Gem & Dixie

by Sara Zarr

  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.”

  “He makes lunch for his kids every day. That’s really nice.”

  Mr. Bergstrom nodded. I thought about how to explain my anger at Luca for that, how I wished his kids would go a day knowing what it felt like without him, how at the same time I wanted to protect my mom from Luca thinking bad things about her. I worried Mr. Bergstrom would think I was a terrible person, hating someone else’s little kids for having something any kid should have.

  “Dixie got a letter from our dad,” I finally said.

  “Oh yeah?” Mr. Bergstrom leaned back and put his hands behind his head. I liked that about him, how relaxed he could be, like the only thing in the world that he had to do was listen to me.

  “He only wrote to her. I didn’t get anything. She won’t tell me or my mom what it says. I don’t think my mom was even going to give it to Dixie except it fell out of her purse when she was . . .” I didn’t want to tell him she was messed up. Whenever I let something like that slip, he asked a bunch of questions I worried would get her in trouble.

  He waited for more, and I didn’t give more, so he asked, “What do you think is in the letter?”

  “My mom says it will be bullshit.”

  “Are you feeling anxious about it?”

  I didn’t know what I was feeling, at least not in the way where I could put it into one category. He picked up his whiteboard marker and I said, “Don’t draw.”

  “Okay,” he said, laughing.

  “I just want to know what it says. The letter.”

  “Well, there’s nothing you can do about that until Dixie chooses to tell you. So maybe you can let it go until then, and whether it’s something bad or good we can talk about it when we know.”

  He always made it sound easy.

  “Meanwhile . . .” He picked his glasses up off his desk and put them on to look at his computer. “How ’bout this? Something we can control is I can get you on the lunch program. I think I can push the paperwork through without your mom even having to know about it.”

  “Really? I thought they needed he
r paycheck and everything.”

  “I’ll pull a few strings.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I know. I’ll tell you a secret, though: I like pulling strings. And what’s not a secret is it’s faster that way.”

  Skaarsgard never would have pulled strings. “Thanks.”

  “Thank Luca.” He glanced at his computer. “I’ll see you in a few days?”

  “Do I have to go back to PE?” It was sixth period, the end of the day.

  “Nah.” He wrote me a pass. He tilted his chin down when he handed it to me, to see over the tops of his glasses, and gave me the smile that made me feel like maybe in spite of Luca and Denny and Dixie’s dumb friends it was okay to be me.

  One of the things Mr. Bergstrom had me do when I first started seeing him was write a family history.

  “What do you mean?” I’d asked. I was suspicious of him then, at first.

  “You know, where your parents come from, whatever you know about your grandparents and their parents. As far back as you can.”

  “Why?” I already had plenty of homework.

  “It might help you understand some things. It will help me, too, get an idea of how I can support you.”

  Support me. Skaarsgard had never said those words.

  It took a long time for me to do it. My family’s past isn’t something I like to think about. But once I started, it poured out of me, and when I brought him pages and pages of what I’d written on note paper, I felt better, even before I read it to him.

  Here’s the story of my parents.

  Our parents, I guess, since they’re Dixie’s, too. Sometimes I think of them as mine like they’re different parents to me than they are to Dixie, which they kind of are. I don’t have a lot of comforting memories like I guess some people do of their parents. I don’t really know what I got from them that might be good. Dixie got the parts that were looks and charm. She got the confidence.

  But I was there first.

  My parents grew up in the eighties and nineties. They got married pretty young, in 1997. They met at a club most people don’t know about called the Velvet when my mom was twenty and using a fake ID to get into bars all over Seattle. They’re the type that always want to be young. For example, my dad would talk about how he’d never become like people he knew who got regular boring office jobs, and would never move to the suburbs and never turn into a paycheck-getting zombie. My mom doesn’t say it in those exact words but you can tell from how she acts and dresses that she feels the same about it.

  My mom got pregnant with me and they decided it was a sign to get married. They went to city hall and did the thing and changed their last names from the ones they grew up with to a new one they chose together. They named me after the diamond they couldn’t afford when they got married. I was supposed to shine.

  My mom was Adrienne Kostas and my dad was Russell Jacobs and they named themselves Adri and Russell True. It’s pronounced like Ay-dree. When my dad needed to get on her good side, he called her “Dree.” It happened a lot. But her good side got smaller and smaller until there was barely even room for herself there.

  They had this dream of being in music. Not like in a band, because they didn’t have that kind of talent. My mom can’t even carry a tune. So their plan was to buy a club and name it Gem, after me. They’d book all their favorite bands. Then, instead of being fans who have to push their way through the crowd like everyone else, they’d be in charge of it all and get to hang out in the band dressing rooms and stuff.

  Mostly they wanted to prove their parents wrong about everything. I heard that a lot when I was a kid, especially from my dad. Probably everyone tells themselves they won’t be like their parents. I know I do. But for my parents, it was more. I mean, they changed their names, so they acted really serious about it. Except the thing they did that was just like their parents was drinking. They kept trying to stop. Drugs sometimes, too. Every time one of their rock star heroes died of a drug overdose, they’d quit for a while again.

  When my mom found out she was pregnant with Dixie, she stopped for a long time. But mostly, my father couldn’t, and couldn’t keep a job.

  My father couldn’t stay away from other women, either. He left us and came back a bunch of times. Mom would tell him, “Stay gone this time.” Then he’d come back and she’d let him. He’d call her “Dree” and beg and say he loved her more than anything. Then, right before I started high school, my mom said he was leaving forever this time because he’d found a twenty-six-year-old version of her in Austin, Texas.

  He must have known what was coming, because the week before Mom kicked him out he spent a lot of time with me and Dixie. He got us a cat and played us his old records. He took us all around the city. It was like a good-bye tour of his favorite bars and clubs. He let us skip school. He brought us to dark, dirty places where we got free Shirley Temples and peanuts. Dixie would sit up on the bar while Dad’s friends or whatever they were told her how cute she was, how when she got older she’d be trouble. I guess she was around eleven then. I could already tell people liked her better than me. She was soft and bright, and I was bony and I never smiled. I guess I’m still that way. I remember sitting in the shadows trying not to touch the sticky tables, making sure I could always see the door. He made us promise not to tell Mom where we’d been.

  Dixie remembers it all as an adventure, the best times we’d ever had with him. She’d tell stories to her friends about meeting the drummer from My First Crush at one of the bars. And how we named the cat Ringo Starr because Dad once interned at a studio in LA where Ringo and maybe one of the other Beatles recorded an album. After he was gone, she told her friends that Dad worked in “the music industry” in Austin and was coming back to Seattle to open a club and name it Dixie’s.

  I remember it more like the drummer from My First Crush throwing up in the bar halfway between the jukebox and the bathroom. And Ringo Starr disappeared off the fire escape only a few weeks after we got him.

  The internship at the studio in LA was the last real job my father had in music, and it didn’t even pay. I don’t count playing bouncer at bars in Austin as being in the music industry. I don’t think anyone would.

  And I want to tell Dixie’s friends that, actually, it was Gem. They were going to name the club Gem.

  “That’s all I have so far,” I’d told Mr. Bergstrom after I read it out loud. “I was going to write about my grandparents next but I had to do geometry homework instead.” I handed him the pages and he shuffled through them and didn’t say anything. “Is that what you wanted?” I asked. “Is it okay?”

  He nodded. “It’s really good.” He just stared at the pages and we were quiet for the longest time I remember us ever being quiet.

  “It’s kind of a sad story, I guess.”

  “Yeah,” he said, and looked at me. “It kind of is.”

  4.

  DIXIE ENDED up going home with Lia after school that day, and spent the night there. With the letter. I tried not to feel like she was punishing me somehow, like she’d made the plan with Lia just because she knew how bad I wanted to see it. I heard Mom come home in the night, but when she came to our bedroom door and said “Gem?” I pretended to be asleep.

  Then it was Saturday. Dixie came home around noon. Mom was still asleep and I sat at the table doing homework. Dixie dropped the letter onto the table.

  Dad’s handwriting made it hard to read, his script skinny and slanted to the left.

  Hey Dix,

  I tried calling the last number you gave me but I guess you got a new phone or something. I hope you’re still at this address because that email I had for you isn’t working either. Are you trying to hide from me or something? Ha. Anyway, I’ve got great news at least I think it’s great and it’s that I’m coming back to Seattle. After I left and everything I figured I’d get a fresh start, some new—

  “What does this say?” I pointed to the word and held the letter out to Dixie.

&n
bsp; “Dreams,” she said. “New dreams.” She pulled something from her bag and sat across from me. It was a burrito. Before I could ask for half of it, she said, “I got it for you. I already had one.”

  I slid it in front of me and kept reading.

  —dreams out here. But Dixie, there’s no water to look at to help you think, and no real mountains, and it’s hotter than goddamn hell all summer. Not to mention there are assholes everywhere you turn. So I thought I’d come back. I like my old dreams better anyway.

  I don’t like to say this because it seems like I shouldn’t have to report in to my kid, but I’m clean. Have been for a while. I want to see you and your sister but please don’t tell her I’m coming because she’ll worry. You know how she is. I want her to see how good I’m doing before she makes a judgment on me. Also I want to surprise your mom, same deal, so let’s keep this all between us.

  I held it out again to point to a sentence I couldn’t decipher, something about Mom. It ended with a question mark.

  “I can’t really read it, either,” Dixie said. “But I think the point is he wants to know if she has a boyfriend.”

  “Does he think Mom has been sitting around at home every night, in case he came back? After all that?”

  Dixie shrugged and turned away for a second, like she didn’t want me to see in her face how she still believed in some fantasy version of him, of them.

  Anyway, don’t bother writing back because I’ll be on my way. And we’ll be together soon, how ’bout that? Can’t wait to see my girl.

  Love,

  Dad

  Couldn’t wait to see his girl. Singular.

  Dixie watched me as I skimmed back over it. I want to see you and your sister. I latched onto “and your sister” and wished I could have been alone with his handwriting, his words, the paper he’d touched. I wished I could have understood what I felt, what the burn in my cheeks meant, the ache in my chest. He did want to see us, he said. Us. That was the ache, I think. The burn was probably for how he hadn’t even used my name, the name that had once been so important to him and my mother. Or so they’d said.