Perfect Escape (30 page)

I eased into a swing and let my feet leave the ground as I pulled back on the chains to get myself going. Pretty soon I was soaring through the air, letting my mind go blank.

We didn’t talk about my spectacle at Zoe’s house. We didn’t talk about the broken window or the dwindling money supply or my dying cell phone battery or any of that. We settled into a comfortable silence that was only occasionally interrupted by small talk.

“What do you think Rena’s doing right now?”

“I don’t know, Gray. Probably still at the hospital.”

“Think she’ll call you?”

“Maybe. I don’t know…. Did you make any friends in treatment?”

“Not really. Everybody kind of keeps to themselves in those places.”

“Were you scared in treatment?”

“Sometimes. Why?”

“Just wondering.”

“It’s really warm here.”
Uh-uh-uh
. “Not like home.”

“Yeah, I know. Would be awesome to live here…”

But eventually we ran out of easy topics.

“You going to call Mom?” Grayson finally asked. He didn’t look up.

I thought about it. I basically had no other choice at this point, right? But I’d put her through so much, I almost couldn’t even bear to think of talking to her. “I don’t
know,” I said. “I honestly never thought what I would do if the Zoe thing didn’t work out.” At the mention of her name out loud, my stomach flipped again, and I paused, let my swing slow.

My brother picked up a pebble and studied it. “Why were you so sure she’d help us?”

I thought about it. “Because we would’ve helped her,” I said. “Because she said she wouldn’t ever forget us.” I thought some more and sighed. “Because everything in my life always has to be perfect. I even have to have the perfect lifelong friendship.”

Grayson glanced up at me. “Nobody’s perfect.”

“Trust me, I know that now.”

He went back to his rocks, mumbling, “Must be nice.”

“What does that mean?”

He shrugged. “Nothing. It… must be nice to be just now figuring out that you’re not perfect. I had pretty much figured out that I was a total screwup by the time I was ten.”

I rolled my eyes. “Grayson, you’re not a total screwup. Check it out. You even drove a car today.”

“Still. I would’ve rather been as not-perfect as you any day.”

I swallowed, let my swing slow to a stop. It had never occurred to me before that my brother would want to be like me. I’d always been so worried about how who he was affected me; I’d never stopped to think how who I was affected him.

“Well, you wouldn’t want to be me right now,” I said
around the lump that had formed in my throat. “I think I have perfected being not-perfect at the moment.”

“Overachiever,” he joked, and we dropped back into silence.

Overachiever. Sounded about right.

Only it didn’t feel like an insult. Or pressure. It felt like acceptance.

We didn’t stay at the park much longer. Neither of us had much to say. My mind was reeling with everything that had happened. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be me saving Grayson. It was supposed to be Zoe saving both of us. It was supposed to all work, and it hadn’t.

Instead, I’d driven eighteen hundred miles with a sick brother whom I couldn’t fix and a total stranger who let her baby almost die, just to reach a best friend who’d forgotten about me and moved on. I was the biggest chump in the world.

I had nobody to blame but myself.

All of it was my fault.

It was my fault I’d gotten busted cheating. It was my fault we ran away. It was my fault we were out of money. And it was my fault we were stranded in Citrus Heights and all we had to show for it was some broken glass and a text message telling me to go away.

So I sat on that swing with my self-blame and misery
and didn’t even try to stop it when I felt it gnawing through my stomach. I deserved it. I deserved to feel like crap, and I deserved to have nothing to show for the money I’d stolen. I deserved it all.

It wasn’t until we’d gotten back to Hunka and I’d driven down the street and put the last of the money into the gas tank that Grayson finally spoke again.

“How far do you think that’ll get us?” he asked, opening the atlas and flipping to the
N
s. “At least to Reno. We could stop at that hospital again, if you want. Bo’s probably still there.” He reached down to the floorboard and scrabbled up two little rocks that had escaped my fingers back in the hospital parking lot. He lined them up on the highway line on the map. “We could call Mom from there,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, putting the car into drive and feeling totally defeated. I’d have to call Mom. Tell her I was going to have to use the credit card to get home. That was a no-brainer. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to come back a hero. The daughter who saved their son. Instead I would be slinking back as a failure.

I couldn’t cure Grayson for them.

It took more than a stupid road trip to cure someone like Grayson. I should’ve accepted it, like Mom, and caved. Let him count his rocks and…

Wait.

The rocks.

California.

Of course.

I couldn’t cure my brother.

And without Zoe, there was no way I could get us back to the threesome we used to be.

But I could still give him something.

I stalled before turning onto the highway, and a car behind me honked. But I couldn’t make my foot press the gas pedal, couldn’t make my hands turn us back toward home.

“What’re you doing?” Grayson asked, glancing back at the line of cars behind us as I sat at the exit ramp, totally still.
Uh-uh.
“This is the right turn.” He pointed toward the exit ramp, like I was a complete idiot who couldn’t see the obvious right in front of her face.

I was shaking my head. No. I couldn’t go back that way. Not yet.

Instead of turning onto the exit ramp, I flicked on my blinker and swung back out into the other lane. Cars were honking like crazy now, and one guy was shaking his fist at me like a cartoon character, but I barely even noticed any of them.

“What are you doing?” Grayson was demanding, but I’d started giggling, sounding a little unhinged, I knew, and veering off into the left lane to catch the highway going west. He was punching the atlas with his finger, holding it up for me to see. “You want east. This is west.”

But I ignored him.

Pressed on the gas pedal and eased onto the highway.

Sure of myself.

I didn’t need Zoe. I didn’t need her help or her plans. I didn’t need her to save us. I didn’t need Rena or Mom or Dad or Bryn Mallom or stupid Chub Hartley. I could do this myself. It wasn’t the plan that I’d made, but that was the thing about plans—when they got screwed up, you made new ones, and sometimes the new, imperfect plans turned out to be far better than the original, so-called perfect ones.

I couldn’t cure Grayson for my parents.

I couldn’t cure Grayson for me.

I couldn’t cure Grayson at all.

But, by God, I could see this trip through.

Grayson was still freaking out in the seat next to me. “What are you doing? You’re going the wrong way!”

I shook my head. “Nope. For the first time, I’m going exactly the right way, big brother. We have a change in travel plans. We are going to the Hayward Fault.”

Grayson didn’t freak out like I expected him to. Didn’t even argue. He made this moaning sound and turned toward the window and rubbed those two rocks he was holding. Rubbed, rubbed, rubbed them with his thumb until I was sure he’d rub the skin right off. He’d started counting, this time by twos.

I was a little surprised, to be honest. Surprised that he didn’t give me a lecture about money or some guilt trip about Mom and Dad or point out to me that Zoe’s mom had probably called the police when I broke their window, and that she’d also probably called our house and that would be one more headache I’d laid on Mom and Dad. Normally, that is exactly what Grayson would do. He could lecture almost as well as he could wash his hands.

But I was too over it to think this meant any progress on my brother’s part. We’d gone too far during this road trip. I
had no delusions that maybe this meant he was more relaxed or that he was having fun or liked the idea in any way. And I especially didn’t fool myself into thinking that maybe this meant he wasn’t thinking about all those things, plus a hundred or a thousand more dismal others.

More likely, he’d given up arguing with me. He’d probably figured it would be wasted breath.

So we drove in silence, and I squinted into the sunlight, feeling like I was driving out of cold, gray early spring and into paradise. Feeling like I could drive forever and just pretend that life was nothing but sunny and beautiful.

I turned on the radio and searched until I found a song I knew, then sang along, nudging my brother’s shoulder a few times.

He ignored me.
One hundred twenty-two…. One hundred twenty-four
…

“Hey, Gray, remember this one of Dad’s? What’s black and white and red all over?” I paused. “A newspaper! Now don’t you kids go stealing that one.”

Nothing.

When we started seeing signs for San Francisco, I knew we were getting close, but didn’t know where to go from there.

“Hey, Gray,” I said, turning down the radio volume. “Can you get out the atlas?”

No answer. He wasn’t even counting anymore.

“Grayson.” I nudged him again. “We need to look at the map.”

Nothing. Just that incessant rubbing, rubbing, rubbing.

We were getting closer. Traffic was picking up. And I wasn’t sure where to go, but I felt sure that if I stayed in this lane on the highway for much longer, I’d miss it. I’d miss everything and then I’d run out of gas and would be stranded somewhere in Cali-freaking-fornia and I was so sick of this, so sick of this, and God I couldn’t even get this one thing right!

“Dude, come on! Where is this thing?” I practically shouted. Hunka swerved and a car honked. I smacked Grayson’s shoulder, and when he slowly turned to look at me, I could see his lips, pulled together in a tight line across his teeth, like a dog giving a warning growl. But his eyes didn’t look angry. They looked watery and searching behind his glasses. They looked afraid. It was a look I’d seen before. “What’s the matter?” I asked, trying to sound forceful, but it was tough getting the words around the lump that had suddenly formed in my throat.

And that’s when it happened.

Official full freak-out mode.

Just like on the way to Grandma’s house all those years ago.

My brother started screaming and pounding his head back against the seat, kicking the bottom of the dash with his feet, his fists clenched, shrieking, “Stop! Stop! Stop!” and I don’t care how many times you witness something like that, it scares the holy living shit out of you every single time. You never get used to someone coming completely unhinged and shouting in your face. You never get used to
someone you love acting crazy, acting like someone you’ve never seen before. Acting like a total stranger.

“Okay!” I yelled, reaching out with one hand in a useless calming gesture. With the other hand I plunged Hunka in and out of lanes, cars slamming on brakes and people yelling behind their steering wheels, until I was clear over on the right and could pull off the road. “Okay, okay, see? We’re stopped!” I said, putting Hunka in park and turning to hold both palms out toward my brother, like, even though the one-hand-out gesture didn’t do a damn bit of good, maybe the two-hands-out gesture would.

And more than anything in the world, I wanted Mom and Dad. I’d witnessed Grayson’s freak-outs before, but I was always only that—a witness. I could close my eyes if I wanted to. I could go to my bedroom and lock the door. I could pretend I didn’t hear him, didn’t see him, that he was normal, that we were all normal. I could go to school and forget all about him. But my parents never could. They were front-row ticket holders to Grayson’s freak-outs. They couldn’t close their eyes or go to their rooms or pretend.

I didn’t want to be in the front row.

The front row was scary and loud and made my chest hurt.

His screams of “Stop!” had turned to just plain screams now, his voice bouncing off the windows and driving into my eardrums.

“Okay,” I said, still holding my hands out defensively. “Okay, okay. I stopped. Look. I stopped, Grayson. We’re
stopped.” But my voice was carried away on top of his, like the words were being yanked out of my mouth and crushed before they could even form into sounds. It felt horrible, as though, if he kept it up, I wouldn’t be able to even think straight and then I would have no choice but to start shrieking and crying, too, and as awful as it felt to think this, I couldn’t help myself thinking it—
I don’t want to turn into him. Please, God, please don’t make me turn into my brother.
I didn’t want to become a scary person, too.

I tried to think of what Mom and Dad would do in this situation. What had they done before? Hold him down? Yes, sometimes. Yell at him? Only when they were at the bottom of their bag of tricks and nothing else had worked. Let him go on until he was screamed out? Only Mom did that, and only if Dad wasn’t home.