I can feel the look she’s giving me, and I smile to let her know I’m kidding. Sort of.
She sighs. “Marco was my…Well, when I moved here last year, he was my boyfriend, so I sort of fell in with that group. But it was more just like they kept me around because they had to. Now that Marco and I aren’t together…”
I try not to scrunch my nose, picturing her with Marco. “The skinny, sullen-looking one?”
She smiles. “I guess. Well, compared to Sutton and Lydia, at least. To be fair, everyone looks sullen compared to Sutton.”
I grunt. That probably sounded sullen.
“How do you know Sutton, anyway?” she asks.
“Baseball.”
I feel her looking at the side of my face, then her eyes trailing down my neck to my arm. I try not to fidget. “Makes sense,” she says.
“Are you saying I look like a baseball player?” I smile and peer over at her from the corner of my eye, but she looks away, out the window.
“I’m saying you move sort of like Sutton.”
I scoff. That hair. The expression. The mannerisms.
“It’s hard to explain,” she says.
I’m about to make a comment about what she moves like (a ghost, something fast, something I feel like I’m trying to catch, but that slips from your grip just when you think you have it), when her phone directs me to the exit.
“Finally,” I say. But Kennedy has gone uncharacteristically silent.
Her phone directs me through three more turns, and the road becomes wide and deserted at the same time. I hit the brake when I see the sign up ahead, just stop dead in the middle of the road for a second—and I’m glad there’s no one behind us.
Then I veer off to the shoulder and put the car in park. The engine rumbles underneath our seats, but she doesn’t say anything. I stare at her until she looks my way. “What are we doing here?” I ask.
“You promised, no questions.”
“Well, I changed my mind. I’m not going any farther until you tell me what we’re doing here.”
She stares at me like she’s daring me to look away first, but I don’t. “Pretty sure you already know the answer to that,” she says.
I frown, because she’s right. Out the front window, the sign on the side of the road says PINEVIEW REGIONAL DETENTION CENTER. I put the car in drive again, because of course I know exactly what we’re doing here. And I don’t know how to tell her this is a terrible idea. I’m sure she knows that.
It is. For the record. An absolutely terrible idea.
I pull the car into the lot beside the high metal chain fence, facing the large concrete building beyond. The sun feels especially brutal out here, amid the area cleared of trees, with nothing but metal, pavement, and dirty concrete. We walk to the entrance, and the security guard at the gate looks us both over.
“You don’t have to come in,” she says, but I follow her anyway.
At the gate, we’re instructed to leave our phones and keys, so I turn my cell off before leaving it in a locker. We don’t speak. Not during this part, and not when we walk through a metal detector on the way to the registration area. And not while she’s standing in line.
There’s a line of people in front of us, and another group waiting to be let inside, and I start to get a really bad feeling.
I want to tell her to forget this, offer to take her somewhere else, anywhere but here. But before I know it, we’re at the front of the line, and she hands over her ID.
“Inmate’s name?” the woman behind the plastic window asks, without even looking up.
“Elliot Jones,” she says.
The woman looks up from her computer screen and shakes her head. She looks way too friendly to be working here, asking for inmate names all day, from behind a plastic shield. “You’re not on the list.”
“I’m his sister,” I say. “Family.” I point to the ID so she sees the name. Last name Jones.
Her face softens even more. “I know, honey.” She pivots the computer screen my way so I can see. There’s a column of approved names: I see his lawyer’s name and Joe’s name, not that Joe has ever visited, to my knowledge. And then a column marked Unapproved. There’s only one name on it. She taps her purple fingernail against the screen. “There’s a note here, with your name. It says, specifically, you’re not approved.”
My teeth grind together, and I can feel the people behind me in line growing restless. “Who would do that?” I ask, thinking of Joe. Or Elliot’s lawyer. The police. “Let me talk to someone—”
She shakes her head. “It won’t help. Also, darling, you can’t come in regardless without a guardian present. You’re a minor.”
“A guardian.” I almost laugh. “That’s him.” I point to the computer screen. I have no guardian anymore, not one that counts. Technically, Joe is the person to put on the school forms, and he can probably claim me as a tax deduction or something. But my true guardians are either dead or locked up behind that wall. Elliot, at eighteen, should be my legal guardian.
“I’m sorry, I can’t help you,” she says, already looking behind me, to the next person.
I pull the envelope out of my pocket, the one with the readout from the radio telescope inside. The thing, I’m sure, only he can decipher. “Can I get this to him? Please. He won’t…” Call, accept my letters, anything. I need him to see this. To tell me what it means. He built it; he would know.
She seems to be debating something, and it’s awful, the hope that precedes her words. “No, Ms. Jones. The inmates set this list.” She waits for me to understand, and when it seems I haven’t gotten the point yet, she lets out a sigh. “This list, this decision, is from him.”
I shake my head, not understanding. Elliot won’t see me? Elliot won’t let me visit? Not the lawyers, or Joe, but Elliot? Elliot, who never acted like I was a pain in his butt, even when I so obviously was. I don’t understand. I need him to give me answers.
Suddenly I feel a hand at my elbow. A voice at my ear. “Come on,” he says. It’s Nolan, beside me, the line of people growing louder behind us. They’re completely unsympathetic to my cause, and I get it, I do. Look where we are; everyone’s got a problem. We’re at a jail. They’re probably immune to scenes like this. To people like me.
He leads me back into the sunlight, against the barren landscape. I hold the paper out to him so he understands. “He built it. The satellite dish. The computer program. He’ll know what it means.”
Nolan frowns. “Can’t you email or something?”
I feel my jaw clenching. “He doesn’t have email. He doesn’t use the phone. I don’t know if my letters get to him.” I used to send them, but eventually they were returned, unopened. I didn’t understand. I don’t understand.
The lawyers, Joe, none of them would let me see him. I thought it was because of them. Or because I’m working with the district attorney. For the facts. Just the facts. That’s what I told them. When his lawyer starts in on cross-examination, I’ll be able to tell them there must be another explanation. Elliot, who had never hurt anyone in his life, not even me. Elliot, who once tried to help me clean a cut on my knee (a slip off the railing, the first time I tried to sneak out), and who almost got sick just from looking at it. Mom called me her wild one, which made Elliot the stable one, the reliable one.
Elliot with his prints on the gun; Elliot, covered in blood. Elliot, running from the house, running away.
My nails dig into my palms.
“Maybe there’s someone else who would understand…,” Nolan says.
But I shake my head. “When Lydia looked at the program, she said something about the date,” I explain. “The date the program began.”
“What date?” Nolan asks.
“December fourth,” I say, and I stare at him until I see the information process.
December fourth. Before. After. The split in my life, in the universe.
Something happened then. Elliot Jones was not himself.
“Don’t you see? This signal has to be some sort of warning. Something happened that night,” I explain. “Something dangerous.”
He’s shaking his head, but then he stops. He looks me over carefully.
“You see, don’t you?” I ask, but he seems to be somewhere else. I can tell from his expression, though—he does. He must.
December fourth. The day, according to the papers, that Elliot Jones killed his mother and his mother’s boyfriend, and then ran; schools remained closed in both their county and ours, for safety, until he was found the next day.
The story was this: Elliot’s mother and her boyfriend, Will Sterling, another professor at the college, were at some holiday event. Something happened when they came back to the house after midnight. The daughter—Kennedy, arriving home, sneaking back inside—saw Elliot running from the house. And then she found the bodies on the stairs.