Perfect Escape

by Jennifer Brown

  Once inside, I stood at the edge of the steep decline, watching the toes of my shoes kick loose gravel over the edge and down, down, down, taking more rocks with it as it went.

  I closed my eyes. Turned my face to the sun. Felt the breeze, always blowing at the top of Newman Quarry, muss my hair. I let my arms hang limp at my sides. I took a deep breath. Queen of… nothing. Just like always.

  Queen of less than nothing now.

  I stood there for a long time. The earth did not split and swallow me up. No lava burbled out and melted me, eyeballs and teeth and hair, into a red river. Sediment did not cover me, pressing me into a sad fossil. I was just a girl, standing on a pile of rocks. No superstar to see here, people. Move along.

  When I opened my eyes again, I was almost surprised to find I was shivering. The sun had started to set, and the shadows in the quarry were growing longer. The highway noises had picked up. The birds settling along the quarry’s fence top had flown.

  I wrapped my arms around myself and squatted, looking out over the rocks. Billions. There must be billions of them. How could Grayson have thought he’d ever count them all?

  As if in answer to my thoughts, the breeze gusted suddenly, carrying a small noise on top of it, right to where I huddled over the rocks, my teeth chattering.

  It was a small cough. Not a cough cough, but a short, nervous burst, almost half throat-clearing, half cough. One I recognized well. I’d heard it my whole life. It was one of Grayson’s tics—a little noise in the base of his throat. He made it when he was getting to a crisis point. When he was overwhelmed.

  Like a shot, I stood up again, squinting over the quarry.

  Grayson was in there somewhere.

  I saw it—a tiny glint of sunlight reflecting off his glasses, and when I squinted harder, I saw his dirty white T-shirt and blue jeans. He must have been freezing. Even though the breeze didn’t reach the bottom of the quarry, the shadows were so much deeper down there.

  Again I heard the cough. And some murmuring that sounded like numbers being chanted.

  Stepping sideways down the steep wall of the quarry, my shoe sinking into the gravel, I began trotting toward him, just as I’d done a million times before.

  “Grayson?” I shouted. He didn’t respond. Of course not. He never responded when he was counting. It would make him lose track of where he was. “I’m coming down!” Half jogging, half sliding down the steep embankment, holding my arms straight out to keep my balance, calling my brother’s name.

  Saving him.

  On a day when I needed to be saved, once again I was saving him.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  Grayson was standing ankle-deep in stones, his pointer finger extended out in front of him and bouncing along in the air as if he were touching each one individually. I knew in his mind, he probably was doing exactly that. Touching each rock and marking it. Counted.

  He was up to 4,762. He’d been out here a long time. When I touched his arm, it felt cool, even under my fingers that were practically numb from my run down the pit.

  “Gray,” I said softly, tugging at his arm.

  He pulled away sharply. “Four thousand, seven hundred sixty-three.”

  I tented my hands over my mouth and blew into them to warm them, then reached out and pulled his arm again. “Gray, come on. You’re cold. We should go.”

  “Four thousand, seven hundred sixty-four,” he responded, his voice louder. This time he didn’t jerk away, though.

  “Gray,” I said, pulling a little harder, getting frustrated. I tried so hard to be sympathetic. Really, I did. But I was sick of the song and dance. Why couldn’t this ever be easy? I’d come here for myself. Why couldn’t it ever be about me? “Come on. You’re on an even number. Just quit now.”

  Grayson liked even numbers. When he was forced to quit counting, he always held his ground until he got to an even number. He told me about a year ago that if he stopped counting on an odd number, it meant that someone he loved would die. And if he ended on an odd number, even accidentally, he had to count backward from where he’d been, all the way back to zero, and then start all over again, not stopping until he reached the next even number above the number he’d stopped counting on.

  “I know it’s stupid,” he’d mumbled when he first told me that he’d been counting every time a family member left the house. We sat side by side on the bumper of Dad’s car in the driveway. “But it makes sense to me, you know? Like, as long as I kept hitting even numbers, you were going to get home okay.”

  I shook my head, flexed my toes so my flip-flops would stay on as my feet swung back and forth over the driveway. I’d just gotten home from a date with Tommy and had found my brother standing by Dad’s car, counting. I shook my head. “No, it doesn’t make sense. You can’t stop something horrible from happening by counting. How long have you been doing this?”

  He’d shrugged. “A while. It started with me just saying, ‘Kendra will be all right,’ or ‘Dad won’t get in a car crash,’ or ‘Mom will come home,’ and that used to be good enough, but then I started having to say it a bunch of times. And then… you know, it turned into I had to say it an even number of times. And then it got to where I could just count and it did the same thing. Which is better. Takes less time.”

  We sat in silence for a few minutes.

  Oh my God, my brother has really gone crazy, was all I could think. It scared me. And it broke my heart.

  “I know,” he said, as if he could hear my thoughts. “I can’t help it. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay, Gray,” I’d said, and put my hand on his shoulder. “But you really should stop. You’re not keeping everyone safe by counting.”

  Still, some days Grayson did nothing but sit on his bed and count, forward and backward, to really high numbers, just to keep us all alive. I always felt like I should have been more appreciative of his efforts. Like I shouldn’t have thought it was so stupid or something he could just stop doing. Like I should have thanked him that night instead of telling him it wasn’t working.

  “Four thousand, seven hundred sixty-five,” he said, then shook his head and gave one of those little coughs that I’d heard earlier. “Four thousand, seven hundred sixty-six…”

  Even though it was still late afternoon, the bottom of the quarry was fully engulfed in shadows. My fingers were starting to hurt, no matter how many times I blew on them to warm them up, and my ears were starting to sting, too.

  “Gray,” I said again. “Come on. Mom’s going to get all worried when she realizes you’re gone.” He kept counting. “She’ll probably cuss you out in Italian,” I tried, smirking, hoping he’d get the joke. He coughed again and kept counting.

  I bowed my head, knowing what I needed to do. I hated it when I had to do this—and Grayson really hated it—but sometimes it was the only way.

  “Grayson! Stop counting and listen to me!” I shouted, and jumped in front of him, using my feet to kick at the rocks he was staring at. I shuffled my feet like I was doing a dance, sending the rocks flying everywhere.

  “No!” Grayson gasped in his raggedy been-counting-all-day voice. “Don’t… Kendra…”

  His face looked pale and terrified, his fingers jerking as he tried to follow the scattering rocks with his eyes. As if he could keep track of them, keep counting them.

  Normally this would have been enough to stop me, but today was different. Today, turning Grayson’s world into chaos felt justified somehow. It felt right. It felt… good.

  “One-two-three-four-oh-God-Grayson-look-at-them-go!” I shouted, jumping up and down and doing side kicks into the rock mound. Rivers of rocks swirled at his feet. He gazed down at them sickly, that cough coming in rapid fire: Uh… uh-uh-uh… uh… I bent over and picked up two handfuls of rocks and slung them high into the air over our heads. They rained down on us and I laughed, blinking every time a rock pelted the top of my head. “Oh, no, Grayson, you better count them quick!” I yelled. “They’re getting away
!”

  “Stop it!” he shouted, and before I could even react, he lunged forward, both arms outstretched, planted his hands on my shoulders, and pushed me backward. For the second time that day, I found myself flat on my butt, only this time I was laughing too hard to feel the fall. “I made you stop,” I sang, pointing up at him. “I made you mo-o-ove.” Grayson looked at me, his eyes slits behind his glasses, and reached down with his left hand, scooping up a handful of rocks.

  He cleared his throat a few times. “You don’t know what you’re doing!” he shouted, flinging the rocks at me. They hit me, hard, drying up my laughter. I covered my face with my forearm.

  “Ouch!” I yelled, struggling to get up. “That hurt, you jerk!” And this time I pushed him. He barely moved, but produced a rock out of nowhere and tossed it straight at my forehead. “That’s it!” I shrieked, and body-slammed him, knocking him down and pummeling him with my fists, the way we used to when we were kids and would fight over who got to sleep in Zoe’s tent at backyard campouts or who got the last Oreo in the bag or whatever stupid stuff kids argue about.

  We rolled around in the rocks for a few minutes, arms and legs flailing and rocks scraping white lines onto our cheeks and scalps. Grayson was older, taller, but he’d gotten so skinny, and I easily matched him, my muscle tone making up for the years between us.

  After what seemed like forever, we finally stopped, panting and rolling away from each other. Truce. I wiped my nose with the back of my hand, then noticed how red my hand was from the cold that I didn’t feel anymore.

  “Come on,” I said to the sky. “It’s freezing out here.” I pulled myself up, looking down at the dent we’d made in the rock bed and giggling despite myself. “They’re going to know we were here,” I said. “Mom and Dad will be getting another phone call.” I reached down toward Grayson, whose eyebrow was seeping a little blood right above his glasses. He took my hand and let me help him to his feet.

  “If Mom’s smart, she’ll tell them to vada ad inferno,” he answered, taking off his glasses and wiping them with his shirttail. He grinned at me. “Go to hell,” he explained.

  “Since when do you know Italian?”

  He smirked, made that uh sound again, twice, and stuck his glasses back on his face. “I know a lot of things,” he said. “I’m sort of a genius, in case you don’t remember.”

  I rolled my eyes. Of course, we all remembered. Like any of us could forget. Our Grayson had an IQ of roughly nine billion. The elementary school guidance counselor had actually called him a “genius.” Until he’d gotten so sick with his OCD that he couldn’t go to school anymore, it was all we ever heard. Grayson-the-genius this, Grayson-the-genius that.

  I was the one who brought home straight A’s. I was the one who’d wear the honor ropes at graduation. I was the one who would graduate. But I was never a genius. Of course, I could go to the bathroom without counting the bumps on the ceiling, too. I guess there’s a good and a bad to everything.

  “Well,” I said, tromping through the rocks ahead of him, across the bottom of the quarry. “I’m not a genius, but I do know one thing.” I flicked a glance over my shoulder at him. He was following me, eyes firmly glued to the quarry floor. His finger was up in front of him again, bent like a claw. He was counting steps. “I can still kick your ass.”

  When I looked over my shoulder again, he was still counting, but I could see the corners of his mouth twitch with a grin. Barely detectable, but there nonetheless.

  We hiked up the steep quarry wall, our feet raining down rocks behind us, and soon were standing at the top, looking out across the basin, as I’d done when I arrived. We paused, shoulder to shoulder, our bellies rhythmically stretching for breath.

  “How’d you know I was here?” he asked. I could feel him shiver next to me. The motion was contagious; soon I was shivering again, too. “Mom send you?”

  I shook my head. “I heard you.”

  He glanced at me, then kicked a rock off the edge and watched its path down the side of the quarry. “Why were you here, then?” he asked.

  I chewed my lip. Considered his question. “I don’t know,” I said. And, in truth, I didn’t. I mean, I knew why I didn’t want to go home. I just didn’t know why this was the only other obvious choice. “Let’s go,” I said, before he could ask any more questions. “I’m cold.”

  We scaled the fence and climbed into Hunka, which blasted hot air on us as soon as I turned it on. We held our fingers directly in front of the vents, flexing and bending them, trying to get the feeling back.

  “So what’s the deal?” I finally said when we’d warmed up. I put the car into gear and began creeping around the outer road back out toward the highway. “I thought you were better.”

  He turned his body away from me, almost curling into a fetal position, and faced the window. “I thought I was, too,” he said.

  “So what happened?”

  He shrugged. “Life, I guess. My brain. I don’t know.” Then he murmured, “It’s bullshit. Can we just drive for a while? I don’t want to go home yet.”

  “Okay.” Little did he know, I didn’t exactly want to go home yet, either.

  I pulled onto the highway, driving in the opposite direction of our house, and started speeding up. My limbs were tingling now, and I was beginning to feel the bumps and pricks where the rocks had dug into my skin. I rubbed one elbow absently, then my knee, and then a spot on the back of my shoulder.

  “I won’t tell Mom I found you at Newman if you don’t want her to know,” I offered. “But you’ve got to stop going there, Grayson. You’ve got to stop… all this. Mom and Dad need a life without worry, you know?”

  I felt a pang in my stomach. As if I had any room to talk. As if they weren’t about to have a whole bunch of worry heaped in their laps in just a matter of hours courtesy of yours truly.

  When my brother didn’t answer, I bumped his shoulder with my fist, playfully. “I’m going to be leaving for college in a few months, and you know you don’t want to see Mom trying to climb that fence in her bathrobe.”

  Grayson turned to face me. There were tear tracks on his cheeks, carving clean lines in the mineral dust that had gathered there. “You think I don’t know that?” he said.

  “It was just a joke.”

  “No, you think I don’t want to stop doing this?” His voice had escalated, and his words bounced against the windows sharply.

  I took a deep breath. Clearly, he wasn’t in a joking mood. But it’s not like I was, either, and it only further irritated me that everything always, always had to be about how Grayson was feeling. Why did it feel like I was always the only one trying? “I don’t know, Grayson. You’re supposedly a genius. How is it you can understand everything there ever was to know about metaphoric rocks—”

  “Metamorphic.”

  “Whatever! See, that’s my point! You’re so smart—why can’t you figure this out? Why can’t you just figure it out and stop it?”

  “I don’t know!” he practically roared, his chin wrinkling and his cheeks bright red. I flinched. Grayson wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, but when he shouted, it was loud. “I don’t know,” he said again, more softly. “If I knew, I’d fix it.”

  We drove along in silence for a few minutes, the only sound in the car the hum of the heat blowing on us full-blast.

  “I know you would,” I said.

  He turned his body back toward the window again and took a few hearty sniffs. “I wish I could get away from it, Kendra. Just run away and leave it here and never have to deal with it again. Run away and be normal.”

  We drove along, through rush hour and through sunset, and into evening, when I flicked on my headlights. Grayson hadn’t said anything else, and after a while I began to hear soft snoring rattling against the window. It was no wonder—he was always exhausted after a counting trip to the quarry. I could only imagine how tiring it was—standing in one spot, afraid to move at risk of rearranging the rocks at your feet and having to
begin again. Standing in the shadows and counting, counting, knowing that your efforts were ridiculous, but hoping they’d work anyway.

  I didn’t blame him for wanting to get away from it. Most of the time, I wanted to get away from it. Sometimes I thought even Mom and Dad wanted to get away from it. Especially Dad, who never really understood, I don’t think, that this was something out of Grayson’s control. He got it on an intellectual level. But he was forever telling Grayson that all he needed was “a skill to fall back on” and shouting at him sometimes to stop it, exactly as I’d just done.

  Only Zoe had ever seemed to really understand it. She’d never tried to get away. How ironic that, in the end, she was the only one who did get away.

  I heard my phone vibrate against the seat behind me. I glanced back but didn’t reach for it. I had a feeling that, no matter who was calling, it wasn’t going to be good. Either it was Bryn, telling me that I’d been wrong about Chub and he’d turned on me, or it was Shani, wondering if what everyone was saying about me and the calc final was true, or maybe even Mom, reeling from a phone conversation with Mrs. Reading.

  I couldn’t answer any of them right now. Like Grayson, I just wanted to get away. I needed to get away. I needed some space to figure out what had gone wrong. To decide when I’d turned into this person who needed to be perfect all the time and was willing to do just about anything to keep it that way. Mistakes? Not me. Control, control, control. Perfection and control. But when did that happen? Was it when Zoe left? Was it when Grayson started getting really sick? Or was it the day I was born, and I was only just now realizing it?

  I knew exactly what would be waiting for me at school tomorrow. What devastation I’d brought onto my college plans. God, did I still have college plans? Could I still go to college if I got expelled, like Chub? I never, in a million years, thought that would be a question I’d be asking myself.