Page 90 of Our Elliana

“When Andre was recounting how Elle left to Ruiz, he said something about her and the Brubaker woman attending high school together, right?”

Had Andre said that? I don’t remember.

“Yeah, maybe,” Jackson responds, flicking his guitar pick against his denim jacket. I don’t even mind the noise.

“Shouldn’t we go there? Scope the place out?” the kid suggests, and I’m already actively displaying my agreement. Going home without Elle would feel downright sacrilegious. Wrong on every single level.

Unforgivable.

“I vote yes,” Jackson says.

“Seconded,” I say like we’re in some goddamn committee, but Noah seems to take this as gospel as he slams his truck into gear and accelerates us toward the exit that leads to the Capital Beltway. Deep down, I fully accept that what we’re doing is filling our hours. We’re giving ourselves chores to tick off, so we don’t lose our minds waiting. “Any idea which one she attended?”

“How many are there?” Noah asks.

The kid was brought up in such a small town, my guess is that it had only one. I look up the total on my phone, counting them to give him a tally. “Currently, there are twenty.”

“Twenty? Fucking Christ,” Jackson complains. “Did she ever talk about it?”

She might have. I wrack my brain trying to recall. Much of my one-on-one time with her that wasn’t in bed tended to be in front of the television as we discussed our predictions for the period dramas we’d watch. God, I want to do that with her again.

Then, a recollection of us lounging tangled up in the middle of the sofa comes back to me. One of the characters we were watching was a lawyer—or in English period drama speak, a barrister—and she admits that she considered that as a major in her youth.

“I thought about becoming an attorney,” she told me. “I even went to a charter school founded by law students and professors from Georgetown University.”

“Yeah?” I asked her.

“Yeah, it was called—” Holy shit.

“It’s named for Thurgood Marshall,” I tell them, my pulse pumping as I scroll along the list again. I track down the screen with my finger hunting for the one named for the groundbreaking supreme court justice. “She told me the justice has always been one of her heroes because her dad taught her all about him. Here. It’s on Martin Luther King Junior Avenue.”

I provide the kid with turn-by-turn directions as we go, and soon, we’ve arrived. The main building is older and constructed of red brick with Corinthian columns along the front, but we pause further down to enter the parking lot along the side.

There are a number of cars here, which at this time of night must mean there’s some sort of event going on. Something holiday-themed, no doubt. Jackson and I helped Elle decorate the house for Christmas yesterday, but after hearing the news of her rejection, I could no longer bear to look at them.

Willing all that away, I analyze the vehicles. I see nothing worth noting there at the school, and any burgeoning hopes I might’ve had begin to collapse under the weight of this herculean task.

It’s the cliched needle in a haystack.

My thoughts are circling the drain when Jackson grabs my arm. “What kind of car is that?”

I whip my head to squint where he’s pointing. About half a block down and across the road is a giant warehouse with five massive garage doors. It’s the sort of building that semi-trucks use to drop off their trailers full of merchandise overnight.

In amongst a set of six or seven such trailers, the nose of a car is poking out beneath the streetlight in the darkness. A car the color of a rusted pumpkin.

And if I’m not mistaken, on the front bumper is a bowtie emblem, demonstrating that its make is Chevrolet.

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