The Tenth Circle Read online

  You could not walk out of the hospital, for insurance reasons. If you tripped before you crossed the threshold, you might sue. However, if you chose to throw yourself in front of a car the minute you stepped outside, no one would give a damn.

  Trixie was thinking about it.

  She’d already had to sit down with a shrink this morning, and apparently she was going to have to do that twice a week for the next five forevers, too, all because she had seen a brass ring in the bathroom and had tried to grab it. It didn’t matter if, like Janice the rape counselor, these sessions could eventually wind up in court. She had to attend them, or she had to stay in the hospital on the psych floor with a roommate who ate her own hair. She was going to have to take medicine, too-under the watchful eye of her parents, who would actually check the sides of her mouth and under her tongue to make sure she didn’t fake swallowing. Since arriving at the hospital this morning, her mother was trying so hard to smile that Trixie expected her face to crack, and her father kept asking her if she needed anything. Yeah, she felt like answering. A life.

  Trixie seesawed between wishing everyone would leave her alone and wondering why everyone treated her like a leper. Even when that stupid psychiatrist had been sitting across from her, asking things like, Do you think you’re in danger of wanting to kill yourself right now? she felt like she was watching the whole scene from a balcony, and it was a comedy. She kept expecting the girl who played her to say something smart, like, Why yes, thanks, I would like to kill myself right now…but I’ll restrain myself until the audience is gone. Instead, she watched the actress who was really her fold like a fortune cookie and burst into tears.

  What Trixie wanted, most of all, was what she couldn’t have-to go back to being the kind of girl who worried about things like science tests and whether any college would admit her, instead of being the kind of girl everyone worried about.

  She survived the ride home by closing her eyes almost immediately and pretending she’d fallen asleep. Instead, she listened to the conversation between her parents in the front seat:

  Do you think it’s normal, the way her voice sounds?

  How do you mean?

  You know. Like most of the notes are missing.

  Maybe it’s the medicine.

  They said that would take a few weeks to kick in.

  Then how are we supposed to keep her safe in the meantime?

  Trixie almost would have felt sorry for her parents if she wasn’t so sure that they’d brought this on themselves. After all, her mother didn’t have to open the bathroom door yesterday.

  She felt the truth that she’d been hiding, like an after-dinner mint that might last for ages, if you were careful enough; the truth that she hadn’t told the shrink or the doctors or her parents, no matter how much they tried to pull it out of her. She would swallow it whole before she spit it out loud.

  Trixie made a big show of stretching and yawning as they approached the turn to their street. Her mother turned around, that Halloween-mask smile still on her face. “You’re awake!”

  Her father glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “You need anything?”

  Trixie turned and stared out the window. Maybe she had died, after all. And this was hell.

  Just about when Trixie decided things couldn’t get any worse, the car turned into the driveway and she saw Zephyr waiting. The last conversation they’d had wasn’t one that invited future chats, and it had left Trixie feeling like she’d been quarantined from the rest of the earth. But right now, Zephyr was the one who looked nervous.

  Zephyr knocked on the window. “Um, Mrs. Stone. I, was kind of, you know, hoping to talk to Trixie.”

  Her mother frowned. “I don’t really think that now’s the best time-”

  “Laura,” her father interrupted, and he glanced at Trixie in the rearview mirror: It’s up to you.

  Trixie got out of the backseat. She hunched her shoulders, so that her wrists were even more hidden by the sleeves of her coat. “Hey,” she said cautiously.

  Zephyr looked the way Trixie had felt for the past twenty-four hours-like she was completely made up of tears and trying to hold some semblance of human form together before someone noticed that she was actually just a puddle. She followed Trixie into the house, up to her bedroom. There was one terrifying moment when Trixie passed the bathroom-had anyone cleaned up since yesterday? But the door was closed, and she fled into her own room before she had to think about it anymore.

  “Are you okay?” Zephyr said.

  Trixie wasn’t about to fall for the false sympathy routine. “Who dared you?”

  “What?”

  “Are you, like, supposed to come back with a lock of my hair to prove you got close? Oh, that’s right, I don’t have any hair. I cut it off when I started to go psycho.”

  Zephyr swallowed. “I heard you almost died.”

  Almost doesn’t count, Trixie’s father used to say. Except in horseshoes and hand grenades.

  What about in rape cases?

  “Do you almost care?” Trixie said.

  Suddenly Zephyr’s face crumpled. “I’ve been a total asshole. I was mad at you, because I thought you planned this whole revenge thing for Jason and didn’t trust me enough to tell me-”

  “I never-”

  “No, wait, let me finish,” Zephyr said. “And I was mad at you for that night, when Moss paid more attention to you than to me. I wanted to get back at you, so I said-I said what they all were saying. But then I heard that you were in the hospital and I kept thinking about how awful it would have been if you…if you, you know, before I had a chance to tell you I believe you.” Her face crumpled. “I feel like this was all my fault. I’d do anything to make it up to you.”

  There was no way to tell whether Zeph was telling the truth, and even if she was, that didn’t mean Trixie trusted her anymore. There was every chance that Zephyr was going to run to Moss and Jason and the rest of the hockey team and regale them with tales of the freak. But then again…maybe she wasn’t; maybe the reason Zephyr was here had nothing to do with guilt or her mom telling her to be here but simply because she remembered, like Trixie did, that once when they were five they had been the only two people in the world who knew that fairies lived inside the kitchen cabinets and hid under the pots and pans when you opened the doors.

  Trixie looked at her. “Do you want to know how I did it?”

  Zephyr nodded, drawn forward.

  She slowly pulled the tape that sealed the bandage around her wrist and unraveled the gauze until the wound was visible: gaping and saw-edged, angry.

  “Wow,” Zephyr breathed. “That is sick. Did it hurt?”

  Trixie shook her head.

  “Did you see lights or angels or, like, God?”

  Trixie thought about it, hard. The last thing she could remember was the rusted edge of the radiator, which she focused on before blacking out. “I didn’t see anything.”

  “Figures,” Zephyr sighed, and then she looked at Trixie and grinned.

  Trixie felt like smiling back. For the first time in a long time, when she told her brain to do it, it actually worked.

  Three days after Trixie tried to kill herself, Daniel and Laura found themselves in Marita Soorenstad’s office, with Trixie between them. Detective Bartholemew was seated to their left, and behind the desk the DA was ripping open a Pixy Stix. “Help yourselves,” she said, and then she turned to Trixie. “I’m certainly glad to see you’re with us. From what I understand, that wasn’t a sure thing a few days ago.”

  Daniel reached over and took his daughter’s hand. It felt like ice. “Trixie’s feeling much better.”

  “For how long?” the district attorney asked, folding her hands on the desk. “I don’t mean to sound insensitive, Mr. Stone, but the only thing consistent in this case so far has been the lack of consistency.”

  Laura shook her head. “I don’t understand…”

  “As a prosecutor, my job is to present facts to a jury that make it possible for them to find, beyond a reasonable doubt, that your daughter was the victim of a rape perpetrated