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

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

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

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

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

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

Aaronsen said.

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

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

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

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

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

“If you feel the slightest bit uncomfortable,” Principal Aaronsen was saying. “If you just want a place to catch your breath ...” Three hours later, Trixie’s father had come looking for her.

The one on the right is me, he’d said, showing her the photo again. And that’s Cane, a friend of mine.

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

Her father had explained that the day after he’d been born and named, a village elder came to visit and started calling him Wass short for Wassilieafter her husband, who’d fallen through the ice and died a week before. It was perfectly normal for a Yup’ik Eskimo who had recently died to take up residence in a newborn. Villagers would laugh when they met Daniel as a baby, saying things like, Oh, look. Wass has come back with blue eyes! or Maybe that’s why Wass took that English as a Second Language class! For eighteen years, he’d been known as Daniel to his white mother and as Wass to everyone else. In the Yup’ik world, he told Trixie, souls get recycled. In the Yup’ik world, no one ever really gets to leave.

“... a policy of zero tolerance,” the principal said, and Trixie nodded, although she hadn’t really been listening.

The night after her father told Trixie about his second name, she had a question ready when he came to tuck her in. How come when I first asked, you said those boys were dead? Because, her father answered, they are.

Principal Aaronsen stood up, and so did Mrs. Gray, and that was how Trixie realized that they intended to accompany her to class.

Immediately she panicked. This was way worse than being walked in by her father; this was like having fighter jets escort a plane into a safe landing: Was there any person at the airport who wouldn’t be watching out the windows and trying to guess what had happened on board? “Um,” Trixie said, “I think I’d kind of like to go by myself.” It was almost third period, which meant she’d have time to go to her locker before heading to English class. She watched the principal look at the guidance counselor. “Well,” Mr. Aaronsen said, “if that’s what you want.” Trixie fled the principal’s office, blindly navigating the maze of halls that made up the high school. Class was still in session, so it was quiet - the faint jingle of a kid with a bathroom pass, the muted click of high heels, the wheezy strains of the wind instruments upstairs in the band room. She twisted the combination on her own locker, 40-22-38. Hey, Jason had said, a lifetime ago. Aren’t those Barbie’s measurements? Trixie rested her forehead against the cool metal. All she had to do was sit in class for another four hours. She could fill her mind with Lord of the Flies and A = nr2 and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. She didn’t have to talk to anyone if she didn’t want to. All of her teachers had been briefed. She would be an army of one.

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

Trojan, Trixie read. Twisted Pleasure Lubricated Latex Condoms.

“They’re all having sex,” Marita Soorenstad said, tilting her head and pouring the last of the lime-colored powder into her mouth. In the fifteen minutes that Mike Bartholemew had been sitting with the assistant district attorney, she’d consumed three Pixy Stix. “Teenage girls want guys to be attracted to them, but no one’s taught them how to deal with the emotions that come with that stuff. I see this all the time, Mike. Teenage girls wake up to find someone having sex with them, and they don’t say a word.” She crushed the paper straw in her fist and grimaced. “Some judge told me these were a godsend when he was trying to quit smoking. But I swear all I’m getting is a sugar high and a green tongue.” “Trixie Stone said no,” the detective pointed out. “It’s in her statement.” “And Trixie Stone was drinking. Which the defense attorney will use to call her judgment into question. Oosterhaus is going to say that she was intoxicated, and playing strip poker, and saying yes yes yes all the way up till afterward, which is about when she decided to say no. He’s going to ask her what time it was when she said it and how many pictures were on the walls of the room and what song was playing on the stereo and whether the moon was in Scorpio . . . details she won’t be able to remember. Then he’ll say that if she can’t remember particulars like this, how on earth could she be sure of whether she told Jason to stop?” Marita hesitated. “I’m not saying that Trixie Stone wasn’t raped, Mike.

I’m just telling you that not everyone is going to see it as clearly.” “I think the family knows that,” Bartholemew said.

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

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

Bartholemew cleared his throat. “The Stones thought their daughter was having a parent-supervised sleepover at a friend’s house.” Marita ripped open a yellow Pixy Stix. “Great,” she said, upending the contents into her mouth. “So Trixie’s already lied once.” Even though parents don’t want to admit it, school isn’t about what a kid absorbs while she’s sitting at a cramped desk, but what happens around and in spite of that. It’s the five minutes between bells when you find out whose house is hosting the party that evening; it’s borrowing the right shade of lip gloss from your friend before you have French with the cute guy who moved here from Ohio; it’s being noticed by everyone else and pretending you are above that sort of celebrity.

Once all this social interaction was surgically excised from Trixie’s school day, she noticed how little she cared about the academic part. In English, she focused on the printed text in her book until the letters jumped like popcorn in a skillet. From time to time she would hear a snide comment: What did she do to her hair? Only once did someone have the guts to actually speak to her in class. It was in phys ed, during an indoor soccer game. A girl on her own team had come up to her after the teacher called a time-out. “Someone who got raped for real,” she’d whispered, “wouldn’t be out here playing soccer.” The part of the day that Trixie was most dreading was lunch. In the cafeteria, the mass of students split like amoebas into socially polarized groups. There were the drama kids and the skateboarders and the brains. There were the Sexy Sevena group of girls who set the school’s unwritten fashion rules, like what months you should wear shorts to school and how flip-flops were totally passe. There were the caffies, who hung out all morning drinking Java with their friends until the voc-tech bus came to ferry them to classes on hairstyling and child care. And then there was the table where Trixie used to belong - the one with the popular kids, the one where Zephyr and Moss and a carefree knot of hockey players hung out pretending they didn’t know that everyone else was looking at them and saying they were so fake, when in reality those same kids went home and wished that their own group of friends could be as cool.

Trixie bought herself french fries and chocolate milk - her comfort lunch, for when she screwed up on a test or had period cramps - and stood in the middle of the cafeteria, trying to find a place for herself. Since Jason had broken up with Trixie, she’d been sitting somewhere else, but Zephyr had always joined her in solidarity. Today, though, she could see Zephyr sitting at their old table. One sentence rose from the collective din: “She wouldn’t dare.” Trixie held her plastic tray like a shield. She finally moved toward the Heater Hos, congregating near the radiator. They were girls who wore white pants with spandex in them and had boyfriends who drove raised I-Rocs; girls who got pregnant at fifteen and then brought the ultrasounds to school to show off.

One of them - a ninth-grader in what looked like her ninth month - smiled at Trixie, and the action was so unexpected, she nearly stumbled. “There’s room,” the girl said, and she slid her backpack off the table so that Trixie could sit down.

A lot of kids at Bethel High made fun of the Heater Hos, but Trixie never had. She found them too depressing to be the butt of jokes. They seemed to be so nonchalant about throwing their lives away - not that their lives were the kind that anyone would have wanted in the first place, but still. Trixie had wondered if those bellybaring T-shirts they wore and the pride they took in their situation were just for show, a way to cover up how sad they really were about what had happened to them. After all, if you acted like you really wanted something even when you didn’t, you just might convince yourself along with everyone else.

Trixie ought to know.

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

“Elvis?” another answered. “I thought you were going to name him Pilot.” “I was, but then I thought, what if he’s born afraid of heights? That would suck for him.” Trixie dipped a french fry into a pool of ketchup. It looked weak and watery, like blood. She wondered how many hours it had been since she’d talked out loud. If you didn’t use your voice, ever, would it eventually shrivel up and dry away? Was there a natural selection involved in not speaking up? “Trixie.

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

“I would have called,” Zephyr said, “but I’ve sort of been grounded until I’m forty.” Trixie nodded. It was enough, really, that Zephyr was sitting here now.

“So . . . you’re okay, right?” “Yeah,” Trixie said. She tried to remember what her father had said that morning: If you think you’re fine, you’ll start to believe it. “Your hair...” She ran her palm over her head and smiled nervously. “Crazy, isn’t it?” Zephyr leaned forward, shifting uncomfortably. “Look, what you did ... well, it worked. No questionyou got Jason back.” “What are you talking about?” “You wanted payback for getting dumped, and you got it. But Trixie ... it’s one thing to teach someone a lesson ... and a whole different thing to get him arrested. Don’t you think you can stop now?” “You think...” Trixie’s scalp tightened. “You think I made this up?” “Trix, everyone knows you wanted to hook up with him again.

It’s kind of hard to rape someone who’s willing.” “You’re the one who came up with the plan! You said I should make him jealous! But I never expected ... I didn’t. . .” Trixie’s voice was as thin as a wire, vibrating. “He raped me.” A shadow fell across the table as Moss approached. Zephyr looked up at him and shrugged. “I tried,” she said.

He pulled Zephyr out of her chair. “Come on.” Trixie stood up, too. “We’ve been friends since kindergarten.

How could you believe him over me?” Something in Zephyr’s eyes changed, but before she could speak, Moss slid an arm around her shoulders, anchoring her to his side.

So, Trixie thought. It’s like that.

“Nice hair, G.I. Ho,” Moss said as they walked off.

It had gotten so quiet in the cafeteria that even the lunch ladies seemed to be watching. Trixie sank down into her seat again, trying not to notice the way that everyone was staring at her. There was a one-year-old she used to babysit for who liked to play a game: He’d cover his face with his hands and you’d say, “Where’s Josh?” She wished it was that simple: Close your eyes, and you’d disappear.

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

Daniel had made coffee for Laura.

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

She stared at the carafe, its swollen belly steaming with French roast. It occurred to Laura that in all the years they had been married, she could literally not remember it being the other way around: Daniel had been a student of her likes and dislikes; in return, Laura had never even signed up for the proverbial course. Was it complacency that had made her restless enough to have an affair? Or was it because she hadn’t wanted to admit that even had she applied herself, she would not be as good a wife as Daniel was a husband? She had come into the kitchen to sit down at the table, spread out her notes, prepare for her afternoon class. Today, thank God, was a lecture, an impersonal group where she got to do all the talking, not a smaller class where she might have to face the questions of students again. In her hands was a book, open to the famous Dore illustration for Canto 29, where VirgilDante’s guide through hellberated his curiosity. But now that Laura could smell the grounds, inhale that aromatic steam, she couldn’t for the life of her remember what she was going to say about this drawing to her students.

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

There was a fine line between love and hate, you heard that cliche all the time. But no one told you that the moment you crossed it would be the one you least expected. You’d fall in love and crack open a secret door to let your soul mate in. You just never expected such closeness, one day, to feel like an intrusion.

Laura stared down at the picture. With the exception of Dante, nobody chose to go willingly to hell. And even Dante would have lost his way if he hadn’t found a guide who’d already been through hell and come out the other side.

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

She hoped that was a start.

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

It was actually Laura who had told Daniel when he was becoming famous. They’d gone to a Christmas party at Marvel in New York, and when they entered the room, they were separated in the crush.

Later, she told him that as he walked through the crowd, she could hear everyone talking in his wake. Daniel, she had said, people definitely know you.

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

Today, though, drawing wasn’t bringing him any joy or relief.

He kept thinking about Trixie and where she would be at this hour of the day and if it was a good thing or a bad thing that she hadn’t called him yet to say how it was going. Ordinarily, if Daniel was restless, he’d get up and walk around the house, or even take a run to jog his brain and recover his lost muse. But Laura was home - she had no classes until this afternoon - and that was enough to keep him holed up in his office. It was easier to face down a blank page than to pull from thin air the right words to rebuild a marriage.

His task today was to draw a series of panels in hell with adultery demons - sinners who had lusted for each other in life, and in death couldn’t be separated from each other. The irony of having to draw this, given his own situation, had not been lost on Daniel. He imagined a male and a female torso, each growing out of the same root of a body. He pictured one wing on each of their backs. He saw claws that would reach in to steal a hero’s heart, because that was exactly how it felt.

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

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

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

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

“Nothing good.” “Worried about Trixie?” Daniel rubbed a hand down his face. “How couldn’t I be?” She sank down at his feet, cross-legged. “I know. I keep thinking I hear the phone ring.” She glanced down at her coffee cup, as if she was surprised to find herself clutching it. “Oh,” she said. “I brought this for you.” She never brought him coffee before. He didn’t even really like coffee. But there was Laura with her hand outstretched, offering the steaming mug . . . and in that instant, Daniel could imagine her fingers reaching like a dagger between his ribs. He could see how a wing that grew from between her shoulder blades might sweep over the muscles of her trapezius, wrapping over her arm like a shawl.

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

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

“What’s the quilt for?” Laura asked, as he picked up his pencil and started to draw. “You have wings.” “Am I an angel?” Daniel glanced up. “Something like that,” he said. The moment Daniel stopped obsessing about drawing the wing, it took flight.

He drew fast, the lines pouring out of him. This quick, art was like breath. He couldn’t have told you why he placed the fingers at that angle instead of the more conventional one, but it made the figure seem to move across the panel. “Lift the blanket up a little, so it covers your head,” he instructed.

Laura obliged. “This reminds me of your first story. Only drier.” Daniel’s first paid gig had been a Marvel fill-in for the Ultimate X-Men series. In the event that a regular artist didn’t make deadline, his stand-alone piece would be used without breaking the continuity of the ongoing saga.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before.

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

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

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

Laura’s eyes filled with tears, and a moment later she walked out of his office. When he heard the door close, Daniel sank down into his chair again. He kept brushing up against the fact that his wife had cheated on him. It was a little like a scar on a polished wooden table - you’d try to see the rest of the gleaming surface, but your eyes and your fingers would be drawn to the pitted part, the one thing that kept it from being perfect.

It was two-fifteen; only another half hour until he picked up Trixie at school. Only a half hour until she could serve as the cushion that kept him and Laura from rubbing each other raw.

But in a half hour, lightning could strike. Wives could fall in love with men who weren’t their husbands. Girls could be raped.

Daniel buried his face in his hands. Between his splayed fingers, he could see the figure he’d sketched. Half of a demon, she was wrapped in her own single wing. She was the spitting image of Laura. And she was reaching for a heart Daniel couldn’t draw, because he’d forgotten its dimensions years ago.

Jason was missing practice. He sat in the swanky law offices of Yargrove, Bratt & Oosterhaus, wondering what drills Coach was putting the team through. They had a game tomorrow against Gray-New Gloucester, and he was on the starting line.

Trixie had come back to school today. Jason hadn’t seen her - someone had made damn sure of that - but Moss and Zephyr and a dozen other friends had run into her. Apparently, she’d practically shaved her head. He’d wondered, on the drive down to Portland, what it would have been like if he had crossed paths with Trixie. The judge at the arraignment had said that was enough cause to have Jason sent to a juvy prison, but he must have meant Jason would be in trouble if he sought Trixie out. . . not if Fate tossed her in his path.

Which is sort of what had happened in the first place.

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

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

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

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

You know.”

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

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

He’d liked her, but he hadn’t really loved her. At least he didn’t think he had. There were no lightning bolts across his vision when he saw her across a room, and his general feeling when he was with her was one of comfort, not of blood boiling and fire and brimstone. The reason he’d broken up with her was, ironically, for her own good. He knew that if he’d asked Trixie to drop everything and follow him across the earth, she’d do it; if the roles were reversed, though, he wouldn’t. They were at different places in that same relationship, and like anything that’s out of alignment, they were destined to crash sooner or later. By taking care of it early - gently, Jason liked to think - he was only trying to keep Trixie from getting her heart broken even harder.

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

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

“Walk me through what happened after you found her in Zephyr’s bathroom?” Jason scrubbed his hands over his head, making his hair stand on end. “I offered her a ride home, and she said yes. But then she started crying. I felt bad for her, so I kind of hugged her.”

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

“What happened next?” “She came on to me. She kissed me.”

“What did you do?” Dutch asked.

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

“Define that,” Dutch interrupted.

“She took off her own shirt,” Jason said, and his mother winced. “She unbuckled my belt and went down on me.”

Dutch wrote another note on his pad. “She initiated oral sex?” “Yeah.”

“Did you reciprocate?” “No.”

“Did she say anything to you?” Jason felt himself getting hot beneath the collar of his shirt.

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

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

“Did she ask you to stop?” “No,” Jason said.

“Did you know she was a virgin?” Jason felt all the thoughts in his head solidify into one hard, black mass, as he understood that he’d been played the fool.

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

Trixie looked like she’d been fighting a war. The minute she threw herself into the truck beside Daniel, he was seized with the urge to storm into the school and demand retribution from the student body that had done this to her. He imagined himself raging through the halls, and then, quickly, shook the vision out of his mind. The last thing Trixie needed, after being raped, was to see that violence could beget more violence.

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

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

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

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

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

Well, fuck Janice. She didn’t have a daughter who’d been raped.

And even if she did, it wasn’t Trixie.

Suddenly there was the sound of glass breaking, as a car drove by and the boys inside threw a six-pack of empty beer bottles at the truck. “Whore!” The word was yelled through open windows.

Daniel saw the retreating taillights of a Subaru. The backseat passenger reached through his window to high-five the driver.

Daniel let go of Trixie and stepped out of the car onto the shoulder of the road. Beneath his shoes, glass crunched. The bottles had scratched the paint on the door of the truck, had shattered under his tires. The word they’d called his daughter still hung in the air.

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

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

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

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

“Not before you hang out with seniors,” Zephyr said.

They told Zephyr’s mother that they were going to study for an algebra test with Bettina Majuradee, the smartest girl in ninth grade, who in reality wouldn’t have given them the time of day.

They walked two miles to the house party, which was being held by a guy named Orson. Twice, Trixie had to double up at the side of the road and barf into some bushes. “Actually, this is cool,” Zephyr had told her. “They’re going to think you’re already trashed.”

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

Five minutes later, she opened up the door and started down the hallway, intent on finding Zephyr and leaving. “Do you believe in love at first sight,” a voice asked, “or should I ask you to walk by me again?” Trixie glanced down to find a guy sitting on the floor, his back to the wall. He was wearing a T-shirt so faded she couldn’t read the writing on it. His hair was jet-black, and his eyes were the color of ice, but it was his smile - lopsided, as if it had been built on a slope - that made her heart hitch.

“I don’t think I’ve seen you before,” he said.

Trixie suddenly lost the power of conversation.

“I’m Jason.”

“I’m sick,” Trixie blurted out, cursing herself the minute she heard the words. Could she sound any stupider if she tried? But Jason had just grinned, off-kilter, again. “Well, then,” he’d said, and started it all. “I guess I need to make you feel better.”

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

“I guess,” Zephyr said.

“You want to sit down?” But the only place to sit was a little kidsized tea table, set with Madeline china and plastic cupcakes.

Bartholemew could imagine his knees hitting his chin or, worse, getting down and never getting back up again.

“I’m good,” Zephyr said. She put down the gun that affixed the UPC labels and folded her arms around a fluffy polar bear.

Bartholemew looked at her stretch button-down shirt and stacked heels, her eye makeup, her scarlet nail polish, the toy in her arms. He thought, This is exactly the problem. “I appreciate you talking to me.”

“My mothers making me do it.”

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

“Well,” Bartholemew said, “it is one.”

Zephyr snorted. She picked up the sticker gun and started tagging the animals again.

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

“Since we were five.”

“She mentioned that just before the incident occurred, you two were having an argument.” He paused. “What were you fighting about?” She looked down at the counter. “I don’t remember.”

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

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

“What do you mean?” “Well, I guess she meant to screw Jason in more ways than one.”

“Did she say she intended to have intercourse that night?” “She told me she was willing to do whatever it took,” Zephyr said, Bartholemew looked at her. “Did you see Trixie and Jason having sex?” “I’m not into peep shows. I was upstairs.”

“Alone?” “With a guy. Moss Minton.”

“What were you doing?” Zephyr glanced up at the detective. “Nothing.”

“Were you and Moss having sex?” “Did my mother ask you to ask me that?” she said, narrowing her eyes.

“Just answer the question.”

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

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

“When?” “I don’t know. Two-thirty? Three?” Bartholemew looked at his notes. “Could you hear the music in your bedroom?” Zephyr stared at him dully. “What music?” “The CDs you were playing during your party. Could you hear that upstairs?” “No. By the time we got upstairs, someone had turned them off.”

Zephyr gathered the stack of stuffed animals, holding them in her arms like a bounty, and walked toward an empty shelf. “That’s why I figured Jason and Trixie had gone home.”

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

Until Laura met Daniel, she had never done anything wrong.

She’d gotten straight As in school. She’d been known to pick up other people’s litter. She’d never had a cavity.

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

One Friday, when they went to the movie theater, it was closed because of a burst water main. She and Walter decided to walk down Mill Avenue instead, where on warm nights buskers littered the streets with their violin cases and their impromptu juggling.

There were several artists too, sketching in pencil, sketching in charcoal, making caricatures with Magic Markers that smelled like licorice. Walter gravitated toward one man, bent over his pad. The artist had black hair that reached down to the middle of his back and ink all over his hands. Behind him was a makeshift cardboard stand, onto which he’d pinned dynamic drawings of Batman and Superman and Wolverine. “These are amazing,” Walter said, and Laura had thought at the time that she’d never seen him get so excited about something. “I used to collect comics as a kid.” When the artist looked up, he had the palest blue eyes, and they were focused on Laura. “Ten bucks for a sketch,” he said. Walter put his arm around Laura. “Can you do one of her?” Before she knew it, she’d been seated on an overturned milk crate. A crowd gathered to watch as the sketch took shape. Laura glanced over at Walter, wishing that he hadn’t suggested this. She startled when she felt the artist’s fingers curl around her chin, turning her face forward again. “Don’t move,” he warned, and she could smell nicotine and whiskey.

He gave the drawing to Laura when he was finished. She had the body of a superhero - muscular and able - but her hair and face and neck were all her own. A galaxy swirled around her feet. There were people sketched into the background - the crowd that had gathered. Walter’s face was nearly off the edge of the page.

Beside the figure of Laura, however, was a man who looked just like the artist. “So that you’ll be able to find me one day,” he said, and she felt as if a storm had blown up inside her.

Laura looked at Walter, holding out his ten-dollar bill. She lifted her chin. “What makes you think I’ll be looking?” The artist grinned. “Wishful thinking.”

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

In the toe of the left boot was ME.

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

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

Hell was at 358 Wylie Street.

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

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

Daniel Stone sat closest to the door. He raised one eyebrow and stubbed out his cigarette on the wood of the bar. “Have a seat.”

She held out her hand. “I’m Laura Piper.”

He looked at her hand, amused, but didn’t shake it. She crawled onto the stool and folded her purse into her lap. “Have you been waiting long?” she asked, as if this were a business meeting.

He laughed. The sound made her think of summer dust, kicked up by tires on a dirt road. “My whole life.”

She didn’t know how to respond to that. “You didn’t give me a specific time . . .”

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

“Are you from Phoenix?” “Alaska.”

To a girl who’d grown up on the outskirts of the desert, there was nothing more remarkable or idealistically romantic. She pictured snow and polar bears. Eskimos. “What made you come here?” He shrugged. “Up there, you learn the blues. I needed to see reds.” It took Laura a moment to realize that he was talking about colors and his drawing. He lit another cigarette. It bothered her she wasn’t used to people smoking around her - but she didn’t know how to ask him not to. “So,” he said. “Laura.”

Nervous, she began to fill in the silence between them. “There was a poet who had a Laura as his muse. Petrarch. His sonnets are really beautiful.” Daniel’s mouth curved. “Are they, now.”

She didn’t know if he was making fun of her, and now she was conscious of other people in the bar listening to their conversation, and frankly, she couldn’t remember why she’d ever come here in the first place. She was just about to get up when the bartender set a shot of something clear in front of her.

“Oh,” she said. “I don’t drink.”

Without missing a beat, Daniel reached over and drained the shot glass.

She was fascinated by him, in the same way that an entomologist would be fascinated by an insect from the far side of the earth, a specimen she had read about but never imagined she’d hold in the palm of her hand. There was an unexpected thrill to being this close “Don’t we?” Daniel approached her, pinning the door shut with one arm. “Did you tell your boyfriend you were coming to see me?” When Laura remained stone-silent, he laughed.

Laura stilled underneath the weight of the truth: She had lied not only to Walter but also to herself. She had come here of her own free will; she had come here because she couldn’t stand the thought of not coming. But what if the reason Daniel Stone fascinated her had nothing to do with difference . . . but similarity? What if she recognized in him parts of herself that had been there all along, underneath the surface? What if Daniel Stone was right? She stared up at him, her heart hammering. “What would you have done if I hadn’t come here today?” His blue eyes darkened.

“Waited.”

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

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

“I was hoping to talk to you about Trixie Stone,” he said. , She nodded, glancing at the crowd around them. “Why don’t we go into one of the empty exam rooms?” There was nowhere Mike wanted to be less. The last time he’d been in one, it was to ID his daughter’s body. He had no sooner walked across the threshold than he started to weave and feel the room spin. “Are you all right?” the doctor asked, as he steadied himself against the examination table. “It’s nothing.” “Let me get you something to drink.”

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

“Fire away.”

Mike took a pad and pen out of his coat pocket. “You said that Trixie Stone’s demeanor was calm when she was here?” “Yes, until the pelvic exam . . . she got a bit upset at that.

But during the rest of the exam she was very quiet.”

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

“Was she bleeding?” “Minimally.”

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

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

The doctor frowned at him. “Aren’t you supposed to be on her side?” “I don’t take sides,” Mike said. “But I do try to make sense of the facts, and before we have a rape case, I need to make sure that I’ve ruled out inconsistencies.”

“Well, you’re talking about an organ that’s made for accommodation. Just because there wasn’t visible internal trauma doesn’t mean there wasn’t intercourse without consent.”

Mike looked down at the examination table, uncomfortable, and suddenly could see the still, swathed form of his daughters battered body. One arm, which had slipped off to hang toward the floor, with its black user’s bruise in the crook of the elbow.

“Her arm,” Mike murmured.

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

Mike took the Polaroid out of his pocket, the one that showed Trixie’s left wrist. There was the deep cut that Dr. Roth was describing, still angry and red as a mouth, but if you looked carefully you could also see the silver herringbone pattern of older scars. “Is there any chance Trixie Stone did this to herself?” “It’s a possibility. We see a lot of cutting in teenage girls these days. But it still doesn’t preclude the fact that Trixie was sexually assaulted.”

“You’d be willing to testify to that?” Mike asked. The doctor folded her arms. “Have you ever sat in on a female rape kit collection, Detective?” She knew, of course, that Mike hadn’t. He couldn’t, as a man.

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

She glanced up at Mike. “Yes,” Dr. Roth said. “I’ll testify.”

Janice didn’t just have tea in her office. She had Toolong, Sleepytime, and orange pekoe. Darjeeling, rooibos, and sencha.

Dragon Well, macha, gunpowder, jasmine, Keemun. Lapsang souchong: Yunnan and Nilgiri. “What would you like?” she asked, Trixie hugged a throw pillow to her chest. “Coffee.”

“Like I haven’t heard that before.”

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

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

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

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

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

“You must have missed them.”

She shook her head. “I was so wrapped up in Jason, there wasn’t room for anything else.” Trixie looked up at Janice. “That’s love, isn’t it?” “Did Jason ever tell you he loved you?” “I told him once.” She sat up and reached for the tea that Janice had given her, even though she’d said she didn’t want any.

The mug was smooth in her palms, radiant with heat. Trixie wondered if this was what it felt like to hold a heart. “He said he loved me too.”

“When was that?” October fourteenth, at nine thirty-nine P.M. They had been in the back row of a movie theater holding hands, watching a teen slasher flick. She had been wearing Zephyr’s blue mohair sweater, the one that made her boobs look bigger than they actually were. Jason had bought Sour Patch Kids and she was drinking Sprite. But Trixie thought that telling Janice the details that had been burned into her mind might make her sound too pathetic, so instead she just said, “About a month after we got together.”

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

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

“How did you two break up?” Janice asked.

They had been standing in Jason’s kitchen, eating M&M’s out of a bowl on the table. I think it might be a good thing if we saw other people, he had said, when five seconds earlier they had been talking about a teacher who was taking the rest of the year off to be with the baby she’d adopted from Romania. Trixie hadn’t been able to breathe, and her mind spun frantically to figure out what she had done wrong. It isn’t you, Jason had said. But he was perfect, so how could that be true? He said he wanted them to stay friends, and she nodded, even though she knew it was impossible. How was she supposed to smile as she passed by him at school, when she wanted to collapse? How could she unhear his promises? The night Jason broke up with her, they had gone to his house to hook up - his folks were out. Afraid that her parents might do something stupid, like call, Trixie had told them that a whole bunch of kids were going to a movie. And so, after Jason dropped the bomb, Trixie was forced to spend another two hours in his company, until the time the movie would have been over, when all she really wanted to do was hide underneath her covers and cry herself dry.

“When Jason broke up with you,” Janice asked, “what did you do to make yourself feel better?” Cut. The word popped into Trixie’s mind so fast that only at the very last moment did she press her lips together to keep it inside. But at the same time, she subconsciously slid her right hand over her left wrist.

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

“No.”

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

After Jason broke up with her, Trixie lost any semblance of emotional control. She’d find herself sobbing when a certain song came on the car radio and have to make up excuses to her father.

She would walk by Jason’s locker in the hope that she might accidentally cross paths with him. She’d find the one computer in the library whose screen in the sunlight mirrored the table behind her, and she’d watch Jason in its reflection while she pretended to type. She was swimming in tar, when the rest of the world, including Jason had so seamlessly moved on.

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

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

“It’s crazy, right?” Trixie interrupted. “To love someone who’s hurt you?” “It’s crazier to think that someone who hurts you loves you,” Janice replied.

Trixie lifted her mug. The tea was cold now. She held it in a way that blocked her face, so that Janice wouldn’t be able to look her in the eye. If she did, surely she’d see the one last secret Trixie had managed to keep: that aft