Perfect Escape by Jennifer Brown Page B

announced they were moving and took everything awayfrom me. Zoe, away to California. Grayson, away inside his head. I was the one who did everything I was supposed to do, yet I lost my two best friends. It wasn’t fair. All of them were so wrapped up in their own pain, they didn’t even think I might be in pain, too. My best friend was gone, and nobody even bothered to ask if I was okay.
    But in my mind, as I drove toward Cali, I got it all back. Zoe would take me into her bedroom, and it would be pink and have butterfly decals on the walls, just like her bedroom back home. We’d eat soft pretzels on her bed, and she’d tell me about her school—about how she’d found friends but, like Shani and Lia, they weren’t the same. She’d take me to the beach, maybe. Let me borrow a halter top. Introduce me to boys. She’d spread her hands on Grayson’s chest and absorb the anxiety that had eaten him up all these years. She’d embrace him, and we’d even drive to Berkeley and look at the football stadium, and we’d marvel at the irony of how the fault we’d always worried would destroy us all had actually saved us. Brought us all back together.
    Maybe even our parents would reunite. Maybe they could forgive one another. They would see that Grayson was fixable. They would see that Zoe wasn’t trampy and that Grayson wasn’t crazy and that we were all exactly what they’d always wanted us to be—happy.
    No, not maybe.
    Definitely.
    It had to be.
    “Is that something up there?” Grayson asked, pointingout his window toward a dim light, an oasis in the middle of nothingness.
    I eased up onto the exit and followed the dusty road toward the light, which, as we drew closer, looked like a small motor lodge at the edge of an even smaller town.
    I pulled into the parking lot as Hunka sucked down almost the last bit of gas in the tank.

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
    “You’re kidding, right?” Grayson asked, as I put the car into park and practically jumped out onto the cracked asphalt. I stretched greedily, my muscles feeling drained and weak after so long sitting still. “This place is… God, Kendra, they probably have bugs….”
    I held a finger out toward him, schoolmarm-style. “Uh-uh. No you don’t. This place is fine.” I stepped up onto the curb and gazed at the office, which sat at the end of a dilapidated statuary-lined path. There was a cow skull lying in the grass by the walk. This was no Holiday Inn. I tried not to think about horror movies and dead hookers and crazy diseases on sheets. This was fine. It had to be fine. For my brother’s sake, I had to pretend that I thought this motel was the finest motel ever.
    Grayson stepped up on the curb and down again. Then up again. Then down again. I turned.
    “Stop it,” I hissed. “Come on. I’m going in, with or without you.”
    He followed, hesitantly, his head jerking back toward the curb as though he wanted to step on and off it a few more times. “I won’t be able to sleep in a place like this,” he said, edging around a large bird dropping on the ground. He crouched and touched the clean ground next to the dropping, over and over again. “One, two, three, four…”
    I’d reached the door. A McGruff the Crime Dog sticker on the window was faded and peeling off. A broken wind chime lay crumpled on the concrete stoop. A chewed-looking Tupperware bowl filled with about half an inch of filthy water sat nearby, along with an open and mostly eaten can of cat food. A muddied, skin-and-bones cat peered up at me from behind a half-dying bush off to my left. It meowed and scooted back into the bushes as I reached for the door handle.
    “… sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty. I can’t do it. I can’t sleep here.”
    “Fine. Sleep in the car,” I said, trying on my best exposure therapy voice. Or at least what I imagined an exposure therapy voice to sound like. I actually had no idea what a therapy voice would sound like. I’d spent so much of the