Perfect Escape (19 page)

“I’ve got one,” I said. “If two nerds drive to Wyoming together, how long before the normal person in the car goes crazy?”

But they both ignored me.

“Okay, okay,” Rena said. “How about this? I can’t remember the rhyme, but this is close enough. Elizabeth, Elspeth, Besty, and Bess found a bird’s nest with five eggs in
it. They all took one and left four eggs inside. How did they do that?”

“It was the same egg—they just passed it around,” I said, then pointed at Grayson. “Ha-ha, sucker! Beat you to it!”

“Those are just nicknames. Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy, and Bess are all the same girl,” Grayson said over me, then tossed Rena’s crumpled granola bar wrapper at my head and added, “dumbass.”

I grabbed the wrapper and threw it back at him. “That’s tough talk from a guy whose ass I kicked at the bottom of a quarry yesterday,” I said. “And it’s a good thing I did. You’d still be there counting if I hadn’t.” It was barely out of my mouth before I realized I shouldn’t have said it. I could see him wilt a little next to me, and I wanted to kick myself for bringing up the one thing I was hoping to help him forget about. After a few seconds, he turned forward again and relined the stones on the dash.

“So what’s with all the rocks?” Rena asked.

Grayson swallowed. “Nothing,” he said. “I just like rocks.” All the playfulness was gone.
Poof.

“Sorry, Gray,” I said after a few more minutes, bumping his shoulder with my hand playfully. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.” And even though inside my head I protested—
but he’s embarrassed me so many times!
—I was surprised to find that I really meant it. Probably because I knew in my heart that he never meant to embarrass me, either, and if he could have changed it, he would have.

He shook his head. “I embarrass myself,” he said, then curled up on his side toward the window and grew quiet.

I felt like a jerk. And like I might cry.

I’d never felt farther from home, and Zoe never seemed farther away, and for just a moment, if I let myself, I could almost feel totally lost. Like I’d never get to where I wanted to be again.

I left Grayson alone with his thoughts for a while as I took in the scenery of Wyoming and noticed that really every place kind of looks like every other place when you’re on the road. But eventually my curiosity got to me. I knew nothing about Wyoming.

“So what’s in Wyoming?” I asked, trying to get conversation going again.

“Fossils,” Grayson muttered, still pouting.

Ugh. Fossils. Science. Not my strong suit. But I wanted to lighten the mood in the car… see if I could get us back to where we were before I brought up the rocks. See if I could get Grayson talking again.

“Cool. Maybe we should pull over and try to find a dinosaur head or something,” I said. “Wouldn’t that be awesome to come home with a giant
T. rex
head as a souvenir?”

Grayson rolled his eyes at me. “You can’t just go find a dinosaur head,” he answered. “It’s not like they’re lying on the side of the road waiting for someone to pick one up as a souvenir.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, for starters, when they dug up the ground to lay the highway, they probably would have already found it.”

“Maybe. You don’t know.”

He glared at me. “I do know. It’s called logic. You’re not going to find a dinosaur head out here.”

“If I got out and found one, you’d feel like a real idiot right now,” I countered. “How do you think the first guy who found a dinosaur head found it? By getting down on the ground and looking.”

“Good luck. And it’s called a skull, by the way. Not a head. And a
T. rex
skull would be way too big to take home as a souvenir.”

“You have no imagination, Grayson.”

“But I have logic.”

I made a face at him, secretly delighted at how normal this conversation was. Like a billion conversations we’d had over the years. It felt comfy. It felt like he’d forgiven me for acting like a jerk earlier.

“Jackalopes,” Rena said from the backseat.

“Huh?”

She laughed. “Back at the motel, we had these brochures about this place called Douglas, Wyoming. Home of the jackalope.”

“What’s a jackalope?” I asked.

Grayson rolled his eyes again, as if he was seriously put out about having to explain yet another simple concept to his ignorant sister. But he was also grinning. “Part jackrabbit, part antelope. A rabbit with antelope horns.”

“Legend has it they’re vicious,” Rena said, and giggled again. “A vicious bunny.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said.

“Seriously? You think you’re going to put a
T. rex
head in your pocket to take home, and it’s a jackalope that you find ridiculous?” Grayson countered. Then he mimicked in a falsetto voice, “Where’s your imagination?”

We drove on for a few seconds in silence. Every so often, Rena would giggle in the backseat. Jackalopes. Granted, I hadn’t exactly planned out this trip, but never in my wildest dreams would I have thought I’d be having a discussion about jackalopes. I kind of liked it. Jackalopes had nothing to do with calc or OCD or lost friendships. Jackalopes were just a ridiculous story. Something to talk about to pass the time.

I didn’t mind passing a little time. It’s not like Zoe was waiting for us or anything.

“Hey, Rena, where did you say this place was?”

“Douglas, Wyoming,” she answered.

“Grayson, how far is it?” I pointed to the atlas.

He scrunched his eyebrows up at me as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “No way.”

“Yes way. How far is Douglas? Lead me to the jackalope, man!” Both Rena and I cracked up.

Slowly he picked up the atlas and studied it for a few minutes. “It’d be about two hours off the highway.”

“That’s no time!”

“Kendra, think about it. Two hours off the highway to get there. And then two hours back. Just to see an animal that doesn’t exist.”

“We have time. Now, tell me where to get off, or I’ll start taking random highways.”

He sighed, shaking his head. “Fine. Whatever.” But he didn’t sound as if he hated the idea that much, really. Jackalopes kinda seemed like something that would be right up my brother’s alley.

The afternoon wore on as we drove up the highway toward Douglas. Grayson told us more about jackalopes, proving that, being Genius Boy and all, he knew everything about everything. After a while, his jackalope lecture led to a discussion about unicorns and leprechauns, all of us losing ourselves in legends and myths and stupid stories that nobody in their right mind should ever believe but that have somehow morphed into “true stories” that everyone believes.

Next thing I knew, Rena was pointing over the seat. “Jackalope!”

We gazed up at a hillside, upon which a giant cutout of a jackalope sat, and we all laughed. It looked so ridiculous. Awesomely ridiculous.

“So in the brochure we had, it said something about the world’s largest jackalope statue being in the town square, I think.”

“Let’s find it!” I said.

We drove into town, pointing out the images of jackalopes everywhere, on benches and storefronts. We even saw
WATCH OUT FOR THE JACKALOPE
signs. It was all so hokey and touristy. I loved it.

“There it is,” Grayson said, and sure enough we were coming up on a huge statue of a rabbit with horns. Two other cars were parked nearby, a man taking a photo of two little kids standing in front of the statue.

It was something I’d always wanted and never had—a hokey touristy photo in front of a hokey tourist trap.

I pulled to a stop and grabbed my phone. “Come on, Grayson. I’m getting up on that jackalope.”

“What?” he was saying, surprise making his voice squeaky, but Rena and I had already hopped out of Hunka and were gazing at the statue.

Rena kept giggling. “I never actually thought I’d come see this thing,” she said, shaking her head.

The family had finished taking their photos and were slowly getting back in their car.

“Take a picture of me,” I said, handing her my phone and heading for the statue.

She took the phone and I scrambled up the pedestal that the statue sat on and proceeded to climb up its back. It was a lot more vertical than it looked, and there was nothing
really to grab on to, and I kept sliding back down, one close scrape with tumbling to the ground after another.

“Kendra, get down!” Grayson was yelling from his position by the car. “Someone’s going to see you.”

“So?” I grunted, hoisting myself up again. “I’ll play innocent.”

Finally, I got some purchase and was able to clumsily wrap myself around the rabbit’s back. “Hurry! Take it!” I yelled, and Rena did, while I mugged for the camera like I didn’t have a care in the world.

“Got a good one!” she called back, and I started to get down, but had a better idea.

“Grayson! Come up here with me!”

He shook his head, his arms wrapped tightly across the front of him. “Not happening.”

“Come on! Look! Nothing happened to me!”

“Yet!” he called back.

“I like it up here. I’m going to stay here until you come up. I think I could probably sleep here.” Total lie. I was slipping, and my muscles were trembling and wanting to give.

After a few seconds of thought, he reluctantly started walking toward the statue, looking severely ticked off. “There’s a sign right here that says you can’t climb the jackalope.”

“No, it says you
shouldn’t
climb the jackalope. Clearly, I can. I already did.”

“That’s not what the sign means.” He sighed. “Fine. I can’t believe I’m letting you talk me into this.”

It took Grayson far fewer tries to get up on the rabbit’s back, and most of the times he slid back down were because he thought he saw a bug or bird poop or was too put out by the embarrassment of it all.

“Smile,” I said as soon as he got up behind me, and Rena took a photo and gave us a thumbs-up.

“Good one!” she yelled.

“Now can we get down?” Grayson grumbled.

“You did it!” I cooed in a kindergarten teacher voice. “Yay, Grayson!” But when I reached back to tousle his hair, he ducked, and both of us slid backward off the rabbit and into a heap at the bottom of the base.

“You okay?” Rena asked, rushing to us, but I was laughing too hard to answer, and Grayson was too busy being angry.

Finally, we untangled ourselves and headed back to Hunka, where Bo was still sleeping in his carrier.

We drove around a little bit more, teasing one another about spotting jackalopes in the bushes on the side of the road or peeking out from behind houses, but as the sun began to slide over the horizon, it became clear that we needed to get back on track.

“Can I stop at that gift shop first, though?” I asked, and nobody argued, so I did.

Inside was a jackalope lover’s dream. They even had a stuffed, mounted jackalope head.

“Gross, can you imagine waking up to that every morning?” I breathed.

“I’ve woken up to worse. I’ve woken up to Archie’s head,” Rena joked. We snickered. “Hey, you should buy it. Attach it to the front of the car,” she said, her eyes going big. “You know, kind of like a road trip mascot. Proudly leading us to sunny California.”

I grinned. A road trip mascot. Grayson would hate the idea. But there was something about Rena’s excitement over little things like this that was contagious. “Good idea,” I said. “Let’s do it!”

“We don’t have any money, remember?” Grayson interjected, just as I expected him to.

“We have a little,” I countered.

“Not for jackalope heads. Hey, maybe you’ll get lucky and find a T. jackalope head on the side of the highway, though.”

“Har-har-har.”

In the end, Rena and I settled on a small plush jackalope, which I tied to Hunka’s grille with my student ID lanyard.

I brushed my hands together and stepped back. We all stared at the poor little thing, antlers trembling in the breeze. “There,” I said. “It’s Jack. Our mascot.”

“I like it,” Rena said. “It’s cute.”

“I think so, too,” I said. I turned to Grayson. “Do jackalopes like to eat bugs?”

Grayson grunted and headed back toward Hunka, but his grunt sounded like a suppressed laugh to me.

I got into Hunka and pulled out my cell phone. There it
was, the photo of my brother and me on top of the jackalope statue. He wasn’t smiling. But he was there.

We pulled onto the highway and headed back in the direction we’d come from, all of us lost in our own thoughts.

In some ways, it was as though I’d lived a whole lifetime in one day. As though, up until today, I’d been living a pretend life. One where I said and did all the things that everyone wanted to hear so I could be the child who stood out for the right reasons. It was as though I’d spent all of my time molding myself into what everyone else wanted me to be—or maybe even what I wanted myself to be, which was to say entirely unlike my brother—that I never considered being a regular, flawed person, just like everybody else. The kind of person who wanted to do the right things and live a good life, but honestly sometimes fell short. Like everyone else. Not perfect, just… normal.

I kind of wondered if Grayson felt the same way today. He’d been obsessing less, that was for sure. He’d joked a little. He seemed so much more… there. Even if neither of us knew exactly where “there” was at the moment. Maybe my plan would work. Maybe the cure for OCD is to give someone no other choice than to cut it out. Probably, with my luck, it was really dangerous or something and I was messing him up for, like, the rest of his life.

But in some ways, he seemed more like the Grayson that Zoe knew. The uncrushed and unshattered Grayson.

Bringing them back together was the right thing to do. She could fix him. She
would
fix him.

We drove in that easy silence for hours, into the night.

“I’ve gotta eat,” I finally said. “And I’ve gotta stop driving.”

“Pizza,” Rena said. “Pizza sounds really good.”

“And bed,” I added, yawning.

“No motels,” Grayson said.

“Don’t start.”

“Can’t we sleep in the car?”