Perfect Escape Read Free

Grayson became. When Zoe was around, he was a lot more relaxed. She understood him. She didn’t make him feel weird. She didn’t make him feel anxious about feeling anxious. She didn’t expect him to ever be anything other than what or who he was. She was better than me in that respect. Because, after she left, I had all kinds of expectations about him, none of them anything he could ever live up to.
    I also blamed Zoe’s parents for the fact that I lost my two best friends for no good reason. But everyone was too busy worrying about Grayson to care about that.
    After Zoe’s parents left, taking her with them, Grayson’s anxiety went through the roof. His OCD spun out of control, like nothing any of us had ever seen before. He could barely function, and all he could think about was rocks and counting and germs and weird stuff that had kind of always been there, but not nearly as bad. Before,he’d been a kid who did some obsessive stuff. Afterward, he was just plain obsessive. And it was totally their fault. It’s not like what Grayson did was
that
bad. He was in love with their daughter. So what?
    The last time I saw Zoe, she was streaking out the back of her parents’ minivan toward my yard, where I was standing, unabashedly watching, hoping that her parents would see how they were breaking my heart, too, and maybe change their minds. Her parents were occupied talking to a guy in coveralls, a moving van rumbling in idle at the curb.
    “Here, Ken, take this,” Zoe had said, her face slick with tears and her nose plugged. She shoved a tiny rectangular piece of paper into my palm—her school photo, with her new address scrawled across the back. “I’ll write as soon as I set up a secret e-mail, okay?”
    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 ranfor 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 tohelp Mom coax Grayson into a bath, a process that could take hours on a high-stress day like that