Perfect Escape

by Jennifer Brown

  Her dad had noticed her standing in our yard and began shouting for her. “Zoe! Get in the van. We’re leaving.”

  “Okay,” I whispered, nodding, my own chin quivering.

  “Zoe! Dammit, get off that lawn!”

  Zoe glanced back at the minivan, where both of her parents were staring daggers out the windshield at us, and then quickly wrapped her arms around me in a tight hug. Almost immediately the minivan horn blared, and I could feel her shoulders jump and tense. “Don’t forget me,” she whispered. “And don’t let Grayson forget me.”

  “Never,” I whispered back. “Don’t forget us, either, okay?”

  “I couldn’t if I tried,” she said, and then turned and ran for the van, which had begun pulling away from the curb before she even had the back door all the way shut. I watched as it pulled past our house, Zoe’s parents’ faces grim and eyes set firmly on the road ahead.

  Just after the car passed our driveway, Zoe turned around in her seat, staring at me through the back window. Slowly she held up one hand, her fingers slightly curled in, and waved. I held up mine in return.

  And when the van turned the corner and out of sight, I sat on the curb and cried, remembering a million days playing with our dolls under a sheet stretched across Zoe’s picnic table. A million afternoons spent painting each other’s fingernails, because neither of us was good with our left hand. A million sleepovers. A million board games. A million times we’d promised to go to college together and see the world together and be best friends forever and ever. And even though we had all of that… it still wasn’t enough.

  My dad had sat on the curb next to me, and I’d leaned into him.

  “Maybe you’ll see her again someday,” he’d said, putting his arm around my shoulder and pulling me in. “You never know.”

  I’d shaken my head pitifully. “They’re moving to California. That’s so far away. I’ll never see her again.”

  Dad seemed to consider this, then patted my head and said, “The world gets a lot smaller the older you get. Never say never.” And he’d gotten up and gone inside the house to help Mom coax Grayson into a bath, a process that could take hours on a high-stress day like that one.

  And I’d stayed on the curb and felt sorry for myself, staring at Zoe’s photo and sniffling, repeating under my breath, I won’t forget you, Zo. Never say never.

  My phone buzzed again, jarring me out of my memory, but this time it kept buzzing—not a text but an incoming call. I groaned and set the laptop next to my pillow, then got up and grabbed the phone off my dresser. Shani and her guy problems.

  But when I looked, the caller ID displayed a number I didn’t recognize. “Hello?”

  “Kendra? It’s Bryn.”

  I paused. Why would Bryn Mallom be calling me? Other than in Advanced Calculus class, we never talked. Ever. Bryn was one of those girls you talked to only when you absolutely had to. Her arms were always bug-bitten and her clothes dirty and out of style. She was chunky, and she was always in trouble for something. When we were growing up, the boys called her Bryn Bubblebutt, and Ryan Addleson once made her cry when he told the class that his dad had arrested her mom for drunk driving the night before. Probably being picked on didn’t do wonders for her personality, but on top of being an easy target, Bryn was kind of a bitch, so people didn’t feel very bad when they were mean to her. And almost all of us avoided talking to her at all costs.

  But lately I’d had reasons to talk to Bryn. And they weren’t good reasons.

  “I got your number from Shani,” she said. “We need to talk.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and massaged the bridge of my nose with two fingers. I’d have to remember to thank Shani for sharing my number with the most obnoxious girl on earth. “Um, I’m kind of in the middle of something, Bryn,” I said. “Can we talk in calc tom—”

  “It’s important,” she said. “It’s about the calc final.”

  “What about it?” I asked, thinking, I should never have started talking to Bryn in the first place. That’s where I went wrong. Nothing good ever comes from hanging out with Bryn Mallom. “We’ve still got three weeks.”

  “I heard Mrs. Reading talking to Mr. Floodsay about it today when I was picking up my tardy slip. They know.”

  My heart thrummed, one time, hard, in my chest. I swallowed, but it felt like a wad of peanut butter was lodged in my throat. I swallowed again, my mind reeling for something to say, and could almost instantly feel cold sweat prick up across the backs of my shoulders. My eyes landed on my laptop screen, which was still pulled up to my e-mail account. No new messages.

  “Hello? Are you there?”

  “Yeah,” I said at last. “I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about, Bryn.”

  “Uh, yeah, actually, there is, Kendra. Mr. Floodsay said something about searching lockers tomorrow, starting with Chub’s. I don’t know about you, but I find that kinda worrisome.”

  “So?” Bryn’s sarcastic voice was really rubbing me the wrong way. “Chub’s not dumb. I seriously doubt he’s leaving evidence in his locker.” Coming out of my mouth, the words sounded so sure, but in my mind I was freaking out. The truth was Chub was just dumb enough to totally leave evidence in his locker.

  “I hope you’re right,” she said, then sighed, her breath barreling into the phone. “But you’re probably not. They’re going to figure it out. And when they do, we’re all in really big trouble. Especially you.”

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  After my conversation with Bryn, I went downstairs to feel out what Mom knew. Surely if the school had figured something out, they would have called Mom immediately, so if I went downstairs and she was happily making a Welcome Home, Grayson dinner, I’d know Bryn was just being her typical dramatic self and I was safe. If I went downstairs and Mom was canceling my college savings account, I’d know the shit had, as they say, hit the fan. And hard.

  She was doing neither. Instead, she was sitting on the couch cross-legged, a book open in her lap and earphones clamped down over her head. She smiled and waved at me with her pencil when I walked by, then announced in a slow, measured voice, “Dov’é il bagno?”

  My heart slowed down. I wiped my sweaty palms on my thighs. If she was calmly practicing her Italian, there was a good chance I was safe. I peeked into the kitchen and saw a pot of something bubbling on the stove, and Grayson sitting at the table, lining up coins in neat little rows in front of him—one of his two favorite pastimes (the other being looking at, talking about, arranging, gathering, and basically knowing everything there is to know about rocks).

  “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 inherited 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.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

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

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

  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.

  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 stud
ents 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.