The Lies He Spoke

THIRTY FOUR

ELIJAH

"Powers 45!"

Elijah stopped folding laundry and looked around for which officer was calling him. They always called him by last name followed by the last two digits of his inmate number.

"Here!" he called back to the woman at the front door of the laundry room.

"You have a visitor. Follow me."

Elijah finished folding the towel he had in his hand, then left the rest of the pile to the man folding next to him. He followed the officer to the front rooms where inmates could talk to visitors at the phone booths on off-visitation hours.

But who on earth was it? It was school time so it couldn't be Olivia. Logan was supposed to be in class. With a sinking feeling, he hoped nothing bad enough had happened that would make Logan skip school and see him again about the Sons of Solomon.

When he got to the booth, though, it was neither of them. Instead, Blake sat on the other end, holding the phone between his ear and his shoulder, reading an open notebook he had spread across the table. When Elijah sat down, he looked up, pushed his glasses back into place, and grinned.

Elijah picked up the phone from the receiver. "Hey, Blake," he said.

"Hi Elijah, one of my two most favorite older brothers in the whole entire world," Blake started. "How are you? How is your leg? Is it better? Can you walk now?"

"It's a lot better now. It doesn't hurt as much."

"Are you still taking painkillers?"

"Sometimes, if I can't sleep."

Blake chewed his lip, studying Elijah's face. Elijah wondered if he could see his lies. The wounds were deep and still hurt him most hours of the day. Elijah was terrified of the constant pain medication he was taking so he tried only to take it at night, but sometimes he couldn't focus if he didn't take anything in the mornings.

"Does that happen often?" Blake asked quietly.

"No."

"Well, did they get the guy? Did they put him in solitary confinement?"

"You watch too many movies, Blake."

Blake was completely undeterred. "And what did you have for breakfast? I hope it wasn't some weird mush."

"Why are you worrying about whether I had weird mush?"

Blake's eyes grew even bigger. "Why is that even a question? Do you think I don't stay up all night, wondering what you ate for dinner?"

Elijah grimaced. "I really can't tell whether you're being serious or not."

"I am one thousand million percent serious." Blake jabbed a finger against the bulletproof plexiglass wall between them. "Confess right now. What did you have for breakfast?"

"I had oatmeal, Blake," Elijah sighed. He pressed down the urge to demand why Blake was here. Elijah was always happy to see any one of his siblings, but lately, it seemed that every time they came, it was something terrible that he wished he had been there with them for.

Still, he couldn't stop himself. "What's up with you? Don't you have class?"

"I am ditching my psychology and my English classes. Also, I hate my computer science class so now I know I'll never go into that. I can't code. Every time I write a program, it keeps giving me errors that I can't fix. I don't have the patience to make it work."

"You have time to decide," Elijah said. He remembered when Blake was first applying to colleges, he'd worried about what he wanted to do, because he loved to draw but he didn't want to go to art school. Elijah had sat with him many hours looking over his college essays and reassuring him that whatever happened, nothing was set in stone and he could always do something else if he still wanted to.