Laura Stone knew exactly how to go to hell. She could map out its geography on napkins at departmental cocktail parties; she was able to recite all of the passageways and rivers and folds by heart; she was on a first-name basis with its sinners. As one of the top Dante scholars in the country, she taught a course in this very subject and had done so every year since being tenured at Monroe  College. English 364 was also listed in the course handbook as Burn Baby Burn (or: What the Devil is the Inferno?), and it was one of the most popular courses on campus in the second trimester even though Dante’s epic poem the Divine Comedy wasn’t funny at all. Like her husband Daniel’s artwork, which was neither comic nor a book, the Inferno covered every genre of pop culture: romance, horror, mystery, crime. And like all of the best stories, it had at its center an ordinary, everyday hero who simply didn’t know how he’d ever become one.

 She stared at the students packing the rows in the utterly silent lecture hall. “Don’t move,” she instructed. “Not even a twitch.” Beside her, on the podium, an egg timer ticked away one full minute. She hid a smile as she watched the undergrads, all of whom suddenly had gotten the urge to sneeze or scratch their heads or wriggle.

 Of the three parts of Dante’s masterpiece, the Inferno was Laura’s favorite to teach - who better to think about the nature of actions and their consequences than teenagers? The story was simple: Over the course of three days - Good Friday to Easter Sunday - Dante trekked through the nine levels of hell, each filled with sinners worse than the next, until finally he came through the other side. The poem was full of ranting and weeping and demons, of fighting lovers and traitors eating the brains of their victims - in other words, graphic enough to hold the interest of today’s college students ... and to provide a distraction from her real life.

 The egg timer buzzed, and the entire class exhaled in unison.

 “Well?” Laura asked. “How did that feel?”

 “Endless,” a student called out.

 “Anyone want to guess how long I timed you for?”

 There was speculation: Two minutes. Five.

 “Try sixty seconds,” Laura said. “Now imagine being frozen from the waist down in a lake of ice for eternity. Imagine that the slightest movement would freeze the tears on your face and the water surrounding you. God, according to Dante, was all about motion and energy, so the ultimate punishment for Lucifer is to not be able to move at all. At the very bottom of hell, there’s no fire, no brimstone, just the utter inability to take action.” She cast her gaze across the sea of faces. “Is Dante right? After all, this is the very bottom of the barrel of hell, and the devil’s the worst of the lot. Is taking away your ability to do whatever you want, whenever you want, the very worst punishment you can imagine?”

 And that, in a nutshell, was why Laura loved Dante’s Inferno.

 Sure, it could be seen as a study of religion or politics.

 Certainly it was a narrative of redemption. But when you stripped it down, it was also the story of a guy in the throes of a midlife crisis, a guy who was reevaluating the choices he’d made along the way.

 Not unlike Laura herself.

 As Daniel Stone waited in the long queue of cars pulling up to the high school, he glanced at the stranger in the seat beside him and tried to remember when she used to be his daughter.

 “Traffics bad today,” he said to Trixie, just to fill up the space between them.

 Trixie didn’t respond. She fiddled with the radio, running through a symphony of static and song bites before punching it off entirely. Her red hair fell like a gash over her shoulder; her hands were burrowed in the sleeves of her North Face jacket. She turned to stare out the window, lost in a thousand thoughts, not a single one of which Daniel could guess.

 These days it seemed like the words between them were there only to outline the silences. Daniel understood better than anyone else that, in the blink of an eye, you might reinvent yourself. He understood that the person you were yesterday might not be the person you are tomorrow. But this time, he was the one who wanted to hold on to what he had, instead of letting go.

 “Dad,” she said, and she flicked her eyes ahead, where the car in front of them was moving forward.

 It was a complete cliche, but Daniel had assumed that the traditional distance that came between teenagers and their parents would pass by him and Trixie. They had a different relationship, after all, closer than most daughters and their fathers, simply because he was the one she came home to every day. He had done his due diligence in her bathroom medicine cabinet and her desk drawers and underneath her mattress - there were no drugs, no accordion-pleated condoms. Trixie was just growing away from him, and somehow that was even worse.

 For years she had floated into the house on the wings of her own stories: how the butterfly they were hatching in class had one of its antennae torn off by a boy who wasn’t gentle; how the school lunch that day had been pizza when the notice said it was going to be chicken chow mein and how if she’d known that, she would have bought instead of bringing her own; how the letter / in cursive

 is nothing like you’d think. There had been so many easy words between them that Daniel was guilty of nodding every now and then and tuning out the excess. He hadn’t known, at the time, that he should have been hoarding these, like bits of sea glass hidden in the pocket of his winter coat to remind him that once it had been summer.

 This September - and here was another cliche - Trixie had gotten a boyfriend. Daniel had had his share of fantasies: how he’d be casually cleaning a pistol when she was picked up for her first date; how he’d buy a chastity belt on the Internet. In none of those scenarios, though, had he ever really considered how the sight of a boy with his proprietary hand around his daughter’s waist might make him want to run until his lungs burst. And in none of these scenarios had he seen Trixie’s face fill with light when the boy came to the door, the same way she’d once looked at Daniel. Overnight, the little girl who vamped for his home videos now moved like a vixen when she wasn’t even trying. Overnight, his daughter’s actions and habits stopped being cute and started being something terrifying.

 His wife reminded him that the tighter he kept Trixie on a leash, the more she’d fight the choke hold. After all, Laura pointed out, rebelling against the system was what made her start dating Daniel. So when Trixie and Jason went out to a movie, Daniel forced himself to wish her a good time. When she escaped to her room to talk to her boyfriend privately on the phone, he did not hover at the door. He gave her breathing space, and somehow, that had become an immeasurable distance.

 “Hello?!” Trixie said, snapping Daniel out of his reverie. The cars in front of them had pulled away, and the crossing guard was furiously miming to get Daniel to drive up.

 “Well,” he said. “Finally.”

 Trixie pulled at the door handle. “Can you let me out?”

 Daniel fumbled with the power locks. “I’ll see you at three.”

 “I don’t need to be picked up.”

 Daniel tried to paste a wide smile on his face. “Jason driving you home?”

 Trixie gathered together her backpack and jacket. “Yeah,” she said. “Jason.” She slammed the truck door and blended into the mass of teenagers funneling toward the front door of the high school.

 “Trixie!” Daniel called out the window, so loud that several

 other kids turned around with her. Trixie’s hand was clenched into a fist against her chest, as if she were holding tight to a secret. She looked at him, waiting.

 There was a game they had played when Trixie was little, and would pore over the comic book collections he kept in his studio for research when he was drawing. Best transportation? she’d challenge, and Daniel would say the Batmobile. No way, Trixie had said. Wonder Woman’s invisible plane.

 Best costume?

 Wolverine, Daniel said, but Trixie voted for the Dark Phoenix.

 Now he leaned toward her. “Best superpower?” he asked.

 It had been the only answer they agreed upon: -flight. But this time, Trixie looked at him as if he were crazy to be bringing up a stupid game from a thousand years ago. “I’m going to be late,” she said and started to walk away.

 Cars honked, but Daniel didn’t put the truck into gear. He closed his eyes, trying to remember what he had been like at her age. At fourteen, Daniel had been living in a different world and doing everything he could to fight, lie, cheat, steal, and brawl his way out of it. At fourteen, he had been someone Trixie had never seen her father be. Daniel had made sure of it. “Daddy.”

 Daniel turned to find Trixie standing beside his truck. She curled her hands around the lip of the open window, the glitter in her pink nail polish catching the sun. “Invisibility,” she said, and then she melted into the crowd behind her.

 Trixie Stone had been a ghost for fourteen days, seven hours, and thirty-six minutes now, not that she was officially counting.

 This meant that she walked around school and smiled when she was supposed to; she pretended to listen when the algebra teacher talked about commutative properties; she even sat in the cafeteria with the other ninth-graders. But while they laughed at the lunch ladies’ hairstyles (or lack thereof), Trixie studied her hands and wondered whether anyone else noticed that if the sun hit your palm a certain way, you could see right through the skin, to the busy tunnels with blood moving around inside. Corpuscles. She slipped the word into her mouth and tucked it high against her cheek like a sucking candy, so that if anyone happened to ask her a question she could just shake her head, unable to speak.

 Kids who knew (and who didn’t? the news had traveled like a forest fire) were waiting to see her lose her careful balance. Trixie had even overheard one girl making a bet about when she might fall apart in a public situation. High school students were cannibals; they fed off your broken heart while you watched and then shrugged and offered you a bloody, apologetic smile.

 Visine helped. So did Preparation H under the eyes, as disgusting as it was to imagine. Trixie would get up at five-thirty in the morning, carefully select a double layer of long-sleeved T-shirts and a pair of flannel pants, and gather her hair into a messy ponytail. It took an hour to make herself look like she’d just rolled out of bed, like she’d been losing no sleep at all over what had happened. These days, her entire life was about making people believe she was someone she wasn’t anymore.

 Trixie crested the hallway on a sea of noise - lockers gnashing like teeth, guys yelling out afternoon plans over the heads of underclassmen, change being dug out of pockets for vending machines. She turned into a doorway and steeled herself to endure the next forty-eight minutes. Psychology was the only class she had with Jason, who was a junior. It was an elective. Which was a fancy way of saying: You asked for this.

 He was already there; she knew by the way the air had taken a charge around her body, an electric field. He was wearing the faded denim shirt she’d borrowed once when he spilled Coke on her while they were studying, and his black hair was a mess. You need a part, she used to tell him, and he’d laugh. I’ve got better ones, he’d say.

 She could smell him - shampoo and peppermint gum and, believe it or not, the cool white mist of utter ice. It was the same smell on the T-shirt she’d hidden in the bottom of her pajama drawer, the one he didn’t know she had, the one she wrapped around her pillow each night before she went to sleep. It kept the details in her dreams: a callus on the edge of Jason’s wrist, rubbed raw by his hockey glove. The flannel-covered sound of his voice when she called him on the phone and woke him. The way he twirled a pencil around the fingers of one hand when he was nervous or thinking too hard.

 He’d been doing that when he broke up with her.

 She took a deep breath and headed past the seat where Jason slouched, his eyes focused on the four-letter words students had worn into the desktop through years of boredom. She could feel his face heat up with the effort he was making to avoid looking at her. It felt unnatural to walk past, to not have him tug on the straps of her backpack until she gave him her full attention.

 “You’re coming to practice,” he’d say, “right?” As if there had ever been any question.

 Mr. Torkelson had assigned seating, and Trixie had been placed in the first row - something she had hated for the first three months of the school year and now was supremely grateful for, because it meant she could stare at the board and not have to see Jason or anyone else out of the corner of her eye. She slipped into the chair and opened her binder, her eyes avoiding the big Wite-Out centipede that used to be Jason’s name.

 When she felt a hand on her shoulder - a warm, broad, guy’s hand - all the breath left her body. Jason was going to apologize; he’d realized that he’d made a mistake; he wanted to ask her if she’d ever forgive him. She turned around, the word yes playing over her lips like the call of a flute, but instead found herself staring at Moss Minton, Jason’s best friend.

 “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 co-captains. 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 fathers 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 aislesone 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 armmost 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 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 Lauras 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 dermatologists-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 is 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 criss-cross 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 upuntil 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 lecon 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.

 Today Daniel sat hunched at his drafting table, procrastinating. He twirled his mechanical pencil; he kneaded an eraser in his palm. He was having a hell of a time turning his main character into a hawk. He had gotten the wingspan right, but he couldn’t seem to humanize the face behind the bright eyes and beak.

 Daniel was a comic book penciler. While Laura had built up the academic credentials to land her a tenured position at Monroe College, he’d worked out of the home with Trixie at his feet as he drew filler chapters for DC Comics. His style got him noticed by Marvel, which asked him numerous times to come work in NYC on Ultimate X-Men, but Daniel put his family before his career. He had graphic art to pay the mortgage - logos and illustrations for corporate newsletters - until last year, just before his fortieth birthday, when Marvel signed him to work from home on a project all his own.

 He kept a picture of Trixie over his workspace - not just because he loved her, but because for this particular graphic novel - The Tenth Circle - she was his inspiration. Well, Trixie and Laura. Laura’s obsession with Dante had provided the bare-bones plot of the story; Trixie had provided the impetus. But it was Daniel who was responsible for creating his main character Wildclaw - a hero that this industry had never seen.

 Historically, comics had been geared toward teenage boys.

 Daniel had pitched Marvel a different concept: a character designed for the demographic group of adults who had been weaned on comic books yet who now had the spending power they’d lacked as adolescents. Adults who wanted sneakers endorsed by Michael Jordan and watched news programs that looked like MTV segments and played Tetris on a Nintendo DS during their business-class flights. Adults who would immediately identify with Wildclaw’s alter ego, Duncan: a forty-something father who knew that getting old was hell, who wanted to keep his family safe, whose powers controlled him, instead of the other way around.

 The narrative of the graphic novel followed Duncan, an ordinary father searching for his daughter, who had been kidnapped by the devil into Dante’s circles of hell. When provoked, through rage or fear, Duncan would morph into Wildclaw - literally becoming an animal. The catch was this: Power always involved a loss of humanity. If Duncan turned into a hawk or a bear or a wolf to elude a dangerous creature, a piece of him would stay that way.

 His biggest fear was that if and when he did find his missing daughter, she would no longer recognize who he’d become in order to save her.

 Daniel looked down at what he had on the page so far, and sighed. The problem wasn’t drawing the hawkhe could do that in his sleep - it was making sure the reader saw the human behind it. It was not new to have a hero who turned into an animal - but Daniel had come by the concept honestly. He’d grown up as the only white

 boy in a native Alaskan village where his mother was a schoolteacher and his father was simply gone. In Akiak, the Yupiit spoke freely of children who went to live with seals, of men who shared a home with black bears. One woman had married a dog and given birth to puppies, only to peel back the fur to see they were actually babies underneath. Animals were simply nonhuman people,

 with the same ability to make conscious decisions, and humanity simmered under their skins. You could see it in the way they sat together for meals, or fell in love, or grieved. And this went both ways: Sometimes, in a human, there would turn out to be a hidden bit of a beast.

 Daniel’s best and only friend in the village was a Yup’ik boy named Cane, whose grandfather had taken it upon himself to teach Daniel how to hunt and fish and everything else that his own father should have. For example, how after killing a rabbit, you had to be quiet, so that the animal’s spirit could visit. How at fish camp, you’d set the bones of the salmon free in the river, whispering Ataam taikina. Come back again.

 Daniel spent most of his childhood waiting to leave. He was a kass’aq, a white kid, and this was reason enough to be teased or bullied or beaten. By the time he was Trixie’s age, he was getting drunk, damaging property, and making sure the rest of the world knew better than to fuck with him. But when he wasn’t doing those things, he was drawing - characters who, against all odds, fought and won. Characters he hid in the margins of his schoolbooks and on the canvas of his bare palm. He drew to escape, and eventually, at age seventeen, he did.

 Once Daniel left Akiak, he never looked back. He learned how to stop using his fists, how to put rage on the page instead. He got a foothold in the comics industry. He never talked about his life in Alaska, and Trixie and Laura knew better than to ask. He became a tpical suburban father who coached soccer and grilled burgers and mowed the lawn, a man you’d never expect had been accused of something so awful that he’d tried to outrun himself.

 Daniel squeezed the eraser he was kneading and completely rubbed out the hawk he’d been attempting to draw. Maybe if he started with Duncan-the-man, instead of Wildclaw-the-beast? He took his mechanical pencil and started sketching the loose ovals and scribbled joints that materialized into his unlikely hero. No spandex, no high boots, no half mask: Duncan’s habitual costume was a battered jacket, jeans, and sarcasm. Like Daniel, Duncan had shaggy dark hair and a dark complexion. Like Daniel, Duncan had a teenage daughter. And like Daniel, everything Duncan did or didn’t do was linked to a past that he refused to discuss.

 When you got right down to it, Daniel was secretly drawing himself.

 Jason’s car was an old Volvo that had belonged to his grandmother before she died. The seats had been reupholstered in pink, her favorite color, by his grandfather for her eighty-fifth birthday. Jason had told Trixie he used to think about changing them back to their original flesh tone, but how could you mess with that kind of love?

 Hockey practice had ended fifteen minutes ago. Trixie waited in the cold, her hands tucked into the sleeves of her jacket, until Jason came out of the rink. His enormous hockey bag was slung over his shoulder, and he was laughing as he walked beside Moss.

 Hope was a pathological part of puberty, like acne and surging hormones. You might sound cynical to the world, but that was just a defense mechanism, cover-up coating a zit, because it was too embarrassing to admit that in spite of the bum deals you kept getting, you hadn’t completely given up.

 When Jason noticed her, Trixie tried to pretend she didn’t see the look that ghosted over his face - regret, or maybe resignation. She concentrated instead on the fact that he was walking toward her alone. “Hey,” she said evenly. “Can you give me a ride home?”

 He hesitated, long enough for her to die inside all over again. Then he nodded and unlocked the car. She slid into the passenger seat while Jason stowed his gear, turned over the ignition, and blasted the heater. Trixie thought up a thousand questions – How was practice? Do you think it’ll snow again? Do you miss me? – but she couldn’t speak. It was too much, sitting there on the pink seats, just a foot away from Jason, the way she’d sat beside him in this car a hundred times before.

 He pulled out of the parking spot and cleared his throat. “You feeling better?”

 Than what? she thought.

 “You left psych this morning,” Jason reminded her.

 That class seemed like forever ago. Trixie tucked her hair behind her ear. “Yeah,” she said, and glanced down. Trixie thought of how she used to grasp the stick shift, so that when Jason reached for it, he would automatically be holding her hand. She slid her palm beneath her thigh and gripped the seat so she wouldn’t do anything stupid.

 “What are you doing here, anyway?” Jason said.

 “I wanted to ask you something.” Trixie took a deep breath for courage. “How do you do it?”

 “Do what?”

 “All of it. You know. Go to class and practice. Make it through the day. Act like . . . like none of it mattered,”

 Jason swore beneath his breath and pulled the car over. Then he reached across the seat and brushed his thumb over her cheek; until then, she hadn’t been aware she was crying. “Trix,” he sighed, “it mattered.”

 By now, the tears were coming faster. “But I love you,” Trixie said. There was no easy switch that she could flip to stem the flow of feelings, no way to drain the memories that pooled like acid in her stomach because her heart no longer knew what to do with them. She couldn’t blame Jason; she didn’t like herself like this, either. But she couldn’t go back to being the girl she’d been before she

 met him; that girl was gone. So where did that leave her?

 Jason was wavering, she could tell. When he reached over the console to pull her into his arms, she tucked her head against his neck and rounded her mouth against the salt of his skin. Thank you, she murmured, to God or Jason or maybe both.

 His words stirred the hair beside her ear. “Trixie, you’ve got to stop. It’s over.”

 The sentence - and that’s exactly what it was, in every sense of the word - fell between them like a guillotine. Trixie disengaged herself, wiping her eyes on the puffy sleeve of her coat. “If it’s us,” she whispered, “how come you get to decide?” When he didn’t answer - couldn’t answer - she turned and stared out the front window. As it turned out, they were still in the parking lot. They hadn’t gotten anywhere at all.

 The entire way home, Laura planned the way she was going to break the news to Seth. As flattering as it was to have a twenty-something man find a thirty-eight-year-old woman attractive, it was also wrong: Laura was his professor; she was married; she was a mother. She belonged in a reality made up of faculty meetings and papers being published and think tanks conducted at the home of the dean of humanities, not to mention parent-teacher conferences at Trixie’s school and worries about her own metabolism slowing down and whether she could save money on her cellular service if she switched companies. She told herself that it did not matter that Seth made her feel like summer fruit about to drop from a vine, something she could not remember experiencing anytime in the last decade with Daniel.

 Doing something wrong, it turned out, packed a heady adrenaline rush. Seth was dark and uneven and unpredictable and . . . oh, God, just thinking about him was making her drive too fast on this road. On the other hand, Laura’s husband was the most solid, dependable, mild-mannered man in all of Maine. Daniel never forgot to put out the recycling bin; he set the coffee to brew the night before because she was a bear when she didn’t have any in the morning; he never once complained about the fact that it had taken a good decade longer than he’d liked to make a name for himself in the comics industry because he was the stay-at-home parent. Sometimes, ridiculously, the more perfect he was the angrier she got, as if his generosity existed only to highlight her own selfishness. But then, she had only herself to blame for that - wasn’t she the one who’d given him the ultimatum, who’d said he had to change?

 The problem was (if she was going to be honest with herself) that when she asked him to change, she was focusing on what she thought she needed. She’d forgotten to catalog all the things she’d lose. What she had loved most about Seth - the thrill of doing something forbidden, the understanding that women like her did not connect with men like him - was exactly what had once made her fall for Daniel.

 She had toyed with the idea of telling Daniel about the affair, but what good would that do, except hurt him? Instead, she would overcompensate. She would kill him with kindness. She would be the best wife, the best mother, the most attentive lover. She would give him back what she hoped he never realized had been missing.

 Even Dante said that if you walked through hell, you could climb your way to paradise.

 In the rearview mirror, Laura saw a carnival of flashing lights. “Goddamn,” she muttered, pulling over as the police cruiser slid neatly behind her Toyota. A tall officer walked toward her, silhouetted by the headlights of his vehicle. “Good evening, ma’am, did you know you were speeding?”

 Apparently not, thought Laura.

 “I’m going to need your license and . . . Professor Stone? Is that you?”

 Laura peered up at the officer’s face. She couldn’t place it, but he was young enough; she might have taught him. She offered her most humble expression. Had he gotten a high enough grade in

 her class to keep her from getting a ticket?

 “Bernie Aylesworth,” he said, smiling down at Laura. “I took your Dante class my senior year, back in 2001. Got shut out of it the year before.”

 She knew she was a popular teacher - her Dante course was rated even higher than the Intro to Physics lectures where Jeb Wetherby shot monkeys out of cannons to teach projectile motion. The Unauthorized Guide to Monroe College named her the prof students most wanted to take out for a beer. Had Seth read that? She thought suddenly.

 “I’m just gonna give you a warning this time,” Bernie said, and Laura wondered where he had been six months ago, when she truly needed one. He passed her a crisp piece of paper and smiled. “So where were you hurrying off to?”

 Not to, she thought, just back. “Home,” she told him. “I was headed home.” She waited until he was back in the cruiser to put on her signal - a penitent motion if ever there was one – and pulled into the gentle bend of the road. She drove well within the speed limit, her eyes focused ahead, as careful as you have to be when you know someone is watching.

 “I’m leaving,” Laura said the minute she walked through the door. Daniel looked up from the kitchen counter, where he was chopping broccoli in preparation for dinner. On the stove, chicken was simmering in garlic.

 “You just got here,” he said.

 “I know.” Laura lifted the lid on the skillet, breathed in.

 “Smells really good. I wish I could stay.”

 He could not pinpoint what was different about her, but he thought it had to do with the fact that when she’d just said she wanted to be home, he believed her - most of the time, if she apologized for leaving, it was only because it was expected.

 “What’s going on?” he asked.

 She turned her back to Daniel and began to sort through the mail. “That departmental thing I told you about.”

 She had not told him; he knew she hadn’t told him. She unwound her scarf and shrugged out of her coat, draped them over a chair.

 She was wearing a black suit and Sorel boots, which were tracking snow in small puddles all over the kitchen floor. “How’s Trixie?”

 “She’s in her room.”

 Laura opened the refrigerator and poured herself a glass of water. “The crazy poet is trying to stage a coup,” she said.

 “She’s been talking to the tenured professors. I don’t think she knows that . . .”

 Suddenly, there was a crash, and Daniel turned in time to see the glass explode against the tile floor. Water spread in a puddle, seeping beneath the edge of the refrigerator.

 “Damn it!” Laura cried, kneeling to pick up the pieces.

 “I’ve got it,” Daniel said, tossing down paper towels to absorb the spill. “You’ve got to slow down. You’re bleeding.”

 Laura glanced down at the gash on the pad of her thumb as if it belonged to someone else. Daniel reached for her and wrapped her hand in a clean dish towel. They knelt inches apart on the tile floor, watching her blood soak through the checkered fabric.

 Daniel couldn’t remember the last time he and Laura had been this close to each other. He couldn’t remember a lot of things, like the sound of his wife’s breathing when she gave herself over to sleep, or the half smile that slipped out like a secret when something took her by surprise. He had tried to tell himself that Laura was busy, the way she always got at the beginning of a trimester. He did not ask if it could be anything more than that, because he did not want to hear the answer.

 “We need to take care of that,” Daniel said. The bones of her wrist were light and fine in his hand, delicate as china.

 Laura tugged herself free. “I’m fine,” she insisted, and she stood up. “It’s a scratch.” For a moment she stared at him, as if she knew, too, that there was another entire conversation going on here, one they had chosen not to have.

 “Laura.” Daniel got to his feet, but she turned away.

 “I really have to go change,” she said.

 

 Daniel watched her leave, heard her footsteps on the stairs overhead. You already have, he thought.

 “You didn’t,” Zephyr said.

 Trixie pushed her sleeves up and stared down at the cuts on her arms, a red web of regret. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” she said. “I started walking, and I wound up at the rink ... I figured it was a sign. If we could just talk . . .”

 “Trixie, right now Jason doesn’t want to talk. He wants to take out a restraining order.” Zephyr sighed. “You are so Fatal Attraction.”

 “Fatal what?”

 “It’s an old movie. Don’t you ever watch anything that doesn’t have Paul Walker in it?”

 Trixie tucked the phone between her shoulder and her ear and carefully unwound the screw neck of the X-Acto knife that she’d taken from her father’s office. The blade came out, a tiny silver trapezoid. “I’d do anything to get him back.” Closing her eyes, Trixie scored the blade over her left arm. She sucked in her breath and imagined she was opening up a vent, allowing some of the enormous pressure to ease.

 “Are you going to complain about this until we graduate?”

 Zephyr asked. “Because if that’s the case, then I’m taking matters into my own hands.”

 What if her father knocked on the door right now? What if anyone, even Zephyr, found out that she was doing stuff like this?

 Maybe it wasn’t relief she was feeling, but shame. Both made you burn from the inside out.

 “So, do you want my help?” Zephyr asked.

 Trixie clapped her hand over the cut, stanching the flow.

 “Hello?” Zephyr said. “Are you still there?”

 Trixie lifted her hand. The blood was rich and bright against her palm. “Yeah,” she sighed. “I guess I am.”

 “Good timing,” Daniel said, as he heard Trixie’s footsteps pounding down the stairs. He set two plates on the kitchen table and turned around to find her waiting in her coat, carrying a backpack. Her cascade of hair spilled out from beneath a striped stocking cap.

 “Oh,” she said, blinking at the food. “Zephyr invited me for a sleepover.”

 “You can go after you eat.”

 Trixie bit her lower lip. “Her mom thinks I’m coming for dinner.”

 Daniel had known Zephyr since she was seven. He used to sit in the living room while she and Trixie performed the cheerleading moves they’d made up during an afternoon of play, or lip-synched to the radio, or presented tumbling routines. He could practically still hear them doing a hand-clapping game: The spades go eeny-meeny pop zoombini. . .

 Last week, Daniel had walked in with a bag of groceries to find someone unfamiliar in the kitchen, bent over a catalog. Nice ass, he thought, until she straightened and turned out to be Zephyr.

 “Hey, Mr. Stone,” she’d said. “Trixie’s in the bathroom.”

 She hadn’t noticed that he went red in the face, or that he left the kitchen before his own daughter returned. He sat on the couch with the grocery bag in his hands, the ice cream inside softening against his chest, as he speculated whether there were other fathers out there making the same mistake when they happened upon Trixie.

 “Well,” he said now, “I’ll just save the leftovers.” He stood up, fishing for his car keys.

 “Oh, that’s okay. I can walk.”

 “It’s dark out,” Daniel said.

 Trixie met his gaze, challenging. “I think I can manage to get to a house three blocks away. I’m not a baby, Dad.”

 Daniel didn’t know what to say. She was a baby, to him. “Then maybe before you go to Zephyrs you could go vote, join the army, and rent us a car... oh, hang on, that’s right. You can’t.”

 Trixie rolled her eyes, took off her hat and gloves, and sat down.

 “I thought you were eating at Zephyrs.”

 “I will,” she said. “But I don’t want you to have to eat all by yourself.”

 Daniel sank into the chair across from her. He had a sudden flashback of Trixie in ballet class, the two of them struggling to capture her fine hair in a netted bun before the session began. He had always been the sole father present; other men’s wives would rush forward to help him figure out how to secure the bobby pins, how to slick back the bangs with hair spray.

 At her first and only ballet performance, Trixie had been the lead reindeer, drawing out the sleigh that held the Sugar Plum Fairy. She wore a white leotard and an antler headband and had a painted red nose. Daniel hadn’t taken his eyes off her, not for any of the three minutes and twenty-two seconds that she stood on that stage.

 He didn’t want to take his eyes off her now, but part of this new routine of adolescence meant a portion of the dance took place offstage. “What are you guys going to do tonight?” Daniel asked.

 “I don’t know. Rent a movie off the dish, I guess. What are you going to do?”

 “Oh, the same thing I always do when I’m alone in the house.

 Dance around naked, call the psychic hotline, cure cancer, negotiate world peace.”

 Trixie smiled. “Could you clean my room too?”

 “Don’t know if I’ll have time. It depends on whether the North Koreans are being cooperative.” He pushed his food around his plate, took a few bites, and then dumped the rest into the trash.

 “Okay, you’re officially free.”

 She bounced up and grabbed her pack, heading toward the front door. “Thanks, Daddy.”

 “Any time,” Daniel said, but the words turned up at the end, as if he were asking her for minutes that were no longer hers to give.

 She wasn’t lying. Not any more than her father had when Trixie was little and he said one day they’d get a dog, although they didn’t. She was just telling him what he wanted - needed – to hear. Everyone always said the best relationships between parents and kids involved open communication, but Trixie knew that was a joke. The best relationships were the ones where both sides went out of their way to make sure the other wasn’t disappointed.

 She wasn’t lying, not really. She was going to Zephyr’s house.

 And she did plan to sleep over.

 But Zephyr’s mother had gone to visit her older brother at Wesleyan  College for the weekend, and Trixie wasn’t the only one who’d been invited for the evening. A bunch of people were coming, including some hockey players.

 Like Jason.

 Trixie ducked behind the fence at Mrs. Argobath’s house, opened up her backpack, and pulled out the jeans that were so low rise she had to go commando. She’d bought them a month ago and had hidden them from her father, because she knew he’d have a heart attack if he saw her wearing them. Shimmying out of her sweatpants and underwear - Jesus, it was cold out - she skimmed on the jeans.

 She rummaged for the items she’d stolen from her mother’s closet - they were the same size now. Trixie had wanted to borrow the killer black-heeled boots, but she couldn’t find them. Instead, Trixie had settled for a chain-link belt and a sheer black blouse her mother had worn one year over a velvet camisole to a faculty Christmas dinner.

 The sleeves weren’t see-through enough that you could see the Ace bandage she’d wrapped around the cuts on her arm, but you could totally tell that all she had on underneath was a black satin bra.

 She zipped up her coat again, jammed on her hat, and started walking. Trixie honestly wasn’t sure she’d be able to do what Zephyr had suggested. Make him come to you, Zephyr had said. Get him jealous.

 Maybe if she was hammered enough, or totally stoned.

 Now there was a thought. When you were high, you were hardly yourself.

 Then again, maybe it would be easier than she expected. Being someone else - anyone else, even for one night - would beat being Trixie Stone.

 A human heart breaks harder when it’s dropped from a greater height. Seth lay on the sheets of his futon, the ones that smelled of the cigarettes he rolled and - he loved this - of Laura. He still felt her words like the recoil from a shotgun. It’s over. Laura had gone to pull herself together in the bathroom. Seth knew there was a hairline fracture between duty and desire; that you might think you were walking on one side of it and then find yourself firmly entrenched on the other. He just also had believed stupidly - that it wasn’t that way for them. He’d believed that even with the age difference, he could be Lauras future. He hadn’t counted on the chance that she might want her past instead.  “I can be whatever you want me to be,” he’d promised. Please, he had said, half question, half command.

 When the doorbell rang, he nearly didn’t answer. This was the last thing he needed right now. But the bell rang again, and Seth opened the door to find the kid standing in the shadows. “Later,” Seth said, and he started to shut the door.

 A twenty-dollar bill was pressed into his hand. “Look,” Seth said with a sigh, “I’m out.”

 “You’ve got to have something.” Two more twenties were pushed at him.

 Seth hesitated. He hadn’t been lying - he really didn’t have any weed - but it was hard to turn down sixty bucks when you had eaten ramen noodles every night that week. He wondered how much time he had before Laura came out of the bathroom. “Wait here,” he said.

 He kept his stash in the belly of an old guitar with half its strings missing. The battered case had travel stamps on it, from Istanbul and Paris and Bangkok, and a bumper sticker that said, IF YOU CAN READ THIS, GET THE FUCK AWAY.

 The first time Laura had visited his apartment he’d come back from digging up a bottle of wine to find her strumming the remaining strings, the guitar still cradled inside its open case.

 Do you play? she had asked.

 He had frozen, but only for a moment. He took the case, snapped it shut, and put it off to the side. Depends on the game, he had answered.

 Now he reached into the sound hole and rummaged around. He considered his sidelight vocation philosophically: Grad school cost a fortune; his tech job at the vet’s office barely paid his rent; and selling pot wasn’t much different from buying a six-pack for a bunch of teenagers. It wasn’t like he went around selling coke or heroin, which could really mess you up. But he still didn’t want Laura to know this abo