Gem & Dixie

by Sara Zarr

  Then I imagined her coming out of the bathroom, looking all over for me. I thought of her face when she asked why nothing good ever happens to us, and what she’d said about how she couldn’t go home without the money. How betrayed she’d feel. How betrayed I’d feel, if I were her.

  So I’d give her the backpack and send her home. I’d still have what I needed. I put my hands in my coat pockets, feeling for the phone, the Haciendas, the hotel washcloth—

  My heart stopped.

  No.

  No!

  I went over it in my mind again, and again, as if I would come to some other conclusion than that I’d thrown seven thousand dollars into the trash can in the mall bathroom, in the pocket of my old jacket. My head filled with a low buzzing as Dixie came back into view. I couldn’t go back for it, not now, not without confessing to Dixie about secretly stashing money, lying to her. If it was even there anymore.

  Dixie couldn’t go home without the money; I couldn’t leave without it. My backup plan, my safety net, was gone.

  When she reached me, I could tell something was wrong.

  “What happened?” I asked, trying to hide the horror I felt over my own carelessness.

  “She’s a fucking—” She mashed her lips together and turned away from me, striding fast back toward the water. She had her phone in her hand.

  I jogged after her. “Who?”

  “Fucking Mom is who,” she said over her shoulder.

  “Dixie, wait.” She only walked faster. The voice mails. She must have listened to the voice mails when she was in the bathroom. “What did she say?”

  She broke into a run straight toward the water and for a second I worried she’d climb the rail and jump in. But when she got right up to it, I knew exactly what she was doing.

  She pulled her arm back, and the phone flew out of her hand in a huge arc in the gray sky before dropping into the Sound.

  I got to her and touched her shoulder; she batted my hand away.

  “Tell me what she said.”

  “Now she wants the money. Dad told her about it and now she wants me to come home with it.”

  “He told her?” I asked, confused. It was easy to imagine him using the idea of all this money to manipulate Mom, but harder to believe she’d fall for it, especially after the way she’d dumped all of the food.

  “She only ever wants something from me,” Dixie said through her tears. “She wants me to listen to her when she thinks she’s in love or some guy breaks up with her. She wants me to get her pills from kids at school. She wants me to act like her fucking best friend but she doesn’t ever do anything for me.”

  “What happened, though?” I was still fixated on the image of my jacket in the bathroom trash can, and Dixie was barely making sense. “All this was on a voice mail?”

  “She called.” She calmed down a little bit, taking deeper breaths. “I wasn’t going to answer, but then I did, in case school called or something to say I’m not there. I wanted to give her some reason I—”

  “You shouldn’t have talked to her.” It was too risky, what could come out in an emotional conversation.

  Dixie dropped her arms. “Well, I did. And she was all, ‘Do you have the money? I just talked to Dad and he says you have this money and oh Dixie you should bring it home, what do you think you’re doing, we need it blah blah.’”

  “Maybe she’s just worried about you?”

  “She didn’t ask if I’m okay. Running around the city with this money. She didn’t even ask if I’m okay. It was more like she’s mad. Just really . . . mad.”

  Of course she was mad, I thought. And Dixie’d never been able to handle Mom being mad at her. “Did you tell her you’re with me?” I asked.

  Dixie wiped her face with her sleeve. “I’m so stupid. Like you’ve been trying to tell me. Well, you were right, so you can be happy about that.”

  “I’m not.” She’d already forgotten every single thing that had happened between us on the ferry.

  “I told her to go to hell.” She looked at me. “I should have told her I didn’t even take the stupid money! None of this was even my idea.”

  “I know.” I shifted on my feet. The new boots had started to rub my right little toe.

  “I wish you’d left it there like you said you would. None of this would have happened.” She wiped a tear away. “Everything was fine like it was.”

  “No it wasn’t.”

  “For me it was.”

  We were back to where we’d started. There wasn’t any point arguing about something she didn’t want to see. I knelt down and opened the backpack to get out one of the spare packs of Haciendas I’d brought along. I needed to think, I needed one of my rituals back. I asked Dixie if she wanted one; she nodded.

  We got two cigarettes lit in the drizzle, cupping our hands around the matches from the Velvet, and found a bench partly protected by a big tree with spreading branches. Dixie stared out at the water, quiet, forgetting to actually smoke while her ash got longer and longer. I tried words out in my head, tried to imagine what it would feel like to tell her what I’d done, losing a big chunk of the money.

  “Can I get a smoke?”

  The voice had sounded like a girl’s, but when I looked up, I saw a guy around our age, in jeans and sneakers, coat and knit cap. A little bit of shaved head and a fuzz of light hair showed at the temples.

  Dixie looked him—or her?—up and down, flicked her ash.

  I handed over the pack.

  “Are these Mexican?”

  “Do you want one or not?” Dixie asked.

  The person smiled. Girl, I thought again. “Can I get a light, too?”

  I gave her my matchbook.

  “Oh shit, matches. Can I just . . .” She held out her hand for my Hacienda and used it for a light, then gave it back. “Thanks.”

  We sat another few seconds. Then Dixie said, “Fuck. I can’t keep this fucking thing lit in this fucking rain.” She threw her half-smoked Hacienda on the ground and got up to walk closer to the water, her arms wrapped around herself.

  The girl sat on the bench where Dixie had been. “You guys cutting school, too?” she asked.

  “Not really. I mean, yeah, but . . .” I pointed across the Sound to the city. “I go to school over there.” Went to.

  “I wish I lived in the city. Nothing but assholes at my school.”

  “Oh.”

  “‘Oh,’” she said with a laugh. “Yeah. I’m Kip.”

  “Gem. And there are plenty of assholes at my school, trust me.”

  “Is that short for something? Gemma? Jemima?”

  “No. Gem like a diamond.”

  “What’s up with her?” Kip asked, pointing with the cigarette to Dixie, whose back was still to us.

  “She’s my sister,” I said, as if that answered the question.

  Kip looked at me. “What’s her name?”

  “Dixie.”

  Dixie turned and came toward us. “I’m hungry and it’s cold. What’s the plan?”

  “Finding lunch, I guess?”

  Her eyes flicked to Kip. “Do you live here?”

  “Yep.” She dropped her cigarette and stepped on it with the heel of her sneaker. “There’s a good diner nearby. If you like burgers and other dead animals and stuff.”

  “Can you show us where?” Dixie asked.

  “Sure.”

  20.

  THE DINER smelled like grease and meat, bacon and coffee and pancakes. There weren’t a lot of people there; we were between lunch and dinnertime. It had been a short walk, a few blocks up from the harbor. A woman in jeans and a T-shirt and a green apron, hair dyed black and up in a bun, tattoos on her arms, greeted us. “Table or booth?”

  “Booth,” Kip answered.

  The whole situation seemed like a bad idea to me. Every person who knew anything about us would be a risk. If not right away, then to me, later, if I had the money and Dad or Mom was looking. But it wasn’t like I had an alternate plan to sugge
st, and I was preoccupied with how badly I’d screwed up, from the beginning. Maybe Dixie was right. Even if everything wasn’t fine before, maybe it was better than whatever this was going to turn into.

  She sat next to Kip on one side, their shoulders almost touching, and I sat on the other. There was a tin cup full of crayons, along with paper place mats to draw on.

  “They have breakfast all day,” Kip said.

  “We’ve eaten a ton of food in the last twenty-four hours,” Dixie said to Kip, holding her paper menu up. I could barely see her face. “I can’t believe I’m hungry again.”

  I tried to make eyes at Dixie like, Don’t say so much. She wouldn’t look at me.

  “Order anything you want,” she continued, to Kip. “It’s on us.”

  “I have money,” Kip said.

  “It’s on us anyway.”

  My anxiety ticked up. I stared at my menu without seeing it.

  “So, what’s fun around here?” Dixie asked.

  “Nothing.”

  Dixie laughed a strange laugh. Something about her had changed since we’d met Kip, and not only that she’d gotten cold toward me.

  “On a nice day I go to this park on the other side of the island. It’s like a hundred acres. It has everything. Swings and slides. Trails. Ducks and stuff.”

  “Ducks! I love ducks.”

  I finally caught Dixie’s eye. You “love” ducks?

  “They’re funny.”

  Kip laughed, and the waitress came back. I ordered a bacon cheeseburger and fries. Kip got vegetarian nachos and a shake. Dixie ordered a black bean burger and said to Kip, “I’ll share mine if you share yours.”

  After the waitress left, Kip asked Dixie if she was a vegetarian.

  “Pretty much,” Dixie answered.

  “No you’re not,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “From the salmon you ate last night? And the bacon mac and cheese?”

  Her face got pink. “You’re high,” she said, shaking her head. She rested loosely on her elbows and whispered to Kip, loud enough—on purpose—for me to hear. “Gem lies. And steals.”

  She’d completely changed back to the Dixie I knew from before we found the money—ignoring me, ridiculing me, giving all her attention to someone she wanted to make like her. The part of me I’d let Dixie into for the last two days began to close up.

  “I’m going to go wash my hands,” I said, and scooted out of the booth. When I picked up my backpack, Dixie said, “You can leave your stuff. We’ll watch it.”

  “No thanks.”

  I was only in the bathroom a few seconds before Dixie came in behind me.

  “What are you doing?” I asked her as I scrubbed the cigarette smell off my hands.

  “Just making sure you don’t crawl out a window with the money or something.”

  “No, back there.” I turned off the water and hit the button on the hand dryer. “You love ducks? You’re pretty much a vegetarian? Saying we’re going to buy all the food? What do you think—”

  Then a stall door opened and a woman with short gray hair came over to wash her hands. We immediately shut up and Dixie went into the other stall. I turned on my heel and left.

  When I got back to the booth, Kip said, “You know what’s funny?”

  Nothing, I thought. Nothing is funny. “What?”

  “I’m pretty sure your sister thinks I’m a dude.”

  Our eyes met and then it made sense. What Dixie had been doing. Flirting and lying and trying to seem impressive. We laughed, and I instantly felt the relief of not being alone.

  “Should I tell her the truth?” Kip asked me.

  I shrugged and put the backpack between me and the wall. “I don’t care.”

  Kip glanced at the bathroom door. “I have a sister, too,” she said. “And two brothers.”

  “Do you get along?”

  “Uh, no. My sister is mad at me that I don’t dress or act more like how she thinks a girl should, like I used to. This is kind of new,” she said, pointing at herself. “A few months ago I had long hair and went around in yoga pants and dumb little tops, like my sister. People don’t like it when you change.” She took some sugar packets out of a bowl on the table and arranged them in a line, corners touching. “And my brothers are mad at me because they say I’m trying to be like them. Which, trust me, I’m not. Being like them is not on my list of life goals.”

  She moved the sugar packets into a circle.

  “Dixie’s mad at me because . . .” Because of our parents. Because of the money. Because of a million things, most of which had nothing to do with us. “We act mad at each other. But really it’s other things.”

  Dixie came back from the bathroom. She’d cleaned off the smudges of makeup that had been under her eyes from crying, and fixed her hair a little bit. Kip and I shared another glance.

  “What?” Dixie asked as she sat down, getting right up close to Kip again.

  “Nothing.”

  The food came. Dixie kept taking nachos off Kip’s plate like they were best friends, and shoving her fries at Kip. My burger was good but not as good as the one I’d had at the hotel.

  “So, what’s up with you guys anyway?” Kip asked. “Like, why are you on the island?”

  Dixie said, “We’re on the run.”

  I glared; she ignored me. “Just cutting,” I said. “Taking a break.”

  Kip subtly slid her nacho plate a little farther away from Dixie.

  “Gem basically kidnapped me,” Dixie said. “She forced me onto a bus and made me lie to my mom and she’s not going to let me go back unless I let her have something that isn’t hers.”

  She wanted me to react, to lose my shit, as she would put it, to prove something to me or to herself. I made myself calm, counting something other than money for the first time since we’d left home. I chose the crayons. There were only eight; I could count and recount while talking. “We have some stuff going on at home,” I said.

  Kip nodded. “I’m going to have some stuff going on at home, too, if I don’t get back soon. You guys want a ride somewhere? My car is parked down by the terminal.”

  Dixie looked at me. “Ask Gem. She’s the one running this show. I’m just a helpless victim.”

  I did another round with the crayons. “Is there a hotel around here we could get into with a fake ID and cash?” I stopped worrying about what Kip might think of us and money. For all she knew, we always had money. She probably had us pegged as spoiled rich kids, with our new clothes and paying for lunch and everything. I almost laughed at the idea.

  Kip thought for a second. “Not a hotel. But a motel. You won’t need me to drive you, we actually passed it on the way here.” She took a green crayon out of the tin cup—I subtracted it, seven—and wrote her number on a corner of one of the paper place mats. “Call me if you guys need anything while you’re out here.” She tore the corner off and Dixie took it out of her hand even though I was pretty sure Kip had intended to give it to me.

  We all stood and gathered our stuff, and Dixie paid at the counter. It had stopped raining and the cloud cover had broken apart, showing bright blue sky. “I know you said you wish you lived in the city,” I told Kip as we walked down the hill, “but I think the island is beautiful.”

  “It is beautiful. And I hate it. I feel trapped, is the main thing, and people here don’t get me.”

  “Why don’t they get you?” Dixie asked.

  Kip paused, then said, “Because I’m a girl who suddenly decided to dress like a boy but isn’t gay. I’m just me.”

  Dixie stopped walking. Her cheeks were red as she stared at Kip.

  “It’s okay,” Kip said. “It happens all the time, I don’t care.”

  I knew Dixie cared, though. She started walking again, ahead of us but not far enough ahead that we could talk about her without her hearing, so we stayed quiet the rest of the way to the motel. When Kip said good-bye, she hugged me. Surprised, I stepped back.

&n
bsp; “Sorry,” she said. “I kind of hug everyone.”

  “It’s okay. It’s just that I kind of hug no one. Or more like no one hugs me.”

  “Seriously, you can call me if you need anything. And not that you asked for advice, but I’d be careful about staying on the island for too long. People here notice stuff quicker than they do over there.” She nodded her head in the direction of the Seattle skyline.

  Dixie had gone off to stand under the motel’s car port.

  “I guess she probably doesn’t want a hug from me,” Kip said with a laugh.

  “Probably not.”

  Dixie took care of all the checking-in stuff, like last time. This place wasn’t nearly as nice and didn’t have room service and we only had to leave a hundred-dollar deposit. The guy acted like paying cash wasn’t that unusual. His main concern—he said it twice—was that we not smoke in the room because then we’d have to pay an extra cleaning fee.

  “We won’t,” Dixie assured him.

  The room was plain and functional, with only a view of the parking lot behind the building. “Which bed do you want?” I asked Dixie.

  “I don’t care.”

  I dropped my stuff on the one closest to the door, same as the one I’d had at the nice hotel.

  “I bet that was really funny to you,” Dixie said.

  “No.”

  “Did you know?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I could tell right away.”

  Dixie unlaced her blue Docs and pulled them off her feet with a wince. “She says she’s not gay but she was totally giving off the flirty vibe, right?” She stripped off her socks, her jeans, and her sweater, and sat on the other bed in her underwear and the black T-shirt.

  I shrugged. “You’re the one who gave off a vibe. It’s like your automatic way of being when you’re around guys.”

  “What? What do you mean? You never even see me around guys.”

  “Like Napoleon at the deli? Giving you sandwiches. And you get rides to school and I don’t know what all else. You always have money.”

  “Are you calling me some kind of whore?”