“You’re welcome.”
In our bedroom I put my backpack on my pillow with the straps toward the wall. My keys went on top of the cardboard box on its side that I used as a sort of nightstand. My shoes went inside the box, laces hanging out. I hung my jacket on the closet doorknob and put on the thick socks I always wore around our apartment. Whenever Dixie saw me doing this stuff, or checking the gate lock more than twice, she’d tease me and say I had OCD. But Mr. Bergstrom asked me a bunch of questions about it and said I didn’t fit the diagnosis, that it was more like I had a few rituals that helped me feel in control, and they didn’t interfere with my life, and it wasn’t the same thing. “Plus, from what you’ve told me about where you live,” he’d said, “checking the gate lock sounds like plain common sense.”
I confirmed one more thing—that my stash of cigarettes was still under the bed—then went back to the living room. The onion smell of Dixie’s sandwich made me salivate.
“Did you get that from Napoleon?” I asked.
She chewed and stared at me like, Obviously. Napoleon was the older guy who worked at the deli down the block and had a crush on Dixie—like a hundred other guys.
“Can I have some?” The ravioli from lunch seemed forever ago.
“No,” she said, but held it out anyway. I sat on the floor next to her and took a bite. Then another. Roast beef. Avocado. Cheddar cheese. Thin-sliced red onion and a hard sourdough roll. It was perfect, as if all of Napoleon’s craving for Dixie had been slathered onto that sandwich. I swallowed huge pieces of it, half chewed and sharp with mustard.
Dixie watched me eat. “You can finish that if you’ll go down and get the laundry from the dryer.”
“You did laundry? With what money?”
“Money I had.”
“I’m not going down there at night,” I said.
“It’s not night.”
She tried to take the sandwich away from me; I held it out of her reach. “It’s dark, though.”
“I washed some of your clothes, too, Gem. Do you want them to get stolen?” She lunged again for the sandwich.
“O-kay,” I said. I finished it and went the five steps to the kitchenette to throw away the white paper it had been wrapped in.
“Did you see your shrink today?”
“He’s not a shrink. He’s just a school psychologist.” I opened the fridge. There were a few stale corn tortillas, an opened bag of green beans, ketchup, and a white plastic butter dish with maybe a teaspoon of butter left, crumbs stuck all over it. Same as that morning.
“You should get him to send you to a real shrink. Say you need Adderall. You could sell it at school and then you’d have some money.” I’d heard that Dixie helped some seniors sell their prescriptions at school. I didn’t want to know. “I can tell you what symptoms to have,” she said.
“No thanks.”
I imagined going down to the laundry room. The lights could have burned out again. Sometimes there were noises that might be a zipper clanging against the dryer door, or might be rats or a creepy neighbor.
“Let’s go get the laundry together,” I said to Dixie.
She looked up from her homework. “You always do that.”
“What?”
“‘What?’” she repeated, in a bad imitation of my voice. “I already took my shoes off.”
“So did I. Put them back on.”
I went to the bedroom to get mine. When I came out, Dixie stood by the door forcing her flip-flops over her tights.
“You’re going to fall down the stairs and die,” I said as she shuffle-walked to me.
She shrugged.
I knelt to tie my laces. “Where’s Mom?”
“Out.”
“I know. Out where?”
“Work, I guess?”
I straightened up and we faced each other.
“Do you think Napoleon would give me a sandwich?”
She laughed. “Well, you might have to flash your boobs.”
“Is that what you do?”
“No! I’m joking, Gem, obviously. Do you really—” She shook her head. “You never get my jokes.”
It didn’t matter. I knew exactly why Dixie got sandwiches and why I wouldn’t.
Dixie is pretty. No one in our family is beautiful the way movie stars are beautiful, but she’s the type of girl who gets second, third, fourth looks—as many looks as people can get away with before she stares them down. She’s soft in the sense of being curvy, and hard in the sense of not taking any shit. She’s cute—her hair, her clothes, the faces she makes when she’s surprised or mad or thinks something is funny. And intimidating. She exudes a sexuality, but in a way where it’s like it’s for her, not for anyone else. It started in junior high, and by the time she got to high school, people couldn’t spend five minutes with Dixie before they wanted to give her things, feed her, touch her, get her to smile, be her friend, be her boyfriend. She got sandwiches, she got her cell phone bill paid, she got attention when she wanted and deflected it when she didn’t.
Whereas I still hadn’t figured out how to make and keep a friend.
I stared, she stared back. For her it was a game. She thought I was trying to get her to look away first. But really it was me trying to see who I was through Dixie’s eyes, me wondering if she evaluated me and my face and clothes and body, the ways I made it through the world, like I evaluated hers.
Did she look for herself in me, the way I looked for myself in her?
Finally she broke, and laughed. “You’re such a weirdo, Gem,” she said. “You probably scared that freshman with your creepy eyes.”
I didn’t want her to see I couldn’t take a joke, so I bugged my eyes at her to make them even creepier.
“Ew,” she said with an exaggerated shudder. “Let’s go downstairs before the rats come out.”
2.
I WOKE up in the night, like I usually did for one reason or another—street noise or neighbor noise, a bad dream, Mom coming home from work or a night with “the girls,” who, most of the time, probably weren’t.
Dixie’s bed was empty. She snuck out sometimes, but tonight I heard her voice with Mom’s, coming from the living room. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, them being up late together. Sometimes I could ignore them and go back to sleep. Sometimes I’d lie there with my eyes open, wishing that for once they’d check to see if I was awake. Maybe I wanted to be up talking, too.