Perfect Escape Read Online Free

working.
    “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.” But he was only looking at his coins, switching two pennies for reasons that would never make sense to anyone but him, and leaning close to the table to gaze at them from a different angle.
Fffp
. Gaze.
Fffp
.
    “You still like jalapeños and cream cheese on your pizza?”
    He shrugged. “They don’t serve much of that in treatment.”
    I took a breath. Tried again. “Remember that time you and Brock ate that superlarge with triple jalapeños and then Brock drank that entire two-liter of root beer and you and his mom ended up having to take him to the ER because his stomach was burning so bad?”
    Grayson didn’t look up from his coins, but his mouthtwitched into a smile. “That was pretty funny. I kept telling him I could see an alien head moving around under the front of his hospital gown.”
    We were both smiling now. “And when they brought you home, Dad gave Brock an ice pack and told him to brace himself for the pizza’s reappearance in the morning.”
    Grayson laughed out loud. “I forgot about that.”
    Mom’s voice floated in from the other room: “
Paria Inglese?
”
    I shifted uncomfortably as the moment turned back to awkward, and when the urge to dash over and swipe my hand across the table where Grayson sat got to be too much, I turned and went back up to my bedroom.
    Between Bryn’s phone call and Grayson’s sad coin arranging and my fear of what awaited me at school, not to mention never getting a response from Zoe, I could no more sleep than run a marathon in my bathrobe. Instead, I sat up through the night, listening to Dad close the house up, the soft bumps and creaks of everyone moving around in their bedrooms. Then I just lay there in the silence, until the sky began to lighten again, staring out the window and wondering what I would do if Bryn was right and Chub had been stupid enough to store evidence in his locker.
    And the thought must have etched itself into my brain, because morning had come and I’d gone through all the motions of getting myself to school, yet there I was, sitting in Hunka (short for Hunka Junka, the name Shani and I had lovingly given the blue-and-rust Oldsmobile I’d inherited when my grandfather died) in the school parking lot, still wondering. But I knew that even if I sat there and thought about it for the next twenty-four hours, I’d never come up with a good answer. If Chub left evidence in his locker, I was busted. Plain and simple.
    The first bell had rung, and then the second. But still my legs didn’t want to move. I was so afraid of what awaited me in that school.
    But I finally told myself that the last thing I needed was a tardy, because then I’d have to stop by the attendance office on my way in, and Mrs. Reading’s office was next to it, which meant Mrs. Reading was usually hanging around right inside, and she would probably take one look at my guilty face and call district security to haul me off to juvie or something.
    God, irrational, I know, but I was in an irrational place.
    Before the third bell rang, I took two deep breaths, exhaled them with a “You can do this, Kendra,” and pulled myself out of Hunka, yanking my backpack by one strap and dragging it along behind me.
    There was hardly anyone going into the building now. Almost everybody was already inside, getting last-minute stuff out of the lockers and reporting to first period. I wondered if the others knew. If Bryn had called any of them last night as well. If I wasn’t the only one walking in on leaden legs with a brainful of knotted black squiggles.
    I pushed through the front doors and stood on the rug inside the school vestibule. My mouth tasted salty, and mypalms felt slick, and I could feel every nerve ending in the bottoms of my feet.
    This is it
, I thought.
This is where I find out how bad it really is
.
Either everything will be cool… or I might actually die of fear
. And then I had the thought
Is this what Grayson feels like