Gem & Dixie

by Sara Zarr

  Kip talked more about deciding to cut her hair, change her name, change her clothes, but I got fixed on what she’d said about Dixie being mad at herself for not being like me. Could that be true even a little bit? I couldn’t imagine how. Dixie had friends, Dixie was cute, Dixie got along better with Mom and Dad. What was there about me to like? To want?

  We were at the motel. “Are you sure you’ll be okay?” Kip asked. “Do you want me to go in with you and see if she’s there? If you want me to get Ryan’s number—”

  “No. I’m fine.” I pushed the car door open, caught up in my own thoughts, but before I could get out, Kip grabbed my arm. I looked back at her.

  “Um, good-bye?” she said. “I mean, you’re not just going to get out of the car and slam it in my face after I drove you all around today and everything.”

  “Oh.” I reached into my jacket pocket. “I could give you some gas money. . . .”

  Kip laughed, then just sat there with her face turned to me. I couldn’t see her eyes too well in the car but she didn’t seem mad. “We’re friends, Gem. Don’t worry about it. But don’t jump out of my car without saying good-bye.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Call me if you need help. Call me if you don’t. Text me or whatever. Stay in touch. Let me know what happens.”

  “Yeah. I will. Bye.”

  She leaned over and hugged me. I got out and watched her drive off. I waved.

  When I went up to the room, Dixie wasn’t there but her stuff was. Not that her stuff was anything she would need to come back for. She was wearing her new clothes, her boots.

  I turned off the light and lay on the bed.

  I could hear the TV in the room on the other side of the wall. And sometimes passing headlights would beam moving light onto the ceiling. The heater fan rumbled on and shuddered off at random intervals; it made my muscles tense up every time.

  But I was all alone.

  This is what it’s like without Dixie, I told myself.

  I’d slept alone before. There were all those times she’d spent the night somewhere else. And then there were all the ways she made me invisible to her at school, and all the ways she ignored me at home. There were the times she yelled at me to leave her alone, or gave me the silent treatment. But there’s a way a person is there even when they aren’t and even when they don’t want to be. A way a sister is there.

  That night, though, I knew she could be gone. Really gone. Because she’d told me from the beginning she wouldn’t go back without the money, and then I gave it to her. Most of it, anyway. I might as well have said Go home.

  I let that idea, of her going back and me going forward, sink way down into my heart and pump through me with my blood. The way Kip wasn’t part of Julia and Jessa anymore—what if I wasn’t part of Gem and Dixie? Would I still be me? Kip talked about wanting to be herself, but I couldn’t think who I was without Dixie to take care of, or Dixie to avoid, or Dixie to be mad at. Dixie to feel hurt by, Dixie to feel jealous of.

  I made an image of myself in my mind. Walking on a road, in the clothes Dixie had chosen for me. Me, putting one boot in front of the other, moving forward, forward, with my back to whoever could see me, whoever was watching.

  And I realized it was Dixie. Dixie was the one watching, the one whose eyes I saw myself through as I walked away.

  25.

  I FELL asleep for a couple of hours and woke up with a stiff neck and a growling stomach. My arm throbbed. I wished I’d thought to get a few more pills from Kip, also that I’d eaten more at the party or at least stuffed some cheese cubes into my pockets.

  Dixie hadn’t come back.

  Yet, I thought, almost as a reflex. Still, I had to start figuring out what I would do after I checked out of the motel at noon—eleven hours away. Where could I go next? I had less than two hundred dollars left of what we’d doled out to ourselves in the dressing room. This wasn’t a game. Either I had to go home, or this was my life now.

  And I wasn’t going home.

  I moved in the dark to the little desk with the phone and clicked on the light, sat in the wheeled chair. The phone had buttons for the front desk and for emergencies. The instruction card next to it detailed the prices for personal calls and how they’d be added to your bill when you checked out. Halfway through doing the math, I realized how dumb I was being. My problem wasn’t the cost. My problem was that the phone was for people who had someone to call, friends or family or connections, people they could rely on.

  I tried. I thought about Roxanne. I think she would have driven out to get me if she knew I was in trouble, even though she hadn’t seen me for years. She wouldn’t invite me to move in with her or anything, but she’d come for me at the very least. She might talk me through this. Only I didn’t know her number or if she even lived in the area anymore. I picked up the phone and called information even though it was going to cost me over two dollars, according to the price list.

  “What city?” the operator asked.

  “Seattle. I think.”

  “Name?”

  “Gem,” I said automatically.

  “That a last name? Spell it?”

  Then I realized he meant he needed the name of the person I was trying to reach. “I . . . I don’t know the last name.”

  He paused. “Is this a prank?”

  “No,” I said quickly. “No.” Roxanne was always just Roxanne. If she or Mom ever said her last name, I didn’t remember it. “Can you look up first names? Roxanne? It’s not that common.”

  “Honey . . .” I heard a sigh, then a typing noise. “Hang on. Roxanne Adams. Roxanne Chang. Roxanne Crandall. Roxanne Evans. Roxanne Fletcher, Roxanne Fung, Roxanne George, Roxanne Granger—two of those, believe it or not. Roxanne Gunderson. Roxanne Haverford. Roxanne—”

  “Never mind.” I didn’t know her name and I wasn’t going to suddenly know it. “What about . . . Idaho. Ivan Kostas.”

  “You know the city?”

  “No.”

  He started to say something else but I hung up. The things in the world made to help people weren’t going to help people like me.

  Imagine:

  Your family is broken. Your family is addicted. Your family is poor or sick or unstable in some other way, and your family doesn’t have an address book sitting by a vase of flowers and your mother doesn’t say, Hey, kids let’s call Uncle Ivan, let’s send him a Christmas card, let’s send him a gift for his new house in Specific Town, USA.

  No, it’s more like your mom stares into space and says, Ivan went off to Idaho with his new girlfriend, who, by the way, is pregnant, so I guess that’s that. And you want to ask where, how pregnant, what does she mean, “that’s that,” and why. But she looks too sad and you don’t want to bother her.

  And when she says, Fucking Roxanne and her twelve-step shit, I don’t need anyone telling me what to do and I’m blocking her number so she gets the message, you don’t ask for a reminder about what Roxanne’s last name is in case you ever leave home and have no one else to call.

  Imagine that’s how it is.

  I picked up the phone and called information again and got a different person, a woman, and this time I asked to be connected to my school.

  “A school? At this time of night?”

  “Yes.” I got through to the phone system and followed all the prompts to get to Mr. Bergstrom’s voice mail, and then it disconnected me. It disconnected me and I didn’t have the number because I’d been connected directly. I was about to call information again when I heard the key card in the door and Dixie walked in.

  I put down the phone. She dropped the backpack on the floor and looked at me with a blank expression. Then she turned her back and went into the bathroom.

  When she came out, I hadn’t moved. She stood in front of me, waiting for me to say something. I could tell she expected me to be mad. To yell at her or be freaking out. But all I wanted to do was look at her. Her hair was kind of frizzed out the way i
t got sometimes in rain or fog, and her eyeliner had smudged under one of her eyes. I saw her as a kid, as a kid playing dress up in her Doc Martens and makeup and her hands shoved into her jacket pockets, defiant.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” she finally asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Like . . .” She pulled her hands out of her pockets and let her arms fall to her sides. “I was practically having a heart attack the whole time I was with Ryan. I kept waiting for him to try to get me to open it to prove there wasn’t money in there.”

  “Did he?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I threw it in the trunk of his car like it really was full of your laundry.” She pulled her jacket off. “We drove around. He wanted to show me the school where they all go. He kept telling me about the ‘haunted dugout’ or whatever at the baseball field, so we went there. We sat in it forever in the freezing cold and nothing happened. It was dumb.”

  She walked to her bed, picked up the TV remote, and dropped it again without turning the TV on.

  “Nothing happened,” she said. “I’m not what you think.” She sat on the bed and unlaced her boots, took them off, let them drop onto the floor.

  “What do you think I think?” I spun my chair around and used my heels to drag it over the carpet, closer to her.

  She narrowed her eyes as I came toward her. “What are you doing?”

  “What do you think I think?” I asked again.

  “I think . . .” She pulled a pillow into her lap. “I think you think I’m mean. I think you think I’m a slut. I think you don’t want me around. I think—” Her voice broke. She squeezed the pillow. “I think you think I’m a bad sister.”

  My instinct was to say no, you’re not, and I started to, but Dixie continued. “I am. I stayed out as long as I could with Ryan while he bored me to death with his stupid stories because I wanted you think I wasn’t coming back. I wanted you to know what it would feel like if I left.” She brushed tears away with the back of her hand. “The way you want to leave. Leave me.”

  “It’s not you that I want to leave.”

  “Then why, Gem? Why can’t you stay?” She was tearful and urgent. “Because of Mom? She’ll get better, you know she will. She always does. I mean, she always gets better enough, we always get by. We always do.”

  “I know.” The only thing I could think to say was exactly what I felt, which sounded simple and selfish. “I can’t go back. I want . . . I don’t know. But I know I can’t get it there, and I don’t want to wait anymore. I’m ready now. I knew when I saw the money.”

  “Well, you don’t have the money now. So you have to come back.”

  I scooted my chair even closer. Our knees touched.

  “Why’d you give it to me?” Dixie asked, wiping her face again.

  “Because you need it to go home.”

  “But what are you going to do? You need it more than I do.”

  I could see how she thought that, and I’d believed it myself even yesterday, but it wasn’t true. She’d take it back to Mom and Dad, go home the hero, having gotten it back from crazy Gem.

  “And,” I said, “I wanted you to know I’m not like them. That it doesn’t mean as much to me as you do.”

  She backed away from me and sat cross-legged in the middle of her bed, and pulled the pillow tighter, up to her mouth. I could only see her eyes. “I know. I know you’re not like them.”

  “If you don’t want to go back, if you think you shouldn’t, I can . . .” I was going to say I could help her, but I didn’t know if I could. I still didn’t even know exactly how I was going to help myself. “I can find someone to help you.”

  She shook her head and set aside the pillow. “I told you. We always get by, Mom always gets better enough.”

  Enough seemed to be all she wanted. Maybe I needed too much, or maybe I wasn’t strong.

  No—that wasn’t it. I think I’m strong. Or, more like I think whatever I am is okay. Maybe what I have is strength, or maybe what I have is weakness that I accept. Being strong is one way to be, but it’s not the only way.

  “You can’t be mixed up in the pill thing at school anymore,” I said. “For Mom or anyone else.”

  “I know.”

  “You can get a real job next year. And you have to focus on graduating and—”

  “I know.”

  “I have to tell you something else,” I said. “That you don’t know.”

  She pulled the pillow into her lap again. “Okay?”

  “There’s some money missing. And Dad is going to be mad about it. More than the amount we spent on stuff.” I wheeled my chair back a little bit. “I took seven thousand dollars of it. Then I accidentally threw it away with my old coat.”

  “Oh my god.” She put her hand over her mouth. “Oh shit, Gem.”

  “Just tell him it’s all my fault. Or I’ll tell him. He can come after me. Let him try.” I wasn’t scared. I felt like nothing could happen to me ever again that would scare me.

  She dropped her hand. “You took it? You weren’t going to tell me?”

  “It was, like, a backup plan.”

  “That you weren’t going to tell me,” she repeated.

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  A slow smile spread across her face. “That’s kinda badass of you. I didn’t think you could be that devious. Like me.” Her smile fell; she looked down. “I thought you were the good one. I’m the bad one, you’re the good one.”

  I took in her face, remembered how sweetly she trusted me when I used to tell her we were going to Narnia, going to Mars. How she always wanted to make sure our picnic rations were fair. How, whenever she drew us, we were holding hands.

  “I don’t think it works like that, Dixie.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Maybe not.”

  26.

  WE TRIED to get some sleep. We meant to stay right until checkout. But once we knew it was over, the idea of hanging out, ordering a pizza, watching more TV, didn’t seem so fun. Dixie kept asking me what I was going to do. I told her I didn’t know, specifically. I stayed vague. Our paths were going to diverge and whatever my plans were, her knowing them might not be the best thing for her or for me.

  In the morning, while Dixie showered, I dug the burner phone out of the backpack and turned it on. It lit up with a message from Lia.

  glad you’re ok xoxo

  She must have called or texted Lia the night before while we were separated. I fooled around with the phone until I could figure out how to see recent calls and messages, to see if Dixie had contacted anyone else. Dad, or Mom, or anyone. But she’d only texted Lia.

  I looked at the contact list we’d programmed in since we got the phone:

  mom

  dad

  lia

  kip

  I scrolled to Dad’s number. My thumb hovered there. He’d been so out of my reach for so long—barely writing or calling all the years after he left, and not talking to me during the years he was there. I mean, he talked to me, but he didn’t talk to me. He didn’t ask me about me or give me helpful advice or read to me or sing to me or walk me to school or tell me I was good, tell me I was smart, tell me I was somebody worth something. I guess he could tell a different story about how it was, he could tell a version where he did those things, was a fine dad, not perfect, but not a total failure. He might even think he had a little evidence to prove it, too. The recital when he said I could sing. Getting us a cat before he left.

  But no matter what he did or didn’t do, he withheld himself. He withheld himself from me, my whole life. I wasn’t the needy one now. He was. He needed to believe Mom would always take him back, he needed to believe he was going to be a big deal, he needed to feel important. It wasn’t enough for him to just be there. Maybe that was the difference between me and Dixie, why I couldn’t go back. She was willing to make the trade-offs, say what he or Mom needed to hear. At least for now.

  Now, I had something he wanted. I could
make him listen. And there was his number, him on the other side of a tiny movement of my finger. A simple thing for most people, maybe.

  I pushed the call button. I lifted the phone to my ear and listened to it ring from a spot on my bed where I could see out the window. It was only a few rings before Dad answered.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Gem.”

  He was silent.

  “Gem, your daughter.”

  “Yeah, I know Gem, my daughter,” he said. “Is Dixie with you?”

  “Where’d you get the money?” I asked him.

  “Do you have the money? Where are you? I need that back, Gem.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “It’s . . . it came . . . I got it for my business. I told you I was starting my business.”

  “Did you steal it? Did you borrow it?”

  He laughed. A kind of uncomfortable laugh that was more like holding himself back from yelling. “Sort of I borrowed it, I guess. That’s why I need it back, I need to make a return on this guy’s investment, you see? Where are you, sweetie?”

  Sweetie.

  “Don’t be mad at Dixie.”

  He paused. “Okay.”

  “Everything was my idea.”

  “Just tell me where you are.”

  “We needed you.” My voice shook. I swallowed and tried again. “We needed you. We really needed you to be better than you are.”

  He didn’t say anything. I couldn’t even hear breathing.

  “Are you there?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Yep.”

  “You can still try harder,” I said. “It won’t change anything for me. But maybe for Dixie. Maybe she’ll give you a chance to be better.”

  I pressed the end button before he could say anything else, anything like sweetie or honey or Gem, baby. I turned the phone off and packed it away.

  When we checked out, Dixie gave me the cash from the deposit—a hundred dollars. With what I’d had on me it added up to about two hundred eighty.

  “How mad do you think Dad will be?” Dixie asked once we were outside and headed for the ferry. A thick blanket of fog made it so we could barely see down the block.