The metal band around Susan Mitchell's neck dug into her skin. She should have known when the metal shop students had fashioned the metal yoke last week that it would not have been for a one-time-only use. Susan's fellow cheerleader Kylie had positioned it around the young woman's neck that morning, securing it tightly with a thick padlock. But she had not placed Susan's wrists through the loops at the end of the yoke. Instead she had just handcuffed the girl's wrists behind her back, meaning the metal yoke rested on her bare shoulders. Then Kylie had fastened Susan's ankles together with a short metal spreader bar.
Susan didn't understand the purpose of the yoke until Kylie came back with a pair of metal pails she had procured from one of the school's janitors. She locked each pail onto the ends of the yoke where Susan's hands had been locked last week. The pails rocked back and forth as Susan balanced them on the ends of the yoke.
Then Kylie attached a piece of garden hose from the sink in Susan's concrete cell. She turned on the water and began filling each of the buckets to the brim with water, weighing down the ends of the yoke and putting strain on Susan's neck.
"Ok, your task this morning is simple," Kylie said. "You need to carry five gallons of water from here to the girl's locker room. There is a big tub there you need to fill up. I'll be waiting here to refill you."
Susan thought the task sounded anything but simple, but she slowly tottered her way out of the room. She had to shuffle sideways to get through the open door, water sloshing out of the buckets as she moved. Slowly she moved her feet as much as she could with the spreader bar between them and made her way down the main hallway. She soon discovered sliding her feet rather than picking them up meant she would spill less water. The yoke was heavy by itself and the water made it even heavier around her slender neck so she was trying to be as careful as she could.
It was a long laborious walk down the long hallway from her cell to the women's locker room. She couldn't really see the level of water in the buckets but she knew she had lost a good bit. She finally arrived at the locker room and saw a five gallon tub in the middle of room. She walked up to it and tried to determine how she could get the water from the buckets to the tub as it was not wide enough for both buckets. She turned sideways and placed one bucket over the tub and bent forward. The water spilled out into the tub, but the other bucket emptied onto the floor instead of into its target. Susan groaned because she knew this meant more trips would be needed to fill up the tub. Susan thought for a minute about filling up one of the buckets from the sink, but figured Krutz was watching on a camera somewhere so she started her slow shuffling walk back to her cell for a refill.
Kylie was waiting when Susan returned. She had a bored look on her face. "Would you please hurry this up? I am not going to stand around here all day."
Susan wouldn't think of talking back to Krutz, but decided to speak her mind to Kylie. "What you like me to do, your highness?" Susan retorted. "I can only move so fast with my ankles bound like this, and I can't use my hands to dump out the water, so you may want to get comfortable. This is going to take all day."