She laughed. “Not for more than a few hours.” We drove a bit farther. “Did you leave forever? Are you runaways now?”
That didn’t seem like the right word for us. For me. I don’t think I wanted to run away from something so much as find something else. “If we are, we’re not very good at it,” I said. “We’re probably not even ten miles away from home.”
“Why’d you leave? You said your Dad was gone. Do you have an asshole stepdad or something? Is your mom really strict?” She glanced at me. “Is it, like, abuse and stuff?”
“No. It’s . . . I don’t know. It’s not great. A lot could be better.” I thought about how back in the hotel Dixie had said maybe things hadn’t been fine for me, but they were for her. Maybe that was only something she told herself, or it could be a little bit true. It was hard to explain to Kip without telling about the money. If it hadn’t been for the money, we’d still be there. “It’s always affected me more than Dixie,” I said. “The stuff at home.”
“Because you’re older. The older ones always deal with more shit, or so my brothers say.”
“That’s part of it. I’ve always been different, though, from her. Sometimes I think she’s mad at me because I’m not more like her.”
“Maybe she’s mad at herself that she’s not more like you,” Kip said. “I feel that way sometimes. Like why couldn’t I be happy being part of ‘Julia and Jessa’? It was easier. It wasn’t me, though. I didn’t want to be one of those people who goes her whole life not being herself.”
Kip talked more about deciding to cut her hair, change her name, change her clothes, but I got fixed on what she’d said about Dixie being mad at herself for not being like me. Could that be true even a little bit? I couldn’t imagine how. Dixie had friends, Dixie was cute, Dixie got along better with Mom and Dad. What was there about me to like? To want?
We were at the motel. “Are you sure you’ll be okay?” Kip asked. “Do you want me to go in with you and see if she’s there? If you want me to get Ryan’s number—”
“No. I’m fine.” I pushed the car door open, caught up in my own thoughts, but before I could get out, Kip grabbed my arm. I looked back at her.
“Um, good-bye?” she said. “I mean, you’re not just going to get out of the car and slam it in my face after I drove you all around today and everything.”
“Oh.” I reached into my jacket pocket. “I could give you some gas money. . . .”
Kip laughed, then just sat there with her face turned to me. I couldn’t see her eyes too well in the car but she didn’t seem mad. “We’re friends, Gem. Don’t worry about it. But don’t jump out of my car without saying good-bye.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Call me if you need help. Call me if you don’t. Text me or whatever. Stay in touch. Let me know what happens.”
“Yeah. I will. Bye.”
She leaned over and hugged me. I got out and watched her drive off. I waved.
When I went up to the room, Dixie wasn’t there but her stuff was. Not that her stuff was anything she would need to come back for. She was wearing her new clothes, her boots.
I turned off the light and lay on the bed.
I could hear the TV in the room on the other side of the wall. And sometimes passing headlights would beam moving light onto the ceiling. The heater fan rumbled on and shuddered off at random intervals; it made my muscles tense up every time.
But I was all alone.
This is what it’s like without Dixie, I told myself.
I’d slept alone before. There were all those times she’d spent the night somewhere else. And then there were all the ways she made me invisible to her at school, and all the ways she ignored me at home. There were the times she yelled at me to leave her alone, or gave me the silent treatment. But there’s a way a person is there even when they aren’t and even when they don’t want to be. A way a sister is there.
That night, though, I knew she could be gone. Really gone. Because she’d told me from the beginning she wouldn’t go back without the money, and then I gave it to her. Most of it, anyway. I might as well have said Go home.
I let that idea, of her going back and me going forward, sink way down into my heart and pump through me with my blood. The way Kip wasn’t part of Julia and Jessa anymore—what if I wasn’t part of Gem and Dixie? Would I still be me? Kip talked about wanting to be herself, but I couldn’t think who I was without Dixie to take care of, or Dixie to avoid, or Dixie to be mad at. Dixie to feel hurt by, Dixie to feel jealous of.
I made an image of myself in my mind. Walking on a road, in the clothes Dixie had chosen for me. Me, putting one boot in front of the other, moving forward, forward, with my back to whoever could see me, whoever was watching.
And I realized it was Dixie. Dixie was the one watching, the one whose eyes I saw myself through as I walked away.
25.
I FELL asleep for a couple of hours and woke up with a stiff neck and a growling stomach. My arm throbbed. I wished I’d thought to get a few more pills from Kip, also that I’d eaten more at the party or at least stuffed some cheese cubes into my pockets.
Dixie hadn’t come back.
Yet, I thought, almost as a reflex. Still, I had to start figuring out what I would do after I checked out of the motel at noon—eleven hours away. Where could I go next? I had less than two hundred dollars left of what we’d doled out to ourselves in the dressing room. This wasn’t a game. Either I had to go home, or this was my life now.
And I wasn’t going home.
I moved in the dark to the little desk with the phone and clicked on the light, sat in the wheeled chair. The phone had buttons for the front desk and for emergencies. The instruction card next to it detailed the prices for personal calls and how they’d be added to your bill when you checked out. Halfway through doing the math, I realized how dumb I was being. My problem wasn’t the cost. My problem was that the phone was for people who had someone to call, friends or family or connections, people they could rely on.
I tried. I thought about Roxanne. I think she would have driven out to get me if she knew I was in trouble, even though she hadn’t seen me for years. She wouldn’t invite me to move in with her or anything, but she’d come for me at the very least. She might talk me through this. Only I didn’t know her number or if she even lived in the area anymore. I picked up the phone and called information even though it was going to cost me over two dollars, according to the price list.
“What city?” the operator asked.
“Seattle. I think.”
“Name?”
“Gem,” I said automatically.
“That a last name? Spell it?”
Then I realized he meant he needed the name of the person I was trying to reach. “I . . . I don’t know the last name.”
He paused. “Is this a prank?”