by Jodi Picoult
“Hey.” He glanced back over his shoulder to where Jason was still hunched over his own desk. “You okay?”
Trixie smoothed the edges of her homework. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I just want you to know we all think he’s an idiot.”
We. We could be the state champion hockey team, of which Moss and Jason were cocaptains. It could be the whole of the junior class. It could be anyone who wasn’t her. That part of it was almost as hard as the not having Jason: trying to negotiate through the minefield of the friends they’d shared, to learn who still belonged to her.
“I think she’s just something he needs to get out of his system,” Moss said, his words a handful of stones dropped from a cliff.
Trixie’s handwriting started to swim on the page before her. Please leave, she thought, praying fiercely for the telekinetic power to cause a distraction, and for once in her life something went right. Mr. Torkelson walked in, slammed the door, and came to the front of the classroom. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “why do we dream?”
A stoner in the back row answered. “Because Angelina Jolie doesn’t go to Bethel High.”
The teacher laughed. “Well, that’s one reason. Sigmund Freud might even agree with you. He called dreams a ‘royal road’ into the unconscious, made up of all the forbidden wishes you had and wished you didn’t.”
Dreams, Trixie thought, were like soap bubbles. You could look at them from a distance, and they were lovely. It’s when you stuck your face too close that your eyes wound up stinging. She wondered if Jason had the same dreams she did, the kind where you wake up with all your breath gone and your heart as flat as a dime.
“Ms. Stone?” the teacher repeated.
Trixie blushed. She had no idea what Torkelson had asked. She could feel Jason’s gaze rising like a welt on the back of her neck.
“I’ve got one, Mr. T,” Moss called out from somewhere behind her. “I’m skating out at the regionals, and a pass comes my way, but all of a sudden my stick is like a piece of spaghetti—”
“As blatantly Freudian as that is, Moss, I’d really like to hear from Trixie.”
Like one of her father’s superheroes, Trixie’s senses narrowed. She could hear the girl in the back of the class scratching out a secret note to her friend across the aisle, Torkelson clasping his hands together, and worst of all, that broken connection as Jason closed his eyes. She scribbled on her thumbnail with her pen. “I don’t remember any dreams.”
“You spend a sixth of your life dreaming, Ms. Stone. Which in your case amounts to about two and a half years. Certainly you haven’t blocked out two and a half years of your life?”
She shook her head, looked up at the teacher, and opened her mouth. “I . . . I’m going to be sick,” Trixie managed, and with the classroom wheeling around her, she grabbed her books and fled.
In the bathroom, she flung her backpack under the row of square white sinks that looked like a giant’s dentures and crouched in front of one of the toilets. She vomited, although she would have wagered that there was nothing inside of her. Then she sat on the floor and pressed her hot cheek against the metal wall of the stall.
It was not that Jason had broken up with her on their three-month anniversary. It was not that Trixie—a freshman who’d seemed to have hit the jackpot, a nobody elevated to the level of queen by association—had lost her Cinderella status. It was that she truly believed you could be fourteen when you learned how love could change the speed your blood ran through you, how it made you dream in kaleidoscope color. It was that Trixie knew she couldn’t have loved Jason this hard if he hadn’t loved her that way too.
Trixie came out of the stall and turned the water on in the sink. She splashed her face, wiped it with a brown paper towel. She didn’t want to go back to class, not ever, so she took out her eyeliner and mascara, her lip gloss and her compact mirror. She had her mother’s rich copper hair, her father’s dark complexion. Her ears were too pointed and her chin was too round. Her lips were okay, she guessed. Once, in art class, a teacher had said they were classic and made the rest of the students draw them. It was her eyes, though, that scared her. Although they used to be a dark mossy color, nowadays they were a frosted green so pale it was barely a color at all. Trixie wondered if you could cry away the pigment.
She snapped shut her compact and then, on second thought, opened it and set it on the floor. It took three stomps before the mirror inside shattered. Trixie threw out the plastic disc and all but one shard of glass. It was shaped like a tear, rounded on one end and sharp as a dagger on the other.
She slid down along the tiled wall of the bathroom until she was sitting underneath the sink. Then she dragged the makeshift knife over the white canvas of her inner arm. As soon as she did it, she wished she could take it back. Crazy girls did this, girls who walked like zombies through YA novels.
But.
Trixie felt the sting of the skin as it split, the sweet welling rise of blood.
It hurt, though not as much as everything else.
• • •
“You have to do something pretty awful to wind up in the bottom level of hell,” Laura said rhetorically, surveying her class. “And Lucifer used to be God’s right-hand man. So what went wrong?”
It had been a simple disagreement, Laura thought. Like almost every other rift between people, that’s how it started. “One day God turned to his buddy Lucifer and said that he was thinking of giving those cool little toys he created—namely, people—the right to choose how they acted. Free will. Lucifer thought that power should belong only to angels. He staged a coup, and he lost big-time.”
Laura started walking through the aisles—one downside of free Internet access at the college was that kids used lecture hours to shop online and download porn, if the professor wasn’t vigilant. “What makes the Inferno so brilliant are the contrapassi—the punishments that fit the crime. In Dante’s mind, sinners pay in a way that reflects what they did wrong on earth. Lucifer didn’t want man to have choices, so he winds up literally paralyzed in ice. Fortune-tellers walk around with their heads on backward. Adulterers end up joined together for eternity, without getting any satisfaction from it.” Laura shook off the image that rose in her mind. “Apparently,” she joked, “the clinical trials for Viagra were done in hell.”
Her class laughed as she headed toward her podium. “In the 1300s—before Italians could tune in to The Revenge of the Sith or Lord of the Rings—this poem was the ultimate battle of good versus evil,” she said. “I like the word evil. Scramble it a little, and you get vile and live. Good, on the other hand, is just a command to go do.”
The four graduate students who led the class sections for this course were all sitting in the front row with their computers balanced on their knees. Well, three of them were. There was Alpha, the self-christened retrofeminist, which as far as Laura could tell meant that she gave a lot of speeches about how modern women had been driven so far from the home they no longer felt comfortable inside it. Beside her, Aine scrawled on the inside of one alabaster arm—most likely her own poetry. Naryan, who could type faster than Laura could breathe, looked up over his laptop at her, a crow poised for a crumb. Only Seth sprawled in his chair, his eyes closed, his long hair spilling over his face. Was he snoring?
She felt a flush rise up the back of her neck. Turning her back on Seth Dummerston, she glanced up at the clock in the back of the lecture hall. “That’s it for today. Read through the fifth canto,” Laura instructed. “Next Wednesday, we’ll be talking about poetic justice versus divine retribution. And have a nice weekend, folks.”
The students gathered their backpacks and laptops, chattering about the bands that were playing later on, and the BÈΠ party that had brought in a truckload of real sand for Caribbean Night. They wound scarves around their necks like bright bandages and filed out of the lecture hall, already dismissing Laura’s class from their minds.
Laura didn’t need to prepare for
her next lecture; she was living it. Be careful what you wish for, she thought. You just might get it.
Six months ago, she had been so sure that what she was doing was right, a liaison so natural that stopping it was more criminal than letting it flourish. When his hands roamed over her, she transformed: no longer the cerebral Professor Stone but a woman for whom feeling came before thought. Now, though, when Laura realized what she had done, she wanted to blame a tumor, temporary insanity, anything but her own selfishness. Now all she wanted was damage control: to break it off, to slip back into the seam of her family before they had a chance to realize how long she’d been missing.
When the lecture hall was empty, Laura turned off the overhead lights. She dug in her pocket for her office keys. Damn, had she left them in her computer bag?
“Veil.”
Laura turned around, already recognizing the soft Southern curves of Seth Dummerston’s voice. He stood up and stretched, unfolding his long body after that nap. “It’s another anagram for evil,” he said. “The things we hide.”
She stared at him coolly. “You fell asleep during my lecture.”
“I had a late night.”
“Whose fault is that?” Laura asked.
Seth stared at her the way she used to stare at him, then bent forward until his mouth brushed over hers. “You tell me,” he whispered.
• • •
Trixie turned the corner and saw them: Jessica Ridgeley, with her long sweep of blond hair and her dermatologist’s-daughter skin, was leaning against the door of the AV room kissing Jason.
Trixie became a rock, the sea of students parting around her. She watched Jason’s hands slip into the back pockets of Jessica’s jeans. She could see the dimple on the left side of his mouth, the one that appeared only when he was speaking from the heart.
Was he telling Jessica that his favorite sound was the thump that laundry made when it was turning around in a dryer? That sometimes he could walk by the telephone and think she was going to call, and sure enough she did? That once, when he was ten, he broke into a candy machine because he wanted to know what happened to the quarters once they went inside?
Was she even listening?
Suddenly, Trixie felt someone grab her arm and start dragging her down the hall, out the door, and into the courtyard. She smelled the acrid twitch of a match, and a minute later, a cigarette had been stuck between her lips. “Inhale,” Zephyr commanded.
Zephyr Santorelli-Weinstein was Trixie’s oldest friend. She had enormous doe eyes and olive skin and the coolest mother on the planet, one who bought her incense for her room and took her to get her navel pierced like it was an adolescent rite. She had a father, too, but he lived in California with his new family, and Trixie knew better than to bring up the subject. “What class have you got next?”
“French.”
“Madame Wright is senile. Let’s ditch.”
Bethel High had an open campus, not because the administration was such a fervent promoter of teen freedom but because there was simply nowhere to go. Trixie walked beside Zephyr along the access road to the school, their faces ducked against the wind, their hands stuffed into the pockets of their North Face jackets. The crisscross pattern where she’d cut herself an hour earlier on her arm wasn’t bleeding anymore, but the cold made it sting. Trixie automatically started breathing through her mouth, because even from a distance, she could smell the gassy, rotten-egg odor from the paper mill to the north that employed most of the adults in Bethel. “I heard what happened in psych,” Zephyr said.
“Great,” Trixie muttered. “Now the whole world thinks I’m a loser and a freak.”
Zephyr took the cigarette from Trixie’s hand and smoked the last of it. “What do you care what the whole world thinks?”
“Not the whole world,” Trixie admitted. She felt her eyes prickle with tears again, and she wiped her mitten across them. “I want to kill Jessica Ridgeley.”
“If I were you, I’d want to kill Jason,” Zephyr said. “Why do you let it get to you?”
Trixie shook her head. “I’m the one who’s supposed to be with him, Zephyr. I just know it.”
They had reached the turn of the river past the park-and-ride, where the bridge stretched over the Androscoggin River. This time of year, it was nearly frozen over, with great swirling art sculptures that formed as ice built up around the rocks that crouched in the riverbed. If they kept walking another quarter mile, they’d reach the town, which basically consisted of a Chinese restaurant, a minimart, a bank, a toy store, and a whole lot of nothing else.
Zephyr watched Trixie cry for a few minutes, then leaned against the railing of the bridge. “You want the good news or the bad news?”
Trixie blew her nose in an old tissue she’d found in her pocket. “Bad news.”
“Martyr,” Zephyr said, grinning. “The bad news is that my best friend has officially exceeded her two-week grace period for mourning over a relationship, and she will be penalized from here on in.”
At that, Trixie smiled a little. “What’s the good news?”
“Moss Minton and I have sort of been hanging out.”
Trixie felt another stab in her chest. Her best friend, and Jason’s? “Really?”
“Well, maybe we weren’t actually hanging out. He waited for me after English class today to ask me if you were okay . . . but still, the way I figure it, he could have asked anyone, right?”
Trixie wiped her nose. “Great. I’m glad my misery is doing wonders for your love life.”
“Well, it’s sure as hell not doing anything for yours. You can’t keep crying over Jason. He knows you’re obsessed.” Zephyr shook her head. “Guys don’t want high maintenance, Trix. They want . . . Jessica Ridgeley.”
“What the fuck does he see in her?”
Zephyr shrugged. “Who knows. Bra size? Neanderthal IQ?” She pulled her messenger bag forward, so that she could dig inside for a pack of M&M’s. Hanging from the edge of the bag were twenty linked pink paper clips.
Trixie knew girls who kept a record of sexual encounters in a journal, or by fastening safety pins to the tongue of a sneaker. For Zephyr, it was paper clips. “A guy can’t hurt you if you don’t let him,” Zephyr said, running her finger across the paper clips so that they danced.
These days, having a boyfriend or a girlfriend was not in vogue; most kids trolled for random hookups. The sudden thought that Trixie might have been that to Jason made her feel sick to her stomach. “I can’t be like that.”
Zephyr ripped open the bag of candy and passed it to Trixie. “Friends with benefits. It’s what the guys want, Trix.”
“How about what the girls want?”
Zephyr shrugged. “Hey, I suck at algebra, I can’t sing on key, and I’m always the last one picked for a team in gym . . . but apparently I’m quite gifted when it comes to hooking up.”
Trixie turned, laughing. “They tell you that?”
“Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. You get all the fun without any of the baggage. And the next day you just act like it never happened.”
Trixie tugged on the paper clip chain. “If you’re acting like it never happened, then why are you keeping track?”
“Once I hit a hundred, I can send away for the free decoder ring.” Zephyr shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess it’s just so I remember where I started.”
Trixie opened her palm and surveyed the M&M’s. The food coloring dye was already starting to bleed against her skin. “Why do you think the commercials say they won’t melt in your hands, when they always do?”
“Because everyone lies,” Zephyr replied.
All teenagers knew this was true. The process of growing up was nothing more than figuring out what doors hadn’t yet been slammed in your face. For years, Trixie’s own parents had told her that she could be anything, have anything, do anything. That was why she’d been so eager to grow up—until she got to adolescence and hit a big, fat wall of reality. As it turned out, she couldn�
��t have anything she wanted. You didn’t get to be pretty or smart or popular just because you wanted it. You didn’t control your own destiny; you were too busy trying to fit in. Even now, as she stood here, there were a million parents setting their kids up for heartbreak.
Zephyr stared out over the railing. “This is the third time I’ve cut English this week.”
In French class, Trixie was missing a quiz on le subjonctif. Verbs, apparently, had moods too: They had to be conjugated a whole different way if they were used in clauses to express want, doubt, wishes, judgment. She had memorized the red-flag phrases last night: It is doubtful that. It’s not clear that. It seems that. It may be that. Even though. No matter what. Without.
She didn’t need a stupid leçon to teach her something she’d known for years: Given anything negative or uncertain, there were rules that had to be followed.
• • •
If he had the choice, Daniel would draw a villain every time.
There just wasn’t all that much you could do with heroes. They came with a set of traditional standards: square jaw, overdeveloped calves, perfect teeth. They stood half a foot taller than your average man. They were anatomical marvels, intricate displays of musculature. They sported ridiculous knee-high boots that no one without superhuman strength would be caught dead wearing.
On the other hand, your average bad guy might have a face shaped like an onion, an anvil, a pancake. His eyes could bulge out or recess in the folds of his skin. His physique might be meaty or cadaverous, furry or rubberized, or covered with lizard scales. He could speak in lightning, throw fire, swallow mountains. A villain let your creativity out of its cage.
The problem was, you couldn’t have one without the other. There couldn’t be a bad guy unless there was a good guy to create the standard. And there couldn’t be a good guy until a bad guy showed just how far off the path he might stray.
