“Just making sure you don’t crawl out a window with the money or something.”
“No, back there.” I turned off the water and hit the button on the hand dryer. “You love ducks? You’re pretty much a vegetarian? Saying we’re going to buy all the food? What do you think—”
Then a stall door opened and a woman with short gray hair came over to wash her hands. We immediately shut up and Dixie went into the other stall. I turned on my heel and left.
When I got back to the booth, Kip said, “You know what’s funny?”
Nothing, I thought. Nothing is funny. “What?”
“I’m pretty sure your sister thinks I’m a dude.”
Our eyes met and then it made sense. What Dixie had been doing. Flirting and lying and trying to seem impressive. We laughed, and I instantly felt the relief of not being alone.
“Should I tell her the truth?” Kip asked me.
I shrugged and put the backpack between me and the wall. “I don’t care.”
Kip glanced at the bathroom door. “I have a sister, too,” she said. “And two brothers.”
“Do you get along?”
“Uh, no. My sister is mad at me that I don’t dress or act more like how she thinks a girl should, like I used to. This is kind of new,” she said, pointing at herself. “A few months ago I had long hair and went around in yoga pants and dumb little tops, like my sister. People don’t like it when you change.” She took some sugar packets out of a bowl on the table and arranged them in a line, corners touching. “And my brothers are mad at me because they say I’m trying to be like them. Which, trust me, I’m not. Being like them is not on my list of life goals.”
She moved the sugar packets into a circle.
“Dixie’s mad at me because . . .” Because of our parents. Because of the money. Because of a million things, most of which had nothing to do with us. “We act mad at each other. But really it’s other things.”
Dixie came back from the bathroom. She’d cleaned off the smudges of makeup that had been under her eyes from crying, and fixed her hair a little bit. Kip and I shared another glance.
“What?” Dixie asked as she sat down, getting right up close to Kip again.
“Nothing.”
The food came. Dixie kept taking nachos off Kip’s plate like they were best friends, and shoving her fries at Kip. My burger was good but not as good as the one I’d had at the hotel.
“So, what’s up with you guys anyway?” Kip asked. “Like, why are you on the island?”
Dixie said, “We’re on the run.”
I glared; she ignored me. “Just cutting,” I said. “Taking a break.”
Kip subtly slid her nacho plate a little farther away from Dixie.
“Gem basically kidnapped me,” Dixie said. “She forced me onto a bus and made me lie to my mom and she’s not going to let me go back unless I let her have something that isn’t hers.”
She wanted me to react, to lose my shit, as she would put it, to prove something to me or to herself. I made myself calm, counting something other than money for the first time since we’d left home. I chose the crayons. There were only eight; I could count and recount while talking. “We have some stuff going on at home,” I said.
Kip nodded. “I’m going to have some stuff going on at home, too, if I don’t get back soon. You guys want a ride somewhere? My car is parked down by the terminal.”
Dixie looked at me. “Ask Gem. She’s the one running this show. I’m just a helpless victim.”
I did another round with the crayons. “Is there a hotel around here we could get into with a fake ID and cash?” I stopped worrying about what Kip might think of us and money. For all she knew, we always had money. She probably had us pegged as spoiled rich kids, with our new clothes and paying for lunch and everything. I almost laughed at the idea.
Kip thought for a second. “Not a hotel. But a motel. You won’t need me to drive you, we actually passed it on the way here.” She took a green crayon out of the tin cup—I subtracted it, seven—and wrote her number on a corner of one of the paper place mats. “Call me if you guys need anything while you’re out here.” She tore the corner off and Dixie took it out of her hand even though I was pretty sure Kip had intended to give it to me.
We all stood and gathered our stuff, and Dixie paid at the counter. It had stopped raining and the cloud cover had broken apart, showing bright blue sky. “I know you said you wish you lived in the city,” I told Kip as we walked down the hill, “but I think the island is beautiful.”
“It is beautiful. And I hate it. I feel trapped, is the main thing, and people here don’t get me.”
“Why don’t they get you?” Dixie asked.
Kip paused, then said, “Because I’m a girl who suddenly decided to dress like a boy but isn’t gay. I’m just me.”
Dixie stopped walking. Her cheeks were red as she stared at Kip.
“It’s okay,” Kip said. “It happens all the time, I don’t care.”
I knew Dixie cared, though. She started walking again, ahead of us but not far enough ahead that we could talk about her without her hearing, so we stayed quiet the rest of the way to the motel. When Kip said good-bye, she hugged me. Surprised, I stepped back.
“Sorry,” she said. “I kind of hug everyone.”
“It’s okay. It’s just that I kind of hug no one. Or more like no one hugs me.”
“Seriously, you can call me if you need anything. And not that you asked for advice, but I’d be careful about staying on the island for too long. People here notice stuff quicker than they do over there.” She nodded her head in the direction of the Seattle skyline.
Dixie had gone off to stand under the motel’s car port.
“I guess she probably doesn’t want a hug from me,” Kip said with a laugh.
“Probably not.”
Dixie took care of all the checking-in stuff, like last time. This place wasn’t nearly as nice and didn’t have room service and we only had to leave a hundred-dollar deposit. The guy acted like paying cash wasn’t that unusual. His main concern—he said it twice—was that we not smoke in the room because then we’d have to pay an extra cleaning fee.
“We won’t,” Dixie assured him.
The room was plain and functional, with only a view of the parking lot behind the building. “Which bed do you want?” I asked Dixie.
“I don’t care.”
I dropped my stuff on the one closest to the door, same as the one I’d had at the nice hotel.
“I bet that was really funny to you,” Dixie said.
“No.”
“Did you know?”
“Yeah. I mean, I could tell right away.”
Dixie unlaced her blue Docs and pulled them off her feet with a wince. “She says she’s not gay but she was totally giving off the flirty vibe, right?” She stripped off her socks, her jeans, and her sweater, and sat on the other bed in her underwear and the black T-shirt.
I shrugged. “You’re the one who gave off a vibe. It’s like your automatic way of being when you’re around guys.”