Perfect Escape Read Free Page B

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 andsaw 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 ourlives 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