Perfect Escape

by Jennifer Brown

  “Well, what is it? One of those sunstones you were talking about?”

  He gave me a look. “No. Do you see any glitter in it?” He sounded irritated, but I noticed his hands loosen their grip on the grass. His arms slowly worked their way in until he was able to prop himself up on his elbows. “It’s a rock.”

  I dropped it back on the floorboard and pulled out another. “This one looks like the same thing.”

  He nodded. “It is.” And then, acting extremely put out, he proceeded to tell me about how a sedimentary rock is formed, which led to a more relaxed lecture on how rocks are classified, which led to a comfy little soliloquy about lava rock and why we should be able to spot plenty of it around where we were right at that moment. And as he talked, slowly, slowly, he pulled himself up out of the grass, until he was sitting next to me, his back against Hunka’s side panel.

  I pulled out another rock and then another, until all that was left was a long, thin, flat rock that felt so delicate I could crush it with my fingers.

  “That’s mica,” he said, pulling it out of my hands. “See those lines in it?” I peered, nodded. “Those are the cleavage lines I was telling Rena about. Mica breaks cleanly. So you could hold both pieces of a broken mica together and they would fit perfectly.”

  “Sort of like us,” I whispered, without even realizing I was speaking out loud. I could feel my shoulder brush up against my brother’s. “Broken and way messed up but not destroyed. Not ruined.”

  He glanced at me but didn’t answer. We sat in silence for a few moments, nothing but the noise of traffic whooshing around us.

  I leaned my head on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Gray,” I said, and I felt his shoulder dip a little, but surprisingly he didn’t pull it away.

  “For what?” he answered. Uh-uh-uh.

  I thought about it, felt a tear slip out, and watched it soak into his jeans. “I don’t know. For my shadow, I guess.”

  “Yeah,” he said, but he didn’t say any more, and neither did I, and maybe that was because we both knew that everything else kind of fell under that. It was both of our shadows that hurt. His mental illness, which seemed to take over everything about our lives, and my perfection, which made him disappear.

  Those shadows were how we’d ended up here. How we’d ended up driving across the country, counting rocks and running from consequences. How we’d ended up breaking Zoe’s window and lying facedown in the grass off the highway. Everything, if we were to trace it all back to the beginning, started with those shadows.

  And on some level I knew we were lucky, because we both knew the shadows were there. We’d acknowledged them, accepted them. Everybody has shadows. And I don’t know why it took all of… this… for me to understand that, but it did. And maybe it took all of… this… for my brother to understand it, too. I don’t know. I’ll probably never know when he decided that living in my shadow was sometimes not all that horrible. I just know when it happened for me. Right there, by the car, I realized that sometimes you don’t have to say you love someone for it to be true. Sometimes you just have to hang out in that person’s shadow and be okay with it.

  I didn’t need to tell my brother that I was sorry for trying to fix him. And he didn’t need to tell me he was sorry for trying to make me turn around and go home. And, miraculously, I didn’t even feel so sorry about the calc final anymore. I was ready to face the consequences, full on, head up, just as my brother had faced the road ahead of us.

  Another car pulled up behind us, and another woman asked if we needed help. We kind of laughed after she left, because she seemed super pissed that we weren’t dying or anything and were just being “dangerous teenagers.”

  But after she pulled away, we decided it was time to get back in the car.

  “You still wanna go to the fault?” I asked after we settled in and I started the engine.

  “No,” Grayson answered. He still had lines on his forehead from pressing it so hard into the grass.

  “Okay.”

  “But we should.”

  A pause, then, “Okay.”

  And we did.

  CHAPTER

  FORTY

  The stadium was huge. I don’t know what I’d been expecting—probably something along the lines of my high school football field—but I hadn’t been expecting this. I allowed myself a moment of daydreaming—that this was my campus and I was going to my first football game with my new friends from the dorm. That I was a little bit worried about a poli sci test that I’d taken earlier that day, but that I was excited to flirt with the cute senior who worked at the reference desk in the library.

  That life was good and as it should be. That I’d never messed it up at the eleventh hour.

  The thought was too depressing.

  Grayson’s face was practically pressed up against his window, staring out at the field. I watched him. Was he trying to be still? To detect the slightest tremor in the earth? Or was he, like me, simply daydreaming? What-iffing? Imagining a life where he was whole and normal and feeling possibility?

  Finally, I found a place, pulled over, and turned off Hunka. I rolled down my window, letting the fresh air, the smell of exhaust, and the sound of distant cars and birds fill the car. Grayson didn’t move to open his.

  I wondered if he was remembering all the times we played that game in our backyard, or if his brain was flipping through all the possible catastrophes that could happen, like a file cabinet of Scary Scientific Knowledge.

  Those games we played—Grayson, Zoe, and me—they were fun. Grayson acting the superhero and rescuing us over and over again. But he always saved me first. Not Zoe. Me. Always. And that had never occurred to me until right then, watching him stare out the window at the stadium.

  “Come on,” I said after a while.

  He didn’t move.

  “I didn’t come all the way here to look at it through Hunka’s gross windshield. I came here to experience this thing,” I said, even though I knew that wasn’t true. I didn’t come here to step on the Hayward Fault; I came here to fix my brother and fix myself. And I already had done those things, in a way. Or rather, I’d let us fix each other. “Well, I’m going.”

  I opened the door and stretched in the sunlight, then walked around to the chain-link fence that stood between us and the stadium. I peered down inside. Nothing but an empty football field.

  “Hey!” I shouted over my shoulder. “I don’t see any crack in the ground.”

  My brother’s eyes flicked to me, and then back to the stadium.

  “Are you sure this is the right place? I thought you said it ran right down the middle of the stadium. Goalpost to goalpost, remember? Why can’t I see it?”

  Grayson rolled his eyes this time, and his door opened. I’d said one stupid thing too many. But he didn’t correct me. He was too busy trying to put one foot in front of the other, his legs visibly shaking.

  I jumped up and down a few times, my sneakers thunking on the ground. “Solid as a rock,” I said. “No quakes today. You’re good.”

  He finally reached the fence and looped his fingers through the lattice. I smiled, proud of him, and turned to look down onto the field again, looping my fingers through the fence next to his.

  “Can you imagine playing football on this field?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Never.”

  I leaned my cheek against the fence and looked toward campus. “Can you imagine going to school here?”

  He shook his head again. A pause, then, “But I can see you doing it.”

  I sighed. “Maybe I could’ve. But not now.”

  He glanced at me. “Kendra,” he said. “Your life is not over. You’ll get this worked out.”

  “If by worked out you mean not getting into any college.”

  “You’ll get into college.”

  “You think?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. You messed up, but you didn’t ruin your life or anything. You made this way bigger in your head than it really is. Fiv
e years from now, you’ll probably look back on what you did and laugh.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Another pause, then a chuckle. “Yeah, probably not. But I will. The point is, you’re not going to be expelled. You’ll fail calc. You’ll probably get suspended. And you may have to choose a different college that you’ll still be awesome at. So what?”

  For the first time in days, my heart lightened. Maybe he was right. Maybe this would cause a ton of problems in the short run, but in the long run everything would be okay. “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “I hope you’re right.”

  “But…” he said, then paused.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” He turned his eyes back to the stadium.

  I let go of the fence and nudged him. “No. Say it. But what?”

  “But. Don’t take calc. Or if you do, have your brother help you with the tests. He is a genius, after all.” A smile crept up the corners of his mouth.

  I barked out a laugh. “Jerk,” I said, nudging him again. I’d never even thought of that before. What would things have been like if I’d done that in the first place? If I’d trusted my brother and asked for his help and not tried to be so… above him all the time? I turned back toward the fence. “Let’s climb it,” I said.

  His eyes grew wide behind his glasses. “What? No!”

  “Yeah, come on. Let’s climb it. Don’t act like you haven’t climbed a fence before. Plus, you climbed a jackalope, and those are notoriously vicious.”

  “I’m in flip-flops. I can’t climb a fence in flip-flops.”

  “Oh. You’re right. I wouldn’t want to ruin your pedi.”

  “We’ll get busted.”

  “Like that’s ever stopped you before. Come on. We came all this way.”

  We stared at each other, Grayson’s jaw working, contemplating. Finally, without saying a word, he moved his hands up a few links and pushed his toe into a link at about knee height. Grinning, I did the same.

  Fingers here, toes there. Watch the sharp, clipped edges of the fence at the top. Swing over the right leg, balance, swing over the left leg, balance, and then push off. But not too far—you didn’t want to tumble, ass over teakettle, as my dad always used to say, onto the sidewalk below.

  We landed on the other side, my brother’s legs still shaking, but a brightness to his face that I hadn’t seen in a very long time. We began walking—more like skulking, hoping nobody would catch us and tell us we had to leave—and talking about nothing, really. Grayson told me about how they’d just finished remodeling the whole stadium, how it had shifted on the fault line. I told him about the football games I’d gone to at school and how I couldn’t wait to start going to college games. We talked about Dad and Mom. And about home. We both missed it. Even though I knew what awaited me, I still missed it.

  I was startled by a vibration in my pocket. I’d forgotten about my phone.

  I pulled it out and opened the text I’d just gotten. It was from Zoe.

  Sorry about what happened. You should have warned me. You still in Cali?

  I laughed out loud when I read it. I should have warned her? How many calls had gone unanswered? How many e-mails had she ignored? How many texts unreturned? I should have warned her? She should have let me know she’d moved on. Or maybe we both should have let go three years ago. Actually, yeah. That was what “should have” happened. That was definitely what was going to start happening now.

  “Who is it? Mom?”

  I shook my head, thumbing a reply:

  Sorry, wrong number.

  “It’s nobody,” I said. “Nobody that I know, anyway.” And that was the truth.

  We kept walking, the two of us side by side, Grayson making his nervous uh-uh-uh noise in his throat.

  When we’d walked around the whole thing, I bent and picked up a rock off the ground. Small and gray, nothing pretty or interesting to speak of at all. Maybe, technically, a pebble. But I picked it up and handed it to my brother anyway. “A memento,” I said.

  He took it, nodding, turned it over between his fingers, and stuffed it into his jeans pocket. Then bent and picked up another and stuffed it in there, too.

  I laughed. Of course. Two of them. How could I forget?

  And we stood there for a while together at the top of the stadium. I felt the breeze against my forehead and smelled the chalky dust of rocks being ground up all around me. I listened to my brother count softly next to me and felt that somehow we had come full circle. This was a good place to be.

  “Ready to go home?” I asked after a while.

  He nodded.

  I handed him my cell phone. “Here, you can call Mom.”

  He stared at the phone, shook his head. “We’ll call her later.”

  Instead, I turned the phone to face us, scooched in close to my brother, and stretched my arm around him. “Say cheese,” I said, then smiled and took a photo, with the stadium behind us.

  We hustled back to where we’d climbed the fence before and lifted ourselves back over. I gave Jack the mascot a little pat on the head, and we hopped back into Hunka. Grayson picked up the atlas and I pulled into traffic, trying to figure out how to turn around and get back to the highway.

  Suddenly, my brother started chuckling.

  “What?”

  “I can’t believe it,” he said, shaking his head as if he was totally mystified.

  “Can’t believe what?”

  “I can’t believe you actually got us all the way to California. Your stupid plan worked.”

  I mulled it over, smiled. “Well,” I said, “I am perfect, you know.”

  “Oh, I know. Believe me, I know,” he said. Both of us were laughing now.

  “Besides,” I added, “the real miracle will be if I can actually get us home.”

  I turned Hunka, and the sunlight shifted across the seat. Hunka’s glove compartment door swung open and hit Grayson on the knee. He grunted and slammed it back into place.

  We’d get there. No problem.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Grayson had his rocks, and when it comes to making novels, I have mine. The following people were my Perfect Escape rocks, from sturdy foundation and support to beautiful gemstones to decorative marble, and each of them deserves thanks.

  A special thank-you to my agent (and friend), Cori Deyoe, who always has my back (even when I don’t know my back needs having!), who never seems to mind reading rough drafts and making suggestions, and who tells me I’m great even when I don’t ask her to.

  Thank you to Julie Scheina, my very patient, incredibly thorough editor, and all of the Little, Brown team, especially Leslie Golden, Leslie Shumate, Diane Miller, Barbara Bakowski, and Erin McMahon.

  Thank you to the following for the feedback, the information, the willing ear, the sturdy shoulders, and the hand-holding: my critique partners, Susan Vollenweider and Melody O’Grady; the 2009 Debutantes, who are always there to help a girl out; and my writing friends Cheryl O’Donovan, Laurie Fabrizio, and Nancy Pistorius.

  Thank you to my brother and sister, Steve Gorman and Lynn Smith, for providing the inspiration for writing a sibling story.

  Paige, Weston, Rand, you are my diamonds. Thank you for shining.

  And, always, thank you to Scott; you are the other half of my mica.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I am the youngest of three siblings. I have a brother, who is eight years older, and a sister, five years older. Being a sibling—sort of like being a wife, mother, daughter, author, stay-at-home mom—is something that defines me.

  The sibling relationship is one of the most intimate and complex relationships that could ever exist. Who else in your life can you have, over a lifetime, utterly despised, thrown shoes at, tattled on, cried over, laughed with, taken baths with, shared clothes with, cussed at, fought with, and loved?

  Throughout my life, there have been times when I’ve been frustrated by my siblings. Times when I’ve been extraordinarily proud of them. Times when I’v
e argued bitterly with them. Times when I’ve wanted them to just go away and leave me alone forever. And times when I’ve clung to them.

  No doubt about it, I am a different person when I am with my siblings. And different yet again when I’m alone with just one of them. My relationship with each is unique. With my sister, I’ve been known to cuss like a sailor and party into the night. With my brother, I’ve been known to wage board game wars and laugh so hard my stomach hurts. When we’re all together, I’m the baby. The artist. Nobody takes me all that seriously, and that’s my role, and I’m happy enough with it.

  Think about it. Your siblings are the people in the world who will likely know you for the longest span of your lifetime. My siblings knew me long before my husband and children came around, and they will still know me after my parents are gone. These are two people who hold my story and can even tell parts of it that I can’t. Parts I can’t remember. Parts I misremember. Parts I never knew. They hold my history in their hearts, and they know me—not only the Jennifer With Her Best Face Forward me but the Jennifer at Her Worst me, too. And they love me anyway, just as I love them at their worst.

  When I call up memories of my childhood, some of my favorites are those god-awful family road trips we used to take before my parents divorced. We drove everywhere. To New Jersey, to Texas, even to South Dakota. During those car trips, we really got to know one another, and at times it felt more like torture than vacation. Yet we always find a way to laugh at them now (and sometimes we laughed at them then, too).

  There’s something special about a road trip with your siblings. Something about the way the sides of your legs rub up against each other’s for hours on end. Something about the way you discover a new idiosyncrasy of your sibling, whether it be the way he chews or the way she hums or the way they both smell. Something about the way you share a secret chuckle over something completely stupid or private or both that brings you and your siblings closer, whether you want it to or not. To this day, the phrase “Well, if the platform shoe fits…” brings me to tears in a fit of laughter, not because the phrase itself is funny but because the road trip was long and it was a respite of silliness among hours of dullness.