The Tenth Circle

The Tenth Circle

showered twice a day, so that she could smell like the pear soap that her mother always put in her Christmas stocking. The new Trixie felt dirty, no matter how many times she scrubbed herself. The old Trixie felt like part of a group. The new Trixie felt alone, even when she was surrounded by people. The old Trixie would have taken one look at the new Trixie and dismissed her as a total loser.

There was a knock on her door. That was new, too - her father used to just stick his head in, but even he'd become sensitive to the fact that she jumped at her own shadow. “Hey,” he said.

“You feel up to company?”

She didn't, but she nodded, thinking he meant himself, until he pushed the door wider and she saw that woman Janice, the sexual assault advocate who'd been at the hospital with her. She was wearing a sweater with a jack-o'-lantern on it, although it was closer to Christmas, and enough eyeshadow to cover a battalion of supermodels. “Oh,” Trixie said. “It's you.” She sounded rude, and there was something about that that made a little spark flare under her heart. Being a bitch felt surprisingly good, a careful compromise that nearly made up for the fact that she couldn't ever be herself again.

“I'll just, um, let you two talk,” Trixie's father said, and even though she tried to send him silent urgent messages with her eyes to keep him from leaving her alone with this woman, he couldn't hear her SOS.

“So,” Janice said, after he closed the door. “How are you holding up?”

Trixie shrugged. How had she not noticed at the hospital how much this woman's voice annoyed her? Like a Zen canary.

“I guess you're still sort of overwhelmed. That's perfectly normal.”

“Normal,” Trixie repeated sarcastically. “Yeah, that's exactly how I'd describe myself right now.”

“Normal's relative,” Janice said.

If it was relative, Trixie thought, then it was the crazy uncle that nobody could stand to be around at family functions, the one who talked about himself in the third person and ate only blue foods and whom everyone else made fun of on the way home.

“It's a whole bunch of baby steps. You'll get there.” For the past forty-eight hours, Trixie had felt like she was swimming underwater. She would hear people talking and it might as well

have been Croatian for all that she could understand the words. When it got to be too quiet, she was sure that she heard Jason's voice, soft as smoke, curling into her ear.

“It gets a little easier every day,” Janice said, and Trixie all of a sudden hated her with a passion. What the hell did Janice know? She wasn't sitting here, so tired that the insides of her bones ached. She didn't understand how even right now, Trixie wished she could fall asleep, because the only thing she had to look forward to was the five seconds when she woke up in the morning and hadn't remembered everything, yet.

“Sometimes it helps to get it all out,” Janice suggested. “Play an instrument. Scream in the shower. Write it all down in a journal.”

The last thing Trixie wanted to do was write about what had happened, unless she got to burn it when she was done.

"Lots of women find it helpful to join a survivors' group . .

."

“So we can all sit around and talk about how we feel like shit?”

Trixie exploded. Suddenly she wanted Janice to crawl back from whatever hole good Samaritans came from. She didn't want to make believe that she had a snowball's chance in hell of fitting back into her room, her life, this world. “You know,” she said, “this has been real, but I think I'd rather contemplate suicide or something fun like that. I don't need you checking up on me.”

“Trixie . . .”

“You have no idea what I feel like,” Trixie shouted. “So don't stand here and pretend we're in this together. You weren't there that night. That was just me.”

Janice stepped forward, until she was close enough for Trixie to touch. “It was 1972 and I was fifteen. I was walking home and I took a shortcut through the elementary school playground. There was a man there and he said he'd lost his dog. He wanted to know if I'd help him look. When I was underneath the slide, he knocked me down and raped me.”

Trixie stared at her, speechless.

“He kept me there for three hours. The whole time, all I could think about was how I used to play there after school. The boys and the girls always kept to separate sides of the jungle gym. We used to dare each other. We'd run up to the boys' side, and then back to safety.”

Trixie looked down at her feet. “I'm sorry,” she whispered.

“Baby steps,” Janice said.

* * *

That weekend, Laura learned that there are no cosmic referees. Time-outs do not get called, not even when your world has taken a blow that renders you senseless. The dishwasher still needs to be emptied and the hamper overflows with dirty clothes and the high school buddy you haven't spoken to in six months calls to catch up, not realizing that you cannot tell her what's been going on in your life without breaking down. The twelve students in your class section still expect you to show up on Monday morning. Laura had anticipated hunkering down with Trixie, protecting her while she licked her wounds. However, Trixie wanted to be by herself, and that left Laura wandering a house that was really Daniel's domain. They were still dancing around each other, a careful choreography that involved leaving a room the moment he entered, lest they have to truly communicate.

“I'm going to take a leave of absence from the college,” she had told Daniel on Sunday, when he was reading the newspaper. But hours later, when they were lying on opposite sides of the bed that tremendous elephant of the affair snug between them - he had brought it up again. “Maybe you shouldn't,” he said. She had looked at him carefully, not sure what he was trying to imply. Did he not want her around 24/7, because it was too uncomfortable? Did he think she cared more about her career than her daughter?

“Maybe it will help Trixie,” he added, “if she sees that it's business as usual.”

Laura had looked up at the ceiling, at a watermark in the shape of a penguin. “What if she needs me?”

“Then I'll call you,” Daniel replied coolly. “And you can come right home.”

His words were a slap - the last time he'd called her, she hadn't answered.

The next morning, she fished for a pair of stockings and one of her work skirts. She packed a breakfast she could eat in the car and she left Trixie a note. As she drove, she became aware of how the more distance she put between herself and her home, the lighter she felt - until by the time she reached the gates of the college, she was certain that the only thing anchoring her was her seat belt.

When Laura arrived at her classroom, the students were already clustered around the table, involved in a heated discussion. She'd missed this easy understanding of who she was, where she belonged, the comfort of intellectual sparring. Snippets of the conversation bled into the hallway. I heard from my cousin, who goes to the high school. . . crucified. . . had it coming. For a moment Laura hesitated outside the door, wondering how she could have been naive enough to believe this horrible thing had happened to Trixie, when in truth it had happened to all three of them. Taking a deep breath, she walked into the room, and twelve pairs of eyes turned to her in utter silence.

“Don't stop on my account,” she said evenly. The undergraduates shifted uncomfortably. Laura had so badly wanted to settle into the comfort zone of academia - a place so fixed and immutable that Laura would be assured she could pick up just where she left off - but to her surprise, she no longer seemed to fit. The college was the same; so were the students. It was Laura herself who'd changed.

“Professor Stone,” one of the students said, “are you okay?” Laura blinked as their faces swam into focus before her. “No,” she said, suddenly exhausted by the thought of having to deceive anyone else anymore. “I'm not.” Then she stood up - leaving her notes, her coat, and her baffled class - and walked into the striking snow, heading back to where she should have been all along.

* * *

“Do it,” Trixie said, and she squeezed her eyes shut. She was at Live and Let Dye, a salon within walking distance of her home that catered to the blue-haired set and that, under normal circumstances, she wouldn't have been caught dead in. But this was her first venture out of the house, and in spite of the fact that Janice had given her father a pamphlet about how not to be overprotective, he was reluctant to let Trixie go too far. “If you're not back in an hour,” her father had said, “I'm coming after you.”

She imagined him, even now, waiting by the bay window that offered the best view of their street, so that he'd see her the minute she came back into view. But she'd made it this far, and she wasn't going to let the outing go to waste. Janice had said that when it came to making a decision, she should make a list of pros and cons - and as far as Trixie could tell, anything that made her forget the girl she used to be could only be a good thing.

“You've got quite a tail here,” the ancient hairdresser said.

“You could donate it to Locks of Love.”

“What's that?”

“A charity that makes wigs for cancer patients.” Trixie stared at herself in the mirror. She liked the idea of helping someone who might actually be worse off than she was. She liked the idea of someone who was worse off than she was, period.

“Okay,” Trixie said. “What do I have to do?”

“We take care of it,” the hairdresser said. “You just give me your name, so that the charity can send you a nice thank-you card.”

If she'd been thinking clearly - which, let's face it, she wasn't - Trixie would have made up an alias. But maybe the staff at Live and Let Dye didn't read the newspapers, or ever watch anything but The Golden Girls, because the hairdresser didn't bat a fake eyelash when Trixie told her who she was. She fastened a string around Trixie's

waist-length hair and tied it to a little card printed with her name. Then she held up the scissors. “Say good-bye,” the hairdresser said.

Trixie drew in her breath at the first cut. Then she noticed how much lighter she felt without all that hair to weigh her down. She imagined what it would be like to have her hair so short that she could feel the wind rushing past the backs of her ears. “I want a buzz cut,” Trixie announced.

The hairdresser faltered. “Darlin',” she said, “that's for boys.”

“I don't care,” Trixie said.

The hairdresser sighed. “Let me see if I can make us both happy.”

Trixie closed her eyes and felt the hairdressers scissors chatter around her head. Hair tumbled down in soft strawberry tufts, like the feathers of a bird shot out of the sky.

“Good-bye,” she whispered.

* * *

They had bought the king-sized bed when Trixie was three and spent more time running from nightmares in her own bed straight into the buffer zone of their own. It had seemed a good idea at the time. Back then, they had still been thinking about having more kids, and it seemed to say married with a finality that you couldn't help but admire. And yet, they had fallen in love in a dormitory bed, on a twin mattress. They had slept so close to each other that their body heat would rise each night like a spirit on the ceiling, and they'd wake up with the covers kicked off on the floor. Given that, it was amazing to think that with all the space between them now, they were still too close for comfort. Daniel knew that Laura was still awake. She had come home from the college almost immediately after she'd left, and she hadn't given him an explanation why. As for Daniel, she'd spoken to him only sporadically, economic transactions of information: had Trixie eaten (no); did she say anything else (no); did the police call (no, but Mrs. Walstone from the end of the block had, as if this was any of her business). Immediately, she'd thrown herself into a tornado of activity: cleaning the bathrooms, vacuuming underneath the couch cushions, watching Trixie come back through the door with that hatchet job of a haircut and swallowing her shock enough to suggest a game of Monopoly. It was, he realized, as if she was trying to make up for her absence these past few months, as if she'd judged herself and meted out a sentence. Now, lying in bed, he wondered how two people could be just a foot of distance away from each other but a million miles apart.

“They knew,” Laura said.

“Who?”

“Everyone. At school.” She rolled toward him, so that in the plush dark he could make out the green of her eyes. “They all were talking about it.”

Daniel could have told her that none of this would go away, not until he and Laura and even Trixie could get past it. He had learned this when he was eleven years old, and Cane's grandfather took him on his first moose hunt. At dusk, they'd set out on the Kuskokwim River in the small aluminum boat. Daniel was dropped off at one bend, Cane at another, to cover more ground. He had huddled in the willows, wondering how long it would be before Cane and his grandfather came back, wondering if they ever would. When the moose stepped delicately out of the greenery spindled legs, brindled back, bulbous noseDaniel's heart had started to race. He'd lifted his rifle and thought, I want this, more than anything.

At that moment, the moose slipped into the wall of willows and disappeared.

On the ride home, when Cane and his grandfather learned what had happened, they muttered kass'aq and shook their heads. Didn't Daniel know that if you thought about what you were hunting while you were hunting it, you might as well be telegraphing to the animal that you were there?

At first, Daniel had shrugged this off as Yup'ik Eskimo superstition - like having to lick your bowl clean so you wouldn't slip on ice, or eating the tails of fish to become a fast runner. But as he grew older, he learned that a word was a powerful thing. An insult didn't have to be shouted at you to make you bleed; a vow didn't have to be whispered to you to make you believe. Hold a thought in your head, and that was enough to change the actions of anyone and anything that crossed your path.

“If we want things to be normal,” Daniel said, “we have to act like we're already there.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe Trixie should go back to school.”

Laura came up on an elbow. “You must be joking.” Daniel hesitated. “Janice suggested it. It isn't much good to sit around here all day, reliving what happened.”

“She'll see him, in school.”

“There's a court order in place; Jason can't go near her. She has as much right to be there as he does.”

There was a long silence. “If she goes back,” Laura said finally, “it has to be because she wants to.” Daniel had the sudden sense that Laura was speaking not only of Trixie but also herself. It was as if Trixie's rape was a constant fall of leaves they were so busy raking away they could ignore the fact that beneath them, the ground was no longer solid. The night pressed down on Daniel. “Did you bring him here? To this bed?”

Laura's breathing caught. “No.”

“I picture him with you, and I don't even know what he looks like.”

“It was a mistake, Daniel”

“Mistakes are something that happen by accident. You didn't walk out the door one morning and fall into some guy's bed. You thought about it, for a while. You made that choice.” The truth had scorched Daniel's throat, and he found himself breathing hard.

“I made the choice to end it, too. To come back.”

“Am I supposed to thank you for that?” He flung an arm across his eyes, better to be blind.

Laura's profile was cast in silver. “Do you ... do you want me to move out?”

He had thought about it. There was a part of him that did not want to see her in the bathroom brushing her teeth, or setting the kettle on the stove. It was too ordinary, a mirage of a marriage. But there was another part of him that no longer remembered who he used to be without Laura. In fact, it was because of her that he'd become the kind of man he now was. It was like any other dual dynamic that was part and parcel of his art: You couldn't have strength without weakness; you couldn't have light without dark; you couldn't have love without loss. “I don't think it would be good for Trixie if you left right now,” Daniel said finally. Laura rolled over to face him. “What about you? Would it be good for you?”

Daniel stared at her. Laura had been inked onto his life, as indelible as any tattoo. It wouldn't matter if she was physically present or not; he would carry her with him forever. Trixie was proof of that. But he'd folded enough loads of laundry during Oprah and Dr. Phil to know how infidelity worked. Betrayal was a stone beneath the mattress of the bed you shared, something you felt digging into you no matter how you shifted position. What was the point of being able to forgive, when deep down, you both had to admit you'd never forget?

When Daniel didn't respond to her, Laura rolled onto her back.

“Do you hate me?”

“Sometimes.”

“Sometimes I hate myself, too.”

Daniel pretended that he could hear Trixie's breathing, even and untroubled, through the bedroom wall. "Was it really so bad?

The two of us?"

Laura shook her head.

“Then why did you do it?”

For a long time, she did not answer. Daniel assumed she'd fallen asleep. But then her voice pricked on the edges of the stars strung outside the window. “Because,” she said, “he reminded me of you.”

* * *

Trixie knew that at the slightest provocation, she could stand up and walk out of class and head down to the office for refuge without any teacher even blinking. She had been given her fathers cell phone. Call me anytime, he said, and I will be there before you hang up. She had stumbled through an awkward conversation with the school principal, who phoned to tell her that he would certainly do his best to make Bethel High a haven of safety for her. To that end, she was no longer taking psych with Jason; she had an independent study instead in the library. She could write a report on anything. Right now, she was thinking of a topic: Girls Who Would Rather Disappear.

“I'm sure that Zephyr and your other friends will be happy to see you,” her father said. Neither of them mentioned that Zephyr hadn't called, not once, to see how she was doing. Trixie tried to convince herself that was because Zephyr felt guilty, with the fight they'd had and what had happened afterward as a direct result. She didn't explain to her father that she didn't really have any other friends in the ninth grade. She'd been too busy filling her world with Jason to maintain old relationships, or to bother starting new ones.

“What if I've changed my mind?” Trixie asked softly. Her father looked at her. “Then I'll take you home. It's that easy, Trix.”

She glanced out the car window. It was snowing, a fine fat-flaked

dusting that hung in the trees and softened the edges of the landscape. The cold seeped through the stocking cap she wore - who knew her hair had actually kept her so warm? She kept forgetting she'd cut it all off in all the smallest ways: when she looked in the mirror and got the shock of her life, when she tried to pull a long nonexistent ponytail out from beneath the collar of her coat. To be honest, she looked horrible - the short cap of hair made her eyes look even bigger and more anxious; the severity of the cut was better suited to a boy - but Trixie liked it. If people were going to stare, she wanted to know it was because she looked different, not because she

was different.

The gates of the school came into view through the windshield wipers, the student parking lot to the right. Under the cover of snow, the cars looked like a sea of beached whales. She wondered which

one was Jason's. She imagined him inside the building already, where he'd been for two whole days longer than her, sowing the seeds of his side of the story that by now, surely, had grown into a thicket.

Her father pulled to the curb. “I'll walk you in,” he said. All live wires inside Trixie tripped. Could there be anything that screamed out loser! more than a rape victim who had to be walked into school by her daddy? “I can do it myself,” she insisted, but when she went to unbuckle her seat belt she found that her mind couldn't

make her fingers do the work they needed to.

Suddenly she felt her father's hands on the fastenings, the harness coming free. “If you want to go home,” he said gently,

“that's okay.”

Trixie nodded, hating the tears that welled at the base of her throat. “I know.”

It was stupid to be scared. What could possibly happen inside that school that was any worse than what already had? But you could reason with yourself all day and still have butterflies in your stomach.

“When I was growing up in the village,” Trixie's father said,

“the place we lived was haunted.”

Trixie blinked. She could count on one hand the number of times in her life that her father had talked about growing up in Alaska. There were certain remnants of his childhood that labeled him as different - like the way, if it got too loud, he'd have to leave the room, and the obsession he had with conserving water even though they had an endless supply through their home well. Trixie knew this much: Her father had been the only white boy in a native Yup'ik Eskimo village called Akiak. His mother, who raised him by herself, had taught school there. He had left Alaska when he was eighteen, and he swore he'd never go back.

“Our house was attached to the school. The last person who'd lived in it was the old principal, who'd hanged himself from a beam in the kitchen. Everyone knew about it. Sometimes, in the school, the audiovisual equipment would turn on even when it was unplugged. Or the basketballs lying on the floor of the gym would start to bounce by themselves. In our house, drawers would fly open every now and then, and sometimes you could smell aftershave, out of nowhere.” Trixie's father looked up at her. “The Yupiit are afraid of ghosts. Sometimes, in school, I'd see kids spit into the air, to check if the ghost was close enough to steal their saliva. Or they'd walk around the building three times so that the ghost couldn't follow them back to their own homes.” He shrugged. “The thing is ... I was the white kid. I talked funny and I looked funny and I got picked on for that on a daily basis. I was terrified of that ghost just like they were, but I never let anyone know it. That way, I knew they might call me a lot of awful names . . . but one of them wasn't coward.”

“Jason's not a ghost,” Trixie said quietly. Her father tugged her hat down over her ears. His eyes were so dark she could see herself shining in them. “Well, then,” he said,

“I guess you've got nothing to be afraid of.”

* * *

Daniel nearly ran after Trixie as she navigated the slippery sidewalk up to the front of the school. What if he was wrong about this? What if Janice and the doctors and everyone else didn't know how cruel teenagers could be? What if Trixie came home even more devastated?

Trixie walked with her head down, bracing against the cold. Her green jacket was a stain against the snow. She didn't turn back to look at him.

When she was little, Daniel had always waited for Trixie to enter the school building before he drove away. There was too much that could go wrong: She might trip and fall; she could be approached by a bully; she might be teased by a pack of girls. He'd liked to imagine that just by keeping an eye on her, he could imbue her with the power of safety, much like the way he'd draw it onto one of his comics panels in a wavy, flowing force field. The truth was, though, that Daniel had needed Trixie far more than Trixie had ever needed him. Without realizing it, she'd put on a show for him every day: hopping, twirling, spreading her arms and taking a running leap, as if she thought that one of these mornings she might actually get airborne. He'd watch her and he'd see how easy it was for kids to believe in a world different from the one presented to them. Then he'd drive home and translate that stroke by stroke onto a fresh page.

He could remember wondering how long it would take for reality to catch up to his daughter. He could remember thinking: The saddest day in the world will be the one when she stops pretending.

Daniel waited until Trixie slipped through the double doors of the school, and then pulled carefully away from the curb. He needed a load of sand in the back of his pickup to keep it from fishtailing in the snow. Whatever it took, right now, to keep his balance.

3

Trixie knew the story behind her real name, but that didn't mean she hated it any less. Beatrice Portinari had been Dante's one true love, the woman who'd inspired him to write a whole batch of epic poems. Her mother the classics professor had singlehandedly filled out the birth certificate when her father (who'd wanted to name his newborn daughter Sarah) was in the bathroom.

Dante and Beatrice, though, were no Romeo and Juliet. Dante met her when he was only nine and then didn't see her again until he was eighteen. They both married other people and Beatrice died young. If that was everlasting love, Trixie didn't want any part of it.

When Trixie had complained to her father, he said Nicolas Cage had named his son Kal-el, Superman's Kryptonian name, and that she should be grateful. But Bethel High was brimming with Mallorys, Dakotas, Crispins, and Willows. Trixie had spent most of her life pulling the teacher aside on the first day of school, to make sure she said Trixie when she read the attendance sheet, instead of Beatrice, which made the other kids crack up. There was a time in fourth grade when she started calling herself Justine, but it didn't catch on.

Summer Friedman was in the main office with Trixie, signing into school late. She was tall and blonde, with a perpetual tan, although Trixie knew for a fact she'd been born in December. She turned around, clutching her blue hall pass. “Slut,” she hissed at Trixie as she walked past.

“Beatrice?” the secretary said. “The principal's ready for you.”

Trixie had been in the principal's office only once, when she made honor roll during the first quarter of freshman year. She'd been sent during homeroom, and the whole time she'd been shaking, trying to figure out what she'd done wrong. Principal Aaronsen had been waiting with a Cookie Monster grin on his face and his hand extended. “Congratulations, Beatrice,” he had said, and he'd handed her a little gold honor roll card with her own disgusting name printed across it.

“Beatrice,” he said again this time, when she went into his office. She realized that the guidance counselor, Mrs. Gray, was waiting there for her too. Did they think that if she saw a man alone she might freak out? “It's good to have you back,” Mr. Aaronsen said.

It's good to be back. The lie sat too sour on Trixie's tongue, so she swallowed it down again.

The principal was staring at her hair, or lack of it, but he was too polite to say anything. “Mrs. Gray and I just want you to know that our doors are open any time for you,” the principal said.

Trixie's father had two names. She had discovered this by accident when she was ten and snooping in his desk drawers. Wedged into the back of one, behind all the smudged erasers and tubes of mechanical pencil leads, was a photograph of two boys squatting in front of a cache of fish. One of the boys was white, one was native. On the back was written: Cane & Wass, fish camp. Akiak, Alaska 1976.

Trixie had taken the photo to her father, who'd been out mowing the lawn. Who are these people? she had asked.

Her father had turned off the lawn mower. They're dead.

“If you feel the slightest bit uncomfortable,” Principal Aaronsen was saying. “If you just want a place to catch your breath ...”

Three hours later, Trixie's father had come looking for her. The one on the right is me, he'd said, showing her the photo again. And that's Cane, a friend of mine.

Your name's not Wass, Trixie had pointed out.

Her father had explained that the day after he'd been born and named, a village elder came to visit and started calling him Wass

- short for Wassilieafter her husband, who'd fallen through the ice and died a week before. It was perfectly normal for a Yup'ik Eskimo who had recently died to take up residence in a newborn. Villagers would laugh when they met Daniel as a baby, saying things like, Oh, look. Wass has come back with blue eyes! or Maybe that's why Wass took that English as a Second Language class!

For eighteen years, he'd been known as Daniel to his white mother and as Wass to everyone else. In the Yup'ik world, he told Trixie, souls get recycled. In the Yup'ik world, no one ever really gets to leave.

“... a policy of zero tolerance,” the principal said, and Trixie nodded, although she hadn't really been listening. The night after her father told Trixie about his second name, she had a question ready when he came to tuck her in. How come when I first asked, you said those boys were dead?

Because, her father answered, they are.

Principal Aaronsen stood up, and so did Mrs. Gray, and that was how Trixie realized that they intended to accompany her to class. Immediately she panicked. This was way worse than being walked in by her father; this was like having fighter jets escort a plane into a safe landing: Was there any person at the airport who wouldn't be watching out the windows and trying to guess what had happened on board?

“Um,” Trixie said, “I think I'd kind of like to go by myself.” It was almost third period, which meant she'd have time to go to

her locker before heading to English class. She watched the principal look at the guidance counselor. “Well,” Mr. Aaronsen said, “if that's what you want.”

Trixie fled the principal's office, blindly navigating the maze of halls that made up the high school. Class was still in session, so it was quiet - the faint jingle of a kid with a bathroom pass, the muted click of high heels, the wheezy strains of the wind instruments upstairs in the band room. She twisted the combination on her own

locker, 40-22-38. Hey, Jason had said, a lifetime ago. Aren't those Barbie's measurements?

Trixie rested her forehead against the cool metal. All she had to do was sit in class for another four hours. She could fill her mind

with Lord of the Flies and A = nr2 and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. She didn't have to talk to anyone if she didn't want to. All of her teachers had been briefed. She would be an army of one.

When she pulled open the door of her locker, a sea of snakes poured out of the narrow cubby, spilling over her feet. She reached down to pick one up. Eight small foil squares, accordion-pleated at the perforations.

Trojan, Trixie read. Twisted Pleasure Lubricated Latex Condoms.

* * *

“They're all having sex,” Marita Soorenstad said, tilting her head and pouring the last of the lime-colored powder into her mouth. In the fifteen minutes that Mike Bartholemew had been sitting with the assistant district attorney, she'd consumed three Pixy Stix. "Teenage girls want guys to be attracted to them, but no one's taught them how to deal with the emotions that come with that stuff. I see this all

the time, Mike. Teenage girls wake up to find someone having sex with them, and they don't say a word.“ She crushed the paper straw in her fist and grimaced. ”Some judge told me these were a godsend when he was trying to quit smoking. But I swear all I'm getting is a sugar high and a green tongue."

“Trixie Stone said no,” the detective pointed out. “It's in her statement.”

“And Trixie Stone was drinking. Which the defense attorney will use to call her judgment into question. Oosterhaus is going to say that she was intoxicated, and playing strip poker, and saying yes yes yes all the way up till afterward, which is about when she decided to say no. He's going to ask her what time it was when she said it and how many pictures were on the walls of the room and what song was playing on the stereo and whether the moon was in Scorpio . . . details she won't be able to remember. Then he'll say that if she can't remember particulars like this, how on earth could she be sure of whether she told Jason to stop?” Marita hesitated. “I'm not saying that Trixie Stone wasn't raped, Mike. I'm just telling you that not everyone is going to see it as clearly.”

“I think the family knows that,” Bartholemew said.

“The family never knows that, no matter what they say.” Marita opened the file on Trixie Stone. “What the hell else did they think their kid was out doing at two in the morning?” Bartholemew pictured a car overturned on the side of the road, the rescue crews clustered around the body that had been thrown through the windshield. He imagined the EMT who pulled up the sleeve of his daughter's shirt and saw the bruises and needle marks along the map of her veins. He wondered if that tech had looked at Holly's long-sleeved shirt, worn on the hottest night of July, and asked himself what this girl's parents had been thinking when they saw her leave the house in it.

The answer to this question, and to Marita's: We weren't thinking. We didn't let ourselves think, because we didn't want to know.

Bartholemew cleared his throat. “The Stones thought their daughter was having a parent-supervised sleepover at a friend's house.”

Marita ripped open a yellow Pixy Stix. “Great,” she said, upending the contents into her mouth. “So Trixie's already lied once.”

* * *

Even though parents don't want to admit it, school isn't about what a kid absorbs while she's sitting at a cramped desk, but what happens around and in spite of that. It's the five minutes between bells when you find out whose house is hosting the party that evening; it's borrowing the right shade of lip gloss from your friend before you have French with the cute guy who moved here from Ohio; it's being noticed by everyone else and pretending you are above that sort of celebrity.

Once all this social interaction was surgically excised from Trixie's school day, she noticed how little she cared about the academic part. In English, she focused on the printed text in her book until the letters jumped like popcorn in a skillet. From time to time she would hear a snide comment: What did she do to her hair? Only once did someone have the guts to actually speak to her in class. It was in phys ed, during an indoor soccer game. A girl on her own team had come up to her after the teacher called a time-out. “Someone who got raped for real,” she'd whispered,

“wouldn't be out here playing soccer.”

The part of the day that Trixie was most dreading was lunch. In the cafeteria, the mass of students split like amoebas into socially polarized groups. There were the drama kids and the skateboarders and the brains. There were the Sexy Sevena group of girls who set the school's unwritten fashion rules, like what months you should wear shorts to school and how flip-flops were totally passe. There were the caffies, who hung out all morning drinking Java with their friends until the voc-tech bus came to ferry them to classes on hairstyling and child care. And then there was the table where Trixie used to belong - the one with the popular kids, the one where Zephyr and Moss and a carefree knot of hockey players hung out pretending they didn't know that everyone else was looking at them and saying they were so fake, when in reality those same kids went home and wished that their own group of friends could be as cool.

Trixie bought herself french fries and chocolate milk - her comfort lunch, for when she screwed up on a test or had period cramps - and stood in the middle of the cafeteria, trying to find a place for herself. Since Jason had broken up with Trixie, she'd been sitting somewhere else, but Zephyr had always joined her in solidarity. Today, though, she could see Zephyr sitting at their old table. One sentence rose from the collective din: “She wouldn't dare.”

Trixie held her plastic tray like a shield. She finally moved toward the Heater Hos, congregating near the radiator. They were girls who wore white pants with spandex in them and had boyfriends who drove raised I-Rocs; girls who got pregnant at fifteen and then brought the ultrasounds to school to show off. One of them - a ninth-grader in what looked like her ninth month - smiled at Trixie, and the action was so unexpected, she nearly stumbled. “There's room,” the girl said, and she slid her backpack off the table so that Trixie could sit down. A lot of kids at Bethel High made fun of the Heater Hos, but Trixie never had. She found them too depressing to be the butt of jokes. They seemed to be so nonchalant about throwing their lives away - not that their lives were the kind that anyone would have wanted in the first place, but still. Trixie had wondered if those bellybaring T-shirts they wore and the pride they took in their situation were just for show, a way to cover up how sad they really were about what had happened to them. After all, if you acted like you really wanted something even when you didn't, you just might convince yourself along with everyone else. Trixie ought to know.

“I asked Donna to be Elvis's godmother,” one of the girls said.

“Elvis?” another answered. “I thought you were going to name him Pilot.”

“I was, but then I thought, what if he's born afraid of heights? That would suck for him.”

Trixie dipped a french fry into a pool of ketchup. It looked weak

and watery, like blood. She wondered how many hours it had been since she'd talked out loud. If you didn't use your voice, ever, would it eventually shrivel up and dry away? Was there a natural selection involved in not speaking up?

"Trixie.

She looked up to see Zephyr sliding into the seat across from her. Trixie couldn't contain her relief - if Zephyr had come over here, she couldn't be mad anymore, could she? “God, I'm glad to see you,” Trixie said. She wanted to make a joke, to let Zephyr know it was okay to treat her like she wasn't a freak, but she couldn't think of a single thing to say.

“I would have called,” Zephyr said, “but I've sort of been grounded until I'm forty.”

Trixie nodded. It was enough, really, that Zephyr was sitting here now.

“So . . . you're okay, right?”

“Yeah,” Trixie said. She tried to remember what her father had said that morning: If you think you're fine, you'll start to believe it. “Your hair...”

She ran her palm over her head and smiled nervously. “Crazy, isn't it?”

Zephyr leaned forward, shifting uncomfortably. “Look, what you did ... well, it worked. No questionyou got Jason back.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You wanted payback for getting dumped, and you got it. But Trixie ... it's one thing to teach someone a lesson ... and a whole different thing to get him arrested. Don't you think you can stop now?”

“You think...” Trixie's scalp tightened. “You think I made this up?”

“Trix, everyone knows you wanted to hook up with him again. It's kind of hard to rape someone who's willing.”

“You're the one who came up with the plan! You said I should make him jealous! But I never expected ... I didn't. . .” Trixie's voice was as thin as a wire, vibrating. “He raped me.” A shadow fell across the table as Moss approached. Zephyr looked up at him and shrugged. “I tried,” she said. He pulled Zephyr out of her chair. “Come on.” Trixie stood up, too. “We've been friends since kindergarten. How could you believe him over me?”

Something in Zephyr's eyes changed, but before she could speak, Moss slid an arm around her shoulders, anchoring her to his side. So, Trixie thought. It's like that.

“Nice hair, G.I. Ho,” Moss said as they walked off. It had gotten so quiet in the cafeteria that even the lunch ladies seemed to be watching. Trixie sank down into her seat again, trying not to notice the way that everyone was staring at her. There was a one-year-old she used to babysit for who liked to play a game: He'd cover his face with his hands and you'd say,

“Where's Josh?” She wished it was that simple: Close your eyes, and you'd disappear.

Next to her, one of the Heater Hos cracked her bubble gum. “I wish Jason Underhill would rape me,” she said.

* * *

Daniel had made coffee for Laura.

Even after what she had done, even after all the words that fell between them like a rain of arrows, he had still done this for her. It might not have been anything more than habit, but it brought her to the verge of tears.

She stared at the carafe, its swollen belly steaming with French roast. It occurred to Laura that in all the years they had been married, she could literally not remember it being the other way around: Daniel had been a student of her likes and dislikes; in return, Laura had never even signed up for the proverbial course. Was it complacency that had made her restless enough to have an affair? Or was it because she hadn't wanted to admit that even had she applied herself, she would not be as good a wife as Daniel was a husband?

She had come into the kitchen to sit down at the table, spread out her notes, prepare for her afternoon class. Today, thank God, was a lecture, an impersonal group where she got to do all the talking, not a smaller class where she might have to face the questions of students again. In her hands was a book, open to the famous Dore illustration for Canto 29, where VirgilDante's guide through hellberated his curiosity. But now that Laura could smell the grounds, inhale that aromatic steam, she couldn't for the life of her remember what she was going to say about this drawing to her students.

Explaining hell took on a whole new meaning when you'd been recently living smack in the middle of it, and Laura envisioned her own face on the sketch, instead of Dante's. She took a sip of her coffee and imagined drinking from the River Lethe, which ran back to its source, taking all your sins with it.

There was a fine line between love and hate, you heard that cliche all the time. But no one told you that the moment you crossed it would be the one you least expected. You'd fall in love and crack open a secret door to let your soul mate in. You just never expected such closeness, one day, to feel like an intrusion. Laura stared down at the picture. With the exception of Dante, nobody chose to go willingly to hell. And even Dante would have lost his way if he hadn't found a guide who'd already been through hell and come out the other side.

Reaching up to the cabinet, Laura took out a second mug and poured another cup of coffee. In all honesty, she had no idea if Daniel took it with milk or sugar or both. She added a little of each, the way she liked to drink it.

She hoped that was a start.

* * *

In the latest issue of Wizard magazine, on the list of top ten comic book artists, Daniel was ranked number nine. His picture was there, eight notches below Jim Lee's number one smiling face. Last month, Daniel had been number ten; it was the growing anticipation for The Tenth Circle that was fueling his fame.

It was actually Laura who had told Daniel when he was becoming famous. They'd gone to a Christmas party at Marvel in New York, and when they entered the room, they were separated in the crush. Later, she told him that as he walked through the crowd, she could hear everyone talking in his wake. Daniel, she had said, people definitely know you.

When he'd first been given a test story to draw, years ago - a godawful piece that took place inside a cramped airplane - he'd worried about things that he never would have given a second thought to now: having F lead in his pencil instead of something too soft, testing the geometry of arches, mapping the feel of a ruler in his hand. If anything, he had drawn more from the gut when he was starting out - emotional art, instead of cerebral. The first time he'd penciled Batman for DC Comics, for example, he'd had to reimagine the hero. Daniel's rendition had a certain length ear and a certain width belt that had little to do with the historical progression of art on that character and far more to do with poring over the comic as a kid, and remembering how Batman had looked at his coolest.

Today, though, drawing wasn't bringing him any joy or relief. He kept thinking about Trixie and where she would be at this hour of the day and if it was a good thing or a bad thing that she hadn't called him yet to say how it was going. Ordinarily, if Daniel was restless, he'd get up and walk around the house, or even take a run to jog his brain and recover his lost muse. But Laura was home - she had no

classes until this afternoon - and that was enough to keep him holed up in his office. It was easier to face down a blank page than to pull from thin air the right words to rebuild a marriage. His task today was to draw a series of panels in hell with adultery demons - sinners who had lusted for each other in life, and in death couldn't be separated from each other. The irony of having to draw this, given his own situation, had not been lost on Daniel. He imagined a male and a female torso, each growing out of the same root of a body. He pictured one wing on each of their backs. He saw claws that would reach in to steal a hero's heart, because that was exactly how it felt.

He was cheating today, drawing the action sequences, because they were the most engaging. He always jumped around the story, to keep himself from overdoing it on the first panel he drew. But just in case he started running out of time on a deadline, it was easier to draw straight lines and buildings and roads than to dynamically draw a figure.

Daniel began sketching the outline of an ungainly, birdlike creature, half man and half woman. He roughed in a wing . . . no, too batlike. He was just blowing the eraser rubbings off the Miraweb paper when Laura walked into his office, holding a cup of coffee.

He set down his pencil and leaned back in his chair. Laura rarely visited him in his office. Most of the time, she wasn't home. And when she was, it was always Daniel seeking her out, instead of the other way around.

“What are you drawing?” she asked, peering down at the panels.

“Nothing good.”

“Worried about Trixie?”

Daniel rubbed a hand down his face. “How couldn't I be?” She sank down at his feet, cross-legged. “I know. I keep thinking I hear the phone ring.” She glanced down at her coffee cup, as if she was surprised to find herself clutching it. “Oh,” she said. “I brought this for you.”

She never brought him coffee before. He didn't even really like coffee. But there was Laura with her hand outstretched, offering the steaming mug . . . and in that instant, Daniel could imagine her fingers reaching like a dagger between his ribs. He could see how a wing that grew from between her shoulder blades might sweep over the muscles of her trapezius, wrapping over her arm like a shawl.

“Do me a favor?” he asked, taking the mug from her. He grabbed a quilt that he kept on the couch in his office and leaned down to pull it around Laura.

“God,” she said. “I haven't modeled for you in years.” When he was just starting out, he'd pose her a hundred different ways: in her bra and panties holding a water gun; tossed halfway off the bed; hanging upside down from a tree in the yard. He would wait for the moment when that familiar skin and structure stopped being Laura and became, instead, a twist of sinew and a placement of bone, one he could translate anatomically into a character sprawled just the same way on the page.

“What's the quilt for?” Laura asked, as he picked up his pencil and started to draw. “You have wings.” “Am I an angel?” Daniel glanced up. “Something like that,” he said. The moment Daniel stopped obsessing about drawing the wing, it took flight. He drew fast, the lines pouring out of him. This quick, art was like breath. He couldn't have told you why he placed the fingers at that angle instead of the more conventional one, but it made the figure seem to move across the panel. “Lift the blanket up a little, so it covers your head,” he instructed. Laura obliged. “This reminds me of your first story. Only drier.” Daniel's first paid gig had been a Marvel fill-in for the Ultimate X-Men series. In the event that a regular artist didn't make deadline, his stand-alone piece would be used without breaking the continuity of the ongoing saga.

He'd been given a story about Storm as a young child, harnessing the weather. In the name of research, he and Laura had driven to the shore during a thunderstorm, with Trixie still in her infant seat. They left the sleeping baby in the car and then sat on the beach in the pouring rain with a blanket wrapped around their shoulders, watching the lightning write notes on the sand. Later that night, on his way back to the car, Daniel had tripped

over the strangest tube of glass. It was a fulgurite, Laura told him, sand fused the moment it was struck by lightning. The tube was eight inches long, rough on the outside and smooth through its long throat. Daniel had tucked it into the side of Trixie's car seat, and even today it was still delicately displayed on her bookshelf.

It had amazed him: that utter transformation, the understanding that radical change could come in a heartbeat.

Finally, Daniel finished drawing. He put down his pencil, flexed his hand, and glanced down at the page: This was good; this was better than good. “Thanks,” he said, standing up to take the blanket off Laura's shoulders.

She stood, too, and grabbed two corners of the quilt. They folded it in silence, like soldiers with a casket's flag. When they met in the middle, Daniel went to take the blanket from her, but Laura didn't let go. She slid her hands along its folded seam until they rested on top of Daniel's, and then she lifted her face shyly and kissed him.

He didn't want to touch her. Her body pressed against his through the buffer of the quilt. But instinct broke over him, a massive wave, and he wrapped his arms so tightly around Laura he could feel her struggling to breathe. His kiss was hungry, violent, a feast for what he'd been missing. It took a moment, and then she came to life beneath him, grabbing fistfuls of his shirt, pulling him closer, consuming him in a way he could not ever remember her doing before.

Before.

With a groan, Daniel dragged his mouth from hers, buried his face in the curve of her neck. “Are you thinking about him?” he whispered.

Laura went utterly still, and her arms fell away. “No,” she said, her cheeks bright and hot.

Between them on the floor, the quilt was now a heap. Daniel saw a stain on it that he hadn't noticed before. He bent down and gathered it into his arms. “Well, I am.”

Laura's eyes filled with tears, and a moment later she walked out of his office. When he heard the door close, Daniel sank down into his chair again. He kept brushing up against the fact that his wife had cheated on him. It was a little like a scar on a polished wooden table - you'd try to see the rest of the gleaming surface, but your eyes and your fingers would be drawn to the pitted part, the one thing that kept it from being perfect. It was two-fifteen; only another half hour until he picked up Trixie at school. Only a half hour until she could serve as the cushion that kept him and Laura from rubbing each other raw. But in a half hour, lightning could strike. Wives could fall in love with men who weren't their husbands. Girls could be raped. Daniel buried his face in his hands. Between his splayed fingers, he could see the figure he'd sketched. Half of a demon, she was wrapped in her own single wing. She was the spitting image of Laura. And she was reaching for a heart Daniel couldn't draw, because he'd forgotten its dimensions years ago.