Perfect Escape (3 page)

“How long’s she been doing that?” he asked. He slid a nickel into the “nickel line.”

“It’s one of her New Year’s resolutions,” I said, leaning my hip against the doorframe and watching his hands.
Fffp!
A quarter in its spot.
Fffp! Fffp!
Two dimes, smooth as butter.

I couldn’t count how many times I’d watched Grayson do this. When I was little, I used to wait until he was finished and then run up beside him and brush my hand through the lines just to mess them up. It made him cry and his face always got beet-red and I thought it was funny. But by the time we were ten and thirteen and he was spending sometimes four hours a day lining up his coins and pulling out wads of his own hair in frustration because he couldn’t get them perfect, it wasn’t funny anymore. I spent a lot of those nights sitting next to him with a ruler in my hand, helping him move coins such minuscule degrees I couldn’t even see the movement.
Is this good, Gray? Does this make you happy?

“She’s learning Italian,” I continued. “Dad told her he’ll take her anywhere in the world she wants to go for their twenty-fifth anniversary next year. I guess she wants to go to Italy.”

“They’re going away next year?” he asked.
Fffp! Fffp! Fffp!

“That’s the plan,” I said. “I’ll be away at college and you’ll be…” I trailed off when his eyes lifted to meet mine, his curled fingers frozen over the coins.

He’d be… what? Cured? Living on his own? Not likely. He’d still be there, moving pennies around on the kitchen table and muttering about feldspars and micas and pyroxenes. And there was no way Mom would feel comfortable leaving for a week, with the thought of Grayson being locked in a compulsion and unable to leave the bathtub or get a drink of water or get out of bed. We locked eyes for a moment, all the things we hadn’t talked about since Zoe left fluttering between us like dark and dusty moths.

We used to talk about everything. Nothing went unshared. So why couldn’t we talk about this? Why did we pretend that his illness didn’t exist? Was it because we were both still reeling over what happened with Zoe? Was it because I was too resentful to let him in again? Or had we just given up?

He shrugged, looked back down, and said, “Doesn’t matter,” and my whole body froze at the weird, defeated tone of his voice.

“Sure it matters,” I said, trying to sound light, trying to protect him, as I had since I could remember, from the humiliation of being himself. The guy who blamed himself for driving a whole family of best friends away. The guy who made my parents cry. The guy who interrupted all our
lives and couldn’t just hop in the car to grab a burger, ever. The guy who held us all hostage, without even meaning to. I knew he hated being that guy, even as his brain forced him to keep doing it. “I’m sure they’ll figure something out. I’ll come home from college that week or something. We’ll have the place to ourselves. It’ll be like old times. I’ll make the pizzas; you’ll choose the movies.”
The only thing missing will be Zoe
, I almost finished, but decided against it, knowing what even the mention of Zoe’s name did to Grayson’s anxiety level. Like the time I’d asked him if he’d heard from her and he’d spent the rest of the night picking up the phone hundreds of times to make sure the dial tone was working.

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.” But he was only looking at his coins, switching two pennies for reasons that would never make sense to anyone but him, and leaning close to the table to gaze at them from a different angle.
Fffp
. Gaze.
Fffp
.

“You still like jalapeños and cream cheese on your pizza?”

He shrugged. “They don’t serve much of that in treatment.”

I took a breath. Tried again. “Remember that time you and Brock ate that superlarge with triple jalapeños and then Brock drank that entire two-liter of root beer and you and his mom ended up having to take him to the ER because his stomach was burning so bad?”

Grayson didn’t look up from his coins, but his mouth
twitched into a smile. “That was pretty funny. I kept telling him I could see an alien head moving around under the front of his hospital gown.”

We were both smiling now. “And when they brought you home, Dad gave Brock an ice pack and told him to brace himself for the pizza’s reappearance in the morning.”

Grayson laughed out loud. “I forgot about that.”

Mom’s voice floated in from the other room: “
Paria Inglese?
”

I shifted uncomfortably as the moment turned back to awkward, and when the urge to dash over and swipe my hand across the table where Grayson sat got to be too much, I turned and went back up to my bedroom.

Between Bryn’s phone call and Grayson’s sad coin arranging and my fear of what awaited me at school, not to mention never getting a response from Zoe, I could no more sleep than run a marathon in my bathrobe. Instead, I sat up through the night, listening to Dad close the house up, the soft bumps and creaks of everyone moving around in their bedrooms. Then I just lay there in the silence, until the sky began to lighten again, staring out the window and wondering what I would do if Bryn was right and Chub had been stupid enough to store evidence in his locker.

And the thought must have etched itself into my brain, because morning had come and I’d gone through all the motions of getting myself to school, yet there I was, sitting in Hunka (short for Hunka Junka, the name Shani and I had lovingly given the blue-and-rust Oldsmobile I’d inher
ited when my grandfather died) in the school parking lot, still wondering. But I knew that even if I sat there and thought about it for the next twenty-four hours, I’d never come up with a good answer. If Chub left evidence in his locker, I was busted. Plain and simple.

The first bell had rung, and then the second. But still my legs didn’t want to move. I was so afraid of what awaited me in that school.

But I finally told myself that the last thing I needed was a tardy, because then I’d have to stop by the attendance office on my way in, and Mrs. Reading’s office was next to it, which meant Mrs. Reading was usually hanging around right inside, and she would probably take one look at my guilty face and call district security to haul me off to juvie or something.

God, irrational, I know, but I was in an irrational place.

Before the third bell rang, I took two deep breaths, exhaled them with a “You can do this, Kendra,” and pulled myself out of Hunka, yanking my backpack by one strap and dragging it along behind me.

There was hardly anyone going into the building now. Almost everybody was already inside, getting last-minute stuff out of the lockers and reporting to first period. I wondered if the others knew. If Bryn had called any of them last night as well. If I wasn’t the only one walking in on leaden legs with a brainful of knotted black squiggles.

I pushed through the front doors and stood on the rug inside the school vestibule. My mouth tasted salty, and my
palms felt slick, and I could feel every nerve ending in the bottoms of my feet.

This is it
, I thought.
This is where I find out how bad it really is
.
Either everything will be cool… or I might actually die of fear
. And then I had the thought
Is this what Grayson feels like all the time?
That made me wish I’d gotten out the ruler and helped him with his coins last night.

But I had only a second to feel it before panic set in completely: Chub Hartley, his wide face pale and quivering, was standing between Mrs. Reading and Mr. Floodsay in the attendance-office vestibule.

Mr. Floodsay was talking, animatedly waving a sheaf of papers in his hand, frowning so hard his glasses weren’t even touching the bridge of his nose. I wanted to keep walking. Willed my feet to move. But I was rooted to my spot, barely even registering it when Artie Morris hit me in the back with the door and shoved past me, saying, “Get out of the doorway, ’tard.”

All I could do was watch. And suppose. And worry. And watch and suppose and worry some more. And then some more. A loop of awful.

And when Mr. Floodsay put his hand on Chub’s back and turned, guiding Chub into Mrs. Reading’s office, I knew it was only a matter of time before all the horrible stuff I had worried about would come true.

Here are the things I thought about during what would probably be the longest day of my life:

1. I really hated Chub Hartley for how stupid he was. But I hated myself for being even more stupid than Chub Hartley.
   

2. If God somehow got me out of this, I would do something huge, like… I don’t know… like put out one of those statues of the Virgin Mary on my front lawn and garden around it, like my friend Lia’s family does. Or build a wing on a church someday. Or maybe even both.
   

3. If Chub somehow kept me from getting in trouble, I would hang out at his house a few times, like he was always asking me to do, regardless of how stupid he was and how much he smelled like
   mildew. But I wouldn’t go to prom with him, no matter how many times he asked. There was a limit to grace.
   

I sat through my classes, feeling jumpy and like my palms were vibrating and my eyeballs sweating. My knee pumped up and down nervously under my desk, and I bit my nails. Every time a classroom door opened or a teacher said my name, things got gray and grainy, and I had to remind myself to take a breath.

In calc, everyone was eyeing me. Darian poked me in the back with his pencil eraser when Mr. Floodsay turned his back to us, but I refused to turn around to see what he wanted. I had a pretty good feeling I knew what it was anyway. He wanted what three-fourths of the students in that class (and half of the students in the third-period class, and all but one student in the seventh-period class) wanted: for me to tell them everything was going to be all right, which I, at the moment, could definitely not do.

By the time I got to lunch, I was adding nausea and ringing ears to my list of stress maladies.

Things were only made worse when Bryn stopped by my table, setting her tray down on top of my hand. Her face was set in hard lines.

“Chub got sent home,” she said. “Word is he’s expelled.”

I pulled my hand out from under her tray and used my forefinger to push it toward the edge of the table. “I’m eating,” I said by way of response. (I wasn’t. I was moving my
orange chicken and rice around on the tray and trying to keep from hurling under the table.)

Bryn’s eyes went slitty, and she cocked her head to one side. “Well, while you eat, think about this: If they sent Chub home, it’s probably because he gave them all the information they wanted.”

I picked up my fork and stabbed a piece of chicken nonchalantly, hoping Bryn would just go away… like a dissipating fart. Which, now that I thought about it, was the best possible way a person could describe Bryn Mallom. “Or he gave them none,” I said, shoving the chicken into my mouth and chewing, despite the protests of my stomach. I offered her a confident smile, even though on the inside I was thinking,
Oh, God! He told them everything!

Fortunately, Shani and Lia showed up then, carrying fruit plates and biscuits—an odd combination, even for Shani, who liked barbecue sauce on her waffles and easily had the weirdest eating habits of anyone I’d ever known. They set their trays on the table, glaring at Bryn as they slid into their chairs.

Bryn glanced at them, her face losing some of its cockiness now that we weren’t alone. Shani and Lia really didn’t have much of anything to do with Bryn, ever, but Lia’s boyfriend was Ryan Addleson, and even after all the years since Bryn’s mom’s DUI, Bryn was still afraid of him.

She picked up her tray and swayed a little, looking as if she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to stay or leave or fall through the floor. Finally, she tossed her hair over one
shoulder, turned her back on Shani and Lia, and pursed her lips at me.

“Just so you know,” she hissed, “I’m not Chub, and I don’t have a crush on you.”

I rolled my eyes. “Go away, Bryn,” I said, and poked another piece of rubbery orange chicken into my mouth. Shani and Lia both snickered. My tongue felt fat and mutinous.

But everything on the inside of me said I probably really could use Bryn on my side.

After Bryn left, Shani leaned across the table. “So it’s true that Chub got expelled?” she whispered. “Skylar Tomason was sketchy on the details, but she was saying this morning that by tomorrow half the school is going to be expelled.”

Lia was nodding furiously as she poked a strawberry into her mouth. “I heard it, too, in French. Somebody was saying the school called the cops.”

“The cops?” I said, looking at Lia amusedly. Even I wasn’t scared enough to believe the police would get involved. “Who said that?”

She shook her head and swallowed. “I don’t know. I just heard it.”

“That’s kind of stupid,” Shani said, biting into a biscuit. “Unless it’s, like, drugs or something. Chub Hartley is hardly a drug dealer.” I looked down at my orange chicken and wished I had their appetites. But the two pieces I’d eaten for show with Bryn were sloshing around in my stomach disagreeably as it was. I set my fork down.

“I can’t help it,” Lia said. “It’s just what I heard. And I heard that a lot of really smart students are caught up in it.”

You have no idea
, I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud. I’d never told Shani and Lia what I’d been up to, mainly because they didn’t have calc and it didn’t really seem like that big of a deal when it started, and by the time it escalated into something way big, I didn’t know how to bring it up with them. I would’ve told Zoe about it, but then again Zoe wasn’t answering my e-mails.

Also, Zoe never expected me to be perfect.

But listening to Bryn and then to all the rumors, my earlier thoughts that maybe God or Chub would save me were looking more ridiculous by the moment. I was going to be caught. And then everything I’d worked so hard for would be over.

I took a long sip of my soda, and when I looked up again, Shani was staring at me hard, her fork holding a cube of pineapple an inch or so in front of her lips.