Perfect Escape (21 page)

That way I couldn’t feel anything but the sun and the wind and the rumble of the cars passing by on the highway. That way I couldn’t get caught up in the drama of being caught. I was here and they were there and we wouldn’t have to face one another with the truth that I wasn’t as perfect as any of us thought I was. They couldn’t yell at me if I wasn’t there; they would have to accept it without understanding it. And, more important, I would have to accept it without understanding it, too.

Maybe I would never go home. Maybe I would stay gone forever.

I flipped through my contacts until I got to Zoe’s name and pressed “call.” The phone rang three times and went to voice mail.

Hey, yo, you’ve got Zo!
her voice rang out in a singsong. The mere sound of it brought happy tears to my eyes. I laughed out loud, imagining her making her gangsta face while saying this. I could see her so clearly in my mind—lips pooched together, head cocked to one side, making signs with her fingers and crossing her arms like she was tough.
Leave me a message and… whatev. You know.
This last was followed by giggles, but they weren’t just Zoe’s giggles. Another girl’s voice intertwined with Zoe’s.
You’re a poet and you didn’t kn
—, the other voice said before it was cut off. My smile wilted, and a tiny voice nagged in the back of my mind:
That’s probably Zoe’s new best friend.
That’s probably the reason she never answers your texts or e-mails, Kendra. Zoe’s a poet and she didn’t know it, and you are yesterday’s news
.

But I knew Zoe. She was my best friend. Best friends are for life. The girl on the message was probably just some other girl. Zoe’s version of Shani or Lia. No big.

The voice mail beeped and I swallowed the lump in my throat.

“Hey, Zo,” I said. “It’s Ken. I um… I like your voice mail, yo.” I forced a laugh, but even to my own ears it sounded like I was trying too hard. How long had I been doing that? How long had I been putting so much effort into making Zoe remember me? “So my number’s the same. Give me a call, okay? I have a surprise for you. It’s important. Bye.” I hung up and stared at the phone for a minute.
You’re a poet and you didn’t know it
. Why did those words make me feel so rotten inside?

Probably because this was the first time I really felt that Zoe’s life had gone on in California. That she wasn’t still pining for her best friends back in Missouri. Because for the first time, I had to admit that there was a teeny part of me that worried that she wasn’t answering me because she just didn’t want to.

I pushed that thought away. I couldn’t go there. We were way too far in it for me to start having doubts now. I was being silly. Zoe would be there in California. And she would be happy to see us. She would.

I started to put the phone away, then changed my mind
and flipped back to Mom’s text and hit “reply,” noticing that my phone had only two bars of battery charge left.

I’m sorry Mom. I promise to fix it.

A car honked behind me and I jumped. A man was idling, in line for the pump. I quickly turned my phone off and stuffed it into the glove box, then started up Hunka and drove back to the motel, wondering why I’d just made that promise to my mom once again.

Why I’d promised to continue to be perfect when I’d already proved that I was far from it.

Rena and Grayson were sitting on the curb outside the room when I pulled into the parking lot.

“Checkout’s at eleven,” Grayson said as he opened the back door for Rena. She climbed in, pushing Bo’s seat in ahead of her. I noticed that Bo was awake but was lying there, serenely watching the sky with glassy eyes. I still thought he looked funny. Why didn’t Rena see it?

We all have obvious things we don’t see
, my brain rattled in response.
You’re a poet and you didn’t know it, Kendra.
But I batted that thought away.

“So it must be after eleven,” Rena said, “because the maid came in and told us we had to get out or go pay.”

Grayson got in on the passenger side. He mimicked in a thick foreign accent, “Dis a-no slop house. You gotta a-pay for da bed!”

He and Rena both cracked up.

“I think she meant flophouse.” Rena giggled. “Unless she thought we were pigs.” She oinked.

Grayson laughed. “You never know at that place. I’d believe they let barn animals sleep in those beds.”

Rena barked out a laugh. “Smelled like it,” she said. “The sheets on my bed were sticky.”

Bo cried, and Rena pulled the baby carrier’s sun visor up to shade his face. Then she rattled a toy over him, and he stopped.

“We a-no clean da sheets at dis a-slop house,” Grayson said, adopting the accent again. “You gotta a-pay if you a-wanna da clean sheets on da bed!”

Rena joined in. “You gotta a-pay extra if you a-wanna shower!”

Again, they both laughed uproariously, even though Rena’s fake accent was horrible. She sounded like she had a bad cold.

But I couldn’t help it; their jokes were contagious. I chimed in. “We have a-no shower! Only sex webcam in dat shower hole!” And we all laughed, even though my accent was worse than Rena’s.

“No a-touch da sex webcam! We pay nineteen ninety-five for it!” Rena laughed. “Biiig bucks! Cost a-more dan whole a-room!”

“I no a-touched anything in that bathroom if I could help it,” Grayson said, wiping his eyes. “I swear I saw things moving on the toilet seat.”

“No a-touch da tings on the towlet seat,” I said, shaking my finger at him. “Dose are complimentary breakfast!”

“Ewww,” Rena and Grayson moaned together, and we laughed some more as we pulled back onto the highway and headed toward California.

See, Zoe?
I said in my head.
I can laugh with other friends, too. I can even make Grayson laugh about germs now.
I wasn’t sure if even Zoe was ever able to accomplish that.

We drove for a long time in silence. I peeked into the rearview mirror and saw that Rena wore the same satisfied grin that Grayson had on his face. I imagined mine matched theirs, too. I pushed Mom’s text and Zoe’s voice mail message out of my mind and drove along, cracking the window and enjoying the whir of the highway under Hunka’s tires.

I imagined Lia and Shani back at school, their butts sweating on the plastic school chairs as the classrooms get more and more stuffy as the day warms up. Feeling lucky if one of their afternoon teachers says they can go outside to read their assignments. Girls wearing shorts to school, their legs all white and goose-pimply because it’s still not quite warm enough for shorts, but they can’t wait until summer to show off their figures again.

Was Bryn at school? What was happening to Chub right now? What about Darian and Tommy and the others? Had they all been expelled, as Lia and Shani had predicted?

A part of me wanted to be there. I wanted to be gossiping
at my locker with the girls and making fun of the kids who were still wearing their winter boots instead of flip-flops. I wanted to be at the honor society meeting. I wanted to be in class, as much as I hated to admit it.

But I knew that would never happen. Not again. I was in too deep. If Chub was expelled, that spelled doom for me. The thought that I’d passed a certain point of no return scared me a little. What would my life look like when I got back? What would happen to me? Would I still graduate, still pack for college in a few months? I doubted it.

I’d promised Mom I’d make it all better, but I knew it was too late for that.

Sometimes I wished I had an excuse, like Grayson. Leaving school early had been no big deal for him. It was sort of expected. Nobody got mad or disappointed. But other things were expected of me. Different things. And staying in school was certainly one of them.

“Can we turn on some music?” Rena asked, leaning forward and resting her chin on the back of the front seat.

“We can try,” Grayson said, using an antibacterial wipe as a buffer, fiddling with the radio dial. “Let’s see if we can get anything besides static and static.”

A few stations tuned in and out again, and then he landed on a song that made Rena suck in her breath and grab his shoulder.

“Leave it there! ‘Lullaby’! My mom used to listen to it all the time when I was a little kid. Shawn Mullins.” She flopped back against her seat and sang along.

I recognized the song and started singing along to the parts I knew, too, and Grayson seemed to know the whole thing. He even did the talking parts, and before long we were all singing at the top of our lungs.

This. This felt so right. Singing and joking in fake accents and driving in the sun. No sickness here. No perfection to live up to. No hospitals and shrinks and quarries. It was like the song was speaking directly to me—
Yes, Kendra, your life is shit right now. You really screwed the pooch. You’ve got about eight more levels of hell to go through, probably. But everything’s going to be okay. It really will.

When it was over, an old Savage Garden song came on and we sang along to it, too, and then a Backstreet Boys song that had us dancing in our seats and laughing so hard we could hardly sing.

“This station must be all-’90s-throwback-music-all-the-time,” Grayson joked in a radio announcer voice.

As if in answer to what he’d just said, Madonna and Babyface poured through the speakers and we all cracked up, singing along. It felt comforting, singing along to all the songs we remembered from when we were little kids.

Finally, a commercial came on and Grayson turned the volume down a little, then leaned forward and scooped up a handful of rocks and started lining them up on the dash.
Uh-uh-uh-uhuh.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, wondering if maybe something I’d said or done had made him anxious. He’d been fine, and all of a sudden he wasn’t fine, and just like the rest of our
lives, I wished I knew what made things change for him and, more important… how could we change it back?

He glanced at me, then out the windshield, curiously. “What?”

I pointed at the rocks in his hand. “Everything was going so good. Why are you doing that?”

He stared at the rocks as if he wasn’t sure what they were exactly. “I don’t know,” he said. “It felt like I needed to.”

That wasn’t good enough. It didn’t make sense. It never made sense. I wanted an answer. How could he ever expect to get better without an answer? “But why? I mean, if it’s about anxiety, like Dr. St. James said, then why? You weren’t anxious five seconds ago.”

His ears turned red, and I could see his hands grip the rocks so tightly his fingers went white. “I don’t know, Kendra. Why do you always have to be asking me?”

I swerved slightly to avoid a pothole, then looked back at him. “Well, what if it’s just a habit?” I chewed my lip. “What if that’s all it is? What if you aren’t mentally ill. You’ve got a habit. Like… like smoking or chewing your fingernails or something.”

“A habit,” he repeated, looking at me incredulously.

“Yes, a habit. You’re a rock junkie.”

I grinned. I’d meant it to be a joke, but he shook his head and leaned forward to put the next rock up on the dash. Subject closed. His face was so close to the dash that had I stopped suddenly, he would’ve gone face-first into it.

“I have a question about the rocks,” Rena said.

Grayson glared at me as if to blame me for her sudden interest. I shrugged. Not like Rena wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t said something.

“Why rocks? I mean, why not marbles or matches or pennies, or…”

Grayson paused. Seemed to really consider this, as if maybe he’d never thought about it before. “I guess,” he said, “it’s because rocks have a story.”

“A story,” Rena repeated, doubtful.

He nodded. “Yeah. How they were created, where they were created, that kind of thing. I don’t know. It’s probably stupid, but rocks kind of remind me of people.”

“How so?” she asked.

I knocked my fist against Grayson’s temple. “Well for some of us, it’s probably about hardheadedness. Like granite up here.”

He leaned out of my reach. “No. It’s just… we take a long time to form, and when we do, we’re all different in one way or another, even if we seem alike or came from the same place or whatever. We all have our specific traits, our own histories. And, like rocks, people aren’t always as unbreakable as they seem. It’s… it’s just a theory I have.”

She leaned forward and stretched her arm over the seat, pointing at a rock. “So what’s that rock’s story?”

“This?” Grayson said, picking up the rock she was pointing at. She nodded. “This is quartz,” he said. He ran his thumb across the smooth, clear face of the rock.

“I thought quartz was pink,” Rena said, turning her hand so it was palm up.

Grayson gave her the quartz. “Sometimes it is. It can be lots of different colors.”

“Why is this one clear, then?” she asked, bringing her other hand over the seat. She turned the rock around in her hands, studied it, then held it up and squinted at it through the sun.

“Pure quartz is colorless,” Grayson answered, stroking the rock with his forefinger while she held it. “Colored quartz happens when there are chemical impurities in the rock, which I’ve always thought was really cool irony. Quartz is at its most beautiful when it’s been changed by impurities. But this one is pure. That’s kind of what I mean by rocks having stories.”

“Pure. I like that,” Rena said, and a look flitted over her face that reminded me that there was a whole lot about Rena that Grayson and I didn’t know. It was a look of sadness, like this girl had some demons in her past. “Can I keep this one?”

“Technically, it’s yours anyway,” I said. “We stole it from that gazebo.”

“A memento,” Rena said, closing her hand around the rock. “Of that rock-headed old bastard, Archie. Not pure at all.”

“Sure,” Grayson said, bending down to pick up another rock, anxiety flitting quickly across his face. He was prob
ably worried that losing this rock meant he had an odd number of rocks left.
Uh-uh-uh.
“Keep it.”

Bo started fussing, and I watched as Rena pulled him out of his carrier and nestled him to her chest. She talked to him in a low voice, but he kept squawking, arching his back away from her. She jiggled him and bounced him, but he kept going. She tried patting his back, but that only seemed to make the crying worse. She cooed and sang along to the radio right into the side of his face, but nothing worked.