“Hey where the hell are you? I, um— Look, I put something in your room just for safekeeping, okay, and I think you have it and it’s really . . . Dixie, you need to answer your fucking phone and tell me where you are, and do not TELL anyone what you found, that would be very bad. I’m going to try to find you at school today. If I don’t see you there, you’d better meet me back at the apartment later. And . . . listen, don’t be a little shit about this. Show me I can trust you. Call me.”
I sat on my bed and took off the towel I had around my hair. “You can take it if you want. Go to school. See him. I mean, if you want it to be over.” And when he discovered there was seven thousand missing, she could blame it on me, and be right.
“I’m not . . . I’m not ready to do anything yet. I’m not saying I’m not going back. But what’s the rush?”
I felt both relief and worry.
“And it’s not my fault, Gem,” she continued. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe he doesn’t really love me.” She turned her phone back off. “But it’s not my fault that he doesn’t love you, either.”
It didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt to hear. I mean, I felt the pain of it but it was okay. It wasn’t anything I hadn’t already told myself a hundred times, that he hadn’t demonstrated clearly enough. It was a fact like any other fact and it didn’t kill me. I didn’t turn into a pile of ash or disappear. I was still there. And so was Dixie.
17.
WE WOULD get on a ferry, we decided, like she’d told the front desk lady we were going to do. We would ride out to one of the islands. It didn’t solve anything, and I had no plan beyond that. I couldn’t and didn’t want to force her to go back before she was ready. So we were stuck in not leaving, not going back, and not parting ways. Only filling time.
“I have to get a charger before we leave downtown,” she said. “For my phone.”
“Maybe we should just let it die.”
“I have to have a phone, Gem. What if there’s an emergency? What if we get lost? What if we get into trouble?”
Like this whole thing wasn’t trouble and an emergency? “I get along without a phone.”
“Aren’t you a special snowflake.” It was a typical Dixie comment, but without the typical venom.
Getting a charger meant staying put until after nine, when stores would be open. We figured if Dad did what he said he was going to do—show up at school, check at the apartment again—we had the morning before he’d even begin to realize we weren’t at friends’ houses, or even think about where else we might be. Or, not we. I had to remind myself that, from his messages, it seemed he had no idea I was involved, let alone that I was the one behind it. I wonder if he even thought of me at all.
Dixie showered. While she was in there, I took the washcloth with the money inside it out from under my pillow, put it deep into the pocket of my jacket.
When she came out in her robe and picked her shirt and jeans up off her bed, she said, “As long as we’re going shopping, we might as well buy some clothes.”
“I thought you were worried about Dad being angry about us spending money.”
She shrugged. “Nothing expensive. Some extra underwear, T-shirts. I don’t want to walk around in dirty clothes.”
We got packed and agreed that we’d only spend as much as we got when we checked out of the hotel, whatever was left of the cash deposit. The rest of it, we’d leave untouched.
Dixie stood by the door with her jacket on and her schoolbag over her shoulder. She’d put on the scarf again and pinned her hair close to her head, and somehow done her makeup. I guess she always carried makeup to school with her.
“What?” she asked after I’d stared too long.
“Nothing,” I said. “You look good. How do you always look good?”
“I don’t.”
“You do. I see you every day. I know.”
She got that defiant expression I was so used to; then it went away and she said, “Thanks.”
I went to the hotel window one last time, looking out at the puzzle of land and water, wondering where exactly I was headed.
Dixie presented our receipt at the front desk. We waited for them to make sure we hadn’t trashed the room and to total up our room service expenses. Then we got our cash back.
“Thanks for doing all that,” I told Dixie “Making sure we didn’t get ripped off.”
We were on the street, the sidewalks damp but some sun breaking through the low-lying clouds. After a night in a room with windows that didn’t open, the air felt good. Dixie pointed us uphill, where the desk clerk had told her there was a place that would probably have the phone charger she needed.
“The time I was in a hotel before,” she said as we walked, “it was me and Lia. We wanted to try out our fake IDs after we got them and we had some money from Lia’s birthday. We’d seen it on TV a lot, people in hotels.”
I kept quiet so she’d keep talking.
“This guy at the place we went—first he kind of accused us of being whores, then when we tried to get the deposit back in the morning, there was no record of it. Like, he’d just taken it. But it was our word against his, and me and Lia looked like . . . well, like me and Lia look. That’s how I knew how hard it is if you don’t have a credit card. And how shady some of these hotel people are.”
“You spent the night at the hotel?” I asked, trying to keep up.
“Yeah. I told Mom I was sleeping over at Lia’s house. Lia told her mom she was sleeping at mine.” She shrugged. “We do that all the time.”
We got to a corner; Dixie turned us left. There were plenty of those nights I’d been alone in our room when Dixie was at Lia’s, or so I thought. “Why?” I asked. “What do you do?”
We kept walking, and from her silence I thought she must be annoyed with my questions, me being the older one with no idea why someone our age might want to stay out all night, or lie about where she was. She was probably thinking how naive and embarrassing I was.
Then she stopped at the next corner to wait for the light to change, and she said, “We do stupid stuff, Gem. Just dumb stuff we shouldn’t do. I wish . . .” The light changed and she turned to me with this look on her face that I read as a kind of being lost, or maybe an apology. “I guess this is just another dumb thing I’m doing.”
“It’s not dumb,” I said.
“We’ll see.”
She never said what she wished.
We found the phone store, and when Dixie paid for the charger, she also asked the girl at the counter some other stuff about her phone.
“Could someone who had my number, like, track me?”
“Let me see your phone.” The girl examined it and said, “Yeah, probably. I mean, it’s not easy but it’s possible. If you’re really worried about someone finding you, just get a burner.”
“A what?”
“A burner. Cheap, with prepaid minutes. New number.”
“Like the one I had when I worked at the gift shop,” I said to Dixie.
The girl leaned on the counter, tapping her blue-painted nails on the glass. “That’s what I did when this guy I used to date was stalking me. I tossed my old phone, went through a few burners. I’d only give the numbers to people I trusted. If he found the number out, I threw the phone away and got a new one. Or I’d keep the phone but get a new SIM. Outsmarted that dickhead until he got tired of trying. They’re right over there,” she said, pointing to a rack along the wall.