by Jodi Picoult
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 candy-apple 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 vision—of 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.
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 stupi
der 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 kid-sized 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 mother’s 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 A’s 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.”
