The Tenth Circle Read online

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

  “Define that,” Dutch interrupted.

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

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

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you reciprocate?”

  “No.”

  “Did she say anything to you?”

  Jason felt himself getting hot beneath the collar of his shirt. “She said my name a lot. And she kept talking about doing this in someone’s living room. But it wasn’t like she was freaked out about it-it was more like it was exciting for her, hooking up in someone else’s house.”

  “Did she tell you she was interested in having intercourse?”

  Jason thought for a second. “She didn’t tell me she wasn’t,” he replied.

  “Did she ask you to stop?”

  “No,” Jason said.

  “Did you know she was a virgin?”

  Jason felt all the thoughts in his head solidify into one hard, black mass, as he understood that he’d been played the fool. “Yeah,” he said, angry. “Back in October. The first time we had sex.”

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

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

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

  Daniel pulled off the road. He reached over the console to awkwardly draw Trixie into his arms. “You don’t have to go back,” he promised. “Ever.” Her tears soaked through his flannel shirt. He would teach Trixie at home, if he had to. He would find her a tutor. He would pick up the whole family and move.

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

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

  Suddenly there was the sound of glass breaking, as a car drove by and the boys inside threw a six-pack of empty beer bottles at the truck. “Whore!” The word was yelled through open windows. Daniel saw the retreating taillights of a Subaru. The backseat passenger reached through his window to high-five the driver.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Trixie suddenly lost the power of conversation.

  “I’m Jason.”

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

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