“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 her 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.