Page 33 of Come Find Me
I canfeelthe 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 doyouknow 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 saysPINEVIEW 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 nameJones.
