Perfect Escape (31 page)

But I couldn’t let him go on. My head already felt full to bursting with his wails. And I didn’t think I could really hold him down. Not when he was like this.

So I tried yelling.

And for a while it was both of us yelling in that car, him flailing around and me with my eyes closed, and it must have sounded like
screech
dammitGrayson
wail
shutup
squeal
we’restoppedlookaround
shriek
…

And we must have looked nuts in there, but if we did, nobody seemed to notice—they were all busy heading off to their normal lives while we created chaos out of ours.

But then, all of a sudden, Grayson seemed to come back to a semblance of reality, which ordinarily would have been
a good thing. But this time he looked around wildly, his arms and legs flinging out and clutching the seat, one of the rocks flying out of his palm and thwacking me in the chin. He took in an enormous gasp, like you would expect to hear out of someone who has just seen a zombie pop up out of the ground at his feet, and before I could even react, his hand scrambled for the door handle and out he went, rolling onto the grass beside the highway and sprawling there, his fingers curled into the grass, clutching for dear life.

“What the… Gray?” I called, peering out the door, which he’d left open. I could see him, a couple feet away from the car, and I was scared, yes, and I wanted to be sympathetic—I really did—but something about the way he was lying there, looking like a freak for all the world to see, was the last damn straw.

I let out a howl of my own, pounded the steering wheel a few times with my fists, checked the side mirror, and then, when the coast was clear, darted around Hunka into the grass on the other side, seething.

I was so done with this.

I was sick to death of embarrassment. Sick of not going to Grandma’s. Sick of not being able to do anything when he was around, forever a prop in
The Grayson Show
. Sick of losing everyone to him—Mom, Dad, even Zoe. Everyone tiptoed around my brother. Everyone wanted him to be normal, not even bothering to see that I was better than normal. I was damned perfect. It was all about him, all the damned time, and I was so sick of it I wanted to scream.

“Get up!” I yelled, when I got around to the grass. He didn’t budge. “Get up!” I repeated, halfheartedly kicking the dirt next to his right arm. “I’m not kidding, Grayson. Get up!”

He turned his head just enough to show one eye, glasses half-on, and his mouth. “I can’t,” he breathed.

I held both arms out at my sides, gesturing to the highway stretching out on either side of us. “There aren’t any overpasses. Get back in. You’re acting like a freak. Everyone is staring.” Which, by the way, was oddly
not
true. Nobody even seemed to notice.

He swallowed. “What if today’s the day?”

“The day for what?”

“The big one. Today could be the big one.”

“The big what? You’re acting ridiculous.”

But then I understood. All those afternoons in the backyard, Grayson running around, pulling Zoe and me out of upended wheelbarrows, our bodies limp, him crying,
Oh, the humanity!
It was one of our favorite games to play. Our little Hayward Fault rescue game.

Only to my brother, it wasn’t a game. It was practice.

I crouched down next to his head. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. “You’re worried about an earthquake?”

“Studies show earthquakes with a magnitude of six-point-seven happen twenty times a year worldwide, Kendra!”

“That’s stupid.”

He lifted his head. “You’re the one who brought us here. You’re the one who had this brilliant idea to go to a fault
line that’s famous for the possibility that it could cause a hugely devastating earthquake any day, and you’re blaming me for thinking an earthquake is possible? Who’s the stupid one?”

“You are!” I yelled, knowing full well that we sounded like a couple of little kids. I think even I wasn’t sure if what was coming out of my mouth wasn’t the six-year-old me, wanting to yell at him to stop playing this idiotic game of fear and sadness and put the coins away and stand up to the big boys and stop crying all the time and just be normal.

“Well, that’s rich,” he said, “coming from you. I never had to cheat.”

“At least I made it past my junior year,” I shot back.

“At least I was smart enough to take the tests all on my own.”

“How the hell would you know? You spent all your class time counting how many times your teachers blinked.”

“At least I never dragged you into my messes,” he said.

I glared at him, barely believing what I’d just heard come out of my brother’s mouth.

“Oh, didn’t you?” I said, my chest feeling like it might explode, I was so angry. I started to pace, little staccato steps around his head. “How many times have I had to stop what I was doing to climb down into that quarry for you, huh? How many times did I have to listen to Mom cry because you were back in the hospital? How many nights have I sat alone in the kitchen at dinnertime because Mom and Dad were too busy discussing what next to do with
you? What about my birthday party that was canceled because you were having a rough time and Mom and Dad didn’t think you could handle company in the house? And the time that we never got to Grandma’s at Christmas because you couldn’t handle an overpass? What about my best friend who had to move away because you couldn’t be normal? You think this is all about
you
, Grayson. That this sickness of yours is
your
problem, but you drag the whole family through your problem. Every. Single. Day. So don’t even talk to me about dragging
you
into
my
problem. My whole life has been about
your
problems. So my advice to you, Genius Boy, if you don’t like being dragged into my mess? Deal with it. I have. My whole life.”

“Whatever,” he said into the ground, his voice sounding as if he was crying, or at least on the verge of it.

“And you really think that hanging on to a few blades of grass is going to save you from ‘the big one’?” I made air quotes with my hands. “That’s as stupid as thinking that counting to a zillion will keep us all from dying, or any of the other ridiculous rituals you do.” I was on a roll now. “Haven’t you ever noticed that normal people don’t do those things? That you have the whole family totally wrapped up in your crap? It’s like you—”

“Shut up!” he cried, pulling his face up from the ground. His glasses had totally fallen off, and there was a piece of grass stuck to his beet-red forehead. His face was covered with sweat and snot and tears. He took a deep, ragged breath. “You have no idea what it’s like to be me.”

“And you have no idea what it’s like to be me,” I yelled. “Always living under your shadow. Always having to be perfect to make up for you, but nobody ever noticing me at all until I screwed up. Always worrying that I might become you. That I might someday wake up and I won’t be able to get out of bed until I’ve recited every color I could think of or some other stupid, crazy obsession. You have no idea what it’s like to be me. It’s worse than any earthquake, because this. Never. Stops! Never!” I swiped my hair, which had caught a breeze, out of my face. Anger was pulsing through me so strongly I could feel it in my eyeballs. It had been such a long day, so filled with emotion. I felt raw and ragged.

Grayson was still staring at me, but the red had faded a little bit. He was breathing hard, though, and his voice was weak from all the screaming. “Poor you, you’ve got it so hard,” he said. “How do you stand it?”

“You have no idea,” I repeated, shaking my head.

“I don’t, huh?” he said. “Let me tell you something, perfect little princess. I have every idea. You don’t think it killed me every time someone treated you like there was something wrong with you because of me? You think I didn’t notice when your friends’ moms wouldn’t let them come around our house because of me, or that one time when that one girl’s mom wouldn’t let you come inside her house because she thought whatever I had made you trashy?”

“Kathy,” I murmured. I’d forgotten about that. How could I have forgotten? We were in sixth grade, and her
mom refused to let me any farther than the front porch. I’d sat on the porch and told her I understood, but later I’d cried and had hated my brother with every ounce of energy I had. For doing this to me.

Never had I thought what it might have done to him.

“I’m not blind,” he said. “I see what I do to the family. I see how Mom and Dad look at you. How they joke with you and laugh and relax. They can carry on a conversation with you without ever once looking at your hands. Did you notice that?” He paused, and the blade of grass fell off his forehead. “Because I noticed. Did they ever once make a big deal out of something good that I did? Did they ever once just treat me like a member of the family? No. I’m always the sick one. The one who struggles. The one with difficulties. The one to blame for everything that doesn’t work out. And every time you did something great, I had to act happy for you, when all I could think was how much I hated you for not being sick like me. How much I wanted to be you. Just for one day.” He took a deep, quivering breath. “So, yeah. I think I have a pretty good idea what it’s like to live in someone’s shadow.”

A car pulled up behind Hunka, and a woman opened the passenger door, sticking her head out.

“Y’all okay?” she asked, a Southern twang to her voice.

I nodded, brushing my hair away from my face again and trying my best with a confident smile. “Fine,” I called back. “He gets carsick.”

“You need us to call someone?”

“No, thanks,” I answered. “I’ve got a cell. He’ll be fine in a couple minutes anyway.” But in my head I was thinking,
Will he? Will we ever be all right?

The woman nodded, eased back into her car, and shut the door, and they pulled away. I felt relief, but also worry. I had to get my brother back in the car before someone thought I’d murdered him, and called the police.

I sighed and lowered myself to the ground, my back against Hunka’s open door, my feet at Grayson’s head. I could hear him make his muffled
uh-uh
sound. He sounded miserable.

As miserable as I felt.

I’d done it. I’d said everything to my brother that I’d always wanted to say. So why didn’t I feel any better?

After a while, I reached inside Hunka and pulled out one of the rocks, which had rolled under Grayson’s seat along with about a dozen others.

“What is this?” I asked, holding it up and squinting at it. “One of those metaphoric ones?”

Grayson lifted his head slowly, one eye closed. “Metamorphic,” he corrected, “and no.”

“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
whoosh
ing 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.