“They’re untraceable?” I asked.
“If you pay with cash. Basically.” She studied us. “I mean, I assume the government isn’t after you.”
I followed Dixie to the display; she picked up a phone. “I’m getting one,” I said. “Then we’ll have something for emergencies and we can get rid of yours.”
She held the package and muttered, “I’m not throwing out my phone,” before handing it to me.
I paid for it and also for three refill cards, with probably more minutes than I’d ever use. The cashier set up the first card for me. “Good luck,” she said when she handed it back.
We left the store and looked for a place we could get some clean clothes. As we walked, a guy came up behind us and started talking. “What do you need? I got smokes, I got smoke, I got rock, I got molly.”
We didn’t turn. I imagined that he had X-ray vision and could see straight into my backpack.
“I know it’s early, ladies, but it looks like you have a long day ahead of you and you probably want a little help to get through it, right?”
Dixie held up her middle finger.
“Okay, okay, I can take a hint.” He kept walking with us, then got in front and turned, walking backward. He wasn’t much older than me. Seahawks knit cap, blond scruff on his face, baggy jeans. He looked back and forth between us. “You sisters?”
We didn’t answer.
“Nice,” he said with a laugh. “Nice.”
“Could you fuck off?” Dixie said. She grabbed my arm and walked faster.
He followed us down the street for a while, talking dirty, until he got bored and went to bother someone else. Dixie pulled me into a drugstore; we looked at the cheap three-packs of underwear in pastels I’d never in my life seen on Dixie. “It covers her belly button,” she said, pointing to the headless woman on the package. “I can’t wear these.”
“Who’s going to see you, other than me?”
“That’s not the point. The point of clothes is how you feel in them. I don’t want polyester grandma underwear bunching up around my ass, do you?”
“I guess not.” I moved down the aisle and found a similar three-pack of T-shirts. I took it off the hook.
“No,” Dixie said. “You will sweat like a pig in those and they also itch.”
“Why did you bring us in here if you hate everything?”
“I don’t know.” She grabbed some tube socks and glanced down the aisle. “We should put the money in these,” she whispered. “So it’s not all loose in your bag. Come on.”
We paid for the socks; then I followed her out and we walked up a few more blocks to a huge mall that Dixie had been to with Lia. The inside was all curving glass and soaring escalators and giant pillars holding it together. Dixie took me into one store, and after we found a few pairs of underwear she deemed cute enough for us, and one basic black T-shirt each, I checked the time. It was ten thirty. “We should get back down to the ferry terminal,” I said.
“He’s not going to find us here that fast.” She was riffling through a rack of coats. “You need a new jacket.”
“We said we wouldn’t spend—”
“Oh fuck that. If he didn’t want us spending the money, he shouldn’t have left it in our room, I guess.”
Like I’d been saying the whole time. I think she needed to hear it in her own voice.
She made me try on not only jackets but jeans and shirts, too. Things that I thought looked good or at least fine, she frowned at and took away. She came in and out of the dressing room with new armloads of stuff to try.
We’d both always worn secondhand and cheap, but she knew how to put things together so they looked good. My clothes were jeans stretched out by other people’s butts and knees, shirts where someone pulled on a thread and kept pulling. Sweaters . . . The sweaters were the worst. No matter how much you washed them or aired them out, they always smelled like Goodwill and the bodies of strangers. I’d tended to look like I was made of someone else’s bad decisions, and I’d wished Dixie would help me, like she was helping me now.
When I pulled on what felt like the twentieth pair of stiff, dark jeans, she said, “Those.”
“They’re too long,” I said.
“No, they’re perfect.” She knelt and cuffed the bottoms and turned me to face the mirror.
I looked tougher, older. More like her. “I don’t know.”
“They’re perfect,” she repeated. “But now you need boots.”
Our eyes met in the mirror. “Dixie . . .”
“If you’re going to disappear into the woods or whatever you’re going to do, you need some good boots. And you’re getting this sweater, too.” She held up a hooded gray wool zip-up. A coat—a peacoat style but lighter weight—was already in our buy pile.
I didn’t argue. What was a few hundred dollars out of almost thirty thousand anyway? While we were in the dressing room, we stuffed the bundles of money into the socks we’d bought at the drugstore, leaving out enough to pay for the clothes and a handful of money for each of us so we wouldn’t have to dig into the backpack for every little thing.
That store didn’t have shoes; we moved on. It was getting close to noon. “This has to be our last stop,” I told Dixie when we went into a place with boots in the window.
Dixie tried on at least as many boots as I did. “Coming with me to the woods?” I said it like a joke, but I really wondered.
“The concrete jungle, maybe.”
This time I chose for myself—boots that were dark brown suede, pull-on, a little higher than my ankle. They were lined, so they were soft and warm inside, but they had a rugged sole. I could see how they’d go with the new jeans and everything else, and I felt stable walking around.
“Those are good,” Dixie said. “But you should try these on, too.” She kicked another of the boxes toward me.
“No. I’m getting these.”
She smiled, only slightly. “Okay, then.” She picked out a pair of electric blue Doc Martens for herself. “I’ve been wanting these for like a year,” she confessed.
I didn’t even want to know the prices on what we’d gotten. Dixie went up to pay. Then we found a bathroom and changed into our new stuff in separate stalls. When I came out, I started to put the pair of jeans I’d left home in into my backpack, then thought, no.
“Throw it all away.” I’d said it aloud.
Dixie watched me ball the jeans up, and the stretched-out Goodwill sweater, and my torn jacket, and finally I dumped my old shoes. I shoved it all deep into the bathroom trash can. She watched me check myself in the mirror, watched me see how different I looked. In black and gray, new denim and good wool. Without speaking, she stood behind me and combed her fingers through my hair. She twisted it around and pinned it back with bobby pins from her own hair, which now came loose.
Her touch was gentler than I’d come to expect from Dixie. I felt her breath on my neck when she said, “There.”
“There,” I echoed, staring straight into my eyes.
18.