“She didn’t ask if I’m okay. Running around the city with this money. She didn’t even ask if I’m okay. It was more like she’s mad. Just really . . . mad.”
Of course she was mad, I thought. And Dixie’d never been able to handle Mom being mad at her. “Did you tell her you’re with me?” I asked.
Dixie wiped her face with her sleeve. “I’m so stupid. Like you’ve been trying to tell me. Well, you were right, so you can be happy about that.”
“I’m not.” She’d already forgotten every single thing that had happened between us on the ferry.
“I told her to go to hell.” She looked at me. “I should have told her I didn’t even take the stupid money! None of this was even my idea.”
“I know.” I shifted on my feet. The new boots had started to rub my right little toe.
“I wish you’d left it there like you said you would. None of this would have happened.” She wiped a tear away. “Everything was fine like it was.”
“No it wasn’t.”
“For me it was.”
We were back to where we’d started. There wasn’t any point arguing about something she didn’t want to see. I knelt down and opened the backpack to get out one of the spare packs of Haciendas I’d brought along. I needed to think, I needed one of my rituals back. I asked Dixie if she wanted one; she nodded.
We got two cigarettes lit in the drizzle, cupping our hands around the matches from the Velvet, and found a bench partly protected by a big tree with spreading branches. Dixie stared out at the water, quiet, forgetting to actually smoke while her ash got longer and longer. I tried words out in my head, tried to imagine what it would feel like to tell her what I’d done, losing a big chunk of the money.
“Can I get a smoke?”
The voice had sounded like a girl’s, but when I looked up, I saw a guy around our age, in jeans and sneakers, coat and knit cap. A little bit of shaved head and a fuzz of light hair showed at the temples.
Dixie looked him—or her?—up and down, flicked her ash.
I handed over the pack.
“Are these Mexican?”
“Do you want one or not?” Dixie asked.
The person smiled. Girl, I thought again. “Can I get a light, too?”
I gave her my matchbook.
“Oh shit, matches. Can I just . . .” She held out her hand for my Hacienda and used it for a light, then gave it back. “Thanks.”
We sat another few seconds. Then Dixie said, “Fuck. I can’t keep this fucking thing lit in this fucking rain.” She threw her half-smoked Hacienda on the ground and got up to walk closer to the water, her arms wrapped around herself.
The girl sat on the bench where Dixie had been. “You guys cutting school, too?” she asked.
“Not really. I mean, yeah, but . . .” I pointed across the Sound to the city. “I go to school over there.” Went to.
“I wish I lived in the city. Nothing but assholes at my school.”
“Oh.”
“‘Oh,’” she said with a laugh. “Yeah. I’m Kip.”
“Gem. And there are plenty of assholes at my school, trust me.”
“Is that short for something? Gemma? Jemima?”
“No. Gem like a diamond.”
“What’s up with her?” Kip asked, pointing with the cigarette to Dixie, whose back was still to us.
“She’s my sister,” I said, as if that answered the question.
Kip looked at me. “What’s her name?”
“Dixie.”
Dixie turned and came toward us. “I’m hungry and it’s cold. What’s the plan?”
“Finding lunch, I guess?”
Her eyes flicked to Kip. “Do you live here?”
“Yep.” She dropped her cigarette and stepped on it with the heel of her sneaker. “There’s a good diner nearby. If you like burgers and other dead animals and stuff.”
“Can you show us where?” Dixie asked.
“Sure.”
20.
THE DINER smelled like grease and meat, bacon and coffee and pancakes. There weren’t a lot of people there; we were between lunch and dinnertime. It had been a short walk, a few blocks up from the harbor. A woman in jeans and a T-shirt and a green apron, hair dyed black and up in a bun, tattoos on her arms, greeted us. “Table or booth?”
“Booth,” Kip answered.
The whole situation seemed like a bad idea to me. Every person who knew anything about us would be a risk. If not right away, then to me, later, if I had the money and Dad or Mom was looking. But it wasn’t like I had an alternate plan to suggest, and I was preoccupied with how badly I’d screwed up, from the beginning. Maybe Dixie was right. Even if everything wasn’t fine before, maybe it was better than whatever this was going to turn into.
She sat next to Kip on one side, their shoulders almost touching, and I sat on the other. There was a tin cup full of crayons, along with paper place mats to draw on.
“They have breakfast all day,” Kip said.
“We’ve eaten a ton of food in the last twenty-four hours,” Dixie said to Kip, holding her paper menu up. I could barely see her face. “I can’t believe I’m hungry again.”
I tried to make eyes at Dixie like, Don’t say so much. She wouldn’t look at me.
“Order anything you want,” she continued, to Kip. “It’s on us.”
“I have money,” Kip said.
“It’s on us anyway.”
My anxiety ticked up. I stared at my menu without seeing it.
“So, what’s fun around here?” Dixie asked.
“Nothing.”
Dixie laughed a strange laugh. Something about her had changed since we’d met Kip, and not only that she’d gotten cold toward me.
“On a nice day I go to this park on the other side of the island. It’s like a hundred acres. It has everything. Swings and slides. Trails. Ducks and stuff.”
“Ducks! I love ducks.”
I finally caught Dixie’s eye. You “love” ducks?
“They’re funny.”
Kip laughed, and the waitress came back. I ordered a bacon cheeseburger and fries. Kip got vegetarian nachos and a shake. Dixie ordered a black bean burger and said to Kip, “I’ll share mine if you share yours.”
After the waitress left, Kip asked Dixie if she was a vegetarian.
“Pretty much,” Dixie answered.
“No you’re not,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“From the salmon you ate last night? And the bacon mac and cheese?”
Her face got pink. “You’re high,” she said, shaking her head. She rested loosely on her elbows and whispered to Kip, loud enough—on purpose—for me to hear. “Gem lies. And steals.”
She’d completely changed back to the Dixie I knew from before we found the money—ignoring me, ridiculing me, giving all her attention to someone she wanted to make like her. The part of me I’d let Dixie into for the last two days began to close up.
“I’m going to go wash my hands,” I said, and scooted out of the booth. When I picked up my backpack, Dixie said, “You can leave your stuff. We’ll watch it.”
“No thanks.”
I was only in the bathroom a few seconds before Dixie came in behind me.
“What are you doing?” I asked her as I scrubbed the cigarette smell off my hands.