some felt like it moved to the front of her panties. She hoped it didn’t go inside her.

The woman got behind the wheel and they drove off. The only conversation was the woman berating the state of her underwear.

Deborah just ignored her and looked out the window. When she caught her badly angled reflection in the mirror she froze. Her wavy red hair was now dark brown and straight. Her face was now had the glow of youth. It wasn’t her face. She put her hand to her face and the reflection did the same. This wasn’t even her body.

She looked at the woman. Her coloration and looks were an older version of the reflection. “Mother?”

“What?” the woman said.

She didn’t know what to say. Was this how reincarnation worked? She didn’t think she was in Heaven or Hell. She didn’t know much about reincarnation, but she had thought reincarnated people start their new life at birth, not as an embarrassed teen in high school.

“What, Alison?” the woman, her mother repeated.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I’m sure you are,” her mother said. “You still are grounded. No TV and no computer beyond what you need for schoolwork, understand?”

Oh joy, do I really have to repeat this horrible part of growing up too? she thought. “How long?”

“For the rest of the week.”

That wasn’t too bad. “It’s Wednesday, right?”

“Yes,” her mother said and turned into a driveway.