“No,” I said quickly. “No.” Roxanne was always just Roxanne. If she or Mom ever said her last name, I didn’t remember it. “Can you look up first names? Roxanne? It’s not that common.”
“Honey . . .” I heard a sigh, then a typing noise. “Hang on. Roxanne Adams. Roxanne Chang. Roxanne Crandall. Roxanne Evans. Roxanne Fletcher, Roxanne Fung, Roxanne George, Roxanne Granger—two of those, believe it or not. Roxanne Gunderson. Roxanne Haverford. Roxanne—”
“Never mind.” I didn’t know her name and I wasn’t going to suddenly know it. “What about . . . Idaho. Ivan Kostas.”
“You know the city?”
“No.”
He started to say something else but I hung up. The things in the world made to help people weren’t going to help people like me.
Imagine:
Your family is broken. Your family is addicted. Your family is poor or sick or unstable in some other way, and your family doesn’t have an address book sitting by a vase of flowers and your mother doesn’t say, Hey, kids let’s call Uncle Ivan, let’s send him a Christmas card, let’s send him a gift for his new house in Specific Town, USA.
No, it’s more like your mom stares into space and says, Ivan went off to Idaho with his new girlfriend, who, by the way, is pregnant, so I guess that’s that. And you want to ask where, how pregnant, what does she mean, “that’s that,” and why. But she looks too sad and you don’t want to bother her.
And when she says, Fucking Roxanne and her twelve-step shit, I don’t need anyone telling me what to do and I’m blocking her number so she gets the message, you don’t ask for a reminder about what Roxanne’s last name is in case you ever leave home and have no one else to call.
Imagine that’s how it is.
I picked up the phone and called information again and got a different person, a woman, and this time I asked to be connected to my school.
“A school? At this time of night?”
“Yes.” I got through to the phone system and followed all the prompts to get to Mr. Bergstrom’s voice mail, and then it disconnected me. It disconnected me and I didn’t have the number because I’d been connected directly. I was about to call information again when I heard the key card in the door and Dixie walked in.
I put down the phone. She dropped the backpack on the floor and looked at me with a blank expression. Then she turned her back and went into the bathroom.
When she came out, I hadn’t moved. She stood in front of me, waiting for me to say something. I could tell she expected me to be mad. To yell at her or be freaking out. But all I wanted to do was look at her. Her hair was kind of frizzed out the way it got sometimes in rain or fog, and her eyeliner had smudged under one of her eyes. I saw her as a kid, as a kid playing dress up in her Doc Martens and makeup and her hands shoved into her jacket pockets, defiant.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she finally asked.
“Like what?”
“Like . . .” She pulled her hands out of her pockets and let her arms fall to her sides. “I was practically having a heart attack the whole time I was with Ryan. I kept waiting for him to try to get me to open it to prove there wasn’t money in there.”
“Did he?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I threw it in the trunk of his car like it really was full of your laundry.” She pulled her jacket off. “We drove around. He wanted to show me the school where they all go. He kept telling me about the ‘haunted dugout’ or whatever at the baseball field, so we went there. We sat in it forever in the freezing cold and nothing happened. It was dumb.”
She walked to her bed, picked up the TV remote, and dropped it again without turning the TV on.
“Nothing happened,” she said. “I’m not what you think.” She sat on the bed and unlaced her boots, took them off, let them drop onto the floor.
“What do you think I think?” I spun my chair around and used my heels to drag it over the carpet, closer to her.
She narrowed her eyes as I came toward her. “What are you doing?”
“What do you think I think?” I asked again.
“I think . . .” She pulled a pillow into her lap. “I think you think I’m mean. I think you think I’m a slut. I think you don’t want me around. I think—” Her voice broke. She squeezed the pillow. “I think you think I’m a bad sister.”
My instinct was to say no, you’re not, and I started to, but Dixie continued. “I am. I stayed out as long as I could with Ryan while he bored me to death with his stupid stories because I wanted you think I wasn’t coming back. I wanted you to know what it would feel like if I left.” She brushed tears away with the back of her hand. “The way you want to leave. Leave me.”
“It’s not you that I want to leave.”
“Then why, Gem? Why can’t you stay?” She was tearful and urgent. “Because of Mom? She’ll get better, you know she will. She always does. I mean, she always gets better enough, we always get by. We always do.”
“I know.” The only thing I could think to say was exactly what I felt, which sounded simple and selfish. “I can’t go back. I want . . . I don’t know. But I know I can’t get it there, and I don’t want to wait anymore. I’m ready now. I knew when I saw the money.”
“Well, you don’t have the money now. So you have to come back.”
I scooted my chair even closer. Our knees touched.
“Why’d you give it to me?” Dixie asked, wiping her face again.
“Because you need it to go home.”
“But what are you going to do? You need it more than I do.”
I could see how she thought that, and I’d believed it myself even yesterday, but it wasn’t true. She’d take it back to Mom and Dad, go home the hero, having gotten it back from crazy Gem.
“And,” I said, “I wanted you to know I’m not like them. That it doesn’t mean as much to me as you do.”
She backed away from me and sat cross-legged in the middle of her bed, and pulled the pillow tighter, up to her mouth. I could only see her eyes. “I know. I know you’re not like them.”
“If you don’t want to go back, if you think you shouldn’t, I can . . .” I was going to say I could help her, but I didn’t know if I could. I still didn’t even know exactly how I was going to help myself. “I can find someone to help you.”
She shook her head and set aside the pillow. “I told you. We always get by, Mom always gets better enough.”
Enough seemed to be all she wanted. Maybe I needed too much, or maybe I wasn’t strong.
No—that wasn’t it. I think I’m strong. Or, more like I think whatever I am is okay. Maybe what I have is strength, or maybe what I have is weakness that I accept. Being strong is one way to be, but it’s not the only way.
“You can’t be mixed up in the pill thing at school anymore,” I said. “For Mom or anyone else.”
“I know.”
“You can get a real job next year. And you have to focus on graduating and—”
“I know.”
“I have to tell you something else,” I said. “That you don’t know.”