Perfect Escape

by Jennifer Brown

  I lifted one hand and waved.

  And she just looked at me. Then shook her head sadly, as if she wished it could be like it was before but it wasn’t. Then turned away, letting the curtains drop closed.

  My hand dropped, too, and I opened Hunka’s door, too numb to even cry.

  My phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out and almost laughed at the irony: The text was from Zoe. Finally. After all this time, she answered me. Her text read:

  U shouldn’t have come here. Please go.

  It was over.

  All of it.

  All this way, and it was over.

  Suddenly I couldn’t pull up a single memory of my childhood with Zoe. No swing set. No school bus. No sleepovers and magazines and warm homemade caramel. All of it, gone. It was as if she never existed, as if we never existed. And, God, she was so important to me for so many years; if she never existed, I couldn’t even remember who I was.

  Grayson got in next to me. Just got in, no theatrics, the seat squeaking under his weight. He shut his door, and we sat there together in silence for what seemed like a lifetime.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, breaking the silence. “It’s my fault.”

  I turned my head to look at him. His eyes were drooping at the edges, and he had them pointed at the dashboard, as if he were too ashamed to even make eye contact with me. His shoulders slumped and his right knee shook ever so slightly, and he looked like the most dejected, saddened, guilty person to ever walk the earth.

  Seeing that look on my brother’s face, I got it. I understood Mom’s and Dad’s rage toward Zoe’s parents. It washed over me, threatened to pull me under like a wicked tide. I could feel myself fighting it, arms and legs flailing and grasping for solid ground. But instead all I got was mouthfuls of bitterness and a clarity I wished I’d had three years earlier. Maybe even further back than that. Before the swing set and school bus and warm caramel.

  How dare they? How dare they do this to him?

  He was a good person, and he never did anything but love Zoe.

  “Bullshit,” I said, and scrambled back out of Hunka. I raced to the flower garden by the front porch and scooped up a handful of rocks. Then I backpedaled until I could see the window Zoe had been looking out of. “Come back and face him!” I screamed, and threw a rock. It went wide and thunked against the side of the house. “Come back and face us, Zoe!”

  I threw another rock, and this time it hit. But the rock was small and my throw weak, and it was a barely audible tick against the glass. So I palmed a heavier one and threw it with all my might. Gong! It smacked the window, and I saw the curtains flutter like someone had moved away fast, but nobody appeared at the window.

  “Come on, Zoe, you coward! It’s not his fault, and you know it! It’s not his fault! You said so yourself! Get out here!”

  I threw another rock, and then another. Again the curtains fluttered, but nothing, so I turned my attention, instead, to the window by the front door. It was skinnier, a harder target to hit, but I didn’t care. I got closer, scooped up another handful of rocks, and threw them in rapid fire—zing! zing! zing!—all the while screaming everything I wished I’d ever said to the Monetts and never had the guts to before now. All the things that had swirled through my head as I’d watched from the stairs or the driveway or the swing set. And not just to them. To everyone who ever treated Grayson as though he were subhuman. To everyone who ever treated our family like we were somehow not good enough because of my brother.

  “You uncaring bastards!” Smack! “How could you do this to him? You had no right! You have no right!” Swack! “You’re not so superior! Do you hear me? You’re not better than him!”

  I was sweating and breathing hard, and in the distance I could hear my brother saying something, calling something, but I was so blinded by my rage at that point I didn’t care.

  “You don’t stop being a best friend!” I cried. “You can’t just stop that! You said you’d never forget, Zoe! You promised you’d never forget me! You’d never forget us!” Zip! “How could you?”

  I’d run out of rocks, so I bent to pick up another and found my hands wrapping around a decorative rock, about the size of both of my fists together. What kind of rock is this? I imagined Rena asking Grayson, her eyes big and eager. Sedimentary, I imagined him answering, and imagined him turning it in his hands to show her, but the only answer I had was the kind of rock that gets a point across.

  Even though I was spent, I heaved that rock with everything I had, with a mighty roar, or maybe a growl, or probably more like a screech, releasing three years’ worth of anger and frustration and grief and worry and fear. They had no right. They had no right to treat him like that. They had no right to treat anyone like that.

  Somehow I hit the target.

  I knew as soon as I heard the crack! that I’d hit it. And almost at the same time, the front door opened, Mrs. Monett storming out onto the porch with a phone in her hand. Zoe stood in the doorway, staring at the shattered glass on her front porch, her hand over her mouth.

  Mrs. Monett’s mouth was moving, but all I could hear was myself screaming over her, over everything. “He’s not a freak! He loved you! He loved you more than anyone will ever love you! And you know what? You don’t deserve him! He’s too good for you, Zoe! Do you hear me? He’s too good for you! You destroyed him, and all he ever gave you was the best he had! Screw you, Zoe! Screw you and your stupid parents!”

  “Kendra,” Zoe was saying, “you should leave… please… oh, my God… you’re crazy… we aren’t kids anymore… you can’t just show up at someone’s house…”

  I felt a hand go around my middle, and I felt my feet leaving the ground, and I saw myself being pulled away from the house, but it did nothing to stop me. I kept screaming. I saw Mrs. Monett bark something into the phone, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything but proving that they were wrong.

  That they’d always been wrong.

  About Grayson.

  About us.

  Zoe had betrayed me. She’d said she’d never forget, but she did.

  My brother carried me across the lawn, bawling and cursing and kicking and flipping off my former best friend in the world. He dumped me into the passenger seat of Hunka, my knee jabbing painfully into the corner of the stupid glove box door, and before I could do anything but continue to blubber—“How could you do this to him? He’s a person, too, you know…”—he slid behind the steering wheel, and Hunka roared into life.

  I watched my best friend’s face—contorted with tears, hand still in front of her mouth—as we pulled away from the curb, then curled into myself and cried seventeen years’ worth of tears while my brother sped us away.

  While he rescued me.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  It seemed like we drove forever, but when the car finally came to a stop and I uncurled myself and squinted through the sun, we were in the parking lot of a little playground not far from the gas station where I’d stopped and asked for directions earlier. There was nobody else there. The swings drifted lazily back and forth in the breeze.

  The graininess of the world through my tear-soaked eyes, combined with the sight of the gas station, gave me a sense of déjà vu, and for the slightest moment it was as if none of what had just happened had happened at all. It was as if I was about to march inside and get directions to Zoe, and then everything would go according to plan.

  But it didn’t go according to plan at all, did it?

  I knew it didn’t, because my nose was plugged up with snot from all the sobbing I’d done. And because I could still hear the crack! of the window beside Zoe’s front door breaking. And because I could still see the words of her text: Please go. And, most important, because when I turned my head I could see my brother in the driver’s seat, his hands trembling on the steering wheel.

  “Good thing you didn’t get pulled over,” I said. My voice was scratchy. My throat felt raw. “No license.”

>   He shrugged. “I had to get you out of there. She was going to call the police.” He peered at the dashboard through the holes of the steering wheel. “This car is dusty. You’re lucky you don’t have asthma.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I laughed, accidentally snorting at the end of it. And then the snort made me giggle. And the giggle made me laugh harder. I threw my head back against the seat.

  “What?” he was saying. “Asthma can kill.”

  Which made me laugh even harder. All that we’d gone through… all that Mrs. Monett had said about him… all of the driving that he’d just done, probably scared to death the entire time… and he was worrying about dashboard dust giving me asthma.

  Only Grayson.

  Only my brother.

  God, I loved him.

  Pretty soon I was laughing so hard I was crying again, and I’m not so sure my body really knew which one it was supposed to be doing, because the sounds coming out of my mouth were half-guffaw, half-sob. I ended up sounding so ridiculous, even Grayson started to tip the slightest smile.

  After the laughter died down, I wiped my eyes again and took a deep breath. “Well, that was a bust,” I said.

  The seat creaked as Grayson shifted. “So, now what?”

  Good question. Really good question. What would we do? What did people do when the friend they’d put all their hopes on left them twisting in the wind? What did they do when the secret they’d been keeping was laid bare, and their hopes were dashed, and they were days away from home and had no money? What did they do when the only solution they’d ever seen to their problem ended up being no solution at all, but just another problem? Nothing had changed. Nothing had been solved. I still faced loads of drama back home. Grayson was still counting. I still had no idea what would happen to me when I got back. Only now, I didn’t even have enough money to get back. So what now was sort of the question of the hour.

  But one thing was clear. Clearer to me than it had been in… maybe forever. Whatever what now was going to be… I was going to have to be the one to make it happen.

  No, actually, we were. We would have to trust each other and finish this out ourselves. But the funny thing was… even though every plan I’d made turned out to be as stupid as Grayson said it was, and even though he was no better than three days ago when I’d found him in the quarry, and even though I was no less busted than I’d been when we left Missouri… after all we’d been through, I had a feeling we could do it. We could make it just fine.

  “I’ll tell you what we do now,” I said, opening the door. “We swing.”

  I grabbed his tub of antibacterial wipes and then got out of the car, taking a deep breath of fresh air through my clogged nostrils.

  To my surprise, Grayson followed me, no argument, no counting, no stopping to tap his toe or touch the ground with his finger. Maybe he could see my new take-charge attitude. Maybe I was fooling him, because I certainly wasn’t doing the greatest job of fooling myself.

  He caught up with me as I stepped up into the grass and headed for the empty swing set.

  “How much money do we have left?”

  I rummaged around in my pocket and pulled out the small cluster of bills that were left. I counted. “Forty-six dollars.”

  “How are we going to get home on forty-six dollars?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We can’t get home on forty-six dollars.”

  “I know that.”

  “You really didn’t think this whole thing through.”

  “I know that, too.”

  I stepped over a railroad tie into pea gravel and sped up a little. I had no clue why this idea had made sense to me at all, but somehow I knew that if I could just make this one decision and execute it properly, everything else would fall into place. Grayson’s flip-flops struggled through the rocks beside me. He didn’t say anything more about money; he sank to his knees and began sifting through the tiny stones.

  I eased into a swing and let my feet leave the ground as I pulled back on the chains to get myself going. Pretty soon I was soaring through the air, letting my mind go blank.

  We didn’t talk about my spectacle at Zoe’s house. We didn’t talk about the broken window or the dwindling money supply or my dying cell phone battery or any of that. We settled into a comfortable silence that was only occasionally interrupted by small talk.

  “What do you think Rena’s doing right now?”

  “I don’t know, Gray. Probably still at the hospital.”

  “Think she’ll call you?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know…. Did you make any friends in treatment?”

  “Not really. Everybody kind of keeps to themselves in those places.”

  “Were you scared in treatment?”

  “Sometimes. Why?”

  “Just wondering.”

  “It’s really warm here.” Uh-uh-uh. “Not like home.”

  “Yeah, I know. Would be awesome to live here…”

  But eventually we ran out of easy topics.

  “You going to call Mom?” Grayson finally asked. He didn’t look up.

  I thought about it. I basically had no other choice at this point, right? But I’d put her through so much, I almost couldn’t even bear to think of talking to her. “I don’t know,” I said. “I honestly never thought what I would do if the Zoe thing didn’t work out.” At the mention of her name out loud, my stomach flipped again, and I paused, let my swing slow.

  My brother picked up a pebble and studied it. “Why were you so sure she’d help us?”

  I thought about it. “Because we would’ve helped her,” I said. “Because she said she wouldn’t ever forget us.” I thought some more and sighed. “Because everything in my life always has to be perfect. I even have to have the perfect lifelong friendship.”

  Grayson glanced up at me. “Nobody’s perfect.”

  “Trust me, I know that now.”

  He went back to his rocks, mumbling, “Must be nice.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing. It… must be nice to be just now figuring out that you’re not perfect. I had pretty much figured out that I was a total screwup by the time I was ten.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Grayson, you’re not a total screwup. Check it out. You even drove a car today.”

  “Still. I would’ve rather been as not-perfect as you any day.”

  I swallowed, let my swing slow to a stop. It had never occurred to me before that my brother would want to be like me. I’d always been so worried about how who he was affected me; I’d never stopped to think how who I was affected him.

  “Well, you wouldn’t want to be me right now,” I said around the lump that had formed in my throat. “I think I have perfected being not-perfect at the moment.”

  “Overachiever,” he joked, and we dropped back into silence.

  Overachiever. Sounded about right.

  Only it didn’t feel like an insult. Or pressure. It felt like acceptance.

  We didn’t stay at the park much longer. Neither of us had much to say. My mind was reeling with everything that had happened. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be me saving Grayson. It was supposed to be Zoe saving both of us. It was supposed to all work, and it hadn’t.

  Instead, I’d driven eighteen hundred miles with a sick brother whom I couldn’t fix and a total stranger who let her baby almost die, just to reach a best friend who’d forgotten about me and moved on. I was the biggest chump in the world.

  I had nobody to blame but myself.

  All of it was my fault.

  It was my fault I’d gotten busted cheating. It was my fault we ran away. It was my fault we were out of money. And it was my fault we were stranded in Citrus Heights and all we had to show for it was some broken glass and a text message telling me to go away.

  So I sat on that swing with my self-blame and misery and didn’t even try to stop it when I felt it gnawing through my stomach. I deserved it. I deserved to feel
like crap, and I deserved to have nothing to show for the money I’d stolen. I deserved it all.

  It wasn’t until we’d gotten back to Hunka and I’d driven down the street and put the last of the money into the gas tank that Grayson finally spoke again.

  “How far do you think that’ll get us?” he asked, opening the atlas and flipping to the Ns. “At least to Reno. We could stop at that hospital again, if you want. Bo’s probably still there.” He reached down to the floorboard and scrabbled up two little rocks that had escaped my fingers back in the hospital parking lot. He lined them up on the highway line on the map. “We could call Mom from there,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, putting the car into drive and feeling totally defeated. I’d have to call Mom. Tell her I was going to have to use the credit card to get home. That was a no-brainer. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to come back a hero. The daughter who saved their son. Instead I would be slinking back as a failure.

  I couldn’t cure Grayson for them.

  It took more than a stupid road trip to cure someone like Grayson. I should’ve accepted it, like Mom, and caved. Let him count his rocks and…

  Wait.

  The rocks.

  California.

  Of course.

  I couldn’t cure my brother.

  And without Zoe, there was no way I could get us back to the threesome we used to be.

  But I could still give him something.

  I stalled before turning onto the highway, and a car behind me honked. But I couldn’t make my foot press the gas pedal, couldn’t make my hands turn us back toward home.

  “What’re you doing?” Grayson asked, glancing back at the line of cars behind us as I sat at the exit ramp, totally still. Uh-uh. “This is the right turn.” He pointed toward the exit ramp, like I was a complete idiot who couldn’t see the obvious right in front of her face.