Perfect Escape (5 page)

And I sat there. I squeezed my eyes shut, hard, then opened them wide. No tears. Just… numbness.

Weird. I was expecting tears. Expected my eyes, like Bryn’s, to be tired and swollen and red, maybe a hitch in my breath as I berated myself over and over again for how stupid I’d been. I expected… something, at least.

I unsnapped my seat belt, leaned forward, and shim
mied out of my backpack, tossing it into the backseat. I reached into my front pocket and palmed my cell phone, which had buzzed three times while I was driving. I glanced at the screen—it was Shani—and then tossed it, too, into the backseat with my backpack. Then I opened the driver’s door and got out.

For a few minutes I stood, my fingers laced through the holes in the chain link, resting my face against the inside of my right elbow, which hung at face level.

“What now?” I breathed into the hollow of my chest. Here I was, three weeks before finals… four weeks before
graduation…
and I was about to lose everything. “What do I do now?”

No answer came to me, but the gooseflesh that popped out on my arms spurred me to action anyway. Ignoring the spring chill creeping in around me, I moved my fingers from the holes they were in to holes much higher, gripped tightly, stuffed a toe into a hole at about knee height, and leaped up, pulling myself most of the way to the top of the fence in one motion.

Even though it’d been months since I’d last been here, the climb was like second nature to me. Fingers here, toes there. Watch the sharp, clipped edges of the fence at the top. Swing over the right leg, balance, swing over the left leg, balance, and then push off. But not too far—you didn’t want to tumble, ass over teakettle, as my dad always used to say, down the quarry wall.

Once inside, I stood at the edge of the steep decline,
watching the toes of my shoes kick loose gravel over the edge and down, down, down, taking more rocks with it as it went.

I closed my eyes. Turned my face to the sun. Felt the breeze, always blowing at the top of Newman Quarry, muss my hair. I let my arms hang limp at my sides. I took a deep breath. Queen of… nothing. Just like always.

Queen of less than nothing now.

I stood there for a long time. The earth did not split and swallow me up. No lava burbled out and melted me, eyeballs and teeth and hair, into a red river. Sediment did not cover me, pressing me into a sad fossil. I was just a girl, standing on a pile of rocks. No superstar to see here, people. Move along.

When I opened my eyes again, I was almost surprised to find I was shivering. The sun had started to set, and the shadows in the quarry were growing longer. The highway noises had picked up. The birds settling along the quarry’s fence top had flown.

I wrapped my arms around myself and squatted, looking out over the rocks. Billions. There must be billions of them. How could Grayson have thought he’d ever count them all?

As if in answer to my thoughts, the breeze gusted suddenly, carrying a small noise on top of it, right to where I huddled over the rocks, my teeth chattering.

It was a small cough. Not a
cough
cough, but a short, nervous burst, almost half throat-clearing, half cough. One I recognized well. I’d heard it my whole life. It was one of
Grayson’s tics—a little noise in the base of his throat. He made it when he was getting to a crisis point. When he was overwhelmed.

Like a shot, I stood up again, squinting over the quarry.

Grayson was in there somewhere.

I saw it—a tiny glint of sunlight reflecting off his glasses, and when I squinted harder, I saw his dirty white T-shirt and blue jeans. He must have been freezing. Even though the breeze didn’t reach the bottom of the quarry, the shadows were so much deeper down there.

Again I heard the cough. And some murmuring that sounded like numbers being chanted.

Stepping sideways down the steep wall of the quarry, my shoe sinking into the gravel, I began trotting toward him, just as I’d done a million times before.

“Grayson?” I shouted. He didn’t respond. Of course not. He never responded when he was counting. It would make him lose track of where he was. “I’m coming down!” Half jogging, half sliding down the steep embankment, holding my arms straight out to keep my balance, calling my brother’s name.

Saving him.

On a day when I needed to be saved, once again I was saving him.

Grayson was standing ankle-deep in stones, his pointer finger extended out in front of him and bouncing along in the air as if he were touching each one individually. I knew in his mind, he probably was doing exactly that. Touching each rock and marking it. Counted.

He was up to 4,762. He’d been out here a long time. When I touched his arm, it felt cool, even under my fingers that were practically numb from my run down the pit.

“Gray,” I said softly, tugging at his arm.

He pulled away sharply. “Four thousand, seven hundred sixty-
three
.”

I tented my hands over my mouth and blew into them to warm them, then reached out and pulled his arm again. “Gray, come on. You’re cold. We should go.”

“Four thousand, seven hundred sixty-
four
,” he responded, his voice louder. This time he didn’t jerk away, though.

“Gray,” I said, pulling a little harder, getting frustrated. I tried so hard to be sympathetic. Really, I did. But I was sick of the song and dance. Why couldn’t this ever be easy? I’d come here for myself. Why couldn’t it ever be about me? “Come on. You’re on an even number. Just quit now.”

Grayson liked even numbers. When he was forced to quit counting, he always held his ground until he got to an even number. He told me about a year ago that if he stopped counting on an odd number, it meant that someone he loved would die. And if he ended on an odd number, even accidentally, he had to count backward from where he’d been, all the way back to zero, and then start all over again, not stopping until he reached the next even number above the number he’d stopped counting on.

“I know it’s stupid,” he’d mumbled when he first told me that he’d been counting every time a family member left the house. We sat side by side on the bumper of Dad’s car in the driveway. “But it makes sense to me, you know? Like, as long as I kept hitting even numbers, you were going to get home okay.”

I shook my head, flexed my toes so my flip-flops would stay on as my feet swung back and forth over the driveway. I’d just gotten home from a date with Tommy and had found my brother standing by Dad’s car, counting. I shook my head. “No, it doesn’t make sense. You can’t stop something horrible from happening by counting. How long have you been doing this?”

He’d shrugged. “A while. It started with me just saying,
‘Kendra will be all right,’ or ‘Dad won’t get in a car crash,’ or ‘Mom will come home,’ and that used to be good enough, but then I started having to say it a bunch of times. And then… you know, it turned into I had to say it an even number of times. And then it got to where I could just count and it did the same thing. Which is better. Takes less time.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes.

Oh my God, my brother has really gone crazy
, was all I could think. It scared me. And it broke my heart.

“I know,” he said, as if he could hear my thoughts. “I can’t help it. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Gray,” I’d said, and put my hand on his shoulder. “But you really should stop. You’re not keeping everyone safe by counting.”

Still, some days Grayson did nothing but sit on his bed and count, forward and backward, to really high numbers, just to keep us all alive. I always felt like I should have been more appreciative of his efforts. Like I shouldn’t have thought it was so stupid or something he could just stop doing. Like I should have thanked him that night instead of telling him it wasn’t working.

“Four thousand, seven hundred sixty-
five
,” he said, then shook his head and gave one of those little coughs that I’d heard earlier. “Four thousand, seven hundred sixty-
six
…”

Even though it was still late afternoon, the bottom of the quarry was fully engulfed in shadows. My fingers were
starting to hurt, no matter how many times I blew on them to warm them up, and my ears were starting to sting, too.

“Gray,” I said again. “Come on. Mom’s going to get all worried when she realizes you’re gone.” He kept counting. “She’ll probably cuss you out in Italian,” I tried, smirking, hoping he’d get the joke. He coughed again and kept counting.

I bowed my head, knowing what I needed to do. I hated it when I had to do this—and Grayson really hated it—but sometimes it was the only way.

“Grayson! Stop counting and listen to me!” I shouted, and jumped in front of him, using my feet to kick at the rocks he was staring at. I shuffled my feet like I was doing a dance, sending the rocks flying everywhere.

“No!” Grayson gasped in his raggedy been-counting-all-day voice. “Don’t… Kendra…”

His face looked pale and terrified, his fingers jerking as he tried to follow the scattering rocks with his eyes. As if he could keep track of them, keep counting them.

Normally this would have been enough to stop me, but today was different. Today, turning Grayson’s world into chaos felt justified somehow. It felt right. It felt… good.

“One-two-three-four-oh-God-Grayson-look-at-them-go!” I shouted, jumping up and down and doing side kicks into the rock mound. Rivers of rocks swirled at his feet. He gazed down at them sickly, that cough coming in rapid fire:
Uh… uh-uh-uh… uh
… I bent over and picked up two
handfuls of rocks and slung them high into the air over our heads. They rained down on us and I laughed, blinking every time a rock pelted the top of my head. “Oh, no, Grayson, you better count them quick!” I yelled. “They’re getting away!”

“Stop it!” he shouted, and before I could even react, he lunged forward, both arms outstretched, planted his hands on my shoulders, and pushed me backward. For the second time that day, I found myself flat on my butt, only this time I was laughing too hard to feel the fall. “I made you stop,” I sang, pointing up at him. “I made you mo-o-ove.” Grayson looked at me, his eyes slits behind his glasses, and reached down with his left hand, scooping up a handful of rocks.

He cleared his throat a few times. “You don’t know what you’re doing!” he shouted, flinging the rocks at me. They hit me, hard, drying up my laughter. I covered my face with my forearm.

“Ouch!” I yelled, struggling to get up. “That hurt, you jerk!” And this time I pushed him. He barely moved, but produced a rock out of nowhere and tossed it straight at my forehead. “That’s it!” I shrieked, and body-slammed him, knocking him down and pummeling him with my fists, the way we used to when we were kids and would fight over who got to sleep in Zoe’s tent at backyard campouts or who got the last Oreo in the bag or whatever stupid stuff kids argue about.

We rolled around in the rocks for a few minutes, arms and legs flailing and rocks scraping white lines onto our
cheeks and scalps. Grayson was older, taller, but he’d gotten so skinny, and I easily matched him, my muscle tone making up for the years between us.

After what seemed like forever, we finally stopped, panting and rolling away from each other. Truce. I wiped my nose with the back of my hand, then noticed how red my hand was from the cold that I didn’t feel anymore.

“Come on,” I said to the sky. “It’s freezing out here.” I pulled myself up, looking down at the dent we’d made in the rock bed and giggling despite myself. “They’re going to know we were here,” I said. “Mom and Dad will be getting another phone call.” I reached down toward Grayson, whose eyebrow was seeping a little blood right above his glasses. He took my hand and let me help him to his feet.

“If Mom’s smart, she’ll tell them to
vada ad inferno
,” he answered, taking off his glasses and wiping them with his shirttail. He grinned at me. “Go to hell,” he explained.

“Since when do you know Italian?”

He smirked, made that
uh
sound again, twice, and stuck his glasses back on his face. “I know a lot of things,” he said. “I’m sort of a genius, in case you don’t remember.”

I rolled my eyes. Of course, we all remembered. Like any of us could forget. Our Grayson had an IQ of roughly nine billion. The elementary school guidance counselor had actually called him a “genius.” Until he’d gotten so sick with his OCD that he couldn’t go to school anymore, it was all we ever heard. Grayson-the-genius this, Grayson-the-genius that.

I was the one who brought home straight A’s. I was the
one who’d wear the honor ropes at graduation. I was the one who
would
graduate. But I was never a genius. Of course, I could go to the bathroom without counting the bumps on the ceiling, too. I guess there’s a good and a bad to everything.

“Well,” I said, tromping through the rocks ahead of him, across the bottom of the quarry. “I’m not a genius, but I do know one thing.” I flicked a glance over my shoulder at him. He was following me, eyes firmly glued to the quarry floor. His finger was up in front of him again, bent like a claw. He was counting steps. “I can still kick your ass.”

When I looked over my shoulder again, he was still counting, but I could see the corners of his mouth twitch with a grin. Barely detectable, but there nonetheless.

We hiked up the steep quarry wall, our feet raining down rocks behind us, and soon were standing at the top, looking out across the basin, as I’d done when I arrived. We paused, shoulder to shoulder, our bellies rhythmically stretching for breath.

“How’d you know I was here?” he asked. I could feel him shiver next to me. The motion was contagious; soon I was shivering again, too. “Mom send you?”

I shook my head. “I heard you.”

He glanced at me, then kicked a rock off the edge and watched its path down the side of the quarry. “Why were you here, then?” he asked.

I chewed my lip. Considered his question. “I don’t know,”
I said. And, in truth, I didn’t. I mean, I knew why I didn’t want to go home. I just didn’t know why this was the only other obvious choice. “Let’s go,” I said, before he could ask any more questions. “I’m cold.”