Perfect Escape

by Jennifer Brown

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  For Scott

  and

  for Pranston

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  I was six the first time we found Grayson at the quarry. Dad and I had just gotten back from my peewee soccer game, and Mom had met us at the front door, car keys dangling from one hand.

  “We won!” I crowed, hopping past her. “And Ashley’s mom brought fish crackers!”

  But Mom didn’t answer. Instead, she muttered something to Dad, whose eyebrows knit together. He turned and peered out the front door into the rapidly approaching night, then stepped outside, cupped his mouth with his hands, and started yelling my brother’s name—“Grayson! Graaayson!”—while Mom shrugged into her coat, not even acknowledging that I had gone on to tell her all about the goal I’d scored and the goalie with the freckles who’d gotten a bloody nose when Imogene Sparks accidentally fell on top of her.

  Nobody told me what was going on. All I knew was our next-door neighbor Tammy came over and fixed me a cheese sandwich for dinner. We played checkers over and over, and she stroked my braids out with her fingers and didn’t make me take a bath so I could go to school with braid-waves the next day.

  “Where did Mom and Dad go, anyway?” I asked. “King me.”

  She shrugged. “To get Grayson. Your move.”

  “Where is he?” I jumped one of her checkers and picked it up, tucking it into the lap bowl created by my nightgown.

  Tammy hesitated the tiniest bit. Her eyes flicked toward the front door, and for a second I thought I might have seen the same worried crease between her eyebrows that I’d seen between Dad’s. But she smiled and slid her checker across the board. “They didn’t say,” she said. “I’m sure they’ll be back soon. Your turn.”

  It wasn’t until the next morning when Mom was brushing my hair for school—using the smoothing brush, which destroyed my waves—that I asked again.

  “Ouch. Mom, where did you guys go last night? Ow.”

  Unlike Tammy, Mom didn’t hesitate one bit—just kept pulling the brush through my hair, all business. “Newman Quarry,” she said, as if this were something they did every evening. “The place off the highway, with all the rocks.” She pulled particularly hard on a knot at the base of my neck, and I sucked my breath in through my teeth. Staticky strands of my hair were floating outward, following the brush; the whole thing was a fuzz-mess. “I really wish Tammy’d given you a bath last night,” she muttered. “You’re frizzed.”

  I frowned. “Why did you go there?” I asked.

  She set the brush on the counter, wet her hands in the sink, and smoothed them over my hair, meeting my eyes in the mirror. She sighed, then moved her palms down to my shoulders and patted them lightly. “Your brother is having some difficulties, Kendra. Go get your backpack now. The bus will be coming.”

  I left the room, my scalp feeling heat-pricked and pulsating, wondering what Mom had meant by “having difficulties” and what that had to do with my parents’ going to Newman Quarry the night before in the dark.

  But that was eleven years ago. Grayson had been to the quarry hundreds of times since then. Sometimes several times a day, walking three miles down the highway in that precise way of his, muttering under his breath, his fingers hooked like claws while he calculated whatever it was he was calculating.

  And we’d all had to go fetch him at one time or another. Stand at the top of the pit and call his name out, knowing he wouldn’t answer. Stumble down the rock beds, trying not to lose our footing, trying not to get too many pebbles in our shoes, trying not to get angry. Still calling his name, stupidly. “Grayson! Come on! Mom and Dad are going to be mad if you miss therapy again. Grayson! Graaayson! I know you hear me!”

  And we’d all had to try to make him leave the quarry before he was “finished.” Which always meant tears for someone. Usually everyone.

  I’d been to the bottom of that quarry hundreds of times, starting when I was seven and my parents began sending me over the fence to fetch him, always framing it as “an adventure.”

  But it didn’t feel like an adventure. It felt like a chore. He never wanted to leave. I’d end up doing just about anything to get him out of there. Push him. Pull him. Yell at him. Make promises to him.

  I’m not finished, Kendra. I have to count them.

  But you have therapy. And there are billions. Come on, just go with me, okay, Gray?

  No! I can’t! Uh-uh-uh!

  Okay, Grayson, okay, okay. Here. I’ll help you. I’ll count the ones in this pile, okay? Don’t cry. We’ll count them together….

  We all knew what Grayson’s “difficulties” were. Grayson’s difficulties dominated his life. And Mom’s and Dad’s.

  And mine.

  Sometimes, like when Zoe left, it felt like especially mine.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Nobody warned me he’d be coming home today.

  I got home from school, dropped my backpack on the floor, and read a text from Shani as I walked into the kitchen.

  Then screamed when I bumped face-first into a bony chest. Before my brain could catch up with my reflexes, my phone-wielding hand reached out and punched at the chest with a hollow thump.

  “Ouch! Nice to see you, too.” My brother, whom I hadn’t seen in months, was rubbing the spot where I’d just hit him. He was impossibly skinny, his hair greasy and flopping in his extremely pale face. He always looked like this when he got home from treatment. Probably I should’ve been used to it, but it’s hard to get accustomed to living with someone who looks like an extra in a zombie movie.

  “You scared the crap out of me, Grayson. Jeez!”

  “I gathered that much when you hit me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, pushing past him and heading for the refrigerator, my breath still coming in quick bursts. “Automatic reaction when I think I’m going to be murdered in my kitchen. It is good to see you. I just…” The phone vibrated in my hand, and I glanced at it. Another text from Shani. Major boyfriend issues. “I didn’t know you were getting released today. Where’s Mom?” I grabbed a slice of cheese out of the refrigerator and unwrapped it, closing the fridge door with my hip, my heartbeat beginning to slow.

  “Neither did I. They told me this morning. And the store. She’ll be right back.”

  I tossed the cellophane into the trash, thinking it would have been nice to have gotten some warning, and began folding the cheese slice into little squares, peeling the top square off and shoving it into my mouth. Grayson stood awkwardly in the doorway, staring intently at my hands, his lips moving.

  I knew what he was thinking. With Grayson, everything had to be so perfectly lined up. Even if it wasn’t his. He was bothered by how I was folding that cheese slice into uneven squares, and I knew by looking at him that he wanted to take a ruler to it before I ate it. I chewed self-consciously, wishing he would stop looking at me like that. Didn’t Mom send him to these treatment places to make him stop looking at people like that? “So why the sudden release? Are you better?” I asked, pulling out a chair and sitting. “I mean, is the OCD, you know…?” I trailed off. I didn’t know how to finish the question.

  I opened Shani’s text, pretending that seeing Grayson back in our kitchen was no bi
g deal and that this was a question people asked each other all the time. Pretending he hadn’t been in that resident facility Mom had found—the one that was supposed to cure him of his obsessive-compulsive disorder, his depression, the billion anxiety disorders he had, and God knows what else.

  Pretending that things hadn’t been weird between us ever since his quirks had slowly evolved into full-blown mental illness. Pretending that I could once again overlook his rituals and worries as I had done when we were kids. I wished I could. But the older we got—the worse he got—the harder it was to pretend that he was normal, like the rest of us. People noticed. I noticed. It was impossible not to notice.

  How do you not notice someone’s mental illness when the whole family constantly revolves around it?

  “Yeah, I think so. I guess. Whatever” was his answer. He was probably thinking the same thing I was thinking: What exactly is better?

  “That’s good,” I said, and I really meant it, though I wasn’t sure if I meant that it was good for him or good for me. Probably a little of both.

  There was an awkward silence between us, during which he shifted from foot to foot, mumbling numbers under his breath and knocking the wood frame of the door softly with one knuckle while I stared intently at my phone, as though Shani had written me an engrossing novel.

  This was the way it’d been for the past three years.

  We couldn’t move. We were both trapped by whatever ritual he was struggling with at the moment. Prisoners of the great Obsessive-Compulsive Oppressor.

  Who was I kidding? This was the way it’d been for our whole lives.

  This is what it’s like living with a mentally ill person: everyone afraid to move. Everyone afraid to speak. You don’t say certain words like suicide or crazy, and you do everything in your power to keep the good milliseconds lasting as long as they possibly can. And you don’t rush into anything at all, because rushing feels like courting disaster, and you don’t even know what that disaster is, because it’s never the same disaster twice. A ruined birthday? A scene at a restaurant? Police cars in the driveway in the middle of the night? All of the above?

  And you don’t ask for attention.

  And you get used to it when you don’t get any.

  And you try really, really hard to forget that not getting attention hurts and that this person—this muttering, shadow-eyed, scabbed patient—was once your hero and best friend in the world. Back when he was just a “weird kid.”

  And you try to remember that you still love him, even if some days you can’t exactly pinpoint why.

  After what seemed like forever, he finally moved out of the doorway, and I could hear his steps, slow and rhythmic, on the floorboards leading to his bedroom. He made it in one try, which meant he must have been feeling better.

  Before Mom sent him out to Camp Cure Me, or whatever this one was called, it could sometimes take him two hours to walk from the kitchen to his bedroom, his cries of frustration piercing the hallway. Mom’s voice trying to soothe whatever broken part of him told him he couldn’t put his foot down until he’d counted every grain in the wood beneath it. Her sobs creeping through the bedroom walls at night. That feeling of fullness behind my eyes all the damn time. And the feeling of resentment that I tried to stuff away because when someone can’t even walk through his home normally, resenting him somehow feels mean. Not to mention pointless. Resenting Grayson wasn’t going to cure him.

  After he was gone, I sat at the table for a few more minutes, taking in deep, even breaths and pressing my forehead into my palms. I could smell the cheese on my fingers, and it made the taste in the back of my throat go sour. I knew I should’ve been happy that he was back, but all I could think was, Things have been so calm around here without him.

  I also thought about the night, two months or so before he left, when things had seemed so good. He’d seemed relaxed… or at least relaxed for Grayson. Mom and Dad were really happy, and we’d all spent the evening watching TV together, which hadn’t happened in months. We joked with one another. Mom made popcorn. I fell asleep on the couch.

  At some point, Grayson had brought in his old alarm clock—the kind that buzzes—set it to go off about thirty seconds later, and propped it right next to my ear. Then sat back and waited for it to go off. When it did, I was so startled and confused, I almost fell off the couch. Grayson laughed until his whole face was red and he was holding his belly and gasping for breath. Mom and Dad, still curled up together on the other couch, were giggling as well.

  “Kendra, get up!” he’d said, trying to look serious but gasping too hard to pull it off. “You’re late for school!”

  I’d punched him in the arm but had laughed, too, because even I had to admit that his prank was a good one. “Paybacks, bro, paybacks,” I said sleepily.

  The next morning, he’d refused to get out of bed. Said the air was filled with toxins and he couldn’t breathe them in or he’d get cancer. And he’d been that way since. I never got the chance to prank him back. He would’ve been way too anxious to find the humor in it.

  Sitting at the kitchen table, I hoped for another evening like the one we’d had before he went away. Only I hoped it would last longer this time.

  I sat there until I heard the garage door rumble to life, and then I got up in a hurry, pushing the chair back with my legs, and headed upstairs to my room. I didn’t want to deal with Mom right now. She would be in that on-edge place again. No softness. No smile. Forever the woman who had yanked that brush through my hair, saying earnestly, Your brother’s having some difficulties, Kendra, only not finishing the sentence: and you’ve got to make up for them. You’ve got to be the child with no difficulties at all.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  From: Kendrazone@comcast.net

  To: zoezo@yahoo.com

  Subject: He’s ba-ack!

  Hey, Zo!

  So G is back. Seems better. A little jittery and def way too skinny, but better. I can’t help but wonder, though… how many times can a person do the treatment thing and come back not any better? I mean, what’s the point of going? Will he ever get better, or will he be like this forever? It sounds brutal, and you know I’ll never give up hope, but… Well, sometimes my life seems like… a lot… when G’s around. You know better than anyone what I mean.

  Listen, Zo. Neither one of us has heard anything from you in a long time. And I’m cool with it. Your dad gave you loads of trouble when you moved, and you’re probably super busy with Bible study or something. ;-) But I haven’t heard from you in like six months and… I don’t know… I guess I think it could really help G if you said hey sometime.

  Ken

  I hit the “send” key and sat back against the headboard, scooching so my pillow was right in the small of my back, and commenced staring at my laptop screen. My phone vibrated on the dresser, but I didn’t want to get up. Shani would have to wait.

  Wait for what? For me to stare at my empty inbox, expecting Zoe’s reply to pop up? Like that was going to happen. I’d said it’d been six months since she’d replied to any of my e-mails, but it felt longer. Maybe it had been longer. Maybe it had been longer than I’d even want to admit to myself. God, had it been a year?

  The phone buzzed again. I ignored it again. I guess that, in a nutshell, was the difference between Shani and Zoe. I liked Shani. Called her my BFF when I was feeling it. Hung out with her and had sleepovers at her house. Shared pizza and locker space and gas money with her.

  But she wasn’t my best friend. She wasn’t Zoe.

  Zoe and I had grown up together. Literally. My birthday was July 31 and hers, August 1. Our moms were next-door neighbors and best friends and, once upon a time, did everything together. Including pregnancy. They had morning sickness together, ate loads of greasy food together, talked about epidurals and episiotomies and all that gross-out stuff together, and even went into labor on the same day. But since my mom had already had one baby, I came quicker. Or at least that’s how Mom
put it.

  Zoe and I bonded in the hospital nursery and didn’t stop until all the craziness between our parents went down and her family moved away three years ago. As if moving could erase what had happened between Zoe and Grayson. As if moving could kill a lifelong friendship.

  In a lot of ways, I blamed Zoe’s parents for how much worse Grayson became. When Zoe was around, he was a lot more relaxed. She understood him. She didn’t make him feel weird. She didn’t make him feel anxious about feeling anxious. She didn’t expect him to ever be anything other than what or who he was. She was better than me in that respect. Because, after she left, I had all kinds of expectations about him, none of them anything he could ever live up to.

  I also blamed Zoe’s parents for the fact that I lost my two best friends for no good reason. But everyone was too busy worrying about Grayson to care about that.

  After Zoe’s parents left, taking her with them, Grayson’s anxiety went through the roof. His OCD spun out of control, like nothing any of us had ever seen before. He could barely function, and all he could think about was rocks and counting and germs and weird stuff that had kind of always been there, but not nearly as bad. Before, he’d been a kid who did some obsessive stuff. Afterward, he was just plain obsessive. And it was totally their fault. It’s not like what Grayson did was that bad. He was in love with their daughter. So what?

  The last time I saw Zoe, she was streaking out the back of her parents’ minivan toward my yard, where I was standing, unabashedly watching, hoping that her parents would see how they were breaking my heart, too, and maybe change their minds. Her parents were occupied talking to a guy in coveralls, a moving van rumbling in idle at the curb.

  “Here, Ken, take this,” Zoe had said, her face slick with tears and her nose plugged. She shoved a tiny rectangular piece of paper into my palm—her school photo, with her new address scrawled across the back. “I’ll write as soon as I set up a secret e-mail, okay?”