Chapter 1
I never met Dixie before juvie. I’m sure there are a lot of stories about her, but I’m not in with the “in” crowd. I’m not in with any crowd. I’m that kid at the back of the class you probably didn’t notice, vibing with the music in my head and watching pigeons fly past the school windows. I don’t have a podcast or a vlog or social media, since I don’t have any friends. Or cool hair or clothes or …. anything. I’m just…Carol.
I have flat, bored looking hair that hangs to my shoulders, eyes that are somewhere in a swamp between green, brown, and grey, and a body type that isn’t fat, but isn’t skinny either. I’m not petite like Crystal Lane. I’m not tall like Kailynne Somersby. Just your average…average. Sorry to disappoint. There is literally nothing about me.
If you’re wondering what I did this summer (not that anyone is), it’s pretty pathetic. I enrolled in summer school. To be clear, I had no failing grades. I had no winning ones either. This will just put me ahead to get into College, which I can’t afford. I’ve been trying to get a job, but nobody’s hiring. Least of all 14 year old kids with limp hair and few prospects.
Dixie Dawson’s summer was much more interesting, at least from the look of it. She showed up on the first day of school with a new look that turned heads instantly. Short hair in stylish waves. Long, slim fingers clutching a silver vape that blinked like diamonds in the sunlight. Some guy dropped her off on a sweet e-bike. He was covered in tattoos. Can you even legally get a tattoo at our age? IS HE EVEN OUR AGE?
None of my business. Dixie had her own friends, and her own problems. She spent the first day of school in and out of the office for vaping on school property, and rumours were flying all day about whether it was vape juice or weed.
“Weed’s legal anyways.”
“If you’re over 18.”
“Who’s that guy she was with?”
“Think they’ve done it?”
“Probably, who wouldn’t?”
I wouldn’t. The guy looked kind of gross. Like the guys you see hanging out in the side parking lot of the high school selling sugar cubes laced with acid and pills from other people’s dirty prescription bottles. The labels crumpled and falling off.
Dixie never talked to me, anyway. Neither did anyone else. Including the teachers and my parents. Any information I got, I had to overhear. Honestly, though, I’m too distracted to hear much of anything. Most days I just stare out the window, watching the birds.
I only had one class with her, anyway. And not even a good class, like English or drama where she might reveal her inner thoughts and bare her soul, or whatever. Not even Science, where I might find out if she was an electric train nut or an animal rights activist. Everyone’s asking me why she did it, who she is. Who she is to me.
All I know is that she knows Pi to the 7th digit, understands how integers work, and can subtract a couple of numbers pretty adequately without messing up. I know she talks too much in class, kicks John Bell’s chair when he “pisses her off”, and gets kicked out of class every other day for one thing or another. If it’s not the dress code (which Dixie thinks is sexist and archaic) or her attitude, it’s her behaviour.
But there’s nothing I can tell you about that, that you don’t already know. Everyone at school knows. They all know how she is, and if they cared, they would all know that I’m jealous. I want to be the kind of person other people see and…remember. The kind of person they still see in their heads when they walk out of the room.
There is one thing I remember that nobody else knows. Nobody except Curtis Burgess, and he’s not going to tell you this. It was the first day of school, in the chill lounge. The room they say is for all the students to protect the kids who need to go in there to panic attack out or come down off a high or whatever their damage is. You can pull the shades down and chill on a ridiculously oversized bean bag. I go in there sometimes. To read. Or cry. Depends on the day.
It doesn’t lock. Obvious reasons. But you don’t go in there if someone else is using the space. So I was waiting to use it and Curtis pushes past me to storm in there, and he starts yelling at Dixie.
Curtis says he’s on the spectrum but he’s undiagnosed and a lot of people think he’s faking. But what do I care? A lot of people think I’m faking, and I can always just cry on the toilet or go home if the chill lounge is taken.
Not even kidding, I’m so invisible that I can go home in the middle of the day and teachers just mark me as present.
Anyway, Curtis was screaming at her to get out. That’s HIS seat and only HE can sit in it, and she needs to MOVE NOW.
Dixie just sat there like “No.”
I poked my head in the door. He grabbed her by the shoulders and tried to drag her off the bean bag. She wrapped her legs around it like a kid on a kettlebell and it came off the floor with her, two feet into the air. He was twice her size and 50 times any of our strength, but she sat there with this weirdly pleasant, secretary smile on her face, lifting the bean bag with her legs and reacting not-at-all to his shrill screaming and quickly progressing rage.
I went to get…someone…anyone…but there was no need. Curtis came flying out the door, red in the face, and punched the wall. I looked in on Dixie, and her face looked red, too. Do you think he hit her?
She was still wearing that detached, out of it smile.
