Gem & Dixie

by Sara Zarr

  It was dark and we went by it too fast to see, but I got an impression of arching trees and fenced-in front yards. It was the kind of street I wouldn’t mind living on someday. I only pictured myself, alone. Not with a husband and not with children, not even with a roommate. Just me. Quiet mornings and peaceful evenings and a fenced-in front yard.

  Kip made a turn off the main road, and another turn, and slowed. “Parking is gonna suck.” She glanced at me. “If you have like five bucks, throw that in the vase or whatever when you go in. To help with the snacks and drinks.”

  Dixie laughed. “Yeah, we have five bucks.”

  When we finally parked and Kip got out, I turned to Dixie. “Don’t say anything to anyone about us or what we’re doing here. Just say we know Kip from . . . through our parents or something.”

  “I’m not an idiot.”

  I got out, and as I pulled my backpack onto my shoulder, it brushed against my tattoo. I winced.

  Kip noticed. “You need some Advil or something?”

  “If there is any.”

  “So you’re supposed to know us through our parents or some shit,” Dixie said to Kip.

  “Plausible. My parents know a lot of people.”

  When we got in sight of the house where the party was, Dixie strode ahead of us straight for the front door, where some kids were crowding through and light shone out.

  Kip turned to me. “What happened? You guys were kind of getting along for a minute in the tattoo place.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We were.”

  23.

  AS WE walked in, I caught a glimpse of myself in the entryway mirror and remembered I had on my new clothes and this is how people would see me. This is how Kip saw me. A little tough, a little badass. A girl that just got a tattoo. The truth, though, was it was my first party—the first one since cake-and-ice-cream parties from childhood.

  A big pottery bowl in the hallway overflowed with dollar bills. I threw in a five.

  “People usually put their coats and stuff in one of the bedrooms, if you want to keep your backpack in there.”

  “That’s okay.” I craned to try to see where Dixie had gone, but she’d already disappeared into the house. I looked back at Kip to ask where a bathroom was. I could take one of the sockfulls of money and put it in my pocket.

  She grabbed my arm and pulled me down the hall. “Come on. Let’s get a drink. Do you drink?”

  “I . . . No.”

  “There’s water and soda and stuff. Just have whatever you want. Don’t worry, I won’t desert you. I know it’s weird to be at a party where you don’t know anyone.”

  She brought me into the huge living room, where most of the people were. It wasn’t like I’d always imagined this kind of party would be. The music wasn’t blasting loud, people weren’t shouting and dancing with their hands up. I guess all I knew about parties was from movies, which seemed to have it completely wrong. This was just a room full of people hanging out, talking and laughing.

  A girl with long blond hair, wearing jeans and a pink sweater, spotted Kip and came straight over. “Where have you been all day? Mom is pissed.” I studied her face; she and Kip looked exactly alike, more than regular sisters do. They must have been twins.

  “It’s not your problem,” Kip said. “This is Gem.”

  “It is my problem when I’m the one who ends up making excuses for you, and by the way I don’t enjoy that at all.” She thrust her hand out. “Hi. I’m Jessa. There’s a keg in the backyard if you want a beer. Other stuff in the kitchen,” she said, pointing. To Kip she said, “Jeremy and Jonathan are here, too. Consider yourself warned.”

  “Great.”

  “Come find me before you leave.” Jessa smiled at me. “Nice to meet you. Don’t drink the punch unless you want to forget everything that happens tonight.”

  She skipped off toward the keg.

  “Jeremy and Jonathan?”

  “Our brothers. Yes, they’re twins, too. Freshmen in college, so they’re pathetic for being here.” Embarrassed, Kip glanced at me. “My real first name is Julia.” She waited. Then: “Get it? Julia, Jessa, Jeremy, Jonathan? It’s horrible. Our parents are also both twins. My dad’s name is Mike and his twin is Matt. My mom and aunt: Allison and Amanda. It’s a generational disorder, the naming thing. My middle name is Kipling, my grandmother’s maiden name. So. Kip.”

  “I like Kip,” I said.

  “I’m never having kids. There’s like a hundred-and-twenty-percent chance I’d have twins, too. No way. Let’s get some food.”

  I followed her to the kitchen. We loaded up paper plates with little mountains of chips and crackers and cheese. “Who brought celery sticks?” she asked a guy filling a glass with water at the sink. “Who brings celery sticks to a party?”

  “Your brother,” he said after he’d turned around.

  Kip rolled her eyes. “Jeremy. He’s on this paleo thing to make weight for wrestling.”

  The guy drank his water and looked at me, and didn’t turn away. Did I seem weird? He didn’t have the expression on his face people get when they think I’m weird. His hair was dark; he was big. Big and tall. I said hi. Then he asked Kip, “Where were you today? You missed that huge test in geometry.”

  “Yeeeaaah, I guess I kind of didn’t want to take that. Anyway,” she said, “these old friends of my parents are in town, so I had to show their daughters around.” She looked at me. “They’re practically like my cousins.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Gem,” I said.

  “Jen?”

  “Gem,” Kip said. “Like a diamond.”

  “Nice. I’m Sefa,” he said.

  “She just got her first tattoo. Look.” She put her plate down and took my arm and slid my sweater sleeve up gently. The stars, through the plastic wrap, were deep black against my reddening skin.

  Sefa came closer, loomed. I felt small next to him and not sure I wanted to show anyone my tattoo yet. “Did it hurt?” he asked.

  “Not too much. It hurts more now.”

  “Want some punch? You’ll feel better.”

  Kip and I exchanged a glance; she smirked.

  “No thanks.” I pulled my sleeve down. “I need to find my sister.”

  “I’m gonna get you something for your arm,” Kip said. “I’ll look for you in a minute.”

  I left my cheese and crackers behind and went back out into the hall, adjusting the backpack on my shoulder, wondering which door led to a bathroom. Then I felt someone tugging on the backpack. I whipped around to see Sefa close behind me.

  “Whoa,” he said after my fast reaction. “Sorry. Just saying hi.”

  “I need to find my sister,” I said again.

  “That’s cool,” he said. “I’m not following you, just going in the same direction you are because that’s where I’m going, so don’t worry about it. I’ll stay three feet behind.”

  “I know, I—”

  “You look a little freaked out.”

  “I’m not.”

  I walked outside; Sefa went to the keg. Dixie was sitting in a corner of the yard, drinking out of a red plastic cup, with some guy. Sitting close like she’d sat close to Kip when they first met. While I watched, she handed him her cup to hold and shifted so she could lift the back of her shirt. Showing her tattoo.

  I went over. “It matches mine,” I said. I pulled up my sleeve to show the guy.

  “Cool.” His eyes flicked to mine. “You’re the sister.”

  The sister. “What’s she telling you?” I asked.

  He shrugged and smiled in a way I didn’t like. I looked into the cup Dixie had been drinking out of. “Is that the punch?” I asked.

  “It’s beer,” Dixie said. “Did you want something?”

  “I think we should leave soon.” I’d never seen Dixie drink and I didn’t know how she’d be. Thinking about how Mom and Dad were with it, I got anxious, and my instinct was to get her away.

  Dixie took her beer back fr
om him. “We literally just got here.”

  “Stay. I’ll give you a ride home,” the guy said to Dixie.

  “Yeah,” Dixie said to me. “I’ll go with Ryan.” She scooted closer to him and stared at me.

  “Can I talk to you for a second?”

  She shook her head. “No. You can’t.”

  I moved toward her. As if I could take her arm and drag her away, as if she were six years old.

  “You should show Ryan what’s in your backpack, Gem.” She leaned on him. I stopped moving. “There’s like thirty thousand dollars in there. Approximately.”

  Ryan laughed like Dixie had made a joke. I laughed, too, a forced laugh. Dixie held my eyes intensely.

  “Right,” I said. I patted the shoulder strap. “Me and my piles of money.”

  “Half of it should actually be mine,” Dixie told Ryan. “Sort of like an inheritance.”

  I tried to understand what she was doing. Her tears at the tattoo place. Messing with me now, knowing I wouldn’t find it funny. Why she was saying the things she was saying, in front of everyone. And how angry she seemed, how hurt. She’s mad at Mom and Dad, I reminded myself, for using her, trying to control her to get what they want.

  I stared back at her, as hard as she stared at me, except what I wanted—what I’d always wanted—was to see myself through her eyes. This time, though, it wasn’t to know how good I was, how needed I was. It was to see truth, for once.

  Maybe she wasn’t mad at the wrong people. Maybe she was actually mad at me, and maybe she was right to be. Maybe that was the truth. Or part of it.

  Kip appeared next to me and held out her hand. There were three pills in it. “Ibuprofen.”

  I put them in my mouth and reached for Dixie’s beer cup. She let me take it, still exposing me with her stare while I took a swallow to wash down the pills. I’d never tasted beer or any other alcohol—it was bitter and disgusting, like drinking vomit, but I made myself not show it on my face as I handed the cup back to Dixie.

  Then I slid the backpack off and put it at her feet. “You can have it.”

  Finally she blinked. She looked down at it, then back up at me. I could see her trying to work out what was going on in my head or maybe in her own head. She tapped it with her blue Doc. “I don’t want to lug your shit around.”

  Kip said, “Just put it in the room with all the coats.”

  “Let’s go buy a car,” Ryan joked.

  “It’s not for you,” I said to him.

  Ryan reached for the backpack. “Is there really money in here?”

  “What?” Kip asked, confused.

  “Don’t touch that,” I said.

  Dixie nudged it away from him with her boot. “If by ‘money’ you mean Gem’s dirty laundry, then yeah.” I could hear a slight tremble in her voice that no one but me would catch. She kicked it back toward me. “I don’t want this.”

  I swallowed. “Watch it for me. I’m going to go have a smoke.” I turned to Kip. “Do you want one?”

  “Gem,” Dixie said, “wait.” She stood and picked up the backpack.

  “I’m just going for a walk,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”

  Ryan pulled her down onto his lap and laced his fingers around her waist. Kip took my arm and we left.

  * * *

  “These are the worst cigarettes I’ve ever tasted, by the way,” Kip said after we both got our Haciendas lit. We were halfway down the block, away from the party. This street, like the one Kip said she lived on, had canopies of trees budding with new leaves.

  “Oh.” I didn’t know cigarettes tasted any other way but bad. “They were my dad’s.” It felt strange, walking without anything on my back. My body was light, as if I could float up off the ground if I let myself.

  “Were?”

  “He’s alive and everything. I took them after he moved out, so now they’re mine.”

  She flicked hers to the ground after only a few drags. “What’s going on with you and Dixie?” We turned a corner and saw the moon, a slim crescent. “Not that you have to tell me.”

  It was a story impossible to tell unless I started at the beginning. And I wasn’t even sure where the beginning was. “It’s complicated” was all I could say. We turned another corner and now we were facing the wind. My Hacienda went out; I tossed it into the gutter.

  “She seems like a pain in the ass. And not that bright, either, if she’s hanging all over a guy like Ryan after knowing him for two seconds.”

  I stopped walking and put my hands in my pockets, gripping the fabric inside. “She’s not stupid.”

  Kip stopped, too, and shrugged. “Okay. Well, you know her better than I do. Those are my first impressions and I only mean—”

  “We’ve been through a lot. She does what she has to do. I do what I have to do.”

  “I didn’t mean anything,” Kip said, laughing as she gripped my shoulders. “I thought you needed to vent. But if what you want to do is stick up for her, then you don’t need to vent and we can go back to the party and have fun.”

  I couldn’t talk. I didn’t want to move, to go back to the party or not go. This was my whole problem, being stuck for one reason or another. I opened my hands in my pockets and tried to draw a deep breath, but I couldn’t.

  Her grip on my shoulders loosened into something more gentle. “Are you about to cry?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’m sorry if I said something wrong,” Kip said. “I know I don’t really know you. I didn’t want to piss you off or anything. I thought that’s what you wanted, someone to take your side.”

  I forced breath in. “You have a big family. Your parents pay attention, right? Like they know when you come and go and where you basically are.” I pointed over my shoulder. “Practically your whole family is at that party.”

  Kip nodded.

  “Dixie’s all I have. We only have each other. She’s my sister. She’s my little sister.”

  “Okay, I get it. I’m sorry,” she repeated.

  I stepped back from her and wiped my coat sleeve across my face. “She’s the only one who knows.”

  Kip must have thought I meant some specific piece of information, some big secret, because she asked, “Knows what?”

  To me, the answer was obvious: “What it’s like to be us.”

  24.

  WHEN WE got back to the party, Dixie was gone.

  Kip and I checked all over the house, and I braced myself in case we walked in on Dixie and Ryan doing something I didn’t want to see. They weren’t in any of the rooms. In the one where people had tossed their stuff, I dug through the coats, checked under the bed and in the closet, looking for the backpack, just in case.

  Then one of Kip’s brothers told us Ryan and Dixie had taken off right after we went for our walk. “Where?” Kip said.

  “I didn’t know it was my job to ask,” he said, holding his hands up. “I don’t even know who she is.” He had the same nose as Kip and Jessa, small and flat.

  I could see Kip about to yell at him. I stopped her and said, “It’s okay. Maybe you could take me back to the motel now.”

  People had stopped their conversations to watch us.

  “If you want,” Kip said.

  Her brother dropped his hands. “Sorry,” he said to me.

  We went out to the car, silent. Then, while she was letting the defroster clear the windshield, she said, “I don’t think you need to worry about her. Ryan’s your basic dickhead but he’s not dangerous.”

  “I’m not worried about that. She’s always been able to handle herself with guys. That’s not something I’d be able to help her with anyway. Don’t know anything about it.”

  “Yeah, me neither. Well, not much.” Impatient with the defroster, Kip swiped her arm across the last bit of fog and drove down the block.

  I was thinking about what I’d done, leaving the money with Dixie. If I regretted it. Maybe it was stupid. But maybe there were some things worse than being stupid.
r />   Kip turned onto the main road. “Do you want to go look for her? Do you want to call her?”

  “She doesn’t have a phone.” Well, she did. My phone, the burner, was in the backpack. But I didn’t have the number memorized.

  “I can probably get Ryan’s number from Jessa.”

  “No,” I said. “Could you take me back to the motel?” Dixie would turn up there eventually. Or she wouldn’t, and then I’d decide what to do next.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m tired. We . . .” I looked at her. “You probably figured out we left home.”

  “Kinda. I thought maybe.”

  “Have you ever done that?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Have you wanted to?”

  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.”