“When are you getting a phone?” Like passing on a message to Dixie was this huge pain in her ass.
“When I have a job again, I guess.” I’d gotten a prepay phone when I had my job so they could call me about shift changes. Then my mom needed to borrow it for a couple of days when she couldn’t pay the bill on her own phone, and after that I kept getting calls from some guy named Paul, using up my minutes looking for her. I got tired of him yelling at me and threw the phone away.
“You’ll tell Dixie about lunch?” I reminded Lia.
“Yes, okay.”
Through government class I sat in the back like always and made one hundred pen dots on a piece of notebook paper while Mr. Coates lectured on the executive branch. Ten rows down and ten across. I imagined being small, tiny enough to fit inside the field of dots, hidden.
So Dad had written to Dixie and not me. So what. The letter was probably full of lies anyway. It still ate at me; then the fact that I cared ate at me more. My father wasn’t anybody I should upset myself over. He’d never upset himself over me.
I didn’t see Dixie anywhere at lunch. Even after the doughnuts I was hungry. I waited until the line got short, picked up a fish sandwich and tater tots, and told Luca, “My mom got paid.”
He smoothed out the bills and slid them into his drawer. “She should still fill out that form, though. She can do it online, you know.”
“We don’t have internet.” Luca had pictures of his two little kids taped to his register. I’d noticed them before: one girl and one boy, both with wavy black hair like his. “What are their names?” I asked, pointing.
“Jorge and Lucia.”
“Lucia. After you.”
“That’s right. I pack them lunch every day. Food from home is better.” He made disapproving eyes at my fish sandwich. Some of us don’t have food from home, I wanted to say.
“My mom doesn’t have time to cook.” Time wasn’t exactly the issue, but I’d rather have him think of her as a busy and broke single mom than as someone who didn’t care enough about me to make sure I ate. “She gave me money for breakfast this morning, though.”
“Yeah? What did you have?”
“Can I get through?” Jordan Fowler was behind me with his tray; I stepped aside. Luca rang him up.
“Doughnuts,” I said, after Jordan was done.
He shook his head and looked at Jorge and Lucia.
“I’m skinny,” I said. “I can eat whatever I want.”
“Who cares about skinny? You need health.”
Luca was only ever nice to me in his own teasing way. But him and his pictures of his kids and the way he cared more about what I ate than my own mother did—all I could see, all I could feel, was what I didn’t have. I was suddenly mad at him for making lunches for his kids, mad at his kids for getting those lunches.
“If you care so much about health, maybe you shouldn’t work in a school cafeteria.”
“There’s a salad bar,” he said, pointing to it.
“You should mind your own business. Leave me alone.” I walked off, with a knot in the pit of my stomach, waiting for him to call after me. Gem! Don’t be mad. I’ll make you a lunch, too, sometime! He didn’t say anything, though, and I didn’t look back.
Denny Miller sat by himself at a table in the corner. I went to it and put my tray down right across from his. “I have your dollar.”
“Oh.” He glanced over his shoulder. “That’s okay.”
I stacked four quarters onto his tray. “I told you I’d pay you back.”
He picked them up and put them in his pocket. I sat down and started eating, and felt his stare.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.” He picked at his food. “Just that Adam usually—”
“Is he here now?”
“No.”
We ate, even though my stomach hurt over what I’d said to Luca. I put the food down on top of the knot.
“Are you really Dixie True’s sister?” Denny asked, eventually.
“Yeah. Why?”
He shrugged and stared at me.
“Why?” I asked again.
His cheeks got white around the red of his zits. He picked apart his sandwich bun.
Then I saw her—we both did. She walked in, flanked by Lia and these two senior guys they hung out with. Dixie had on one of Mom’s tank tops and a denim jacket over it, and a scarf. Blue tights under her short brown corduroy skirt. Denny’s eyes went to me again, looking for the resemblance.
I picked up my tray and walked straight over to Dixie and her friends, who’d just sat down at a table near the door. I stood over her and said, “Hey.”
“Hi?”
“Did you see Mom this morning?”
She tapped her nails on her can of soda. “Yeah. Why?”
I shrugged. “Can I . . . read it?”
“Read what?” Lia asked.
Dixie knew I meant the letter. “Not right now,” she said, shifting her eyes to the others at the table. Then she wrinkled her nose at my half-eaten lunch. “Why don’t you go eat . . . that. I’ll show you at home.”
“Show what?” one of the guys asked.
“Nothing,” Dixie said.
“Do you have it with you?”
“God, Gem, I told you, not right now. Go do whatever it is you do, your deep breathing or counting the floor tiles or whatever. I’ll see you at home.”
The other guy wince-laughed. “Harsh.”
I turned and looked around the cafeteria with the dizzying and familiar feeling of being lost, unclaimed, and unwanted. Denny was still watching me. I raised my middle finger to him and dumped the rest of my food in the trash before walking out.
Mr. Bergstrom called me into the counseling office during PE. When I got there, he smiled like usual, and it immediately made me feel better. “Hi, Gem,” he said.
“Hi.”
“Sorry to make you miss class. My son has a recital right after school, so I’ve got to get going, but I wanted to talk to you.”
“You can make me miss PE whenever you want.” I lingered in the doorway, waiting to see if I was in trouble.
“Come have a seat.” After I sat down, he said, “Luca mentioned that you seemed upset at lunch.”
It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer. He rubbed his hand over his head, which he kept shaved. There was dirt under his nails. He’d probably been working in his yard. On the days I didn’t feel like talking, he’d fill our time by telling me about his household and landscape projects.
“So, are you upset?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I’m not going to freak out or anything.” Lose control of myself, throw something, yell. Like I’d done the time I first got sent to see Skaarsgard.
“Okay. But if Luca says something like that, I listen. Luca’s a good guy. I think he kind of gets you.”
I shrugged again. “What did he say?”
“He worries about how you sometimes don’t have money for lunch or food from home.”