Perfect Escape (10 page)

“Dare you to lick it,” I whispered.

He looked horrified. “No!”

“Come on. I’ll pay you ten bucks.”

“You’re crazy, Kendra. I’m not licking the wall. Here or anywhere else.”

“Chicken.”

“Okay, fine. I’m a chicken. A chicken who’ll live to see tomorrow.”

“Bawk-bawk-bawk,” I whispered, making little wings out of my arms.

Grayson rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Unbelievable. I’m being held hostage by a three-year-old.”

“A three-year-old who isn’t afraid to do this.” Quickly,
without thinking about what I was doing, I stuck out my tongue and grazed the wall with it, leaving behind a wet streak.

“Oh! God!” Grayson screeched as I laughed and stuck my tongue out at him.

“Mmm… certain death,” I teased.

“That’s just… disgusting,” he said, but the conviction was gone from his voice, and I almost thought I heard an amused tone behind it.

I wiped my tongue off on the back of my hand and turned to face the check-in desk again. “Um, excuse me?” I called out. The man glanced at us, and then turned back to the TV again. Not a word. I shifted my weight. “Hello?” I said, louder this time.

“Rena!” the man shouted, still not looking away from the TV. He scratched his belly. “Re-NA!”

A baby cried somewhere off in the distance, there were some stumbling noises, and then a curtain next to the cash register swished to one side, and a blonde stepped out of the darkness behind it, blinking in the light, her long, shiny hair in sleep-tufts around her head. She looked about my age.

“Chill, I was feeding Bo,” she said, closing a ragtag robe around her middle. The baby protested some more in the background. “Hey, there,” she said to me, stepping up to the counter. She yawned. “Checking in?”

I nodded.

The baby’s fussing crescendoed, and she cinched the
robe shut with a belt. “Okay,” she said. “It’s um, forty a night for the basic, fifty-five for a double, and we have, uh, one lovers’ suite for eighty dollars. That one has a two-person Jacuzzi.”

“We’ll take a basic,” I said, resisting the urge to add “ew” about the lovers’ suite. I pulled out my wallet and handed her my credit card. Actually, it was Mom’s credit card, but she let me carry it for the times she needed me to pick something up for her.

The blonde took the card. Her fingernails were filed blunt and painted pink, a shiny spot in this place that so needed a scrubbing.

“Do you have ID?” she asked, again glancing at the curtain as the baby’s cries turned to hiccups.

I pulled out my driver’s license and handed it to her. She squinted at it, looked up, then squinted at it some more. Finally, she looked up at me, scratching her neck and leaving ragged red lines down her throat.

“Um, you have to be eighteen,” she said.

“Oh.” I gestured behind me at Grayson, who was now staring at a stain on the shabby carpet. For one wild moment, I had the urge to lick that, too, just to see what he’d do. “He is.”

“I have to see his ID, then,” she said, handing me back my license.

“Gray, give her your ID,” I said. Grayson didn’t have a driver’s license. He never could get over his anxiety enough to take the test. Instead, he carried a state ID, which was
hard enough for him to get, given he had to stand in a line at the DMV,
where people bleed and vomit and spit all the time
, he’d said, as if he’d survived an acid rain shower or a swim in a porta-potty or something.

His eyes grew wide, and his hands instinctively went to his back pockets. “I don’t have it,” he said.

“What do you mean you don’t have it?”

He turned in a circle, holding his arms up at shoulder height, as if this proved something. “I don’t have my wallet with me.”

“You left without your wallet?” I said incredulously.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize we were going to be sleeping in a dumpy no-tell motel in the middle of nowhere tonight. If you’ll recall, this was not my idea.”

I had nothing to say. I turned back to the girl at the counter, my mouth hanging open. Grayson had no wallet. Which meant Grayson had no money. And which also meant we couldn’t stay in any hotel anywhere, because I was too young and he couldn’t prove that he wasn’t.

And we’d be stranded here in… wherever we were… with no money, no gas, no sleep, and no Zoe.

And Mom and Dad would get here and find Grayson stepping on and off a curb over and over, which he hadn’t done in a year, by the way, so don’t think I hadn’t noticed he was actually getting worse instead of better, and they’d be so pissed.

The baby had stopped crying, and this fact seemed to disturb the blonde girl more than his crying had. “Archie,”
she said over her shoulder. “Would you check on Bo? See if he went to sleep or something?”

But the white-haired man ignored her as soundly as he’d ignored us.

She slumped. “Look,” she whispered. “I’ll give you a room for one night. But don’t tell Archie, okay?”

“Thank you,” I said through the lump in my throat. My vision had gotten grainy, and now I felt supercharged, like I’d gotten my first lucky break. Like this was a sign that I was doing the right thing after all. Like someone “up there” was on my side. “I really appreciate it.”

“No problem,” she said, flashing a weary smile. The baby started a watery cry in the back room again while she ran my card through a machine and copied some information from my driver’s license down into a notebook.

“Sign here,” she said, pushing a clipboard at me. I signed, and she handed me a key—one of the old-fashioned kind stuck to a big plastic paddle with the words
HAPPY HOUR INN
etched in faded silver across the front. “You’re in room nine,” she said, pointing, the bell of her sleeve knocking over an aluminum can filled with pencils. It clattered and the baby cried again, even louder than before. “Go out this door and take a left. You’re almost on the end there. I just cleaned it today, so it’s good to go.”

I gave Grayson a pointed look—
See? She just cleaned it today! Another sign of luck!
—and took the key from her hand.

“Thank you,” I said.

She smiled again, her face lighting up the gloomy room. “No problem,” she said. She gestured to the back room. “I’ll be here if you need anything.”

She stacked a few papers together, picked up the pencils, and disappeared behind the curtain again. The baby’s cries softened and then stopped completely. I could hear her crooning to him back there, a soft song that sounded like sunshine.

“Come on,” I said, pulling Grayson’s arm. “Let’s get some sleep.”

Grayson gave one more worried look at the carpet and then stumbled along behind me. “Yeah,” he said in a ragged voice. “Maybe you will, but I already know I won’t.”

I started out the door and then turned to him. I put my hands on his face, spreading my fingers out over his cheeks. “You will,” I said, looking deep into his eyes. “I know it.”

Because luck was on our side, and I was nothing if not determined to make this work.

I had to.

Our room was decorated like the lobby. Thick, stained curtains on broken and duct-taped rods, orange-and-rust-colored bedspread decorated with cow skulls and cacti, and old, cracked brown vinyl chairs, one of which Grayson was crouching on.

“What are you doing?” I asked, coming out of the bathroom and standing with my back to the discolored dressing room mirror.

“Trying not to touch anything,” he answered. I noticed his fingers were clawing the air like they always did when he was flowing with anxiety.

I grunted and tromped to the bed, turning down the dusty bedspread and exposing the blanket below, which was riddled with cigarette burn holes. Grayson wasn’t counting, but his breathing was high and whistly. He didn’t say
anything, but I could hear the creak of the vinyl beneath his feet as he shifted his weight.

I took a deep breath. “Just get down, okay? The bed smells really clean. You can have the other side. Come on, Grayson.”

Nothing. Just breathing and creaking.

I flopped back against the pillow. “Come on, Gray. Just give it a try.”

But, even though I waited up as long as I could, he never did. And when I woke up in the morning, he was still crouched in the chair, his head dangling between his knees, his breathing soft and even. The small of his back kept him propped against the chair back. He’d managed to sleep without touching anything.

The clock beside the bed flashed twelve o’clock repeatedly, so I had no idea what time it was. All I knew was that the orange parking lot lamplight had been replaced by white morning light, and the thump of the people on the other side of the wall packing up their things and leaving had stirred me.

I sat up in bed and stretched. It felt weird not going to school. Part of me wished I was waking up in my own bed right now, grabbing a granola bar on the way out the door, meeting Shani and Lia at the school café for our real breakfast—caramel iced coffees. Part of me wished I was sitting on the bench outside the front doors of the school, laughing with the girls about something stupid. Going to
class, feeling good. I’d never so much as ditched an hour of class before, and the pangs of anxiety washed over me briefly, before the realization of why I wasn’t there dawned on me full-force. If Mom hadn’t already gotten a call from the school, she soon would.

What would Mom think when she found out? What would she say? I was so humiliated by it all, I didn’t see how I would ever look her in the face again.

Nothing you can do about it now
, I told myself.
All you can do is go forward. Find Zoe. The music will still be there when you get back—you can face it then. Zoe will help you figure out how.

Quietly, I pulled myself out of bed and padded to the shower, glancing at Grayson as I shut the door. He looked cold, but I was afraid of draping a blanket over him. His wallet wasn’t the only thing he was without on this trip. He’d also left his medicine behind—something I hadn’t even thought of before now. His antidepressants. They calmed him. I didn’t know what would happen if he stopped taking them cold turkey, but it probably wouldn’t be pretty. The last thing I needed was him waking up in full freak-out, which I’d seen too many times and would really prefer to never see again.

I remembered Grayson’s first full freak-out. I was maybe nine; Grayson, twelve. We’d been headed to our grandma’s house for Christmas. This was a big deal because Grandma and Papa lived on the other side of the state,
and it was the closest thing we ever had to a family vacation. Grayson’s fears made travel nearly impossible, but usually the thrill of Christmas morning, paired with a knockout dose of Dramamine in the afternoon, made it so Grayson could sleep most of the way there. While he was out, Mom and Dad and I would play word games and sing road trip songs and play license plate bingo and the alphabet game, and it sometimes even felt like we were a normal family.

But this time, Grayson didn’t sleep. And, over the previous few months, he’d developed a serious fear of overpasses. He feared that Dad would drift and we’d plummet to the road below and die a horrible and grisly death. He feared another driver would drift and push our car off the road. He feared it would collapse. He feared it would crumble. It would explode. It would end abruptly. Didn’t matter how silly or far-fetched it sounded; in my brother’s mind, overpasses meant certain death.

So at first he counted and muttered phrases under his breath hundreds of times (“We’re fine we’re fine we’re fine we’re…”), but then he started rocking and shifting, and tears sprang from the corners of his eyes; and halfway through the trip, as Dad approached an overpass, Grayson started shrieking.

“Stop!” he cried out, his voice squeaking with strain. “Stop, stop, stop, stop!”

Dad looked in the rearview mirror, his eyebrows knitting together. “Buddy?” was all he got out before Grayson began
flailing against the back of Mom’s seat, hitting his head against the window, and clawing at the door handle.

Mom’s eyes grew wide as she turned to look over the top of her seat, then she reached out and grabbed Dad’s forearm. “Pull over,” she said in a gruff voice I’d never heard from her before.

Dad whipped the car to the side of the road and jumped out, running over to Grayson’s side and ripping Grayson’s door open. Grayson, sobbing, coughing, shaking, spilled out of the car and scrambled to his feet, bending down to touch the ground with his fingertips repeatedly.

“We’re fine,” he whispered as he pressed his fingers into the gravel. “We’re fine we’re fine we’re fine….”

Only we were anything but fine, because we were halfway across the state—dozens of overpasses in front of us and dozens of them behind us—and we sat by the side of the road like that for hours until Mom finally squeezed into the backseat with us, pulling Grayson’s head into her side and stroking his hair until he finally fell asleep.

“Go home,” she whispered to Dad, and we did. We never went back to our grandparents’ house for Christmas again.

I leaned into the hot water, hoping Grayson wouldn’t revert to that person on our trip to California, then fought off butterflies in my stomach when I realized that whether or not Grayson cried on an overpass was the least of our worries. How could I be so stupid to not even think about his medication?

I got out of the shower and dried off, pulling my clothes back on and shivering against the rough material on my skin. I brushed through my wet hair with my fingers, then stepped out into the room to put on my socks and shoes.

Grayson was still sleeping, his head cocked to one side and his cheek resting on one knee now.

I shuffled through the room quietly, my stomach growling loudly. It dawned on me that all I’d had yesterday was the lunch I’d thrown up and half a bag of beef jerky. I had no idea what Grayson had eaten. I needed to find some food, and sooner rather than later.

I slid my feet into my shoes, grabbed my purse, scratched out a note for Grayson on the back of a receipt, and slithered out the door, holding the handle so it wouldn’t click and wake up Grayson when it shut. Maybe if he got some more sleep, he’d be less anxious today.