Read Online Perfect Escape by Jennifer Brown - Free Book Online Page B

the college I wanted to go to. I begged Mr. Lloyd, my guidance counselor, to put me in another class, but all the other classes were full, so I couldn’t transfer out. So I had no choice. Fail the class or drop it entirely. Either way, I would lose the math credit I needed. I would go to a second-rate school. I would be status quo—
almost
perfect,
almost
amazing. And I was scared to death that the whole rest of my life would be defined by that, by an
almost
. I’d have come so close but never quite gotten there. This wasn’t about me losing everything; this was about me losing the only thing I’d ever gotten attention for. This was about me losing the most important thing.
    I had to do something. I couldn’t let one lousy teacher take it all away from me. Make me just one more child who had
almost
lived up to her potential. Make me the one who couldn’t overcome that she wasn’t born great.
    I didn’t realize until a car’s headlights on the other side of the median had streaked by that I was silently crying. I didn’t know what time it was, but we’d been on the road for hours, it seemed, and Grayson’s stirring was becoming more and more frequent.
    I had no idea where we were. For miles, I’d seen almost nothing but darkness. The only sign of a “town” was an occasional diner or defunct gas station perched at the top of an exit ramp.
    “What’s…?” was the first thing Grayson said when he finally woke up for real. He pulled himself up straighter and blinked, looking around. He licked his lips repeatedly. I reached over and picked up the warmish soda out of the cup holder and held it out to him. He looked at it as if he’d never seen such a contraption before.
    “Good morning, sunshine!” I said, way too cheerily. I could feel the tears hanging off my jaw, but didn’t make any move to wipe them away. “Jerky?” I put the soda back in the cup holder and held up the open bag of beef jerky instead. “Dinner of champions.” Again he stared, so I shook the bag a little. A meaty waft of air clouded the car.
    He didn’t take the bag, but looked out the window instead. “Where are we?” he finally asked, his voice still foggy from sleep.
    “Dunno.” I folded a piece of jerky into my mouth and began chewing, chewing, chewing. “Somewhere in Kansas,” I said around the meat.
    “Kansas?” he repeated, then peered out the windowagain. He began methodically touching his fingers to his thumb, the way he likes to do when he’s nervous. Back and forth, back and forth, forefinger, middle, ring, pinkie, ring, middle, forefinger. It made me want to burst out in song:
Where is Thumbkin? Where is Thumbkin?
“Why are we in Kansas?” His voice was getting clearer now, and his fingers were speeding up.
    “You told me to drive,” I said. “So I drove.”
    “Into the middle of Kansas?”
    I nodded, smiling around the wad of beef jerky that didn’t seem to want to be broken down. “Why not?”
    “What time is it?” he asked, peering at his watch, but it was too dark for him to see its face.
    I shrugged. “We’ve been on the road for a few hours, so maybe eight o’clock or so?”
    His face whipped around to me, startled. “Eight o’clock? At night?”
    “Well, it isn’t morning, Genius Boy.”
    “You’ve been driving through Kansas for four hours?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “Give or take. Here, have some beef jerky. It’s dinner.”
    I held out the bag again and gave it another little shake. I could feel the tension build in my brother as it began to dawn on him what was going on. He’d stopped touching his fingers together and instead had started balling and relaxing his fists in his lap.
Squeeze
.
Relax
.
Squeeze
.
Relax
. Faster now.
Squeezerelax
.
Squeezerelax
. I wondered if this was a new coping technique he’d learned in treatment, andthen it occurred to me that I’d never really asked him about what went on in treatment. I’d only asked if he’d gotten better. There was a whole