“You unnerstand the rules?” the corrections officer said to me in a bored and rapid voice, as she unlocked the door leading to the exercise yard. “No touching. No walking around. Stay seated. No foul language or aggressive behavior. No passing anything. You pass anything at all, we got to do the whole search thing again, and that means full search for her. You unnerstand?”
I did. Cavity. I wasn’t sure what they were so afraid I might hand to Elana. They’d already taken my jacket and checked my shoes and socks and patted me down and given me a swipe with the metal detector wand. She wasn’t a damn serial killer. I also understood the rest of the rules. The guards had run through them twice already, pointing to a plastic board with the same instructions printed on it in big red letters, like the NO RUNNING NO SPLASHING NO DIVING rules at public swimming pools. I guessed Sultan County Detention was used to dealing with morons on both sides of the fence.
The exercise yard was smaller than I had expected. Just a rectangle, half cement and half mangy grass, inside the twelve-foot chain-link. Picnic tables with benches on either side took up the part of the cement ground nearest the door. Some of the tables were already occupied with inmates and their families.
“There,” the C.O. said, pointing to an empty table. I sat. The table and benches were made of the same hard plastic as playground equipment, molded and painted to mimic wood. All the pieces were bolted to the cement.
The guard left, but other C.O.s stood around the tables, not quite out of earshot. The families talked low. Very low. If I tried, I could hear a girl, maybe the inmate’s younger sister, weeping at the next table over.
A different door opened, farther down the windowless wall of the center, and the guard came out, leading Elana. Not every juvie institution made their inmates wear standard issue, but Sultan did. Elana wore a white T-shirt and rust-colored scrub pants. The day was too warm for her to need the matching long-sleeved V-neck I saw on other inmates, with SCD JUVENILE RESIDENT emblazoned on the back.
She looked around, spotted me, and walked toward the table without being prompted. Her brown hair hung loose to her shoulders. No headbands allowed in detention. They hindered searches.
Elana looked pretty much the same as the last time I’d seen her, except for the shorter hair. Same high cheekbones and slightly tilted eyes. Her wide mouth was set in a straight line.
She sat down and looked at me.
“I thought you would be Willard,” she said. “The guards just say there’s a visitor.”
“I’m your stepbrother, today.”
“Why?”
I spread my hands. “To see how you’re doing. They wouldn’t let other people except Willard come here for a long time.”
“No visitors except primary care, first six months,” she said, like a recitation. “It’s a privilege. Which I lost before I even had it, so that added another three months.”
There had been problems, I knew that much, even if Willard was close-mouthed with Dono, and Dono similarly curt with me where Elana was concerned.
“What happened?” I said.
“Fights. You have to fight here. There are gangs.”
“Three months to just get the privilege back, or—?”
“Three months added time for the fighting. Plus for some other things.” She didn’t elaborate.
I asked, even though I dreaded the answer. “How much time?”
Elana scowled at me. “I’m not mad at you. Don’t get all guilty.”
I realized what it was about her that looked a little different. Motion. She didn’t fidget anymore.
“I should have stepped up,” I said. “Told the cops what happened.”
“Then you’d be an idiot. I’d still be here, and you’d be on the other side of this building with the boys. Or maybe doing time in Monroe.”
“You’d have gotten a lighter sentence. Maybe none at all if I could’ve convinced them you weren’t in on it.”
“And you would have had to give up Dono. Uncle Willard explained everything.” Her voice was bitter.
At the next table, the family with the weeping young girl was led away by one of the guards. The inmate had already left, but the girl kept crying anyway. Nobody paid any attention.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Elana shrugged. “It’s done. Another fourteen months and I’ll be out. I’ll have my GED by then. I can get my driver’s license in here, too.”
Fourteen months. Christ. Almost two years in all. That was more time than Dono had served in County when I was a kid.
“You’re okay? You’re safe?”
“Tell me about Watson instead,” she said. “It’s boring without news.”
So I told her some of the stories from senior year. Mostly tests I had muffed and parties that had been lame, trying not to make anything sound like too much fun. Elana listened and made a few of the right expressions in the right places. When there was three minutes left in our allotted half hour, I stopped right in the middle of a tale about Rob Firmino and his buddies filling lockers with water balloons. We were silent for a moment.
“What do you need?” I said. “When you get out?”
“When I get out, I’m going to pick a direction and drive away. For a while, at least.” Her feline eyes looked at me. “You can resist the urge to visit me here. That’s what you can do.”
“The County says you get an allowance to spend. I could—”
“I don’t want to see you again,” she said. She stood up and the C.O. started to walk over to our table.
“Elana.”
“All done?” said the guard.
“Done,” Elana answered. The guard nodded and headed for the exterior door. Elana took a step or two backward in the same direction.
“Call it my present,” she said to me, before she turned and followed. “I just had a birthday.”