by Sara Zarr
“Could someone who had my number, like, track me?”
“Let me see your phone.” The girl examined it and said, “Yeah, probably. I mean, it’s not easy but it’s possible. If you’re really worried about someone finding you, just get a burner.”
“A what?”
“A burner. Cheap, with prepaid minutes. New number.”
“Like the one I had when I worked at the gift shop,” I said to Dixie.
The girl leaned on the counter, tapping her blue-painted nails on the glass. “That’s what I did when this guy I used to date was stalking me. I tossed my old phone, went through a few burners. I’d only give the numbers to people I trusted. If he found the number out, I threw the phone away and got a new one. Or I’d keep the phone but get a new SIM. Outsmarted that dickhead until he got tired of trying. They’re right over there,” she said, pointing to a rack along the wall.
“They’re untraceable?” I asked.
“If you pay with cash. Basically.” She studied us. “I mean, I assume the government isn’t after you.”
I followed Dixie to the display; she picked up a phone. “I’m getting one,” I said. “Then we’ll have something for emergencies and we can get rid of yours.”
She held the package and muttered, “I’m not throwing out my phone,” before handing it to me.
I paid for it and also for three refill cards, with probably more minutes than I’d ever use. The cashier set up the first card for me. “Good luck,” she said when she handed it back.
We left the store and looked for a place we could get some clean clothes. As we walked, a guy came up behind us and started talking. “What do you need? I got smokes, I got smoke, I got rock, I got molly.”
We didn’t turn. I imagined that he had X-ray vision and could see straight into my backpack.
“I know it’s early, ladies, but it looks like you have a long day ahead of you and you probably want a little help to get through it, right?”
Dixie held up her middle finger.
“Okay, okay, I can take a hint.” He kept walking with us, then got in front and turned, walking backward. He wasn’t much older than me. Seahawks knit cap, blond scruff on his face, baggy jeans. He looked back and forth between us. “You sisters?”
We didn’t answer.
“Nice,” he said with a laugh. “Nice.”
“Could you fuck off?” Dixie said. She grabbed my arm and walked faster.
He followed us down the street for a while, talking dirty, until he got bored and went to bother someone else. Dixie pulled me into a drugstore; we looked at the cheap three-packs of underwear in pastels I’d never in my life seen on Dixie. “It covers her belly button,” she said, pointing to the headless woman on the package. “I can’t wear these.”
“Who’s going to see you, other than me?”
“That’s not the point. The point of clothes is how you feel in them. I don’t want polyester grandma underwear bunching up around my ass, do you?”
“I guess not.” I moved down the aisle and found a similar three-pack of T-shirts. I took it off the hook.
“No,” Dixie said. “You will sweat like a pig in those and they also itch.”
“Why did you bring us in here if you hate everything?”
“I don’t know.” She grabbed some tube socks and glanced down the aisle. “We should put the money in these,” she whispered. “So it’s not all loose in your bag. Come on.”
We paid for the socks; then I followed her out and we walked up a few more blocks to a huge mall that Dixie had been to with Lia. The inside was all curving glass and soaring escalators and giant pillars holding it together. Dixie took me into one store, and after we found a few pairs of underwear she deemed cute enough for us, and one basic black T-shirt each, I checked the time. It was ten thirty. “We should get back down to the ferry terminal,” I said.
“He’s not going to find us here that fast.” She was riffling through a rack of coats. “You need a new jacket.”
“We said we wouldn’t spend—”
“Oh fuck that. If he didn’t want us spending the money, he shouldn’t have left it in our room, I guess.”
Like I’d been saying the whole time. I think she needed to hear it in her own voice.
She made me try on not only jackets but jeans and shirts, too. Things that I thought looked good or at least fine, she frowned at and took away. She came in and out of the dressing room with new armloads of stuff to try.
We’d both always worn secondhand and cheap, but she knew how to put things together so they looked good. My clothes were jeans stretched out by other people’s butts and knees, shirts where someone pulled on a thread and kept pulling. Sweaters . . . The sweaters were the worst. No matter how much you washed them or aired them out, they always smelled like Goodwill and the bodies of strangers. I’d tended to look like I was made of someone else’s bad decisions, and I’d wished Dixie would help me, like she was helping me now.
When I pulled on what felt like the twentieth pair of stiff, dark jeans, she said, “Those.”
“They’re too long,” I said.
“No, they’re perfect.” She knelt and cuffed the bottoms and turned me to face the mirror.
I looked tougher, older. More like her. “I don’t know.”
“They’re perfect,” she repeated. “But now you need boots.”
Our eyes met in the mirror. “Dixie . . .”
“If you’re going to disappear into the woods or whatever you’re going to do, you need some good boots. And you’re getting this sweater, too.” She held up a hooded gray wool zip-up. A coat—a peacoat style but lighter weight—was already in our buy pile.
I didn’t argue. What was a few hundred dollars out of almost thirty thousand anyway? While we were in the dressing room, we stuffed the bundles of money into the socks we’d bought at the drugstore, leaving out enough to pay for the clothes and a handful of money for each of us so we wouldn’t have to dig into the backpack for every little thing.
That store didn’t have shoes; we moved on. It was getting close to noon. “This has to be our last stop,” I told Dixie when we went into a place with boots in the window.
Dixie tried on at least as many boots as I did. “Coming with me to the woods?” I said it like a joke, but I really wondered.
“The concrete jungle, maybe.”
This time I chose for myself—boots that were dark brown suede, pull-on, a little higher than my ankle. They were lined, so they were soft and warm inside, but they had a rugged sole. I could see how they’d go with the new jeans and everything else, and I felt stable walking around.
“Those are good,” Dixie said. “But you should try these on, too.” She kicked another of the boxes toward me.
“No. I’m getting these.”
She smiled, only slightly. “Okay, then.” She picked out a pair of electric blue Doc Martens for herself. “I’ve been wanting these for like a year,” she confessed.
I didn’t even want to know the prices on what we’d gotten. Dixie went up to pay. Then we found a bathroom and changed into our new stuff in separate stalls. When I came out, I started to put the pair of jeans I’d left home in into my backpack, then thought, no.
“Throw it all away.” I’d said it aloud.
Dixie watched me ball the jeans up, and the stretched-out Goodwill sweater, and my torn jacket, and finally I dumped my old shoes. I shoved it all deep into the bathroom trash can. She watched me check myself in the mirror, watched me see how different I looked. In black and gray, new denim and good wool. Without speaking, she stood behind me and combed her fingers through my hair. She twisted it around and pinned it back with bobby pins from her own hair, which now came loose.
Her touch was gentler than I’d come to expect from Dixie. I felt her breath on my neck when she said, “There.”
“There,” I echoed, staring straight into my eyes.
18.
ON THE walk from the store to the dock, I understood wh
at Dixie meant about the point of clothes being how they made you feel. In the new clothes, I was a different person, solid on my legs. Strong. My face, with my hair back, felt exposed, like people could see all my flaws, all my angles. But it felt good to not hide, to not apologize for existing.
I hadn’t been on a ferry since seventh grade, when my class took a trip to a marine park on one of the islands. Which island, I can’t remember, or much about the park. I do remember standing up on deck with Miriam Reed when we were still friends, and the way birds would fly right next to the ferry, and the wind in my face, all of it making me feel a kind of freedom I never had before. This time, Dixie and I sat inside, on benches facing each other, near an electrical outlet. I kept my backpack snug between me and the large window while my new phone charged, and I sensed something like that same freedom, a space opening up inside me where I’d only felt smallness before.
It wasn’t only me who noticed—Dixie kept staring. “Shit, Gem. You should see yourself.” She took her charger out of her bag.
“How come you never helped me before when I asked? With clothes and stuff?”
“It’s not just the clothes.” She struggled with the packaging of the charger.
“Yeah, but—”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I’m a selfish bitch?”
“I’m not saying that.”
“I know. But are you going to be mad at me forever? For every time I wasn’t who you wanted for a sister?”
It surprised me, that she saw it that way. “No. Are you?”
She suddenly dropped the package. “Fuck! Fucker.” She’d torn off part of her fingernail; there was blood.
I resisted taking her hand to check the cut, like I might have before. “You used to like me,” I said. “When you were little.”
“Gem . . .” She cradled her hurt hand in the other. “Don’t.”
We had this time. We had this little bit of time together for being honest. It felt sharp and finite, like it could end any second without warning. “I know you want me to be different than I am,” I said. “But you could have helped me be more what you wanted by actually talking to me. Telling me things.”
She squeezed her finger. “I need to go get a paper towel.”
She stalked off. A gull flew alongside the window, pumping its wings and moving at the same speed as the ferry, exactly like I remembered birds doing on that seventh-grade trip, as if it wanted to be close to the boat, the people. One of its eyes seemed to stare straight at me.
Maybe I could ride the ferry for days, getting on different ones and using the money a little bit at a time for food and shelter, if I needed it. Maybe I could last out here off and on ferries for . . . I don’t know. Months? Would anyone notice me? Would anyone—Dad, Mom—even look for me? For reasons other than getting the money back, I mean.
The gull peeled off and flew up out of sight.
Dixie returned from the bathroom and picked up our conversation. “You’re not exactly big on personal sharing, you know.”
“I don’t have anything to share.”
She stared at me and then let out an incredulous laugh. “Okay. Your life is totally normal. I get to high school and find out you don’t have friends, and you never told me that. You’re in Bergstrom’s office all the time and I have no idea what you talk about. You’re a secret smoker. Yeah, nothing to see here, okay, Gem.”
I unplugged my phone and put it, and the charger, in my bag. “Is your finger okay?”
“It hurts but yes.”
“Let’s go up on deck.” I wanted to be in the wind and open air.
We shouldered our bags and climbed the steps. I held the rail to steady myself from the very slight rocking of the boat on the water. Strong in my boots and warm in my coat, I led Dixie to the front of the ferry. The wind blew harder than I expected, but I liked it—the sting on my face and the sense of steady movement, us gliding away from the city and the people we’d been there.
After a few minutes, we walked around to the back and leaned over to watch the foaming trail of water behind us.
“I lied,” Dixie said. “About going on the Ferris wheel with Dad.”
For a second I didn’t understand what she was saying. I thought she meant she’d lied about not enjoying it because she hadn’t wanted my feelings to get any more hurt than they already were.
“It never happened,” she continued. “You want to know about me? I’m telling you.” Her eyes had that Dixie defiance, ready for me to be mad at her.
I wasn’t, though. I tried, but the resentment for her that I could usually find in a second wasn’t there. How could I have been mad at Dixie so long for wanting exactly what I did? What anyone in our situation would want? Like she said, it wasn’t her fault. Sometimes it was just hard to accept that things weren’t how they should be.
Her hair blew around her face; her defiance had evaporated. I put my arm around her, half expecting her to shove me away. But she turned and fell into me and I held her, close. The way she cried at fourteen was different from how she’d cried at six. No big sobs. No drama. Just a quiet shaking and the pressure of her fingertips digging into my sides, my hands, stinging in the wind, pressed to her back.
She pulled away, red-eyed and blotchy. She swiped her sleeve across her nose. “I’m freezing.”
We went back down and I managed to get her charger out of its package. Dixie plugged her phone in and we both stared at it as it came to life. One alert after another poured in—a stream of messages, a couple of voice mail notifications. Dad’s texts alternated between angry and sorry.
answer your goddamn texts dix!!! this is IMPORTANT!
Then:
I’m not mad just call me
In another one he asked:
is gem with you??
It was the first mention of me since it all began.
There were also messages from Mom, who seemed to have no idea what was really going on; she’d only sent a check-in text to see how Dixie’s night at Lia’s was and if Dad had bothered her anymore. He’d come by the apartment, she said, but he wouldn’t tell her what he wanted. She was working a shift at the bar tonight but she’d see us later.
“Listen to the voice mails,” I said. “We should know what he’s thinking.”
“I don’t want to know what he’s thinking. I don’t care what he’s thinking. I don’t want to hear his stupid fucking voice. If he tries calling again, there’s no way I’m picking up.” She jiggled her leg and stared out the window, then turned to me suddenly. “Let me see yours. Your phone.”
I handed it over, and she started punching in numbers.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m adding contacts. Mom and Dad and Lia.” She glanced up at me. “I don’t know. We got this as backup, right? Just in case. Anyway, if they get your number somehow, don’t you want to know it’s them so you don’t accidentally answer?”
“They’re never going to get my number.” If that happened, I’d do what the girl at the phone store said and get rid of it.
Dixie finished with it and handed it back. An announcement came over the ferry’s loudspeaker that we’d be docking in five minutes; drivers should get back to their cars. My next decision was here and I had no idea what to do. “We need to listen to the voice mails,” I said. I didn’t like not knowing.
She nodded. “After we get off the ferry.”
The other passengers collected their stuff and threw out their trash from the café and either went back to their cars or gathered at the pedestrian ramp. We sat still, charging her phone as much as we could until the last possible moment. Through the windows all around us the island drifted closer. Dixie fixed her gaze on the trees, the smaller boats that filled the harbor. It started to rain, fine drops hitting the Sound.
Dixie shook her head, then asked, “How come nothing good ever happens to us?”
I knew she didn’t mean the rain.
19.
WE CAME off the ferry and Dix
ie went into the small terminal to use the bathroom.
I stayed outside. I flipped the hood of my sweater up to keep the drizzle off while I walked a little bit away from the terminal area for a better view, and to get farther from the exhaust of the ferry. I gazed up at the hills; they were covered in evergreens. Even in the rain—especially in the rain—it was beautiful. I thought of Dixie’s joke about me living in the woods.
Why not? I mean, not camping, but maybe someday having a little cabin or cottage. It could be tiny—one room and a bathroom. I wouldn’t be picky and I don’t need a lot. And if I had the money, not just some but all of it . . .
I couldn’t do this one day at a time forever, waiting for Dixie to figure out what she wanted to do. As if she had a choice. She wasn’t even fifteen yet. Despite what Dixie said, I had a feeling my mom would let me go my own way; I’d be eighteen in a little less than a year anyway. She’d never let Dixie go that easily. If Dixie came with me, we wouldn’t be starting a new life, we’d just be running and it wouldn’t be a game, and I’d be responsible for her.
I couldn’t do it. Everything I had to give, I needed to give to myself.
Dixie had to go home. And I had to make a real plan.
With the money on my back and Dixie in the bathroom and the ferry boarding for the return trip to Seattle, I thought: What better way to make sure Dixie didn’t limit my options, didn’t get scared into telling Dad where we were or give him the money, than for me to just . . . take it, and leave? That was my plan A to begin with, and here I was back in the same place, trying to decide if I was capable of going without saying good-bye to her, if I was capable of abandoning her.
She’ll be okay, I told myself. She’d understand now. She had enough to get back, with the cash in her pocket left from all our shopping. I could get on the return ferry, that minute. When she figured out I’d left, she could get a ticket for the next one and go home and tell Dad whatever she wanted to tell him. I could lose myself somewhere on the Seattle side for a few hours or a day. Then ferry back over and, I don’t know, hitchhike deeper into the island? Or go far away, to another state. By myself, responsible for only me.
