Perfect Escape (16 page)

“You remember when that Doug guy kept bothering you at school?” he said.

I looked at him sharply. “Grayson, don’t.”

But he kept going. “The guy was seriously out of line. Remember?”

I nodded, looking into my lap. Doug Barker was two years older than me. We’d met at a party about six months after Zoe left. He’d hit on me and, even though I’d lied to him and told him I already had a boyfriend, he wouldn’t let up. He’d stop by the house on the weekends, show up at the movies when I was there. Constantly trying to get me to go out with him. And when I finally told him that it was never in a million years going to happen, he started saying all these nasty things about me. About my body, mostly. Making it sound as if he’d seen it.

Finally, one night, not sure where else to turn, I knocked on Grayson’s door. I told him everything.

The next day, Grayson and Brock waited for Doug in the school parking lot. My brother looked as if he wanted to melt into the concrete, and he kept making that
uh-uh-uh
sound, but when Brock grabbed Doug by the back of the neck and threatened him, Grayson had gathered himself up tall, and they both looked tough. Doug never bothered me again.

“You owe me one,” he said. “You said so that day. I’m calling it in.”

And I did. I owed him at least one. I’d dragged him into that mess, and now I’d dragged him into this mess. The least I could do was let him know why.

“I cheated,” I said. My voice sounded tiny and uncertain, like it might have come from someone else.

“What?”

“My calc semester final. I cheated,” I repeated, a little louder. Sounding confident and almost feeling as if I were coming clean, even though I knew I’d only told him part of the story.

“You cheated? Like, how?”

“Someone gave me the answers,” I said, also only partially true. “And I used them. And the school found out.”

“That’s it?” he asked, and my breath got jagged, because part of me really wanted it to be true, that I had cheated and that was it. An even bigger part of me wanted to spill the whole story, but I’d kept it all a secret for so long, the words just would not come out. The part of me that would always remain the Superior Sibling, I guess. The part of me that never messed up, because messing up was what Grayson did. I made the family look good. And part of me couldn’t stand the thought of letting that go.

“Yeah, that’s it,” I said, trying to sound irritated. “I’m going to be in huge trouble. Like, expelled trouble.”

“For cheating on a final? I doubt it. You’ll probably get ISS, and it’ll be over with.”

“I wish,” I said, remembering Bryn telling me that Chub had been expelled, and how Lia and Shani said that the
word was lots of people would be expelled. Getting suspended would be getting off easy, if that was the case. “It doesn’t matter now. What’s done is done.” I put Hunka into gear and started to back out. I could see our waitress kneeling in our booth, an empty milk shake glass in her hand, peering out the window at us, as if she still expected us to do something totally delinquent.

“No,” Grayson said, but I backed out anyway. “This is stupid. You’re running away because you cheated on a test?”

“It’s not just that,” I said, pulling out onto the main road again. I turned toward the one gas station I could see. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“I do understand. I understand that you’re running away because of a stupid test.” His face started to take on an agitated look, getting red from the bottom up, his eyes getting small and beady. “You’re making me… all because of… What are you, Little Miss Perfect now?… It’s not right….”

“No, you don’t know the whole story, Grayson. Calm down, okay?”

I pulled into the gas station and parked at a pump, ignoring the stares of a woman standing on the other side. Her hair was in curlers and a little boy crouched next to her, making designs in the dust on the ground with his fingers. She watched us pull in and said something to the boy, who looked up and then disappeared into the backseat of her car.

I could only imagine how we looked to strangers—bedraggled and filthy, my bangs still wet from washing my face in the restroom, Grayson red-faced and agitated.

“I don’t understand this, Kendra. Why are you doing something so stupid for such a dumb reason?” He was not going to let this go easily. I was going to have to tell him more, like it or not.

“Because it wasn’t only one test, okay?” I said. “It was a whole bunch of them. I’ve been cheating on them since October. And the administrators know. I’ll flunk the class for sure. I’ll be lucky if they don’t expel me. I’ll get kicked out of NHS and God knows what else. And there’s no way I’m going to be able to face my teachers again, or Mom and Dad. Everything I’ve worked for. Everything. Basically, I’m screwed.”

I opened the door and stepped out into the soft spring breeze that drifted through the air. I ducked into the backseat and pulled more bills out of my backpack, then palmed my cell phone. I felt so embarrassed. Saying aloud what I’d done humiliated me. Admitting being a cheater made me feel so small.

And I still hadn’t told him the whole story.

Straightening up, I took a deep breath and headed toward the clerk in the doorway.

I’m so screwed.

And I am definitely not perfect, big brother. So far from it.

When I got back in the car, Grayson was working the toes of his shoes in the rocks on the floorboard, and his face had gone back to its normal color. He had rocks clutched in both of his hands, and was rubbing his thumbs across them like worry stones.

I had stocked us up on road trip goodies—candy bars and bags of chips, bottles of juice and soda and water, some smushed-looking sandwiches and little packets of mayonnaise. I set the bags on the front seat between us, then stood by the side of the car, thumbing on my cell phone.

My heart raced as I waited for it to power up. For some reason, trouble didn’t seem to loom as large when you were disconnected from the world. I wanted to stay disconnected. To pretend that nothing had happened. To forget about Grayson’s outburst and my admission and get back
that Grayson who took off his shirt and joked about the restaurants and see if I could make him stay around longer. Most important, I wanted to find Zoe and let her help me fix this. If she could. If she was even there. Why hadn’t she answered me?

I pushed the worry away. There had to be a logical answer. Had to be.

I checked my texts first. They weren’t as bad as I thought. Looked like mostly people had given up on me. Even Shani, from the sound of Lia’s last text:

WTF?! Ur mom showed up @ Shani’s house. Shani = srsly pissed. She sez don’t call her.

I felt bad, even though I knew I wasn’t going to call her anyway. If I was being honest with myself, Shani and I were never close enough friends for me to confide in her about what was going on. She was my stand-by friend. My stand-in friend. The one who would never replace Zoe, even though that’s exactly what she was meant to do.

And now I felt bad for getting her into the middle of this. I texted back, knowing Lia would show my text to Shani:

Sorry I didn’t tell u guys what was going on.

I stared at the screen, my thumb hovering over the buttons. What else could I say? I was scared? I never really trusted you? I’m a spoiled brat like Grayson says, and the
only thing that’s ever mattered to me was being perfect and getting some of the attention that he always seemed to get by being sick? That I always just wanted to be better than him; I always just wanted to matter? And that even though I knew those things, I couldn’t do a damn thing to change them?

I couldn’t say any of those things, so I hit “send” and then deleted all of my texts.

Mom’s voice mails were harder to listen to. She was yelling in some of them, crying in others. Some of them were both Mom and Dad together. They’d called the police. They’d been staying up all night. They’d been watching the news. They had talked to the school. They knew about the cheating issue. They had a feeling we were holed up with a friend somewhere and they would find us. They needed to know if Grayson was okay. He needed his medicine. They were worried sick and were so mad at us, but they loved us and wanted us to come home.

I deleted them all and pulled up my text inbox again and opened a new text.

mom we r ok.

I hit “send” and started to press the button to power down my phone, but stopped. There was one more text I wanted to send. I scrolled through my address book, all the way to the bottom.

Zo, u there?

I waited for a few minutes for a response. One came from Mom:

Where are you? Please, honey, call us! You won’t be in trouble!

But none from Zoe.

Seriously, who still has the same cell phone for three years? She probably just got a new number and hadn’t had a chance to give it to me yet.

I turned off the phone and shoved it into my front pocket, then hopped back into Hunka and buckled up. Tension was radiating off my brother. The air felt thick in the car.

“I sent Mom a text,” I mumbled. “Told her we’re okay.”

“So we’re not going home,” he said, staring straight ahead. Not a question. A declaration, as if he expected this information and was reluctantly reconciling it.

I turned toward the highway. “No,” I said. “We’re going to California as planned. Go ahead and freak out as many times as you want.”

“I’m not going to freak out,” he said. “Because there’s no way you’re going to get us all the way to California. You may not want to admit it yet, but this idea of yours is never going to work. There are too many things you haven’t thought about.”

“Whatever. Just watch.”

I punched the gas pedal and steered us down the exit ramp onto the highway. We were both silent, both spent
and worried, the only sound the air rustling the bags of food on the front seat and the
scritch
of rocks moving against one another under Grayson’s feet. I was going to prove him wrong. My idea was going to work. I may not have been a genius, and I may not have thought it all through, but I’d thought enough through to pull this off. And we’d already made it this far.

We hadn’t talked since I pulled onto the highway. Grayson appeared to be pouting over my refusal to take us home, and I was still thinking about Zoe’s unanswered text. What if it wasn’t just her cell phone number that had changed? What if she’d moved? What if we drove all the way to California and she wasn’t even there anymore?

The thought made me feel panicky, so I tried to bat it away by opening a bottle of apple juice and taking a sip. This was going to be a longer ride than I’d originally anticipated. Maybe it already had been.

“Isn’t that the girl from the motel?” Grayson asked, pointing out the windshield.

Walking down the side of the highway was a blonde girl, an overstuffed diaper bag slung sideways across her body, carrying an infant seat in one hand. The muscles of her carrying arm bulged out above her elbow.

I leaned forward and squinted. The straight blonde hair, the baby-blue sweater, the infant seat.

“Rena,” I said. “Yeah, it is.”

“Where’s she going?”

“How would I know?” I took a quick look around. Nothing on either side of us. Fields as far forward as we could see. We were probably five miles away from the motel. She couldn’t have been just taking a quick walk to somewhere—not if she was walking this way.

I eased Hunka onto the side of the road behind her and put it into park. She didn’t look back at us but must have known we were there, because she started walking faster, her arm going even tauter as her fingers clutched the infant seat handle.

I rolled down the window. “Hey!” I yelled, but she kept going as if she didn’t hear me. “Hey, Rena!” At the sound of her name, she finally chanced a glance over her shoulder. “It’s Kendra!” I said, fumbling my door open.

Her whole body relaxed with relief as she realized who was yelling at her, and she stopped, turning halfway toward me and setting Bo’s seat gingerly in the grass on the side of the road.

“Stay here,” I told Grayson, and got out of the car. A passing RV swerved into the left lane, the driver glaring at me as if I were walking down the center of the highway. “What’re you doing?” I called, jogging toward Rena.

The wind was whisking her hair across her face. She looked beautiful standing there with the green of the newly
budding field behind her, the spring sun glossing the top of her hair. Like she belonged in a soap commercial rather than on the side of a Kansas highway. She stuck her foot under one end of Bo’s seat and used it to rock the carrier on the gravel.

“Where are you going?” I asked, slowing as I reached her.

She turned her face to the wind, letting her hair blow back over her shoulder. Her foot moved up and down, but she just stared off across the plains.

I touched her elbow. “Hey. You okay?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said, or at least it looked like her lips formed the word “no,” but a semi whined past us and I couldn’t hear her.

“C’mon,” I said, tugging on her elbow. “I’ll give you a ride.” I bent and picked up Bo’s carrier. She grabbed for the handle and pulled it out of my grasp, hooking both arms through the handles and pulling his carrier close to her chest. “Whoa, I wasn’t going to do anything,” I said, holding my arms up. This Rena was like a totally different girl from the one who’d rolled my tire down the hill to Buddy’s a few hours ago. What had happened?

The wind whipped Bo’s blanket away and Rena scrambled for it, catching it with one hand, then wadding it up and pushing it back over him. Underneath, he was wearing only a diaper, and his skin looked cold and mottled. He began to fuss, his eyes squinched shut.

“It’s too cold out here for him,” I said. “You should get in the car.”

She looked back over the fields a moment longer, then nodded and walked with me, our shoes crunching against the gravel.