Perfect Escape by Jennifer Brown

I’d probably chicken out and go home. And I couldn’t do that. Not untilI’d had some good, solid highway time to think this over, to get a good grip on what exactly I was going to do.
    The plan was starting to make sense to me. What I was doing was for the best for everyone. Really. Grayson would get away. Get better. Somehow I knew it. If I took him away from his comfort zone—away from Newman Quarry, away from Mom, who wanted so badly for him to feel secure, away from his bedroom with the perfectly lined-up coins and the geology books and the even-numbered rock collection on his windowsill—he would get better. He would see that it was possible to be safe and be okay and be unplanned.
    Exposure therapy. That’s what Dr. St. James had called it. I’d heard Mom and Dad talk about it more times than I could count. Well, fight about it, really.
    You’ve got to make him get out there and face his anxiety, Linda.
    But he suffers. I can’t watch it. Who is he hurting, really?
    Himself! He’s hurting himself, Linda! Dr. St. James says it’s the only way. You have to put him in the situations that make him anxious and force him to cope.
    No. I won’t watch my child suffer. I’ll get another opinion….
    Mom was tough. Always calm and assured when she needed to be. But there was one spot where she was weak, and it was my brother. She babied him.
    But I could be tougher than Mom. I could watch him struggle. It would hurt and I’d feel bad, but I could holdthe line and not give in and not coddle his compulsions. I could do it, and then she wouldn’t have to. I could do that for her, and then maybe what I’d done wouldn’t look so bad anymore.
    And if it worked, Mom and Dad would get some time off. Mom could learn her Italian, and Dad could come home from work without first having to stop and drag his son out of a pile of rocks, and they could spend some time being with one another, relaxed and happy.
    And, yeah, I knew I was using Grayson as an excuse for the fact that I was running away from my own troubles. But as far as I could see, at this point I didn’t have a whole lot of options. The music was too tough to face. I knew I’d have to face it eventually, but right now I needed some time—some space—to figure out just how I was going to do that.
    Grayson stirred as I pulled off the highway and crunched into the pothole-riddled lot of a tiny gas station. Hunka’s glove box popped open and bounced against Grayson’s knee.
    I winced and slowed down, rolling up to a pump so slowly it was almost as if the lot was moving rather than my car.
    Right now the last thing I needed was for Grayson to wake up. He’d obviously want to know where we were—where we were going. And, well, really, I didn’t know. We’d gotten past towns I’d heard of and had started seeing much longer stretches of field and shorter stretches of town.
    But he only shifted his weight, brought a hand up to sleepily swipe at his nose a couple times, and then snuggled his cheek against the seat and sighed back to sleep. I shimmied out of the car, grabbing my purse and cell phone off the backseat along the way.
    I ran inside and headed first for the restroom, a stinking hole in the back corner of the store, which also housed a crusted, empty mop bucket and rolls of paper towels on a shelf. On my way out, I grabbed a pack of beef jerky and two sodas, then handed the guy behind the counter the fifty Mom had had me stuff in my wallet on the day I got my driver’s license.
Just for an emergency
, she’d warned.
You never know when you’ll be in a bind.
    I figured this is what she meant by “bind,” even if she probably never in a million years had thought my “bind” would be gas and grub out in the middle of nowhere while running away and kidnapping my mentally ill brother. I chuckled, thinking about it that way.
    The fifty would pay for the food and drinks and partially fill the tank, and I figured that’d buy me at least another couple