Concealed (Virus Book 1)

by RJ Crayton

  “Dad, I,” she started, trying to gather her thoughts. Trying to figure out what she wanted to say. “I feel like Lijah would have told me. I mean, if he was gay. Or even, I would have noticed.”

  Her father shrugged. “It was just a theory your mother had,” he said. “She could have been wrong, which is why we didn’t say anything. And you shouldn’t either. I just told you so you’d know, in case it was true and that was the reason he was giving you a hard time about Josh.”

  Elaan sat there quietly. She wasn’t sure she was processing this yet. Gay. How could she have missed that her brother was gay? Yes, in the 1950s people missed it, because everyone was in the closet. But not today? She should have seen it. Her mother had seen it, but her mother was good with people that way. She admired that about her mother, her ability to say and do the right thing with people, to read them so well. It was part of the reason she liked Josh so much. He reminded her of her mother a bit, in the way he navigated the world.

  If Lijah did have feelings for Josh, but Josh had feelings for her, then Lijah was just being selfish trying to keep them apart. “Dad, if your theory is right and Lijah isn’t happy because he likes Josh, too, then why did you tell me to cool it? You think I should be unhappy to make Lijah happy?”

  Her father was shaking his head. “No, dear,” he said. “No, not at all. It’s just sometimes it’s easier to ask the one who’s doing better to push a little harder, than to ask the one who’s flailing to push harder. And Lijah, he’s flailing down here. He does his best, but everything about this situation has him on edge. I just suggested you and Josh cool it if nothing was going on already. You did say, when I first asked, that there was nothing happening with you and Josh.”

  She nodded. Fair enough.

  “So what is going on between you and Josh?”

  She wished she’d dropped the subject, that she hadn’t let it get into her head that her father had picked Lijah’s side over hers. Now, he wanted answers. “Can we just have a pass on this talk today?” she said. “What you said was a lot to process, and I just want some time to think, rather than talk.”

  He shrugged. “Alright,” he said, and forced a smile. “A pass for today.”

  She closed her eyes, feeling exhausted with the day and everything she had learned. She needed some alone time. Elaan stood up. “I’m going to my room.”

  Her father stood, too. “I’m sorry, Laani,” he said, using the nickname that only he called her. Somehow Lijah’s nickname had stuck for all the world, but Laani had remained a pet name only her father used. “You can’t go to your room.”

  She stared at him. “Why not?”

  “I need another blood sample. Up in the lab.”

  She frowned. “Dr. Wells took one this morning,” she said, a little tired of the blood draws and tissue samples. Yes, she was immune. Yes, they wanted others to be, but lately, the sample requests were starting to feel onerous.

  “I know,” her father said. “It’s hard to be studied, to be pricked and prodded, but this is going to help people. We think we’re isolating some important cells, and we just need a couple more samples today. We need to compare your samples to the carrier samples again.”

  “Couldn’t you use Josh instead of me?” she asked, really not wanting to be stuck yet again.

  Her father shook his head. “Josh already gave us what we need.” He patted her arm. “I’m sorry, babe, but we need a sample from you. You’re a bit of a rarity, dear. You’re immune to both strains of the virus, unlike some of the other immunes. It will just take a minute.”

  Elaan sighed and nodded. There were people dying and the answers to curing them ran through her veins. She had to stop being selfish. She had to be a grownup. But she was tired of being so grown up. She just wanted to be a teen, with normal teen problems. Not the world dying and she and her brother crushing on the same guy.

  Chapter 7

  The blood draw had been quick and relatively painless. Elaan was glad to be heading back to the apartment. She wanted an hour to herself before she had to sit the kids. Actually, maybe babysitting would lift her spirits. She loved kids.

  She wanted to be a kindergarten teacher, if the world ever went back to normal. She liked the energy of young kids and liked channeling it in constructive directions. She liked making each kid feel special, like they were part of the group, even if they were different. In some ways, being a teacher would be the biggest tribute to her mother’s memory ever.

  Her mother had been a professor of microbiology. Shonda, James, and Lijah Woodson were all scientific thinkers. They lived and breathed cells, molecules, bacteria, and medicine, while all that stuff bored Elaan to tears. When she was little, she would literally burst into fits as the three of them immersed themselves in the world of science. But her mother had seen her standing there on the edge alone and had done everything to bring Elaan into the fold, to make her feel part of their family, even though she so clearly didn’t fit. And she’d loved her mother for that. She’d loved feeling folded into the family. When they were younger, she’d been jealous of Lijah, of his ability to fit in with her parents. But it changed in high school. He went to a science and tech specialty school, and she attended their regular school. The space did them good, and they grew closer.

  She enjoyed the fact that they got along. Not going to the same school, not being compared by teachers, not being in that same sphere had been helpful to them both. She thought they’d grown close enough that she would’ve known, that he would have told her, if he were gay, but maybe not. Maybe he’d felt like she had when she was little, like an outsider in the family. Only, he had never been an outsider. He had always fit in. He had always been their perfect Lijah. Maybe feeling like he didn’t fit in for once — or feeling like he was different — was really hard on him. Elaan had had to become OK with not fitting in, with being herself. “Who you are is the truth,” her mother would say. “Be who you are and don’t worry about what others think.”

  Elaan sighed as she approached her apartment door. She wondered if Lijah didn’t feel he could be who he was with her. If that were true, she was sad. She’d always thought he felt so easy, so comfortable in his own skin. Or if not completely comfortable, at least content with who he was. But was it all a show? Was he scared to tell them how he felt? If so, she didn’t want that. She loved him no matter what.

  When she entered the apartment, she found Lijah sitting on the sofa reading something on a tablet computer. It was probably lab results. Their father had always shared things like that with Lijah, as he took an interest. Her father would probably share with her too, but she wasn’t interested. Well, yes, she was interested in the overall takeaway, but not in the minutiae. She didn’t feel the need to know the individual blood counts or protein data or whatever it was that they were so interested in. It made her eyes glaze over.

  “Hey,” she said.

  He gave a curt nod, the kind of “whazzup” look he might give one of his buddies, but he didn’t speak. She walked over and sat down next to him. “I’m sorry,” she said, this time actually meaning it. “I know I said it before, but I said it because I was supposed to. I mean it, now. I shouldn’t have eavesdropped. It was really wrong, and you were right to be mad at me.”

  He looked up, half laughed. “What brought this on?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know, Dad and I just talked. You know, about Mom, and it just reminded me that we used to be a family of four and now we’re a family of three, and something could happen to Dad and we could easily be a family of two. And I wouldn’t want to be fighting with my only living relative.”

  He stared at her a moment, as if not quite sure he believed her, then he said, “Well, there’s Uncle Tim, and our cousins Igor and Ivanna.”

  She punched him in the arm. “You know what I mean.”

  He chuckled. “J/K. I was kidding,” he said. Elaan sat back and sighed. Even including Tim, Igor and Ivanna, their family was small. Uncle Tim was their father’s on
ly sibling and their mother had been an only child, a girl adopted by a couple who’d been unable to bear children. Her mother’s parents were both dead, so there were no relatives on her mother’s side of the family.

  Elaan turned to him. “I do trust you, Lijah,” she said. “I know you think me eavesdropping, me not listening to you about Josh are signs that I don’t, but they’re not. I trust you, and I want you to know that you can trust me, too. If there’s anything you want to tell me, you can. No judgment, and it stays here, just between us.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “What is it you think I need to tell you?”

  Shit. She was doing this wrong. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just, if you did, I want you to know that I’d listen.”

  “OK,” he said. “Then, I want you to know that I like Josh, and I think he’s a good guy, but that the two of you should probably cool it, at least for a couple more weeks. I think Dad and Kingston are close to figuring this thing out, so there’s no reason to rush things down here.”

  Elaan blinked, a little stunned that that was really where he chose to go. Josh again. Dammit. But why? “OK,” she said, evenly, trying to mask the annoyance she was feeling. “I hear what you’re saying, but I’m having trouble understanding why, if you think Josh is a good guy, that you think he would hurt me, or that by waiting a couple of weeks, he wouldn’t hurt me.”

  Lijah half smiled, half shook his head. “You know,” he said, “If you had applied half as much critical thinking and perseverance to calculus, you wouldn’t have struggled so much with it.”

  “I did apply critical thinking to calc,” she said. “Only, I didn’t really care one way or the other if I understood it. However, I care immensely about understanding where you’re coming from.” She paused and took a breath, staring at Lijah’s deep brown eyes, eyes that everyone said looked exactly like hers. Still, she couldn’t fathom where he was coming from right now. “Lijah, I just feel like you’ve pulled away since we’ve been down here, and your attitude toward me and Josh feels like more than you just pulling away. It’s as if you’ve turned against me. I just want to understand why.”

  “Elaan,” he said. “I’m not against you. Never against you. And I know I’ve been more distant than usual, but it’s hard being down here. If I feel sad, I just don’t see any reason to spread that to others. I’d rather keep it to myself.”

  She nodded. “That’s just it, Lijah,” she said. “If you’re sad, you shouldn’t be sad alone. You can come talk to me. We can cheer each other up or be sad together. We’re a family.”

  He sighed. “God, you sound like Mom,” he said, and he managed not to make it sound like a sin.

  “The mom you used to love, before you hated her?”

  He smiled. “Yes, that mom. Though…” he started, but didn’t continue. “I don’t want to talk about Mom. But, I do appreciate you, Elaan, and I accept your apology. OK? The eavesdropping is all water under the bridge. We’ll just move forward, with you and me trusting each other. I’ll trust you and come to you if I need to, and hopefully you’ll trust me about stuff, especially Josh.”

  Really. Again. Back to Josh. Was her father right about Lijah? She cleared her throat. “You didn’t say why things would be better between Josh and me if we waited a couple of weeks, or why you just don’t like us.”

  He frowned. “I’ll tell you the truth, Elaan, because you say you want to hear it,” he said.

  She looked at him expectantly. “Josh’s secret?”

  He shook his head. “Not that,” he said. “That’s on him to tell or not. But, I said to wait a couple weeks because if Kingston is right about his work, if it’s not another red herring, then in a couple of weeks we’ll go back to the uptop and, presumably, everyone will get back to their lives. And that means Josh will go back to Texas, so this will be a moot point.”

  The University of Texas. Of course. She hadn’t thought about what a cure would mean. But the reality was that it would mean going back to their normal lives. That meant Josh going back to college. But, surely things wouldn’t get back to normal that quickly. Many campuses had closed. They wouldn’t just open right back up. Josh would be home with his father, probably stick around to help do whatever people needed to do. Yet Lijah thought everything would be better if Josh went away. That didn’t even sound like jealousy. It sounded like he wanted Josh away from her. “I don’t get how this secret could be so bad,” Elaan whispered.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, sounding sincere. “But, just because you don’t get it, doesn’t make it not true.”

  She bit her lower lip. “Can I ask you one thing? Not about the secret, about something you said when you were talking to Josh earlier.”

  He shrugged.

  “You said you and Josh were alike, that you and he didn’t get the girl and the happily ever after.”

  Lijah stood up, the suddenness of it startling Elaan.

  She looked up at him, resigned to what his abrupt move meant. “You’re not going to answer me?”

  “Look,” he said. “I’m not going to answer that question, because it’s not … it’s not one I want to answer. But, not every piece of information about a person is for public consumption or familial consumption. Josh and I both have things about us that you don’t know. Doesn’t change that you’re my little sister and I’m going to look out for you.”

  Lijah turned and headed to his room.

  Elaan felt more confused right now than she’d felt all day, and that was saying something, because this had been a crappy, confusing day so far. She was about to go to her own room, when she heard a knock at the door. Instead of heading for the peace and tranquility of her own space, she headed over and opened the door. Nina Sterling was standing there.

  “Hey,” Elaan said, perplexed as to why Nina was there. Was she bringing the kids to her? She peeked around her to see if they were in the hall. “What’s going on?”

  “I just wanted to let you know we’re not going to need you tonight.”

  Elaan’s mouth opened. “Umm, OK,” she said. Given how Nina had said she still wanted her to sit earlier, she was surprised by the turnaround.

  Nina crinkled her brows. “Gemma and I talked, and we just thought that we’d rather use your services later, when we actually can go on dates with our husbands. Why don’t you take the night and hang out with your family?”

  With Elijah in the mood he was in, and her dad all sad, fat chance. “Actually, Josh had asked me to see a movie with him tonight, and I’d had to tell him no, so I’ll probably end up doing that.”

  Nina frowned, but nodded. “OK,” she said, staring as if Elaan were the saddest person to ever have existed. Then she turned and headed off, without even a goodbye.

  Elaan closed the door and said, “That was weird.”

  “What,” Lijah asked, emerging from the hallway.

  Elaan looked up, having not realized Lijah was nearby or would hear. “Nina just canceled my sitting services after making a big deal about still wanting them even though General Sterling went uptop.”

  “Wait, what?” Lijah said, his face pure shock. “The general went uptop?”

  She shouldn’t have let that slip. She was too distracted by everything else to keep her secrets straight. “Don’t say anything,” she urged him. “I’m not even really supposed to know, but the general got called uptop to resolve the communication problem they’ve been having. People aren’t supposed to know, so you can’t tell anyone.”

  “Does Kingston know?” Lijah asked, his voice coming out with a panicky quiver.

  Elaan shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Dad knows.”

  Lijah sighed and walked past her to the door. “I won’t say anything to anyone,” he said as he strode out. “I’ll be back, later.”

  Chapter 8

  With Lijah having left so abruptly, Elaan’s first thought was to head over to Josh’s apartment and let him know she was now free this evening. She had turned toward the door but stopped, as it o
ccurred to her that maybe that wasn’t a good idea. What if Elijah had gone there to see Kingston? While the senior Wells was probably in the lab — he practically lived there — she didn’t want to run into Lijah. So, she went to the telephone hanging on the wall and dialed 262 to connect to Josh’s apartment.

  The phone rang three times, and Josh picked up. “Hello.”

  “Hey, it’s me,” Elaan said, smiling at the sound of his voice. “Nina doesn’t need me to sit tonight, so I wanted to see if I could still come over and watch The Princess Bride?”

  His voice perked up. “Yeah, absolutely,” he said. “Did you want to go to the cafeteria and grab dinner together?”

  Elaan leaned against the wall, the phone cradled to her ear, and grinned even wider. “Yeah. How about we meet there in a half hour?”

  “Sure,” he said. “See ya then.”

  * * *

  She met Josh at the cafeteria around six. It was a high traffic time, with a lot of people eating. Nina was at a table with all four kids, and no sign of Gemma Jackson. Elaan smiled at her and she smiled back, then joined Josh at a table in the corner. He had two bowls of soup and some crackers.

  “I hope it’s OK that I got this,” he said. “It just looked like a line was forming, and I didn’t want you to have to wait.”

  She sat, gave him a grin, and said, “This is great. I appreciate your ability to sweet talk all the kitchen duty staff.”

  “Well, I do try to be useful.”

  They ate and Josh started telling her about one of the books he was reading, I Hate This Place by Jimmy Fallon. She laughed at some of the anecdotes. It felt good to laugh after such a trying day.

  Elaan faced Joshua, who sat in front of the rear wall. Josh stared at the remainder of the room. He looked behind her and seemed troubled. “Hey,” he said. “Do you think I did something to Mrs. Jackson? She’s looking at me and she just seems really pissed off.”