Then she spent a long time mostly listening and came to a total stop, leaning against a building. Laughing, saying “I know” and “What?” and “Oh my god.”
I hadn’t had a best friend since seventh grade, when I’d go to Miriam Reed’s house all the time. Our favorite thing was closing her bedroom door and putting on music and dancing around, singing into our fists like they were microphones, and buying enough candy for ten people and eating it all. Then, in the summer between seventh grade and eighth grade, she stopped inviting me over and made a whole new group of friends, and I’d still see her at school all the time but it was like our whole history had been erased.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Dixie was saying. She put her phone back in her pocket.
“Don’t tell her about the money,” I said.
“No shit.”
We started walking again. We passed three hotels before Dixie asked, “What’s our plan?”
“I’m just checking them all out.” Which wasn’t true. Every time we came near one, I thought, This is the one, but then I had no idea what to do next. “It has to be the right place.”
“Okay. When we find the right place, what’s our plan?”
“Go in and get a room?”
“You can’t just walk in and get a room.”
I stopped. “Why not?”
She sighed. “It’s a hotel, Gem. Have you ever been in a hotel?”
Of course I’d never been in a hotel, she knew that. “Have you?”
She dug around in her bag and handed me a driver’s license with her picture on it. Only it said her name was Amy King and that she was nineteen and lived in Shoreline.
“Where’d you get this?”
“Me and Lia both have them. We wanted to get into eighteen-and-over clubs. Like Mom and Dad used to do when they were our age. Come on.” She started walking back in the direction we’d come from. “It has to be somewhere not too businessy. And not too nice but still nice enough. Hang on.” She stepped to the edge of the sidewalk and crouched over her schoolbag. She pulled out a hairbrush and handed it to me, then a scarf that she twisted around her neck to cover the skin her V-neck left exposed. “We don’t want them thinking we’re, like, teen prostitutes or something. There are a lot of them down here.”
I brushed my hair, but there wasn’t much else I could do other than wipe bagel crumbs off my sweater. We started walking again, and I let myself fall behind, suddenly feeling uncertain and incapable. I watched her walk with the confidence she always had at school. I don’t know if she’d copied it from other people, or if she created it out of thin air by sheer force of will. All I knew was she didn’t get it from me.
She talked over her shoulder. “Let’s go back to that one we passed a couple of blocks ago. With the fountain in the lobby.”
I hadn’t noticed it.
“Let me do the talking,” she added.
Dixie led us into the place she deemed most likely to take our cash. The thing that she’d thought was a fountain in the lobby turned out to be a big stone sculpture, no water. We walked around it and then Dixie stepped right up to the counter. I lurked behind her, ready to pull a bundle of fifties from my bag.
The woman working the desk wore a neat blue suit and had shiny black hair pulled into a tight bun and one perfect curl gelled just in front of her ear. “How can I help you?”
“Do you have any rooms available? We don’t have a reservation.”
“How many nights?”
“Just tonight.”
Her eyes flicked from Dixie to me, and back to Dixie.
“We missed our ferry,” Dixie explained. “All we have is cash, okay?”
“It’s early. The ferries run all day, and late at night.”
“Well, we missed the one we were supposed to get and now no one can pick us up on the other side until tomorrow.”
“We don’t normally . . .” The woman glanced behind her. “You’d have to put an extra three hundred down as a deposit, is the thing.” She said it like she was certain we wouldn’t have that much.
“Okay,” Dixie said.
The woman lifted her dark eyebrows. “And I need to see ID.”
Dixie slid her license across the shiny black marble. “How much total?”
She looked at the license, looked at Dixie. I don’t know if she believed Dixie was nineteen, but I’d already stepped forward to start counting cash onto the marble. She clicked some things on her computer. “With the deposit and the cash-rate room . . . Two queens all right?”
“Yes.”
“And taxes and fees . . .” She watched me. “Five ninety-seven.”
I stopped counting. It was so much. Dixie nodded her head at me. “Put extra,” she said quietly. “For room service and everything. Anyway, we get the deposit back.”
“If the room is in good condition at checkout,” the woman said. “No smoking anywhere in the room. That includes the bathroom. And checkout takes a little extra time. You’ll need to plan for that.”
The woman handed a piece of paper over for Dixie to fill in and sign. I watched her write Amy King and the address from the ID. I counted out the money and the woman whisked it away with another glance over her shoulder, and in a minute we had two key cards.
“Thank you, Ms. King. Enjoy your stay.”
Dixie’s eyes narrowed in a certain way and I knew something had happened that I hadn’t noticed. “I need a receipt. For the deposit.”
“I’m sorry?” The woman stared at us.
“I need a receipt,” Dixie said again, her voice raised.
I sensed someone behind me and thought, This is it—we’re caught. But when I turned, it was only a couple with suitcases, waiting to check in next. Dixie turned around to them and said, “I’m just waiting for my receipt because she took our cash.”
The woman behind the counter smiled tightly. “I’m sorry. Of course.”
Dixie double-checked everything on the receipt before we headed to the elevator. Once we were inside and zooming up to the eleventh floor, she said, “That bitch was going to try to keep our deposit.”
It hadn’t even crossed my mind that could happen. What other kinds of stuff didn’t I know? “Where did you get that ID?” I asked her again.
“Nowhere. I got it. I mean, you have to ask around and then you get a name or an address and you go do it.” She shrugged, as if it was just that easy.
The doors swished open and we found our room. Dixie used her key card, and before I could see what was inside, she turned to me with a smile and said, “Okay, this was actually a really good idea.”
14.
THE ROOM had striped wallpaper, cream and gold. I’d never seen anything like that. Each bed seemed twice as big as our beds at home, and each was covered with pillows. There were an armchair and footrest by the window, a fancy wooden desk, a huge TV on top of a dresser, bedside tables with glass lamps, and a beige-and-brown flowered carpet.