Perfect Escape

by Jennifer Brown

  They figured he was just precise. And when he began counting—sometimes to astronomically high numbers—they figured he was just quirky. So many geniuses are.

  But at some point it became obvious that Grayson’s eccentricity was going to be a problem. And a genius with a problem was a “waste.” A “shame.”

  Suffice it to say, I was never a genius. Not even close. And of course they noticed. I wasn’t even as smart as Zoe, something I had heard Mom say to Zoe’s mom on more than one occasion—not bitterly, but simply as a statement of fact.

  But my parents really didn’t seem to mind that I was just normal. Grayson needed more attention. Because he was Grayson. And I was self-sufficient. I was self-reliant. I had a good head on my shoulders, and I didn’t cause trouble. Those things were important. When there’s someone needy in the house, everyone else has to be need-less. It’s nothing personal. Even if it sometimes feels that way.

  Mom and Dad were good parents. They loved each other. They loved us both. They wanted good things for us. And they were heartbroken that Grayson wasn’t perfect after all.

  After a while, the fact that I was just a regular kid was a really good thing. Mom and Dad could rely on my steadiness. If I worked hard, I could do well in life, maybe even great. They had replaced their high hopes for Grayson with even higher hopes for me. I brought in good grades. I was involved in things. I smiled and laughed and got dirty and played, lounging on my belly on the carpeted living room floor with my toys strewn everywhere around me. Orderless. Childlike.

  I don’t know exactly how being normal turned into a need to be perfect, but at some point it did. For every time my brother dashed my parents’ hopes, I ratcheted my performance up a notch. Maybe I wanted to distance myself from him. Maybe it was the only way for me to get some attention, too.

  Maybe I was trying to forge an identity other than “poor Grayson’s little sister.”

  Whatever the reason, that’s exactly what happened: I shifted from normal Kendra to Kendra the star. While Grayson’s grades and attendance fell, mine got better. While Grayson threatened suicide and went into screaming tantrums when his life didn’t feel right to him, I blossomed. And when Grayson quit school midway through his junior year and spent two holidays in various residential facilities, counting his brain into oblivion, I vaulted to the top of my class.

  I wanted Mom and Dad to have something to be proud of. And I wanted to prove that I could do it.

  So when, at the beginning of my senior year, I pulled Mr. Floodsay, otherwise known as the worst calc teacher in the whole school, I got scared. And when, halfway through the first semester, my grade had dipped into the C range, and then to a low D, I saw it all begin to slip away from me. Everything I’d worked so hard for. All the pride I’d stocked up in Mom and Dad. All the hard work, all the sports, all the projects, all the nights trying to study while Mom stood sobbing in the hallway to Grayson that if he didn’t calm down, she’d have to call the police. All of it, gone.

  I tried going to tutoring. It didn’t work. I tried staying after with Mr. Floodsay. It didn’t work.

  I was embarrassed. And frustrated. And hopeless. And I was petrified over what failing calc would do to my college plans.

  I needed that math credit to get into the college I wanted to go to. I begged Mr. Lloyd, my guidance counselor, to put me in another class, but all the other classes were full, so I couldn’t transfer out. So I had no choice. Fail the class or drop it entirely. Either way, I would lose the math credit I needed. I would go to a second-rate school. I would be status quo—almost perfect, almost amazing. And I was scared to death that the whole rest of my life would be defined by that, by an almost. I’d have come so close but never quite gotten there. This wasn’t about me losing everything; this was about me losing the only thing I’d ever gotten attention for. This was about me losing the most important thing.

  I had to do something. I couldn’t let one lousy teacher take it all away from me. Make me just one more child who had almost lived up to her potential. Make me the one who couldn’t overcome that she wasn’t born great.

  I didn’t realize until a car’s headlights on the other side of the median had streaked by that I was silently crying. I didn’t know what time it was, but we’d been on the road for hours, it seemed, and Grayson’s stirring was becoming more and more frequent.

  I had no idea where we were. For miles, I’d seen almost nothing but darkness. The only sign of a “town” was an occasional diner or defunct gas station perched at the top of an exit ramp.

  “What’s…?” was the first thing Grayson said when he finally woke up for real. He pulled himself up straighter and blinked, looking around. He licked his lips repeatedly. I reached over and picked up the warmish soda out of the cup holder and held it out to him. He looked at it as if he’d never seen such a contraption before.

  “Good morning, sunshine!” I said, way too cheerily. I could feel the tears hanging off my jaw, but didn’t make any move to wipe them away. “Jerky?” I put the soda back in the cup holder and held up the open bag of beef jerky instead. “Dinner of champions.” Again he stared, so I shook the bag a little. A meaty waft of air clouded the car.

  He didn’t take the bag, but looked out the window instead. “Where are we?” he finally asked, his voice still foggy from sleep.

  “Dunno.” I folded a piece of jerky into my mouth and began chewing, chewing, chewing. “Somewhere in Kansas,” I said around the meat.

  “Kansas?” he repeated, then peered out the window again. He began methodically touching his fingers to his thumb, the way he likes to do when he’s nervous. Back and forth, back and forth, forefinger, middle, ring, pinkie, ring, middle, forefinger. It made me want to burst out in song: Where is Thumbkin? Where is Thumbkin? “Why are we in Kansas?” His voice was getting clearer now, and his fingers were speeding up.

  “You told me to drive,” I said. “So I drove.”

  “Into the middle of Kansas?”

  I nodded, smiling around the wad of beef jerky that didn’t seem to want to be broken down. “Why not?”

  “What time is it?” he asked, peering at his watch, but it was too dark for him to see its face.

  I shrugged. “We’ve been on the road for a few hours, so maybe eight o’clock or so?”

  His face whipped around to me, startled. “Eight o’clock? At night?”

  “Well, it isn’t morning, Genius Boy.”

  “You’ve been driving through Kansas for four hours?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Give or take. Here, have some beef jerky. It’s dinner.”

  I held out the bag again and gave it another little shake. I could feel the tension build in my brother as it began to dawn on him what was going on. He’d stopped touching his fingers together and instead had started balling and relaxing his fists in his lap. Squeeze. Relax. Squeeze. Relax. Faster now. Squeezerelax. Squeezerelax. I wondered if this was a new coping technique he’d learned in treatment, and then it occurred to me that I’d never really asked him about what went on in treatment. I’d only asked if he’d gotten better. There was a whole part of him that I didn’t know. I resolved to ask him about it at some point while we were on the road. I was guessing there’d be plenty of time for talk.

  I wiggled the beef jerky bag again. He frowned and pushed it away; it fell out of my hand, the meat spilling out onto the floor at his feet. “I don’t want beef jerky. Kendra, what is going on?”

  “Hey, I was eating that!” I said.

  “I asked what’s going on.”

  “I said I was eating that. Pick it up.”

  “Not until you tell me what’s going on.”

  “Fine,” I said. “If you must know, you’re running away.”

  He squinted behind his glasses, as though he’d heard what I’d said but the words didn’t compute. “What are you talking about?”

  “You said you wanted to run away from your OCD. So you are. I’m helping you. Simple.”

  He let out
an exasperated laugh—just one little breath of air, really—and looked forward, cocking his head to one side. I leaned over and grabbed for the bag of jerky, but had to sit up quickly as the hum of the car veering onto the shoulder jarred me.

  “Stop the car,” Grayson said, a little too calmly.

  “No,” I said. “Give me the jerky.” I even sounded stupid to myself, fighting so hard for a bag of stale gas-station beef jerky. I don’t know what came over me, but all of a sudden everything I believed in, everything I wanted, was wrapped up in that bag. And I wasn’t going to let it go. “I said give it to me!”

  “Pull over,” Grayson said, his measured voice slipping, his left hand reaching for the steering wheel.

  “No! Stop it! You want to kill us? Just give me the beef jerky!”

  “Stop! The! Car!” he shouted. He yanked the steering wheel and we crossed over into the shoulder, bumping into a little ditch on the other side. I screamed, pulling the steering wheel to get Hunka back under control, and stomped on the brake. We came to a stop, halfway on and halfway off the shoulder of the road.

  For the briefest moment, there was nothing but silence. No other cars on the road. Nothing but fields around us. And in that silence, I heard my heart pounding. Ka-thunk-ka-thunk-ka-thunk. I tasted the jerky, salty in the corners of my mouth. I heard my brother’s breathing, quick and angry.

  And then the moment broke around us, as if we’d been suspended in a filmy, iridescent soap bubble and it had given, spilling us out into reality.

  “You could’ve killed us!” I screamed, and pounded my fist into Grayson’s shoulder. “You could’ve wrecked us out in the middle of freaking nowhere!” I pounded his shoulder again, but when I reared back to hit him a third time, he yanked his door open and launched himself out into the black fields. “Get back here!” I yelled, but he kept walking as though he hadn’t heard me. “Dammit,” I cursed under my breath. I checked my side mirror—no headlights, of course—and jumped out of the car, then raced across the field after him.

  “Grayson!” I shouted. “Grayson, stop!”

  He walked for a few more feet and then stopped, allowing me to catch up to him. He turned abruptly and faced me. “I can’t believe you’re this stupid. Running away? You really think I meant you should drive me out all the way to a Kansas soy field?”

  “You said you wanted to run away from it,” I argued, trying to catch my breath. “You said you wanted to run away from the OCD.”

  “You really think coming out here is what I meant?” he asked, his eyes bright, his voice breaking. “Are you really that stupid?”

  “Stop calling me stupid,” I said. “I’m helping you.”

  “No, you’re not!” he yelled, his face furious. “And we’re not going another five feet. Turn the car around and take us home.”

  He turned and walked back toward the car. I stood where I was and watched him go. He was so angry, he ended on an odd number of steps, but got into the car anyway. But I noticed, once he shut the door, that his fingers crooked in front of him and his lips were moving. He was counting, probably backward, to make up for doing it.

  I stood in the field and looked up at the sky. It was totally clear, and in the dark, the stars stood out like Christmas lights. Had it not been cold and my eyes not been blurred from tears, it would have been beautiful. I could imagine Grayson and Zoe and me, lying on our backs in a circle, the tops of our heads touching, trying to identify the constellations. Grayson would know them all. Zoe and I would purposely mess up the names, just to frustrate him. But it would make him laugh.

  “What’s that one again?” Zoe would ask, pointing straight up. “Ursula Major?”

  “No, dummy,” I’d say, laughing. “That’s Ursula Minority.”

  Grayson would growl exasperatedly. “It’s called Ursa Major, and no, that’s not it. You’re pointing at Betelgeuse, and it’s in Orion.”

  “Yeah, Zo,” I’d say, tapping her foot with mine. “You’re thinking of the Big Dipstick.” And we’d both laugh while Grayson pretended to angrily pound his head backward into the grass, groaning, “Big Dipper, you guys, Big Dipper!”

  I would’ve given anything to have Zoe with me tonight. Grayson sure wasn’t pretending to be mad this time.

  “Well, Zo,” I said aloud, peering into the sky. “I wasn’t expecting that. What do I do now, huh? You know him as well as I do. Help a girl out a little. I need my best friend.”

  And just like that, I knew where we were going.

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  I was right—Grayson was counting backward when I got into the car. He was only on number ninety-seven, so the goal number must have been pretty low. I had a frightening second where I wondered how high Grayson could count, and if I would find out on this trip. I was pretty sure if I had to listen to it for hours on end, we’d both end up mumbling numbers to ourselves and opening and shutting our car doors 100 times each to ward off bad omens and cruel accidents.

  I couldn’t think that way. I had to have hope.

  I turned onto my knees and leaned over to the backseat. I pulled my purse off the floorboard, where it had fallen during our little trip into the field. I unzipped it and pulled out my wallet. I thumbed past my student ID, my driver’s license, and two used-up gift cards and worked my way into the pocket section of the wallet. There, tucked away by itself, was a little rectangle of paper. Zoe’s eighth-grade photo. The one she’d pressed into my palm on the day she left. The day we promised not to forget each other. I studied the photo, my finger tracing the heart-shaped jawline of my best friend. Did her hair still flow to the middle of her back, or had she gotten it cut? Had she lost baby fat or had her teeth whitened? Would I even recognize her if I saw her in a crowded mall? I turned the photo over. Scrawled on the back were these words:

  Zoe

  555 Clark Street

  Citrus Heights, CA 95611

  “BFFs 4Ev!”

  I ran my finger over the letters, feeling the raised bump of the ink, then stuffed the photo back into its hiding place and zipped the purse shut, dropping it onto the floorboard behind me.

  I buckled my seat belt, put the car in drive, and thumped over the grass and onto the highway. A whine was coming from the tire on Grayson’s side, but otherwise Hunka seemed to have taken the rough ride like a champ. I stuck my hand through the hole of the steering wheel and patted the dash appreciatively.

  After several minutes, Grayson turned to me, back at zero, and said, “Just drive over the median.”

  “No.”

  “The next exit’s probably ten miles away. Nobody’ll know.”

  I was silent for a beat, sizing up my words. Grayson was thumping his thumb against his knee rhythmically. I fought the urge to mess up his rhythm, but knew that would be a bad idea. It would only serve to make the counting start up again.

  “I’m not turning around,” I finally said. My voice was steady, even, sounding much more confident than I felt. Honestly, after that mini-crash we’d just had, I was feeling pretty shaken up, and I wasn’t so sure going home was a bad idea after all.

  “Yes, you are,” he said. “I’ll pull the wheel again.”

  “Fine,” I snapped. “Go ahead and pull the wheel. You break us down out here and we’re not getting home at all. Nobody would even think to look for us here.”

  “Mom and Dad—”

  “Mom and Dad think you’re at Brock’s and I’m at Shani’s,” I said. “They aren’t even going to be suspicious until tomorrow morning when the school calls to…” I trailed off. My mouth still couldn’t form around the words. Called to what, exactly? Called to tell them what I’d done? Called to tell them that their perfect daughter was getting expelled and wasn’t going to be going to college after all? “To find out why I’m not in class,” I finished, thinking, You wish that was the worst of your worries, Kendra. “By then,” I continued, “we’ll be almost out of Kansas.” I flicked a glance at the gas gauge and added silently, I hope so.
r />   Grayson straightened. “Out of Kansas? Have you lost your mind? We can’t just go driving across the country.”

  “Why not?” I asked, shrugging. “Huh? I mean, here we are… we’re driving… and we’d be fine if you’d just chill out. It’s a road trip. Have fun.”

  He shook his head and gave a sardonic laugh. “Fun,” he muttered. “You’re insane. I don’t know why they keep locking me up. You’re the crazy one.”

  “Yeah, fun,” I said, choosing to ignore his little dig. He was unhappy, but at least he wasn’t shouting at me and reaching for the steering wheel. Or counting, which, to me, seemed like progress. Maybe even seemed as if my plan would work exactly as I’d wanted it to. Like Dr. St. James was right, and all we had to do was make Grayson face his anxiety. “Remember fun? You used to have it sometimes?”

  “Ha-ha-ha,” he deadpanned.

  “Okay. Remember the time we made the woods behind Zoe’s house into a haunted forest for Halloween?”

  He made a noise in the back of his throat but didn’t comment.

  “And we invited all the little neighborhood kids, and you were the headless ghost, and you were so good you made that Ian kid cry?”

  Grayson’s mouth twitched. “Yeah.”

  “See? That was fun. And remember last summer when we snuck out at midnight for that twenty-cent taco sale at Jose Grande’s? And we bought, like, twenty dollars’ worth of tacos? And we both forgot our house keys and we couldn’t get back in?”

  Grayson laughed. “And you had the brilliant idea to throw your shoes at Mom and Dad’s window because they didn’t hear the doorbell.”

  I cracked up. “And they called the cops instead and there we were, holding all these giant bags of tacos on our own front porch.”

  “And your shoes were stuck in the gutter.”