The Tenth Circle

The Tenth Circle

* * *

Jason was missing practice. He sat in the swanky law offices of Yargrove, Bratt & Oosterhaus, wondering what drills Coach was putting the team through. They had a game tomorrow against Gray-New Gloucester, and he was on the starting line. Trixie had come back to school today. Jason hadn't seen her someone had made damn sure of that - but Moss and Zephyr and a dozen other friends had run into her. Apparently, she'd practically shaved her head. He'd wondered, on the drive down to Portland, what it would have been like if he had crossed paths with Trixie. The judge at the arraignment had said that was enough cause to have Jason sent to a juvy prison, but he must have meant Jason would be in trouble if he sought Trixie out. . . not if Fate tossed her in his path.

Which is sort of what had happened in the first place. He still couldn't believe that this was real, that he was sitting in a

lawyers office, that he had been charged with rape. He kept expecting his alarm clock to go off any minute now. He'd drive to school and catch Moss in the hallway and say, Man, you wouldn't believe the nightmare I had.

Dutch Oosterhaus was talking to his parents, who were wearing their church clothes and were looking at Dutch as if he were Jesus incarnate. Jason knew his parents were paying the lawyer with money they'd scrimped together to send him for a PG year at a prep school, so that he'd have a better chance of making a Division I college hockey team. Gould Academy scouts had already come to watch him play; they'd said he was as good as in.

“She was crying,” Dutch said, rolling a fancy pen between his fingers. “She was begging you to get back together with her.”

“Yeah,” Jason replied. “She didn't. . . she didn't take the breakup very well. There were times I thought she was losing it. You know.”

“Do you know if Trixie was seeing a psychiatrist?” Dutch made a note to himself. “She might even have talked to a rape crisis counselor. We can subpoena those records for evidence of mental instability.”

Jason didn't know what Trixie was up to, but he'd never thought she was crazy. Until Friday night's party, Trixie had been so easy to read that it set her apart from the dozens of girls he'd hooked up with who were in it for the status or the sex or the head games. It was nuts - and this wasn't something he'd ever admit to his friends - but the best part about being with Trixie had not been the fact that she was, well, hot. It had been knowing that even if he'd never been an athlete or an upperclassman or popular, she still would have wanted to be with him.

He'd liked her, but he hadn't really loved her. At least he didn't think he had. There were no lightning bolts across his vision when he saw her across a room, and his general feeling when he was with her was one of comfort, not of blood boiling and fire and brimstone. The reason he'd broken up with her was, ironically, for her own

good. He knew that if he'd asked Trixie to drop everything and follow him across the earth, she'd do it; if the roles were reversed, though, he wouldn't. They were at different places in that same relationship, and like anything that's out of alignment, they were destined to crash sooner or later. By taking care of it early - gently, Jason liked to think - he was only trying to keep Trixie from getting her heart broken even harder.

He certainly felt bad about doing it, though. Just because he didn't love Trixie didn't mean he didn't like her.

And as for the other, well. He was a seventeen-year-old guy, and you didn't throw away something that was handed to you on a silver platter.

“Walk me through what happened after you found her in Zephyr's bathroom?”

Jason scrubbed his hands over his head, making his hair stand on end. “I offered her a ride home, and she said yes. But then she started crying. I felt bad for her, so I kind of hugged her.”

“Hugged her? How?”

Jason lifted up his arms and folded them awkwardly around himself. “Like that.”

“What happened next?”

“She came on to me. She kissed me.”

“What did you do?” Dutch asked.

Jason stole a glance at his mother, whose cheeks were candyapple red with embarrassment. He couldn't believe that he had to say these things in front of her. She'd be saying Rosaries for a week straight on his behalf. “I kissed her back. I mean, it was like falling into an old habit, you know? And she clearly was interested . . .”

“Define that,” Dutch interrupted.

“She took off her own shirt,” Jason said, and his mother winced. “She unbuckled my belt and went down on me.” Dutch wrote another note on his pad. “She initiated oral sex?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you reciprocate?”

“No.”

“Did she say anything to you?”

Jason felt himself getting hot beneath the collar of his shirt.

“She said my name a lot. And she kept talking about doing this in someone's living room. But it wasn't like she was freaked out about it . . . it was more like it was exciting for her, hooking up in someone else's house.”

“Did she tell you she was interested in having intercourse?” Jason thought for a second. “She didn't tell me she wasn't,” he replied.

“Did she ask you to stop?”

“No,” Jason said.

“Did you know she was a virgin?”

Jason felt all the thoughts in his head solidify into one hard, black mass, as he understood that he'd been played the fool.

“Yeah,” he said, angry. “Back in October. The first time we had sex.”

* * *

Trixie looked like she'd been fighting a war. The minute she threw herself into the truck beside Daniel, he was seized with the urge to storm into the school and demand retribution from the student

body that had done this to her. He imagined himself raging through the halls, and then, quickly, shook the vision out of his mind. The last thing Trixie needed, after being raped, was to see that violence could beget more violence.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he said after they had driven for a few moments.

Trixie shook her head. She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, as if she was trying to make herself as small as possible.

Daniel pulled off the road. He reached over the console to awkwardly draw Trixie into his arms. “You don't have to go back,” he promised. “Ever.” Her tears soaked through his flannel shirt. He

would teach Trixie at home, if he had to. He would find her a tutor. He would pick up the whole family and move.

Janice, the sexual assault advocate, had warned him against just that. She said that fathers and brothers always wanted to protect the victim after the fact, because they felt guilty about not doing it right the first time. But if Daniel fought Trixie's battles, she might never figure out for herself how to be strong again.

Well, fuck Janice. She didn't have a daughter who'd been raped. And even if she did, it wasn't Trixie.

Suddenly there was the sound of glass breaking, as a car drove by and the boys inside threw a six-pack of empty beer bottles at the truck. “Whore!” The word was yelled through open windows. Daniel saw the retreating taillights of a Subaru. The backseat passenger reached through his window to high-five the driver. Daniel let go of Trixie and stepped out of the car onto the shoulder of the road. Beneath his shoes, glass crunched. The bottles had scratched the paint on the door of the truck, had shattered under his tires. The word they'd called his daughter still hung in the air.

He had an artist's visionof Duncan, his hero, turning into Wildclaw . . . this time in the shape of a jaguar. He imagined what it would be like to run faster than the wind, to race around the tight corner and leap through the narrow opening of the driver's side window. He pictured the car, careening wildly. He smelled their fear. He went for blood.

Text file converted with freeware AcroPad - www.dreamscape.it

Instead, Daniel leaned down and picked up the biggest pieces of glass. He carefully cleared a path, so that he could get Trixie back home.

* * *

The night that Trixie met Jason, she'd had the flu. Her parents had been at some fancy shindig at Marvel headquarters in New York City, and she was spending the night at Zephyr's house. Zephyr had wangled her way into an upperclass party that evening, and it had been all the two of them could talk about. But no sooner had school

let out than Trixie started throwing up.

“I think I'm going to die,” Trixie had told Zephyr.

“Not before you hang out with seniors,” Zephyr said. They told Zephyr's mother that they were going to study for an algebra test with Bettina Majuradee, the smartest girl in ninth grade, who in reality wouldn't have given them the time of day. They walked two miles to the house party, which was being held by a guy named Orson. Twice, Trixie had to double up at the side of the road and barf into some bushes. “Actually, this is cool,” Zephyr had told her. “They're going to think you're already trashed.”

The party was a writhing, pulsing mass of noise and bodies and motion. Trixie moved from a quartet of gyrating girls to a table of faceless guys playing the drinking game Beirut, to a posse of kids trying to make a pyramid out of empty cans of Bud. Within fifteen minutes, she felt feverish and dizzy and headed to the bathroom to be sick.

Five minutes later, she opened up the door and started down the hallway, intent on finding Zephyr and leaving. “Do you believe in love at first sight,” a voice asked, “or should I ask you to walk by me again?”

Trixie glanced down to find a guy sitting on the floor, his back to the wall. He was wearing a T-shirt so faded she couldn't read the writing on it. His hair was jet-black, and his eyes were the color of ice, but it was his smile - lopsided, as if it had been built on a slope - that made her heart hitch.

“I don't think I've seen you before,” he said. Trixie suddenly lost the power of conversation.

“I'm Jason.”

“I'm sick,” Trixie blurted out, cursing herself the minute she heard the words. Could she sound any stupider if she tried?

But Jason had just grinned, off-kilter, again. “Well, then,” he'd said, and started it all. “I guess I need to make you feel better.”

* * *

Zephyr Santorelli-Weinstein worked at a toy store. She was affixing UPC codes for prices onto the feet of stuffed animals when Mike Bartholemew arrived to talk to her. “So,” he said, after introducing himself. “Is now a good time?” He looked around the store. There were science kits and dress-up clothes and Legos, marble chutes and paint-your-own beanbag chair kits and baby dolls that cried on command.

“I guess,” Zephyr said.

“You want to sit down?” But the only place to sit was a little kidsized tea table, set with Madeline china and plastic cupcakes. Bartholemew could imagine his knees hitting his chin or, worse, getting down and never getting back up again.

“I'm good,” Zephyr said. She put down the gun that affixed the UPC labels and folded her arms around a fluffy polar bear. Bartholemew looked at her stretch button-down shirt and stacked heels, her eye makeup, her scarlet nail polish, the toy in her arms. He thought, This is exactly the problem. “I appreciate you talking to me.”

“My mothers making me do it.”

“Guess she wasn't thrilled to find out about your little party.” “She's less thrilled that you turned the living room into some kind of crime scene.”

“Well,” Bartholemew said, “it is one.” Zephyr snorted. She picked up the sticker gun and started tagging the animals again.

“I understand that you and Trixie Stone have been friends for a while.”

“Since we were five.”

“She mentioned that just before the incident occurred, you two were having an argument.” He paused. “What were you fighting about?”

She looked down at the counter. “I don't remember.”

“Zephyr,” the detective said, “if you've got details for me, it might help corroborate your friend's story.”

“We had a plan,” Zephyr sighed. “She wanted to make Jason jealous. She was trying to get him back, to hook up with him. That was the whole point. Or at least that's what she told me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I guess she meant to screw Jason in more ways than one.”

“Did she say she intended to have intercourse that night?”

“She told me she was willing to do whatever it took,” Zephyr said,

Bartholemew looked at her. “Did you see Trixie and Jason having sex?”

“I'm not into peep shows. I was upstairs.”

“Alone?”

“With a guy. Moss Minton.”

“What were you doing?”

Zephyr glanced up at the detective. “Nothing.”

“Were you and Moss having sex?”

“Did my mother ask you to ask me that?” she said, narrowing her eyes.

“Just answer the question.”

“No, all right?” Zephyr said. “We were going to. I mean, I figured we were going to. But Moss passed out first.”

“And you?”

She shrugged. “I guess I fell asleep eventually, too.”

“When?”

“I don't know. Two-thirty? Three?”

Bartholemew looked at his notes. “Could you hear the music in your bedroom?”

Zephyr stared at him dully. “What music?”

“The CDs you were playing during your party. Could you hear that upstairs?”

“No. By the time we got upstairs, someone had turned them off.” Zephyr gathered the stack of stuffed animals, holding them in her arms like a bounty, and walked toward an empty shelf. “That's why I figured Jason and Trixie had gone home.”

“Did you hear Trixie scream for help?”

For the first time since he'd started speaking to her, Bartholemew saw Zephyr at a loss for words. “If I'd heard that,” Zephyr said, her voice wavering the tiniest bit, “I would have gone downstairs.” She set the bears down side by side, so that they were nearly touching. “But the whole night, it was dead quiet.”

* * *

Until Laura met Daniel, she had never done anything wrong. She'd gotten straight As in school. She'd been known to pick up other people's litter. She'd never had a cavity.

She was a graduate student at ASU, dating an MBA named Walter who had already taken her to three jewelry stores to get her feedback on engagement rings. Walter was attractive, secure, and predictable. On Friday nights, they always went out to dinner, switched their entrees halfway through the meal, and then went to see a movie. They alternated picking the films. Afterward, over coffee, they talked about the quality of the acting. Then Walter would drive her back to her apartment in Tempe and after a bout of predictable sex he'd go home because he didn't like to sleep in other people's beds.

One Friday, when they went to the movie theater, it was closed because of a burst water main. She and Walter decided to walk down Mill Avenue instead, where on warm nights buskers littered the streets with their violin cases and their impromptu juggling. There were several artists too, sketching in pencil, sketching in charcoal, making caricatures with Magic Markers that smelled like licorice. Walter gravitated toward one man, bent over his pad. The artist had black hair that reached down to the middle of his back and

ink all over his hands. Behind him was a makeshift cardboard stand, onto which he'd pinned dynamic drawings of Batman and Superman and Wolverine. “These are amazing,” Walter said, and Laura had thought at the time that she'd never seen him get so excited about something. “I used to collect comics as a kid.” When the artist looked up, he had the palest blue eyes, and they were focused on Laura. “Ten bucks for a sketch,” he said. Walter put his arm around Laura. “Can you do one of her?” Before she knew it, she'd been seated on an overturned milk crate. A crowd gathered to watch as the sketch took shape. Laura glanced over at Walter, wishing that he hadn't suggested this. She startled when she felt the artist's fingers curl around her chin, turning her face forward again. “Don't move,” he warned, and she could smell nicotine and whiskey.

He gave the drawing to Laura when he was finished. She had the body of a superhero - muscular and able - but her hair and face and neck were all her own. A galaxy swirled around her feet. There were people sketched into the background - the crowd that had gathered. Walter's face was nearly off the edge of the page. Beside the figure of Laura, however, was a man who looked just like the artist. “So that you'll be able to find me one day,” he said, and she felt as if a storm had blown up inside her. Laura looked at Walter, holding out his ten-dollar bill. She lifted her chin. “What makes you think I'll be looking?” The artist grinned. “Wishful thinking.”

When they left Mill Avenue, Laura told Walter it was the worst sketch she'd ever seen - her calves weren't that big, and she'd never be caught dead wearing thigh-high boots. She planned to go home and throw it in the trash. But instead, that night, Laura found herself staring at the bold strokes of the artist's signature: Daniel Stone. She examined the picture more closely and noticed what she hadn't the first time around: In the folds of the cape the man had drawn were a few lines darker than the rest, which clearly spelled out the word MEET.

In the toe of the left boot was ME.

She scrutinized the sketch, scanning the crowd for more of the message. She found the letters AT on the rings of the planet in the upper left corner. And in the collar of the shirt worn by the man who looked like Walter was the word HELL.

It felt like a slap in the face, as if he knew she'd be reading into the drawing he'd made. Angry, Laura buried the sketch in her kitchen trash can. But she tossed and turned all night, deconstructing the language in the art. You wouldn't say meet me at hell; you'd say meet me in hell. In suggested submersion, at was an approach to a place. Had this not been a rejection, then, but an invitation?

The next day, she pulled the sketch out from the trash, and sat down with the Phoenix area phone book.

Hell was at 358 Wylie Street.

She borrowed a magnifying glass from an ASU biology lab but couldn't find any more clues in the drawing regarding a time or date. That afternoon, once she finished her classes, Laura made her way to Wylie Street. Hell turned out to be a narrow space between two larger buildings - one a head shop with bongs in the window, the other a XXX video store. The jammed little frontage had no windows, just a graffiti-riddled door. In lieu of a formal sign, there was a plank with the name of the establishment hand-lettered in blue paint.

Inside, the room was thin and long, able to accommodate a bar and not much else. The walls were painted black. In spite of the fact that it was three in the afternoon, there were six people sitting at the bar, some of whom Laura could not assign to one gender or the other. As the sunlight cracked through the open doorway, they turned to her, squinting, moles coming up from the belly of the earth.

Daniel Stone sat closest to the door. He raised one eyebrow and stubbed out his cigarette on the wood of the bar. “Have a seat.” She held out her hand. “I'm Laura Piper.” He looked at her hand, amused, but didn't shake it. She crawled onto the stool and folded her purse into her lap. “Have you been waiting long?” she asked, as if this were a business meeting. He laughed. The sound made her think of summer dust, kicked up by tires on a dirt road. “My whole life.” She didn't know how to respond to that. “You didn't give me a specific time . . .”

His eyes lit up. “But you found the rest. And I pretty much live here, anyway.”

“Are you from Phoenix?”

“Alaska.”

To a girl who'd grown up on the outskirts of the desert, there was nothing more remarkable or idealistically romantic. She pictured snow and polar bears. Eskimos. “What made you come here?” He shrugged. “Up there, you learn the blues. I needed to see reds.” It took Laura a moment to realize that he was talking about colors and his drawing. He lit another cigarette. It bothered her

- she wasn't used to people smoking around her - but she didn't know how to ask him not to. “So,” he said. “Laura.” Nervous, she began to fill in the silence between them. “There was a poet who had a Laura as his muse. Petrarch. His sonnets are really beautiful.”

Daniel's mouth curved. “Are they, now.”

She didn't know if he was making fun of her, and now she was conscious of other people in the bar listening to their conversation, and frankly, she couldn't remember why she'd ever come here in the

first place. She was just about to get up when the bartender set a shot

of something clear in front of her.

“Oh,” she said. “I don't drink.” Without missing a beat, Daniel reached over and drained the shot glass.

She was fascinated by him, in the same way that an entomologist would be fascinated by an insect from the far side of the earth, a specimen she had read about but never imagined she'd hold in the palm of her hand. There was an unexpected thrill to being this close

“Don't we?” Daniel approached her, pinning the door shut with one arm. “Did you tell your boyfriend you were coming to see me?” When Laura remained stone-silent, he laughed.

Laura stilled underneath the weight of the truth: She had lied not only to Walter but also to herself. She had come here of her own free will; she had come here because she couldn't stand the thought of not coming. But what if the reason Daniel Stone fascinated her had nothing to do with difference . . . but similarity? What if she recognized in him parts of herself that had been there all along, underneath the surface?

What if Daniel Stone was right?

She stared up at him, her heart hammering. “What would you have done if I hadn't come here today?” His blue eyes darkened.

“Waited.”

She was awkward, and she was self-conscious, but Laura took a step toward him. She thought of Madame Bovary and of Juliet, of poison running through your bloodstream, of passion doing the same.

* * *

Mike Bartholemew was pacing around near the emergency room's Coke machine when he heard his name being called. He glanced up to find a tiny woman with a cap of dark hair facing him, her hands buried in the pockets of her white physician's coat. C. Roth, M.D.

“I was hoping to talk to you about Trixie Stone,” he said. , She nodded, glancing at the crowd around them. "Why don't we

* go into one of the empty exam rooms?"

There was nowhere Mike wanted to be less. The last time he'd been in one, it was to ID his daughter's body. He had no sooner walked across the threshold than he started to weave and feel the room spin. “Are you all right?” the doctor asked, as he steadied himself against the examination table. “It's nothing.” “Let me get you something to drink.”

She was gone for only a few seconds and came back bearing a paper cone from a water cooler. When Mike finished drinking, he crushed the cup in his hand. “Must be a flu going around,” he said, trying to dismiss his own weakness. “I've got a few follow-up questions based on your medical report.”

“Fire away.”

Mike took a pad and pen out of his coat pocket. “You said that Trixie Stone's demeanor was calm when she was here?”

“Yes, until the pelvic exam . . . she got a bit upset at that. But during the rest of the exam she was very quiet.”

“Not hysterical?”

“Not all rape victims come in that way,” the doctor said. “Some are in shock.”

“Was she bleeding?”

“Minimally.”

“Shouldn't there have been more, if she was a virgin?” The doctor shrugged. “A hymen can break when a girl is eight years old, riding a bike. There doesn't have to be blood the first time there's intercourse.”

“But you also said there was no significant internal trauma,” Mike said.

The doctor frowned at him. “Aren't you supposed to be on her side?”

“I don't take sides,” Mike said. “But I do try to make sense of the facts, and before we have a rape case, I need to make sure that I've ruled out inconsistencies.”

"Well, you're talking about an organ that's made for accommodation. Just because there wasn't visible internal trauma doesn't

mean there wasn't intercourse without consent." Mike looked down at the examination table, uncomfortable, and suddenly could see the still, swathed form of his daughters battered body. One arm, which had slipped off to hang toward the floor, with its black user's bruise in the crook of the elbow.

“Her arm,” Mike murmured.

“The cuts? I photographed them for you. The lacs were still oozing when she came in,” the doctor said, “but she couldn't remember seeing a weapon during the attack.”

Mike took the Polaroid out of his pocket, the one that showed Trixie's left wrist. There was the deep cut that Dr. Roth was describing, still angry and red as a mouth, but if you looked carefully you could also see the silver herringbone pattern of older scars. “Is there any chance Trixie Stone did this to herself?”

“It's a possibility. We see a lot of cutting in teenage girls these days. But it still doesn't preclude the fact that Trixie was sexually assaulted.”

“You'd be willing to testify to that?” Mike asked. The doctor folded her arms. “Have you ever sat in on a female rape kit collection, Detective?”

She knew, of course, that Mike hadn't. He couldn't, as a man.

“It takes over an hour and involves not just a thorough external examination but a painfully thorough internal one as well. It involves having your body scrutinized under UV light and swabbed for evidence. It involves photography. It involves being asked intimate details about your sexual habits. It involves having your clothes confescated. I've been an ER OB/GYN for fifteen years, Detective, and I have yet to see the woman who'd be willing to suffer through a sexaual assault exam just for the hell of it.” She glanced up at Mike. “Yes,” Dr. Roth said. “I'll testify.”

* * *

Janice didn't just have tea in her office. She had Toolong, Sleepytime, and orange pekoe. Darjeeling, rooibos, and sencha. Dragon Well, macha, gunpowder, jasmine, Keemun. Lapsang souchong: Yunnan and Nilgiri. “What would you like?” she asked, Trixie hugged a throw pillow to her chest. “Coffee.”

“Like I haven't heard that before.”

Trixie had come to this appointment reluctantly. Her father had dropped her off and would be back to get her at five. “What if I have nothing to say?” Trixie had asked him the minute before she got out of the car. But as it turned out, since she'd sat down, she hadn't shut up. She'd told Janice about her conversation with Zephyr and the way Moss had looked through her like she was a ghost. She'd talked about the condoms in her locker and why she hadn't reported them to the principal. She talked about how, even when people weren't whispering behind her back, she could still hear them doing it.

Janice settled down onto a heap of pillows on the floor - her office was shared by four different sexual assault advocates and was full of soft edges and things you could hug if you needed to.

“It sounds to me like Zephyr's a little confused right now,” Janice said. “She thinks she has to pick between you and Moss, so she isn't going to be a viable form of support.”

“Well,” Trixie said, “that leaves my mom and dad, and I can't quite go dragging them to school with me.”

“What about your other friends?”

Trixie worried the fringe of the pillow on her lap. “I sort of stopped spending time with them when I started hanging out with Jason.”

“You must have missed them.”

She shook her head. “I was so wrapped up in Jason, there wasn't room for anything else.” Trixie looked up at Janice. “That's love, isn't it?”

“Did Jason ever tell you he loved you?”

“I told him once.” She sat up and reached for the tea that Janice had given her, even though she'd said she didn't want any. The mug was smooth in her palms, radiant with heat. Trixie wondered if this was what it felt like to hold a heart. "He said he loved

me too."

“When was that?”

October fourteenth, at nine thirty-nine P.M. They had been in the back row of a movie theater holding hands, watching a teen slasher

flick. She had been wearing Zephyr's blue mohair sweater, the one that made her boobs look bigger than they actually were. Jason had bought Sour Patch Kids and she was drinking Sprite. But Trixie thought that telling Janice the details that had been burned into her mind might make her sound too pathetic, so instead she just said, “About a month after we got together.”

“Did he tell you he loved you after that?” Trixie had waited for him to say it first, without prompting, but Jason hadn't. And she hadn't said it again, because she was too afraid he wouldn't say it back.

She had thought she heard him whisper it afterward, the other night, but she was so numb by then she still was not entirely sure she hadn't just made it up to soften the blow of what had happened.

“How did you two break up?” Janice asked. They had been standing in Jason's kitchen, eating M&M's out of a bowl on the table. I think it might be a good thing if we saw other people, he had said, when five seconds earlier they had been talking about a teacher who was taking the rest of the year off to be with the baby she'd adopted from Romania. Trixie hadn't been able to breathe, and her mind spun frantically to figure out what she had done wrong. It isn't you, Jason had said. But he was perfect, so how could that be true?

He said he wanted them to stay friends, and she nodded, even though she knew it was impossible. How was she supposed to smile as she passed by him at school, when she wanted to collapse? How could she unhear his promises?

The night Jason broke up with her, they had gone to his house to hook up - his folks were out. Afraid that her parents might do something stupid, like call, Trixie had told them that a whole bunch of kids were going to a movie. And so, after Jason dropped the bomb, Trixie was forced to spend another two hours in his company, until the time the movie would have been over, when all she really wanted to do was hide underneath her covers and cry herself dry.

“When Jason broke up with you,” Janice asked, “what did you do to make yourself feel better?”

Cut. The word popped into Trixie's mind so fast that only at the very last moment did she press her lips together to keep it inside. But at the same time, she subconsciously slid her right hand over her left wrist.

Janice had been watching too closely. She reached for Trixies arm and inched up the cuff of her shirt. “So that didn't happen during the rape.”

“No.”

“Why did you tell the doctor in the emergency room that it did?” Trixies eyes filled with tears. “I didn't want her to think I was crazy.”

After Jason broke up with her, Trixie lost any semblance of emotional control. She'd find herself sobbing when a certain song came on the car radio and have to make up excuses to her father. She would walk by Jason's locker in the hope that she might accidentally cross paths with him. She'd find the one computer in the library whose screen in the sunlight mirrored the table behind her, and she'd watch Jason in its reflection while she pretended to type. She was swimming in tar, when the rest of the world, including Jason had so seamlessly moved on.

“I was in the bathroom one day,” Trixie confessed, “and I opened up the medicine cabinet and saw my father's razor blades. I just did it without thinking. But it felt so good to take my mind off everything else. It was a kind of pain that made sense.”

“There are constructive ways to deal with depression . . .”

“It's crazy, right?” Trixie interrupted. “To love someone who's hurt you?”

“It's crazier to think that someone who hurts you loves you,” Janice replied.

Trixie lifted her mug. The tea was cold now. She held it in a way that blocked her face, so that Janice wouldn't be able to look her in

the eye. If she did, surely she'd see the one last secret Trixie had managed to keep: that after That Night, she hated Jason

. . . but she hated herself more. Because even after what had happened, there was a part of Trixie that still wanted him back.

* * *

From the Letters to the Editor page of the Portland Press Herald:

To the Editors:

We would like to express our shock and anger at the allegations leveled against Jason Underhill. Anyone who knows Jason understands that he doesn't have a violent bone in his body. If rape is a crime of violence and dominance over another person, shouldn't there then be signs of violence?

While Jason's life has been brought to a screeching halt, the so-called victim in this case continues to walk around undeterred. While Jason is being redrawn as a monster, this victim is seemingly absent of the symptoms associated with a sexual assault. Might this not be a rape after all... but a case of a young girl's remorse after making a decision she wished she hadn't?

If the town of Bethel was to pass judgment on this case, Jason Underhill would surely be found innocent.

Sincerely,

Thirteen anonymous educators from Bethel H.S and fifty-six additional signatories

* * *

Superheroes were born in the minds of people desperate to be resurrected. The first, and arguably the most legendary, arrived in the 1930s, care of Shuster and Siegel, two unemployed, apprehensive Jewish immigrants who couldn't get work at a newspaper. They

imagined a loser who only had to whip off his glasses and step into a

phone booth to morph into a paragon of manliness, a world where the geek got the girl at the end. The public, reeling from the Depression, embraced Superman, who took them away from a bleak reality.

Daniel's first comic book had been about leaving, too. It had grown from a Yup'ik story about a hunter who stupidly set out alone and speared a walrus. The hunter knew he couldn't haul it in by himself, yet if he didn't let go of the rope it would drag him down and kill him. The hunter decided to release the line, but his hands had frozen into position and he was pulled underwater. Instead of drowning, though, he sank to the bottom of the sea and became a walrus himself.

Daniel started to draw the comic book at recess one day, after he was kept inside because he'd punched a kid who teased him for his blue eyes. He'd absently picked up a pencil and drew a figure that started in the sea - all flippers and tusks - and evolved toward shore to standing position, gradually developing the arms and legs and face of a man. He drew and he drew, watching his hero break away from his village in a way that Daniel couldn't himself. He couldn't seem to escape these days, either. In the wake of Trixie's rape, Daniel had gotten precious little drawing done. At this point, the only way he would make his deadline was if he stayed awake 24/7 and managed to magically add a few hours to each day. He hadn't called Marvel, though, to break the bad news. Explaining why he had been otherwise occupied would somehow make what had happened to Trixie more concrete.

When the phone rang at seven-thirty A.M., Daniel grabbed for it. Trixie was not going to school today, and Daniel wanted her to stay blessedly unconscious for as long as humanly possible. “You got something to tell me?” the voice on the other end demanded. Daniel broke out in a cold sweat. “Paulie,” he said. “What's up?”

Paulie Goldman was Daniel's longtime editor, and a legend. Known for his ever-present cigar and red bow tie, he'd been a crony of all the great men in the business: Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko. These days, he'd be just as likely to be found grabbing a Reuben at his favorite corner deli with Alan Moore, Todd McFarlane, or Neil Caiman.

It had been Paulie who'd jumped all over Daniel's idea to bring a graphic novel back to former comic book fans who were now adults, and to let Daniel not only pencil the art but also write a story line that might appeal to them. He'd gotten Marvel on board, although they were leery at first. Like all publishers, trying something that hadn't been done before was considered anathema unless you succeeded, in which case you were called revolutionary. But given the marketing that Marvel had put behind the Wildclaw series, to miss a deadline would be catastrophic.

“Have you happened to read the latest Lying in the Gutters?” Paulie asked.

He was referring to an online trade gossip column by Rich Johnston. The title was a double entendre - gutters were the spaces between panels, the structure that made a comic illustration a comic illustration. Johnston encouraged “gutterati” to send him scoop to post in his articles, and “guttersnipes” to spread the word across the Internet. With the phone crooked against his shoulder, Daniel pulled up the Web page on his computer and scanned the headlines.

A Story That's Not About Marvel Editorial, he read. The DC Purchase of Flying Pig Comics That Isn't Going to Happen.

You Saw It Here Second: In The Weeds, the new title from Crawl

^^ace, will be drawn by Evan Hohman . . . but the pages are already popping up on eBay.

And on the very bottom: Wildclaw Sheathed?

Daniel leaned toward the screen. I understand that Daniel Stone, Kid of the Moment, has drawn . . . count 'em, folks . . . ZERO pages toward his next Tenth Circle deadline. Was the hype really just a hoax? What good's a great series when there's nothing new to read?

“This is bullshit,” Daniel said. “I've been drawing.”

“How much?”

“It'll get done, Paulie.”

“How much?”

“Eight pages.”

“Eight pages? You've got to get me twenty-two by the end of the week if it's going to get inked on time.”

“I'll ink it myself if I have to.”

“Yeah? Will you run it off on Xerox machines and take it to the distributor too? For God's sake, Danny. This isn't high school. The dog isn't allowed to eat your homework.” He paused, then said,

“I know you're a last-minute guy, but this isn't like you. What's going on?”

How do you explain to a man who'd made a life out of fantasy that sometimes reality came crashing down? In comics, heroes escaped and villains lost and not even death was permanent. “The series,” Daniel said quietly. “It's taking a little bit of a turn.”

“What do you mean?”

“The storyline. It's becoming more . . . family oriented.” Paulie was silent for a moment, thinking this over. “Family's good,” he mused. “You mean a plot that would bring parents and their kids together?”

Daniel pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “I hope so,” he said.

* * *

Trixie was systematically removing all traces of Jason from her bedroom. She tossed into the trash the first note he'd passed her in class. The goofy reel of pictures they'd taken at a booth at Old Orchard Beach. The green felt blotter on her desk, where she could feel the impression of his name, after writing it dozens of times on paper.

It was when she went to throw the blotter out in the recycle bin that she saw the newspaper, the page open to the letter her parents had not wanted her to see.

“If the town of Bethel was to pass judgment on this case,” Trixie read, “Jason Underhill would surely be found innocent.” What they hadn't said, in that awful editorial letter, was that this

town had already tried and judged the wrong person. She ran upstairs again, to her computer, and connected to the Internet. She looked up the Web page for the Portland Press Herald and started to type a rebuttal letter.

To Whom It May Concern, Trixie wrote.

I know it is the policy of your paper to keep victims who are minors anonymous. But I'm one of those minors, and instead of having people guess, I want them to know my name.

She thought of a dozen other girls who might read this, girls who had been too scared to tell anyone what had happened to them. Or the dozen girls who had told someone and who could read this and find the courage they needed to get through one more day of the hell that was high school. She thought of the boys who would think twice before taking something that wasn't theirs. My name is Trixie Stone, she typed.

She watched the letters quiver on the page; she read the spaces between the words - all of which reminded her that she was a coward. Then she hit the delete button.

* * *

The phone rang just as Laura walked into the kitchen. By the time she'd picked up, so had Daniel on an upstairs connection.

“I'm looking for Laura Stone,” the caller said, and she dropped the glass she was holding into the sink.

“I've got it,” Laura said. She waited for Daniel to hang up.

“I miss you,” Seth replied.

She didn't answer right away; she couldn't. What if she hadn't picked up the phone? Would Seth have started chatting up Daniel?

Would he have introduced himself? “Do not ever call here again,” Laura whispered.

“I need to talk to you.”

Her heart was beating so hard she could barely hear her own voice. “I can't.”

“Please. Laura. It's important.”

Daniel walked into the kitchen and poured himself some water.

“Please take me off your call list,” Laura said, and she hung up. In retrospect Laura realized that she'd dated Daniel through osmosis, taking a little of his recklessness and making it part of herself. She broke up with Walter and began sleeping through classes. She started smoking. She peppered Daniel with questions about the past he wouldn't discuss. She learned how her own body could be an instrument, how Daniel could play a symphony over her skin.

Then she found out she was pregnant.

At first, she thought that the reason she didn't tell Daniel was because she feared he'd run. Gradually, though, she realized that she hadn't told Daniel because she was the one considering flight. Reality kicked at Laura with a vengeance, now that responsibility had caught up to her. At twenty-four years old, what was she doing staying up all night to bet on cockfights in the basement of a tenement? What good would it be in the long run if she could lay claim to finding the best tequila over the border but her doctoral thesis was dead in the water? It had been one thing to flirt with the dark side; it was another thing entirely to set down roots there.

Parents didn't take their baby trolling the streets after midnight. They didn't live out of the back of a car. They couldn't buy formula and cereal and clothes with the happenstance cash that dribbled in from sketches done here and there. Although Daniel could currently pull Laura like a tide to the moon, she couldn't imagine them together ten years from now. She was forced to consider the startling fact that the love of her life might not actually be someone with whom she could spend a lifetime. When Laura broke up with Daniel, she convinced herself she was doing both of them a favor. She did not mention the baby, although she had known all along she would keep it. Sometimes she'd find herself losing hours at a time, wondering if her child would have the same pale wolf-eyes as its father. She threw out her cigarettes and started wearing sweater sets again and driving with her seat belt fastened. She folded Daniel neatly away in her mind and pretended not to think about him.

A few months later, Laura came home to find Daniel waiting at her condo. He took one look at her maternity top and then, furious, grabbed her by her upper arms. “How could you not tell me about this?”

Laura panicked, wondering if she'd misinterpreted the jagged edge of his personality all along. What if he wasn't just wild, but truly dangerous? “I figured it was best if . . .”

“What were you going to tell the baby?” Daniel said. “About me?”

“I... hadn't gotten that far.”

Laura watched him carefully. Daniel had turned into someone she couldn't quite recognize. This wasn't just some Bad Boy out to kick the system - this was someone so deeply upset that he'd forgotten to cover the scars.

He sank down onto the front steps. “My mother told me that my dad died before I was born. But when I was eleven, the mail plane brought a letter addressed to me.” Daniel glanced up. “You don't get money from ghosts.”

Laura crouched down beside him.

“The postmarks were always different, but after that first letter he'd send cash every month. He never talked about why he wasn't here, with us. He'd talk about what the salt mountains looked like in Utah, or how cold the Mississippi River was when you stepped into it barefoot. He said that one day he'd take me to all those places, so I could see for myself,” Daniel said. “I waited for years, you know, and he never came to get me.” He turned to Laura. “My mother said she'd lied because she thought it would be easier to hear that my father was dead than to hear he hadn't wanted a family. I don't want our baby to have a father like that.”

“Daniel,” she confessed, “I'm not sure if I want our baby to have a father like you.”

He reared back, as if he'd been slapped. Slowly, he got to his feet and walked away.

Laura spent the next week crying. Then one morning, when she went out to get the newspaper, she found Daniel asleep on the front steps of her condo. He stood up, and she could not stop staring: His shoulder-length hair had been cut military-short; he was wearing khaki pants and a blue oxford cloth shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He held out a stub of paper. “It's the check I just deposited,” Daniel explained. “I got a job working at Atomic Comics. They gave me a week's salary in advance.” Laura listened, her resolve cracking wide open. What if she was not the only one who had been fascinated by a personality different from her own? What if all the time that she'd been absorbing Daniel's wildness, he'd been looking to her for redemption?

What if love wasn't the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?

“I don't have enough cash yet,” Daniel continued, “but when I do, I'm going to take art courses at the community college.” He reached for Laura, so that their child was balanced between them.

“Please,” he whispered. “What if that baby's the best part of me?”

“You don't want to do this,” Laura said, even as she moved closer to him. “You'll hate me one day, for ruining your life.”

“My life was ruined a long time ago,” Daniel said. “And I'll never hate you.”

They got married at the city hall, and Daniel was completely true to his word. He quit smoking and drinking, cold turkey. He came to every OB appointment. Four months later, when Trixie was born, he doted over her as if she were made of sunlight. While Laura taught undergrads during the day, Daniel played with Trixie in the park an at the zoo. At night, he took classes and began doing freelance graphic art, before working for Marvel. He followed Laura from a teaching position in San Diego to one at Marquette to the current one in Maine. He had dinner waiting when she came home from lecturing; he stuffed caricatures of Trixie as SuperBaby in the pockets of her briefcase; he never forgot her birthday. He was, in fact, so perfect that she wondered if the wild in Daniel had only been an act to attract her. But then she would remember the strangest things out of the blue: a night when Daniel had bitten her so hard during sex he'd drawn blood; the sound of him fighting off imaginary enemies in the thick of a nightmare; the time he had tattooed Laura's body with Magic Markers - snakes and hydras down her arms, a demon in flight at the small of her back. A few years ago, wistful, she had gone so far as to bring one of his inking pens to bed. “You know how hard it is to get that stuff off your skin?” Daniel had said, and that was the end of that.

Laura knew she had no right to complain. There were women in this world whose husbands beat them, who cried themselves to sleep

because their spouses were alcoholics or gamblers. There were men in this world whose partners had said “I love you” fewer times in a lifetime than Daniel would in a week. Laura could shift

the blame any old way she liked, but the stiff wind of truth would

send it back to her: She hadn't ruined Daniel's life by asking him to

change. She had ruined her own.

* * *

Mike Bartholemew glanced at the tape recorder to make sure it was still running.

“She was all over me,” Moss Minton said. “Putting her hands in my hair, lap dancing, that kind of stuff.”

The kid had come down willingly, at Mike's request, to talk. But less than five minutes into the conversation, it was clear that anything that came out of Moss's mouth was going to be unduly colored allegiance to Jason Underhill.

“I don't know how to say this without sounding like a total jerk,” Moss said, “but Trixie was asking for it.” Bartholemew leaned back in his chair. “You know this for a fact.”

“Well... yeah.”

“Did you have intercourse with Trixie that night?”

“No.”

“Then you must have been in the room when your friend was having sex with her,” Bartholemew said. “Or how else would you have heard her consent?”

“I wasn't in the room, dude,” Moss said. “But neither were you. Maybe I didn't hear her say yes, but you didn't hear her say no, either.”

Bartholemew turned off the tape recorder. “Thanks for coming in.”

“We're done?” Moss said, surprised. “That's it?”

“That's it.” The detective took a card out of his pocket and handed it to Moss. “If you happen to think of anything else you need to tell me, just call.”

“Bartholemew,” Moss read aloud. “I used to have a babysitter named Holly Bartholemew. I think I was around nine or ten.”

“My daughter.”

“No kidding? Does she still live around here?” Mike hesitated. “Not anymore.”

Moss stuffed the business card in his pocket. “Tell her I said hi the next time you see her.” He gave the detective a half wave and then walked out.

“I will,” Mike said, as his voice unraveled like lace. ^|

* * *

Daniel opened the door to find Janice, the sexual assault advocate, on the other side. “Oh, I didn't know Trixie made plans to see you.”

“She didn't,” Janice replied. “Can I speak to you and Laura for a second?”

“Lauras at the college,” he said, just as Trixie poked her head over the railing from upstairs. Before, Trixie would not have hung back like that; she would have bounded down like lightning, certain that the visitor was for her.

“Trixie,” Janice said, spotting her. “I need to tell you something you're not going to like.”

Trixie came downstairs, sidling up beside Daniel, the way she used to do when she was tiny and saw something frightening.

“The defense attorney representing Jason Underhill has subpoenaed the records of my conversations with Trixie.” Daniel shook his head. "I don't understand. Isn't that a violation

of privacy?"

“Only when you're talking about the defendant. Unfortunately, if you're the victim of a crime, it's a different story. You can wind up with your diary as evidence, or the transcripts of your psychiatric sessions.” She looked at Trixie. “Or your discussions with a rape crisis counselor.”

Daniel had no idea what went on during the times Janice had met with Trixie, but beside him, his daughter was shaking. “You can't turn over the records,” she said.

“If we don't, our director will be sent to jail,” Janice explained.

“I'll do it,” Daniel said. “I'll go to jail in her place.”

“The court won't accept that. Believe me, you're not the first father to volunteer.”

You're not the first. Daniel slowly put the words together.

“This happened before?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” Janice admitted.

“You said what I told you didn't leave that room!” Trixie cried. “You said you'd help me. How is this supposed to help me?” As Trixie flew up the stairs, Janice started after her. “Let me go talk to her.”

Daniel stepped forward, blocking her way. “Thanks,” he said. But I think you've done enough."

* * *

The law says that Jason Underhill has the right to mount a defense, Detective Bartholemew explained on the phone. The law says that a victim's credibility can be questioned. And with all due respect, he added, your daughter already has some credibility issues.

She was involved with this boy beforehand.

She was drinking.

She's made some inconsistent statements.

Daniel's response: Like what?

Now that he'd finished talking to the detective, Daniel felt numb. He walked upstairs and opened Trixie's bedroom door. She lay on her bed, facing away from him.