Perfect Escape (2 page)

After he was gone, I sat at the table for a few more minutes, taking in deep, even breaths and pressing my forehead into my palms. I could smell the cheese on my fingers, and it made the taste in the back of my throat go sour. I knew I should’ve been happy that he was back, but all I could think was,
Things have been so calm around here without him.

I also thought about the night, two months or so before he left, when things had seemed so good. He’d seemed relaxed… or at least relaxed for Grayson. Mom and Dad were really happy, and we’d all spent the evening watching TV together, which hadn’t happened in months. We joked
with one another. Mom made popcorn. I fell asleep on the couch.

At some point, Grayson had brought in his old alarm clock—the kind that buzzes—set it to go off about thirty seconds later, and propped it right next to my ear. Then sat back and waited for it to go off. When it did, I was so startled and confused, I almost fell off the couch. Grayson laughed until his whole face was red and he was holding his belly and gasping for breath. Mom and Dad, still curled up together on the other couch, were giggling as well.

“Kendra, get up!” he’d said, trying to look serious but gasping too hard to pull it off. “You’re late for school!”

I’d punched him in the arm but had laughed, too, because even I had to admit that his prank was a good one. “Paybacks, bro, paybacks,” I said sleepily.

The next morning, he’d refused to get out of bed. Said the air was filled with toxins and he couldn’t breathe them in or he’d get cancer. And he’d been that way since. I never got the chance to prank him back. He would’ve been way too anxious to find the humor in it.

Sitting at the kitchen table, I hoped for another evening like the one we’d had before he went away. Only I hoped it would last longer this time.

I sat there until I heard the garage door rumble to life, and then I got up in a hurry, pushing the chair back with my legs, and headed upstairs to my room. I didn’t want to deal with Mom right now. She would be in that on-edge place again. No softness. No smile. Forever the woman
who had yanked that brush through my hair, saying earnestly,
Your brother’s having some difficulties, Kendra
, only not finishing the sentence:
and you’ve got to make up for them
.
You’ve got to be the child with no difficulties at all.

I hit the “send” key and sat back against the headboard, scooching so my pillow was right in the small of my back, and commenced staring at my laptop screen. My phone vibrated on the dresser, but I didn’t want to get up. Shani would have to wait.

Wait for what? For me to stare at my empty inbox, expecting Zoe’s reply to pop up? Like that was going to happen. I’d said it’d been six months since she’d replied to any of my e-mails, but it felt longer. Maybe it had been longer. Maybe it had been longer than I’d even want to admit to myself. God, had it been a year?

The phone buzzed again. I ignored it again. I guess that, in a nutshell, was the difference between Shani and Zoe. I liked Shani. Called her my BFF when I was feeling it. Hung out with her and had sleepovers at her house. Shared pizza and locker space and gas money with her.

But she wasn’t my best friend. She wasn’t Zoe.

Zoe and I had grown up together. Literally. My birthday was July 31 and hers, August 1. Our moms were next-door neighbors and best friends and, once upon a time, did everything together. Including pregnancy. They had
morning sickness together, ate loads of greasy food together, talked about epidurals and episiotomies and all that gross-out stuff together, and even went into labor on the same day. But since my mom had already had one baby, I came quicker. Or at least that’s how Mom put it.

Zoe and I bonded in the hospital nursery and didn’t stop until all the craziness between our parents went down and her family moved away three years ago. As if moving could erase what had happened between Zoe and Grayson. As if moving could kill a lifelong friendship.

In a lot of ways, I blamed Zoe’s parents for how much worse Grayson became. When Zoe was around, he was a lot more relaxed. She understood him. She didn’t make him feel weird. She didn’t make him feel anxious about feeling anxious. She didn’t expect him to ever be anything other than what or who he was. She was better than me in that respect. Because, after she left, I had all kinds of expectations about him, none of them anything he could ever live up to.

I also blamed Zoe’s parents for the fact that I lost my two best friends for no good reason. But everyone was too busy worrying about Grayson to care about that.

After Zoe’s parents left, taking her with them, Grayson’s anxiety went through the roof. His OCD spun out of control, like nothing any of us had ever seen before. He could barely function, and all he could think about was rocks and counting and germs and weird stuff that had kind of always been there, but not nearly as bad. Before,
he’d been a kid who did some obsessive stuff. Afterward, he was just plain obsessive. And it was totally their fault. It’s not like what Grayson did was
that
bad. He was in love with their daughter. So what?

The last time I saw Zoe, she was streaking out the back of her parents’ minivan toward my yard, where I was standing, unabashedly watching, hoping that her parents would see how they were breaking my heart, too, and maybe change their minds. Her parents were occupied talking to a guy in coveralls, a moving van rumbling in idle at the curb.

“Here, Ken, take this,” Zoe had said, her face slick with tears and her nose plugged. She shoved a tiny rectangular piece of paper into my palm—her school photo, with her new address scrawled across the back. “I’ll write as soon as I set up a secret e-mail, okay?”

Her dad had noticed her standing in our yard and began shouting for her. “Zoe! Get in the van. We’re leaving.”

“Okay,” I whispered, nodding, my own chin quivering.

“Zoe! Dammit, get off that lawn!”

Zoe glanced back at the minivan, where both of her parents were staring daggers out the windshield at us, and then quickly wrapped her arms around me in a tight hug. Almost immediately the minivan horn blared, and I could feel her shoulders jump and tense. “Don’t forget me,” she whispered. “And don’t let Grayson forget me.”

“Never,” I whispered back. “Don’t forget us, either, okay?”

“I couldn’t if I tried,” she said, and then turned and ran
for the van, which had begun pulling away from the curb before she even had the back door all the way shut. I watched as it pulled past our house, Zoe’s parents’ faces grim and eyes set firmly on the road ahead.

Just after the car passed our driveway, Zoe turned around in her seat, staring at me through the back window. Slowly she held up one hand, her fingers slightly curled in, and waved. I held up mine in return.

And when the van turned the corner and out of sight, I sat on the curb and cried, remembering a million days playing with our dolls under a sheet stretched across Zoe’s picnic table. A million afternoons spent painting each other’s fingernails, because neither of us was good with our left hand. A million sleepovers. A million board games. A million times we’d promised to go to college together and see the world together and be best friends forever and ever. And even though we had all of that… it still wasn’t enough.

My dad had sat on the curb next to me, and I’d leaned into him.

“Maybe you’ll see her again someday,” he’d said, putting his arm around my shoulder and pulling me in. “You never know.”

I’d shaken my head pitifully. “They’re moving to California. That’s so far away. I’ll never see her again.”

Dad seemed to consider this, then patted my head and said, “The world gets a lot smaller the older you get. Never say never.” And he’d gotten up and gone inside the house to
help Mom coax Grayson into a bath, a process that could take hours on a high-stress day like that one.

And I’d stayed on the curb and felt sorry for myself, staring at Zoe’s photo and sniffling, repeating under my breath,
I won’t forget you, Zo. Never say never.

My phone buzzed again, jarring me out of my memory, but this time it kept buzzing—not a text but an incoming call. I groaned and set the laptop next to my pillow, then got up and grabbed the phone off my dresser. Shani and her guy problems.

But when I looked, the caller ID displayed a number I didn’t recognize. “Hello?”

“Kendra? It’s Bryn.”

I paused. Why would Bryn Mallom be calling me? Other than in Advanced Calculus class, we never talked. Ever. Bryn was one of those girls you talked to only when you absolutely had to. Her arms were always bug-bitten and her clothes dirty and out of style. She was chunky, and she was always in trouble for something. When we were growing up, the boys called her Bryn Bubblebutt, and Ryan Addleson once made her cry when he told the class that his dad had arrested her mom for drunk driving the night before. Probably being picked on didn’t do wonders for her personality, but on top of being an easy target, Bryn was kind of a bitch, so people didn’t feel very bad when they were mean to her. And almost all of us avoided talking to her at all costs.

But lately I’d had reasons to talk to Bryn. And they weren’t good reasons.

“I got your number from Shani,” she said. “We need to talk.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and massaged the bridge of my nose with two fingers. I’d have to remember to thank Shani for sharing my number with the most obnoxious girl on earth. “Um, I’m kind of in the middle of something, Bryn,” I said. “Can we talk in calc tom—”

“It’s important,” she said. “It’s about the calc final.”

“What about it?” I asked, thinking,
I should never have started talking to Bryn in the first place. That’s where I went wrong. Nothing good ever comes from hanging out with Bryn Mallom.
“We’ve still got three weeks.”

“I heard Mrs. Reading talking to Mr. Floodsay about it today when I was picking up my tardy slip. They know.”

My heart thrummed, one time, hard, in my chest. I swallowed, but it felt like a wad of peanut butter was lodged in my throat. I swallowed again, my mind reeling for something to say, and could almost instantly feel cold sweat prick up across the backs of my shoulders. My eyes landed on my laptop screen, which was still pulled up to my e-mail account.
No new messages.

“Hello? Are you there?”

“Yeah,” I said at last. “I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about, Bryn.”

“Uh, yeah, actually, there is,
Ken
dra. Mr. Floodsay said something about searching lockers tomorrow, starting with
Chub’s. I don’t know about you, but I find that kinda worrisome.”

“So?” Bryn’s sarcastic voice was really rubbing me the wrong way. “Chub’s not dumb. I seriously doubt he’s leaving evidence in his locker.” Coming out of my mouth, the words sounded so sure, but in my mind I was freaking out. The truth was Chub was just dumb enough to totally leave evidence in his locker.

“I hope you’re right,” she said, then sighed, her breath barreling into the phone. “But you’re probably not. They’re going to figure it out. And when they do, we’re all in really big trouble. Especially you.”

After my conversation with Bryn, I went downstairs to feel out what Mom knew. Surely if the school had figured something out, they would have called Mom immediately, so if I went downstairs and she was happily making a Welcome Home, Grayson dinner, I’d know Bryn was just being her typical dramatic self and I was safe. If I went downstairs and Mom was canceling my college savings account, I’d know the shit had, as they say, hit the fan. And hard.

She was doing neither. Instead, she was sitting on the couch cross-legged, a book open in her lap and earphones clamped down over her head. She smiled and waved at me with her pencil when I walked by, then announced in a slow, measured voice, “
Dov’é il bagno?
”

My heart slowed down. I wiped my sweaty palms on my thighs. If she was calmly practicing her Italian, there was a good chance I was safe. I peeked into the kitchen and
saw a pot of something bubbling on the stove, and Grayson sitting at the table, lining up coins in neat little rows in front of him—one of his two favorite pastimes (the other being looking at, talking about, arranging, gathering, and basically knowing everything there is to know about rocks).