The house at the address Kennedy sent me is a sharp contrast to the Jones House. I should probably stop calling it, capital letter, implied italics, the Jones House. But that’s how it was introduced to me, like something haunted, a landmark from which ghosts and stories originate in equal measure. It’s not that large but looks larger rising up out of the center of a huge field. And it’s distinctive, with a wide porch and wooden steps and this feeling it’s missing a pack of farm animals or something.
In contrast, this house I’ve just pulled the car up to is a small ranch, set in a row of near-identical ranches, mere feet apart from one another. They differ from one another only in the color, or the presence or absence of a fence. But really it just looks like someone stuck a row of Monopoly houses down and called it a day.
The address is displayed on the mailbox, sticker numbers pasted on. At one time I’m guessing the siding on the house was blue, but it’s faded to a worn gray, lighter in some sections than others. And no one seems to give two craps about the yard.
She hasn’t answered my texts.
I’m here.
Outside your house.
Still outside your house.
I decide this is almost as creepy as telling her I’m texting her from inside her house. So eventually I get out of the car and ring the bell.
There’s a flurry of footsteps from the other side, and a man opens the door. I see Kennedy racing behind him; the look on her face one of oh crap. The man is about my height, with Kennedy’s coloring—dark hair, sort of messy—but his eyes are blue to her brown. He’s looking me over in a way that makes me uncomfortable, like he’s assessing me for danger. And Kennedy looks between us like she wishes one of us weren’t standing in this doorway, and I’m not sure which of us that is.
“Um,” I say, looking at my phone, “I thought…” Because I can’t figure out who this guy is, and whether I should pretend I have the wrong address.
“No, sorry, my fault,” she says, elbowing the guy aside so he’s no longer taking up the entire doorway. “I told you I had plans,” she says to him, looking at the side of his face.
But he hasn’t taken his eyes off me. “What kind of plans?” he asks.
“The studying kind,” I say, on instinct, which is my go-to answer to my parents, and from the look of relief on Kennedy’s face, it seems like the right answer in this situation, too.
“Joe, this is my friend. Nolan,” she says, smiling, like she’s only just remembered my real name. “Nolan, my uncle, Joe.”
Joe nods, but he doesn’t extend his hand. Instead, he looks at Kennedy with one eyebrow raised. “I know, I know,” she says, fake-smiling, “two friends in less than twenty-four hours, must be some sort of record, right?”
“Kennedy…,” he warns.
But she sidesteps. “What? Is this because he’s a guy? I know you said no boys, I know. But I didn’t think that was an across-the-board rule. Not that I couldn’t study with someone who happened to have a Y chromosome. I thought you just meant, like, no boys in your house? As in, italics, no boys.”
I’m trying not to smile, watching this exchange. Her whole face changes when she talks to him, and she moves her hands to accentuate her points.
Her uncle—it feels weird thinking that, since he can’t be that much older than us—has turned almost scarlet by now. She stares up at him, and he stares back, and it’s like watching the most passive-aggressive game of chicken in history.
When Joe doesn’t answer, she puts a hand out in my direction, in the universal stop signal. “Nolan, to be safe, please keep both feet on the other side of the doorway.”
Joe cracks the slightest smile then, and he opens the door wider. “Take your phone,” he says as she disappears down the hall, presumably to get her things.
When she’s gone, his expression turns serious again. “Nolan what?” he says, like he’s planning to run a background check on me.
“Chandler,” I say. “Sir.”
He almost laughs.
She breezes back out again, just as quick. “Bye, Joe,” she says.
“And answer it if I call you, please.”
“I will!” she calls over her shoulder.
“The library closes at eight!” he yells as she’s getting into the car. “I expect you back here at quarter after!”
She slides into the passenger seat of my car and closes the door like it’s her own, and she’s smiling so wide at something Joe said, but I don’t even get it. She gives him the thumbs-up as he watches us drive away.
She rubs her hands together and looks at the clock on the dashboard and says, “We’d better hurry. We don’t have much time.”
I’m going about five miles per hour, inching down the street. “Um, I know you said no questions, but it would help if I knew where to turn.”
“Ha, yeah, that would help. Sorry.” She holds up her phone and turns up the volume, and it starts directing me. Right on Wilson. Left on Stenton. Merge onto highway. In twenty miles, take the exit.
“Twenty miles,” I say. No wonder she mentioned the time. I have a thousand questions I want to ask. Namely: Where are we going? What are we doing? Who are you? But I’ve grown comfortable in the unknown. Everything takes time. And so will this.
On the way, she grills me on the Event. That’s what she’s started calling it. “Did you pick up anything related to the Event in the park last night?” she asks.
How to explain that I wasn’t out there testing things with machinery. I was out there trying to listen for my brother. “Eh, I think your friends kind of ruined the setting.”
“Those aren’t my friends,” she says.
“You just follow them?”
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.