Perfect Escape (6 page)

We scaled the fence and climbed into Hunka, which blasted hot air on us as soon as I turned it on. We held our fingers directly in front of the vents, flexing and bending them, trying to get the feeling back.

“So what’s the deal?” I finally said when we’d warmed up. I put the car into gear and began creeping around the outer road back out toward the highway. “I thought you were better.”

He turned his body away from me, almost curling into a fetal position, and faced the window. “I thought I was, too,” he said.

“So what happened?”

He shrugged. “Life, I guess. My brain. I don’t know.” Then he murmured, “It’s bullshit. Can we just drive for a while? I don’t want to go home yet.”

“Okay.” Little did he know, I didn’t exactly want to go home yet, either.

I pulled onto the highway, driving in the opposite direction of our house, and started speeding up. My limbs were tingling now, and I was beginning to feel the bumps and pricks where the rocks had dug into my skin. I rubbed one elbow absently, then my knee, and then a spot on the back of my shoulder.

“I won’t tell Mom I found you at Newman if you don’t want her to know,” I offered. “But you’ve got to stop going there, Grayson. You’ve got to stop… all this. Mom and Dad need a life without worry, you know?”

I felt a pang in my stomach. As if I had any room to talk. As if they weren’t about to have a whole bunch of worry heaped in their laps in just a matter of hours courtesy of yours truly.

When my brother didn’t answer, I bumped his shoulder with my fist, playfully. “I’m going to be leaving for college in a few months, and you know you don’t want to see Mom trying to climb that fence in her bathrobe.”

Grayson turned to face me. There were tear tracks on his cheeks, carving clean lines in the mineral dust that had gathered there. “You think I don’t know that?” he said.

“It was just a joke.”

“No, you think I don’t want to stop doing this?” His voice had escalated, and his words bounced against the windows sharply.

I took a deep breath. Clearly, he wasn’t in a joking mood. But it’s not like I was, either, and it only further irritated me that everything always,
always
had to be about how Grayson was feeling. Why did it feel like I was always the only one trying? “I don’t know, Grayson. You’re supposedly a genius. How is it you can understand everything there ever was to know about metaphoric rocks—”

“Metamorphic.”

“Whatever! See, that’s my point! You’re so smart—why can’t you figure this out? Why can’t you just figure it out and stop it?”

“I don’t know!” he practically roared, his chin wrinkling and his cheeks bright red. I flinched. Grayson wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, but when he shouted, it was loud. “I don’t know,” he said again, more softly. “If I knew, I’d fix it.”

We drove along in silence for a few minutes, the only sound in the car the hum of the heat blowing on us full-blast.

“I know you would,” I said.

He turned his body back toward the window again and took a few hearty sniffs. “I wish I could get away from it, Kendra. Just run away and leave it here and never have to deal with it again. Run away and be normal.”

We drove along, through rush hour and through sunset, and into evening, when I flicked on my headlights. Grayson hadn’t said anything else, and after a while I began to hear soft snoring rattling against the window. It was no wonder—he was always exhausted after a counting trip to the quarry. I could only imagine how tiring it was—standing in one spot, afraid to move at risk of rearranging the rocks at your feet and having to begin again. Standing in the shadows and counting, counting, knowing that your efforts were ridiculous, but hoping they’d work anyway.

I didn’t blame him for wanting to get away from it.
Most of the time, I wanted to get away from it. Sometimes I thought even Mom and Dad wanted to get away from it. Especially Dad, who never really understood, I don’t think, that this was something out of Grayson’s control. He got it on an intellectual level. But he was forever telling Grayson that all he needed was “a skill to fall back on” and shouting at him sometimes to stop it, exactly as I’d just done.

Only Zoe had ever seemed to really understand it. She’d never tried to get away. How ironic that, in the end, she was the only one who did get away.

I heard my phone vibrate against the seat behind me. I glanced back but didn’t reach for it. I had a feeling that, no matter who was calling, it wasn’t going to be good. Either it was Bryn, telling me that I’d been wrong about Chub and he’d turned on me, or it was Shani, wondering if what everyone was saying about me and the calc final was true, or maybe even Mom, reeling from a phone conversation with Mrs. Reading.

I couldn’t answer any of them right now. Like Grayson, I just wanted to get away. I needed to get away. I needed some space to figure out what had gone wrong. To decide when I’d turned into this person who needed to be perfect all the time and was willing to do just about anything to keep it that way. Mistakes? Not me. Control, control, control. Perfection and control. But when did that happen? Was it when Zoe left? Was it when Grayson started getting
really sick? Or was it the day I was born, and I was only just now realizing it?

I knew exactly what would be waiting for me at school tomorrow. What devastation I’d brought onto my college plans. God, did I still
have
college plans? Could I still go to college if I got expelled, like Chub? I never, in a million years, thought that would be a question I’d be asking myself.

What’s worse, I knew what was awaiting me at home. What betrayal I’d brought down on my parents. How disappointed even Shani and Lia would be.

I wanted to get away from it all.

Just like Grayson.

I was coming up on the interstate exit, the green signs telling me to get into a different lane or I’d end up heading west. I turned on my blinker and peered into the rearview mirror. The headlights behind me were thick. My phone lit up in the backseat as it buzzed again.

We could
, I thought.
We could get away. The two of us.
Neither of us could go home and pretend life was wonderful. Both of us knew it never would be, even if it was for entirely different reasons. I could help Grayson escape his OCD. And I could get away, too.

Away from all of it.

The more I thought about it, the more it not only seemed like the best choice.

It seemed like the only one.

I turned off my blinker and eased the car onto the exit ramp. At the bottom of the ramp I pressed the gas pedal. Grayson’s body rocked as Hunka accelerated onto the interstate.

I settled back in my seat and took a deep breath to steel myself.

Grayson didn’t know it yet, but we were running away.

I needed gas. I’d punched through rush hour, crossed the state line into Kansas, and made good time on the other side of it, blowing past towns I’d heard of in passing conversations over the years between my parents—Bonner Springs, Basehor, Tonganoxie, Lawrence—without even noticing the miles that stretched between them. Funny how when you had no idea where you were going, really, it seemed as though you would get there really fast.

It was totally dark outside now, and the rumbling in my stomach told me it was well past dinnertime. Also, the rumbling in the backseat. I knew from the insistent buzzing of my cell phone that Mom had been trying to call.

I didn’t want to ignore her, but I couldn’t reach the phone from the driver’s seat, and I didn’t want to stop. Something told me that if I stopped too soon, I’d probably chicken out and go home. And I couldn’t do that. Not until
I’d had some good, solid highway time to think this over, to get a good grip on what exactly I was going to do.

The plan was starting to make sense to me. What I was doing was for the best for everyone. Really. Grayson would get away. Get better. Somehow I knew it. If I took him away from his comfort zone—away from Newman Quarry, away from Mom, who wanted so badly for him to feel secure, away from his bedroom with the perfectly lined-up coins and the geology books and the even-numbered rock collection on his windowsill—he would get better. He would see that it was possible to be safe and be okay and be unplanned.

Exposure therapy. That’s what Dr. St. James had called it. I’d heard Mom and Dad talk about it more times than I could count. Well, fight about it, really.

You’ve got to make him get out there and face his anxiety, Linda.

But he suffers. I can’t watch it. Who is he hurting, really?

Himself! He’s hurting himself, Linda! Dr. St. James says it’s the only way. You have to put him in the situations that make him anxious and force him to cope.

No. I won’t watch my child suffer. I’ll get another opinion….

Mom was tough. Always calm and assured when she needed to be. But there was one spot where she was weak, and it was my brother. She babied him.

But I could be tougher than Mom. I could watch him struggle. It would hurt and I’d feel bad, but I could hold
the line and not give in and not coddle his compulsions. I could do it, and then she wouldn’t have to. I could do that for her, and then maybe what I’d done wouldn’t look so bad anymore.

And if it worked, Mom and Dad would get some time off. Mom could learn her Italian, and Dad could come home from work without first having to stop and drag his son out of a pile of rocks, and they could spend some time being with one another, relaxed and happy.

And, yeah, I knew I was using Grayson as an excuse for the fact that I was running away from my own troubles. But as far as I could see, at this point I didn’t have a whole lot of options. The music was too tough to face. I knew I’d have to face it eventually, but right now I needed some time—some space—to figure out just how I was going to do that.

Grayson stirred as I pulled off the highway and crunched into the pothole-riddled lot of a tiny gas station. Hunka’s glove box popped open and bounced against Grayson’s knee.

I winced and slowed down, rolling up to a pump so slowly it was almost as if the lot was moving rather than my car.

Right now the last thing I needed was for Grayson to wake up. He’d obviously want to know where we were—where we were going. And, well, really, I didn’t know. We’d gotten past towns I’d heard of and had started seeing much longer stretches of field and shorter stretches of town.

But he only shifted his weight, brought a hand up to sleepily swipe at his nose a couple times, and then snuggled his cheek against the seat and sighed back to sleep. I shimmied out of the car, grabbing my purse and cell phone off the backseat along the way.

I ran inside and headed first for the restroom, a stinking hole in the back corner of the store, which also housed a crusted, empty mop bucket and rolls of paper towels on a shelf. On my way out, I grabbed a pack of beef jerky and two sodas, then handed the guy behind the counter the fifty Mom had had me stuff in my wallet on the day I got my driver’s license.
Just for an emergency
, she’d warned.
You never know when you’ll be in a bind.

I figured this is what she meant by “bind,” even if she probably never in a million years had thought my “bind” would be gas and grub out in the middle of nowhere while running away and kidnapping my mentally ill brother. I chuckled, thinking about it that way.

The fifty would pay for the food and drinks and partially fill the tank, and I figured that’d buy me at least another couple hours on the road. By then, we’d have enough distance to really make a decision.

I jogged back out to the car and stuffed the gas nozzle into Hunka’s tank, and then pulled the cell phone out of my purse, turning my back to the wind, which had me gazing at Grayson’s sleeping face in the side mirror on the car door. He looked so peaceful there, and my gut twinged.

He was probably going to hate my plan. Probably, he was going to demand I take him home immediately. Play the “I’m the older sibling and you have to do what I say” card.

But maybe not. He was fresh out of treatment, after all. He was feeling better. Maybe he’d be open to it. See that my idea was for his own good. It would be uncomfortable at first, but I had faith he would eventually see what a good plan it was, my kidnapping him.

I’d missed nineteen calls and at least as many texts. I didn’t have to scan the numbers to know that at least eighteen of those calls were from Mom.

I knew I couldn’t ignore her any longer, but I also knew she wouldn’t agree with my plan, either. She wouldn’t see the genius in it—not in a million years. And she might already also know about the calc final and be super pissed. And if I even gave her a little bit of time to argue with me, I might not see the genius in it anymore, either. I might wimp out.

First, I had to call someone else.

I dialed the number I knew by heart and pressed “call.”

“Yuh?” a familiar voice said, deep, husky. I could hear video-game music in the background. Super Mario Brothers. Real earworm stuff.

“Brock?”

“Yuh.”

“It’s Kendra.”

The music in the background came to an abrupt stop. He’d paused the game. The phone rustled a bit. “Hey, Kendra, what’s up? G-Man still at crazy camp or whatever?” Brock was Grayson’s best, and only, friend. They’d met in ninth-grade P.E. class—Grayson’s OCD making it impossible for him to dress out; Brock’s extreme obesity making it impossible for him to do pretty much anything else. They spent a lot of time on the bleachers together, watching everyone else be normal. They were tight. I didn’t even mind, really, when Brock called Grayson crazy, because I knew that, like me, Brock loved my brother, and sometimes calling him a nutcase or making fun of his quirks was the only way to keep from hating him.

I remembered the first time Brock had Grayson sleep over at his house. Grayson’s compulsions had been getting worse, and Mom was a nervous wreck, sure that he would embarrass himself or have a breakdown of some sort. She’d sat by the phone all night, waiting for him to call, in tears, begging to be picked up.

When he still hadn’t called by morning, she packed me up in the car and we drove over there to make sure Grayson hadn’t slipped out and walked to the quarry.