Perfect Escape (7 page)

Instead, we found Grayson and Brock in Brock’s front yard, tossing a football back and forth. Brock was lounging back in a lawn chair, eating potato chips, the folds of his stomach drooping down between his legs; Grayson was wearing a pair of green, elbow-length dishwashing gloves, a pile of discarded gloves on the ground by his feet.

Mom pulled to the curb and rolled down her window. “I hadn’t heard from you. Everything okay?”

“It’s all good, Mrs. Turner. G-Man cleaned my room for me. Totally arranged my video games.”

Mom’s eyes got moist and she kept swallowing, and for a second I thought she was going to bawl. “Good” was all she said.

“We’ve got four more pairs of those gloves,” Brock shouted. “My mom’ll bring him home after that.”

“I’m good, Mom,” Grayson had called, and the feeling of happiness that swelled through the car almost made me feel light-headed. Mom and I went home and baked cookies together, and I decided right then and there that Brock was a really great friend for my brother. Like Zoe, Brock never expected my brother to be anything other than who he was.

Just hearing his voice over the phone as I stood in a gas station parking lot somewhere in Kansas brought that feeling back. I knew I could count on him. “No, he’s home from treatment now.”

“Cool. Tell him to come on up. I got the new Zombiesplosion 5 game. It rocks. You should see what happens when you blow their heads off.”

“Okay, I’ll tell him. But, um, Brock? I have a favor to ask you.”

“Sure. What’s up?”

“Um, I need you to cover for me. Well, actually, for Grayson. For both of us.”

“Okay. How?”

“My mom is probably going to call there in a few minutes. Can you tell her that Grayson is at your house and he can’t come to the phone? Just make something up. Tell her Grayson will call her later. I’ll take care of that.”

There was a pause. I could hear his trademark heavy breathing whistling into the phone. Grayson never made fun of Brock’s weight, and neither did I, but everyone else did. “What’s going on?” he said, his voice laced with suspicion. “G-Man okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to keep my voice breezy. The nozzle
thunk
ed and the pump switched off. “Yeah, of course. We’re going… we’re taking a little trip. And Mom will get worried. You know how she is.”

“Huh. A trip.” He sounded skeptical. “Where?”

The wind gusted across the Kansas plain behind me again, and I stiffened against it, wishing more than ever I’d gotten my jacket out of my locker before Black Lung had opened it up.
Good question. Where are we going, exactly?
“I don’t… just… just tell her he’s in the shower, okay?” She’d believe it; Grayson went through phases when he showered twenty times a day.

“And everything’s okay? You wouldn’t bullshit me, right?”

I took a deep breath. “I totally wouldn’t bullshit you, Brock. Can you do this or what?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I owe you.”

“No problem,” he said, and the music started up again. Brock’s attention span only went so far. “But have G-Man call me, okay?”

“You bet,” I said, then hung up and leaned back against the car. Step one, done. Step two… coming up.

And then I didn’t even want to think about step three: convincing Grayson that this was a good idea.

I tried to keep my conversation with Mom short, partly because I didn’t want the lack of motion in the car to wake up Grayson, and also partly because I didn’t want Mom to figure out yet what was really going on, and I figured the longer I talked to her, the more time I had for it to dawn on her that there were highway noises in the background.

Fortunately, luck was on my side, and I took it to be a sign that I was doing the right thing. Mom was ticked, sure, but easily calmed, which meant she hadn’t heard from the school yet.

“Kendra! For crying out loud, I’ve been calling you for hours. Where on earth are you? Where is Grayson?”

“Sorry, Mom,” I mumbled. “I had to turn my phone off for a science quiz, and I forgot to turn it back on. But everything’s cool. Did Gray forget to call you?” I made a frustrated grunting noise for authenticity. “He was supposed to
call you and tell you I gave him a ride to Brock’s. I’m at Shani’s house. We’re working on a psych project. Do you mind if I just crash here tonight?”

“On a school night?”

“Mom, seriously. We’re working on homework. And if I’m sleeping here I won’t have to get up early to pick up Shani on the way to school. This way I get more sleep. You can talk to her mom about it if you want.” I was bluffing, but I knew it was a risk I could take. Mom didn’t talk to anyone else’s mom, ever. Not since Zoe’s mom went away.

When Zoe left, Mom lost her best friend, too. I remember Mom standing on the deck behind our house, shouting across the yard at Zoe’s mom, who was having some sort of party with some moms I recognized from school. Mom was screaming, “You changed his diapers, Rachel! How could you treat him like some sort of danger? I thought you and Rob were better people than that!” and Zoe’s mom was sitting with her back to our house, but I could see the faces of the other moms looking uncomfortable around the patio table.

It went on for months, the feud between our families, until finally Zoe’s family gave in and moved out. But even after they were gone, the grudge had affected Mom so much that she went into a deep depression and had to get medication. Even after three years, Mom still didn’t trust other parents. She was polite but separate.

In a lot of ways, Dad was all Mom had. Dad and Grayson and me. But given the grief Grayson had always brought
her, and the grief I was about to bring her, we were little consolation.

Mom paused over the phone. “No, no. It’s fine. And your brother is at Brock’s?” Her voice had gotten much calmer. Mom still loved Brock, even if he couldn’t help my brother with a pair of elbow-length dishwashing gloves anymore.

I started to relax.
See? Everything is going to be fine. Great. By the time they get the call from the school, I’ll be too far away for them to make me come home. And by the time I actually do come home, Grayson will be normal, and things will look so much better to all of us. We’ll all be so happy to have a normal family, we won’t even care about the damage I’ve done at school.

“Yeah,” I said. “I saw Gray walking when I was leaving school, so I picked him up and took him to Brock’s. I figured it would be good for him. I can’t believe he forgot to call you. I reminded him, like, a billion times.”

“I’ll call him,” she said. “I’m glad he’s seeing Brock again. That’ll be good for him. Did he seem relaxed to you at all, Kendra?”

“Sure, Mom,” I lied, and then I felt really, really horrible for all the lies. Mom wanted nothing more than for Grayson to be happy. And she was always trying so hard to make him that way, even though Dr. Sellerman, Dr. Houston, Dr. Fantaglio, and especially Dr. St. James had all warned her about enabling his OCD. Poor Mom couldn’t deny him. “He seemed really happy to see Brock. When I
left, they were playing some video game. Blowing up zombies or something.” I tried not to think about Grayson counting the rocks at the bottom of Newman Quarry a couple hours before, or about him crying, telling me to just drive, and saying he wished he could run away from it all. Mom would want to know those things. Mom would
need
to know them.

I promised her I would call the next day and told her I loved her, then hung up and turned my phone off completely.

There was no turning back now.

I got into Hunka, shutting the door as softly as I possibly could, and pulled out of the gas station parking lot. I turned the vents to blow hot air onto my fingers as they were wrapped around the steering wheel. The headlights carved little tunnels out of the extreme dark of the Kansas highway. Grayson snored steadily, the glove box door tapping against his leg.

I opened my soda and the bag of jerky and headed west, imagining all my lies dropped unceremoniously on the ground by the gas pump. This was going to be a new beginning, where none of that old stuff would matter anymore.

All that mattered was what was ahead of us.

Even if I wasn’t certain what exactly that was.

Or how I’d know it when I found it.

Or if any of this would work at all.

I couldn’t think about those things. I took a deep breath, popped a piece of jerky into my mouth, and focused on the highway ahead.

To understand how I got into the mess I got into, you first have to understand what it’s like to be born under the shadow of a sibling’s extreme failed potential.

Grayson was everything to Mom and Dad. Their first, a boy, just as they’d hoped for. He was sweet and cuddly and rough-and-tumble and smart and what they saw as the culmination of everything good about themselves. Of course, this was back when they thought that only good could come out of their children. Only perfection.

He was gifted. Of course he was. He could throw a tight spiral on a football by the time he was five, and by the time he was six could explain the physics behind it. Science was his thing, and, they figured, math was, too. Before he could even walk, he could count to ten and seemed to be stacking blocks in a particular order. Before he went to school, he would melt down if a puzzle piece went missing under the
TV or if Mom picked up his toys from their permanent perch on the piano bench.

They figured he was just precise. And when he began counting—sometimes to astronomically high numbers—they figured he was just quirky. So many geniuses are.

But at some point it became obvious that Grayson’s eccentricity was going to be a problem. And a genius with a problem was a “waste.” A “shame.”

Suffice it to say, I was never a genius. Not even close. And of course they noticed. I wasn’t even as smart as Zoe, something I had heard Mom say to Zoe’s mom on more than one occasion—not bitterly, but simply as a statement of fact.

But my parents really didn’t seem to mind that I was just normal. Grayson needed more attention. Because he was Grayson. And I was self-sufficient. I was self-reliant. I had a good head on my shoulders, and I didn’t cause trouble. Those things were important. When there’s someone needy in the house, everyone else has to be need-less. It’s nothing personal. Even if it sometimes feels that way.

Mom and Dad were good parents. They loved each other. They loved us both. They wanted good things for us. And they were heartbroken that Grayson wasn’t perfect after all.

After a while, the fact that I was just a regular kid was a really good thing. Mom and Dad could rely on my steadiness. If I worked hard, I could do well in life, maybe even great. They had replaced their high hopes for Grayson with
even higher hopes for me. I brought in good grades. I was involved in things. I smiled and laughed and got dirty and played, lounging on my belly on the carpeted living room floor with my toys strewn everywhere around me. Orderless. Childlike.

I don’t know exactly how being normal turned into a need to be perfect, but at some point it did. For every time my brother dashed my parents’ hopes, I ratcheted my performance up a notch. Maybe I wanted to distance myself from him. Maybe it was the only way for me to get some attention, too.

Maybe I was trying to forge an identity other than “poor Grayson’s little sister.”

Whatever the reason, that’s exactly what happened: I shifted from normal Kendra to Kendra the star. While Grayson’s grades and attendance fell, mine got better. While Grayson threatened suicide and went into screaming tantrums when his life didn’t feel right to him, I blossomed. And when Grayson quit school midway through his junior year and spent two holidays in various residential facilities, counting his brain into oblivion, I vaulted to the top of my class.

I wanted Mom and Dad to have something to be proud of. And I wanted to prove that I could do it.

So when, at the beginning of my senior year, I pulled Mr. Floodsay, otherwise known as the worst calc teacher in the whole school, I got scared. And when, halfway through the first semester, my grade had dipped into the C range,
and then to a low D, I saw it all begin to slip away from me. Everything I’d worked so hard for. All the pride I’d stocked up in Mom and Dad. All the hard work, all the sports, all the projects, all the nights trying to study while Mom stood sobbing in the hallway to Grayson that if he didn’t calm down, she’d have to call the police. All of it, gone.

I tried going to tutoring. It didn’t work. I tried staying after with Mr. Floodsay. It didn’t work.

I was embarrassed. And frustrated. And hopeless. And I was petrified over what failing calc would do to my college plans.

I needed that math credit to get into the college I wanted to go to. I begged Mr. Lloyd, my guidance counselor, to put me in another class, but all the other classes were full, so I couldn’t transfer out. So I had no choice. Fail the class or drop it entirely. Either way, I would lose the math credit I needed. I would go to a second-rate school. I would be status quo—
almost
perfect,
almost
amazing. And I was scared to death that the whole rest of my life would be defined by that, by an
almost
. I’d have come so close but never quite gotten there. This wasn’t about me losing everything; this was about me losing the only thing I’d ever gotten attention for. This was about me losing the most important thing.

I had to do something. I couldn’t let one lousy teacher take it all away from me. Make me just one more child who had
almost
lived up to her potential. Make me the one who couldn’t overcome that she wasn’t born great.

I didn’t realize until a car’s headlights on the other side of the median had streaked by that I was silently crying. I didn’t know what time it was, but we’d been on the road for hours, it seemed, and Grayson’s stirring was becoming more and more frequent.

I had no idea where we were. For miles, I’d seen almost nothing but darkness. The only sign of a “town” was an occasional diner or defunct gas station perched at the top of an exit ramp.