Perfect Escape

by Jennifer Brown

  I was shaking my head. No. I couldn’t go back that way. Not yet.

  Instead of turning onto the exit ramp, I flicked on my blinker and swung back out into the other lane. Cars were honking like crazy now, and one guy was shaking his fist at me like a cartoon character, but I barely even noticed any of them.

  “What are you doing?” Grayson was demanding, but I’d started giggling, sounding a little unhinged, I knew, and veering off into the left lane to catch the highway going west. He was punching the atlas with his finger, holding it up for me to see. “You want east. This is west.”

  But I ignored him.

  Pressed on the gas pedal and eased onto the highway.

  Sure of myself.

  I didn’t need Zoe. I didn’t need her help or her plans. I didn’t need her to save us. I didn’t need Rena or Mom or Dad or Bryn Mallom or stupid Chub Hartley. I could do this myself. It wasn’t the plan that I’d made, but that was the thing about plans—when they got screwed up, you made new ones, and sometimes the new, imperfect plans turned out to be far better than the original, so-called perfect ones.

  I couldn’t cure Grayson for my parents.

  I couldn’t cure Grayson for me.

  I couldn’t cure Grayson at all.

  But, by God, I could see this trip through.

  Grayson was still freaking out in the seat next to me. “What are you doing? You’re going the wrong way!”

  I shook my head. “Nope. For the first time, I’m going exactly the right way, big brother. We have a change in travel plans. We are going to the Hayward Fault.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-NINE

  Grayson didn’t freak out like I expected him to. Didn’t even argue. He made this moaning sound and turned toward the window and rubbed those two rocks he was holding. Rubbed, rubbed, rubbed them with his thumb until I was sure he’d rub the skin right off. He’d started counting, this time by twos.

  I was a little surprised, to be honest. Surprised that he didn’t give me a lecture about money or some guilt trip about Mom and Dad or point out to me that Zoe’s mom had probably called the police when I broke their window, and that she’d also probably called our house and that would be one more headache I’d laid on Mom and Dad. Normally, that is exactly what Grayson would do. He could lecture almost as well as he could wash his hands.

  But I was too over it to think this meant any progress on my brother’s part. We’d gone too far during this road trip. I had no delusions that maybe this meant he was more relaxed or that he was having fun or liked the idea in any way. And I especially didn’t fool myself into thinking that maybe this meant he wasn’t thinking about all those things, plus a hundred or a thousand more dismal others.

  More likely, he’d given up arguing with me. He’d probably figured it would be wasted breath.

  So we drove in silence, and I squinted into the sunlight, feeling like I was driving out of cold, gray early spring and into paradise. Feeling like I could drive forever and just pretend that life was nothing but sunny and beautiful.

  I turned on the radio and searched until I found a song I knew, then sang along, nudging my brother’s shoulder a few times.

  He ignored me. One hundred twenty-two…. One hundred twenty-four…

  “Hey, Gray, remember this one of Dad’s? What’s black and white and red all over?” I paused. “A newspaper! Now don’t you kids go stealing that one.”

  Nothing.

  When we started seeing signs for San Francisco, I knew we were getting close, but didn’t know where to go from there.

  “Hey, Gray,” I said, turning down the radio volume. “Can you get out the atlas?”

  No answer. He wasn’t even counting anymore.

  “Grayson.” I nudged him again. “We need to look at the map.”

  Nothing. Just that incessant rubbing, rubbing, rubbing.

  We were getting closer. Traffic was picking up. And I wasn’t sure where to go, but I felt sure that if I stayed in this lane on the highway for much longer, I’d miss it. I’d miss everything and then I’d run out of gas and would be stranded somewhere in Cali-freaking-fornia and I was so sick of this, so sick of this, and God I couldn’t even get this one thing right!

  “Dude, come on! Where is this thing?” I practically shouted. Hunka swerved and a car honked. I smacked Grayson’s shoulder, and when he slowly turned to look at me, I could see his lips, pulled together in a tight line across his teeth, like a dog giving a warning growl. But his eyes didn’t look angry. They looked watery and searching behind his glasses. They looked afraid. It was a look I’d seen before. “What’s the matter?” I asked, trying to sound forceful, but it was tough getting the words around the lump that had suddenly formed in my throat.

  And that’s when it happened.

  Official full freak-out mode.

  Just like on the way to Grandma’s house all those years ago.

  My brother started screaming and pounding his head back against the seat, kicking the bottom of the dash with his feet, his fists clenched, shrieking, “Stop! Stop! Stop!” and I don’t care how many times you witness something like that, it scares the holy living shit out of you every single time. You never get used to someone coming completely unhinged and shouting in your face. You never get used to someone you love acting crazy, acting like someone you’ve never seen before. Acting like a total stranger.

  “Okay!” I yelled, reaching out with one hand in a useless calming gesture. With the other hand I plunged Hunka in and out of lanes, cars slamming on brakes and people yelling behind their steering wheels, until I was clear over on the right and could pull off the road. “Okay, okay, see? We’re stopped!” I said, putting Hunka in park and turning to hold both palms out toward my brother, like, even though the one-hand-out gesture didn’t do a damn bit of good, maybe the two-hands-out gesture would.

  And more than anything in the world, I wanted Mom and Dad. I’d witnessed Grayson’s freak-outs before, but I was always only that—a witness. I could close my eyes if I wanted to. I could go to my bedroom and lock the door. I could pretend I didn’t hear him, didn’t see him, that he was normal, that we were all normal. I could go to school and forget all about him. But my parents never could. They were front-row ticket holders to Grayson’s freak-outs. They couldn’t close their eyes or go to their rooms or pretend.

  I didn’t want to be in the front row.

  The front row was scary and loud and made my chest hurt.

  His screams of “Stop!” had turned to just plain screams now, his voice bouncing off the windows and driving into my eardrums.

  “Okay,” I said, still holding my hands out defensively. “Okay, okay. I stopped. Look. I stopped, Grayson. We’re stopped.” But my voice was carried away on top of his, like the words were being yanked out of my mouth and crushed before they could even form into sounds. It felt horrible, as though, if he kept it up, I wouldn’t be able to even think straight and then I would have no choice but to start shrieking and crying, too, and as awful as it felt to think this, I couldn’t help myself thinking it—I don’t want to turn into him. Please, God, please don’t make me turn into my brother. I didn’t want to become a scary person, too.

  I tried to think of what Mom and Dad would do in this situation. What had they done before? Hold him down? Yes, sometimes. Yell at him? Only when they were at the bottom of their bag of tricks and nothing else had worked. Let him go on until he was screamed out? Only Mom did that, and only if Dad wasn’t home.

  But I couldn’t let him go on. My head already felt full to bursting with his wails. And I didn’t think I could really hold him down. Not when he was like this.

  So I tried yelling.

  And for a while it was both of us yelling in that car, him flailing around and me with my eyes closed, and it must have sounded like screechdammitGraysonwailshutupsquealwe’restoppedlookaroundshriek…

  And we must have looked nuts in there, but if we did, nobody seemed to notice—they were all busy heading off to t
heir normal lives while we created chaos out of ours.

  But then, all of a sudden, Grayson seemed to come back to a semblance of reality, which ordinarily would have been a good thing. But this time he looked around wildly, his arms and legs flinging out and clutching the seat, one of the rocks flying out of his palm and thwacking me in the chin. He took in an enormous gasp, like you would expect to hear out of someone who has just seen a zombie pop up out of the ground at his feet, and before I could even react, his hand scrambled for the door handle and out he went, rolling onto the grass beside the highway and sprawling there, his fingers curled into the grass, clutching for dear life.

  “What the… Gray?” I called, peering out the door, which he’d left open. I could see him, a couple feet away from the car, and I was scared, yes, and I wanted to be sympathetic—I really did—but something about the way he was lying there, looking like a freak for all the world to see, was the last damn straw.

  I let out a howl of my own, pounded the steering wheel a few times with my fists, checked the side mirror, and then, when the coast was clear, darted around Hunka into the grass on the other side, seething.

  I was so done with this.

  I was sick to death of embarrassment. Sick of not going to Grandma’s. Sick of not being able to do anything when he was around, forever a prop in The Grayson Show. Sick of losing everyone to him—Mom, Dad, even Zoe. Everyone tiptoed around my brother. Everyone wanted him to be normal, not even bothering to see that I was better than normal. I was damned perfect. It was all about him, all the damned time, and I was so sick of it I wanted to scream.

  “Get up!” I yelled, when I got around to the grass. He didn’t budge. “Get up!” I repeated, halfheartedly kicking the dirt next to his right arm. “I’m not kidding, Grayson. Get up!”

  He turned his head just enough to show one eye, glasses half-on, and his mouth. “I can’t,” he breathed.

  I held both arms out at my sides, gesturing to the highway stretching out on either side of us. “There aren’t any overpasses. Get back in. You’re acting like a freak. Everyone is staring.” Which, by the way, was oddly not true. Nobody even seemed to notice.

  He swallowed. “What if today’s the day?”

  “The day for what?”

  “The big one. Today could be the big one.”

  “The big what? You’re acting ridiculous.”

  But then I understood. All those afternoons in the backyard, Grayson running around, pulling Zoe and me out of upended wheelbarrows, our bodies limp, him crying, Oh, the humanity! It was one of our favorite games to play. Our little Hayward Fault rescue game.

  Only to my brother, it wasn’t a game. It was practice.

  I crouched down next to his head. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. “You’re worried about an earthquake?”

  “Studies show earthquakes with a magnitude of six-point-seven happen twenty times a year worldwide, Kendra!”

  “That’s stupid.”

  He lifted his head. “You’re the one who brought us here. You’re the one who had this brilliant idea to go to a fault line that’s famous for the possibility that it could cause a hugely devastating earthquake any day, and you’re blaming me for thinking an earthquake is possible? Who’s the stupid one?”

  “You are!” I yelled, knowing full well that we sounded like a couple of little kids. I think even I wasn’t sure if what was coming out of my mouth wasn’t the six-year-old me, wanting to yell at him to stop playing this idiotic game of fear and sadness and put the coins away and stand up to the big boys and stop crying all the time and just be normal.

  “Well, that’s rich,” he said, “coming from you. I never had to cheat.”

  “At least I made it past my junior year,” I shot back.

  “At least I was smart enough to take the tests all on my own.”

  “How the hell would you know? You spent all your class time counting how many times your teachers blinked.”

  “At least I never dragged you into my messes,” he said.

  I glared at him, barely believing what I’d just heard come out of my brother’s mouth.

  “Oh, didn’t you?” I said, my chest feeling like it might explode, I was so angry. I started to pace, little staccato steps around his head. “How many times have I had to stop what I was doing to climb down into that quarry for you, huh? How many times did I have to listen to Mom cry because you were back in the hospital? How many nights have I sat alone in the kitchen at dinnertime because Mom and Dad were too busy discussing what next to do with you? What about my birthday party that was canceled because you were having a rough time and Mom and Dad didn’t think you could handle company in the house? And the time that we never got to Grandma’s at Christmas because you couldn’t handle an overpass? What about my best friend who had to move away because you couldn’t be normal? You think this is all about you, Grayson. That this sickness of yours is your problem, but you drag the whole family through your problem. Every. Single. Day. So don’t even talk to me about dragging you into my problem. My whole life has been about your problems. So my advice to you, Genius Boy, if you don’t like being dragged into my mess? Deal with it. I have. My whole life.”

  “Whatever,” he said into the ground, his voice sounding as if he was crying, or at least on the verge of it.

  “And you really think that hanging on to a few blades of grass is going to save you from ‘the big one’?” I made air quotes with my hands. “That’s as stupid as thinking that counting to a zillion will keep us all from dying, or any of the other ridiculous rituals you do.” I was on a roll now. “Haven’t you ever noticed that normal people don’t do those things? That you have the whole family totally wrapped up in your crap? It’s like you—”

  “Shut up!” he cried, pulling his face up from the ground. His glasses had totally fallen off, and there was a piece of grass stuck to his beet-red forehead. His face was covered with sweat and snot and tears. He took a deep, ragged breath. “You have no idea what it’s like to be me.”

  “And you have no idea what it’s like to be me,” I yelled. “Always living under your shadow. Always having to be perfect to make up for you, but nobody ever noticing me at all until I screwed up. Always worrying that I might become you. That I might someday wake up and I won’t be able to get out of bed until I’ve recited every color I could think of or some other stupid, crazy obsession. You have no idea what it’s like to be me. It’s worse than any earthquake, because this. Never. Stops! Never!” I swiped my hair, which had caught a breeze, out of my face. Anger was pulsing through me so strongly I could feel it in my eyeballs. It had been such a long day, so filled with emotion. I felt raw and ragged.

  Grayson was still staring at me, but the red had faded a little bit. He was breathing hard, though, and his voice was weak from all the screaming. “Poor you, you’ve got it so hard,” he said. “How do you stand it?”

  “You have no idea,” I repeated, shaking my head.

  “I don’t, huh?” he said. “Let me tell you something, perfect little princess. I have every idea. You don’t think it killed me every time someone treated you like there was something wrong with you because of me? You think I didn’t notice when your friends’ moms wouldn’t let them come around our house because of me, or that one time when that one girl’s mom wouldn’t let you come inside her house because she thought whatever I had made you trashy?”

  “Kathy,” I murmured. I’d forgotten about that. How could I have forgotten? We were in sixth grade, and her mom refused to let me any farther than the front porch. I’d sat on the porch and told her I understood, but later I’d cried and had hated my brother with every ounce of energy I had. For doing this to me.

  Never had I thought what it might have done to him.

  “I’m not blind,” he said. “I see what I do to the family. I see how Mom and Dad look at you. How they joke with you and laugh and relax. They can carry on a conversation with you without ever once looking at your hands. Did you n
otice that?” He paused, and the blade of grass fell off his forehead. “Because I noticed. Did they ever once make a big deal out of something good that I did? Did they ever once just treat me like a member of the family? No. I’m always the sick one. The one who struggles. The one with difficulties. The one to blame for everything that doesn’t work out. And every time you did something great, I had to act happy for you, when all I could think was how much I hated you for not being sick like me. How much I wanted to be you. Just for one day.” He took a deep, quivering breath. “So, yeah. I think I have a pretty good idea what it’s like to live in someone’s shadow.”

  A car pulled up behind Hunka, and a woman opened the passenger door, sticking her head out.

  “Y’all okay?” she asked, a Southern twang to her voice.

  I nodded, brushing my hair away from my face again and trying my best with a confident smile. “Fine,” I called back. “He gets carsick.”

  “You need us to call someone?”

  “No, thanks,” I answered. “I’ve got a cell. He’ll be fine in a couple minutes anyway.” But in my head I was thinking, Will he? Will we ever be all right?

  The woman nodded, eased back into her car, and shut the door, and they pulled away. I felt relief, but also worry. I had to get my brother back in the car before someone thought I’d murdered him, and called the police.

  I sighed and lowered myself to the ground, my back against Hunka’s open door, my feet at Grayson’s head. I could hear him make his muffled uh-uh sound. He sounded miserable.

  As miserable as I felt.

  I’d done it. I’d said everything to my brother that I’d always wanted to say. So why didn’t I feel any better?

  After a while, I reached inside Hunka and pulled out one of the rocks, which had rolled under Grayson’s seat along with about a dozen others.

  “What is this?” I asked, holding it up and squinting at it. “One of those metaphoric ones?”

  Grayson lifted his head slowly, one eye closed. “Metamorphic,” he corrected, “and no.”