The Tenth Circle Read online

It was what her mother used to call snowman snow-the kind damp enough to stick together. Trixie packed it into a ball. She started to roll it across the lawn like a bandage, leaving behind a long brown tongue of matted grass.

  After a while, she surveyed the damage. The yard looked like a crazy quilt, white stripes bordering triangles and squares made of lawn. Taking another handful of snow, Trixie began to roll a second snowball, and a third. A few minutes later, she was standing in the middle of them, wondering how they’d gotten so big so fast. There was no way she would be able to lift one onto the other. How had she managed to build a snowman when she was little? Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe someone else had always done it for her.

  Suddenly the door opened and her mother was standing there, screaming her name and trying to see through the flakes still coming down. She looked frantic, and it took Trixie a moment to understand: Her mother didn’t know she’d come outside; her mother was still worried she’d kill herself.

  “Over here,” Trixie said.

  Not that death-by-blizzard was a bad idea. When Trixie was tiny, she used to dig a hideout in the mountain of snow left behind by the plow. She called it her igloo, even though her father had told her that Eskimos in America did not and never had lived in those. But then she read a newspaper article about a kid in Charlotte, Vermont, who had done the same exact thing and the roof had collapsed on his head and smothered him before his parents even knew he was missing, and she never did it again.

  Her mother walked outside and immediately sank ankle-deep in snow. She was wearing Trixie’s boots, which she must have dug out of the closet wreckage after Trixie had commandeered her own Sorels. “You want help?” her mother asked.

  Trixie didn’t. If she’d wanted help, she would have invited someone outside with her in the first place. But she couldn’t for the life of her imagine how she was going to get that stupid belly on top of the snowman’s base. “All right,” she conceded.

  Her mother got on one side of the ball and pushed, while Trixie tried to pull it from the front. Even together, they couldn’t budge the weight. “Welcome to the Fourth Circle,” her mother said, laughing.

  Trixie fell onto her butt on the snow. Leave it to her mother to turn this into a classics lesson.

  “You’ve got your tightwads on one side and your greedy folks on the other,” her mother said. “They shove boulders at each other for all eternity.”

  “I was kind of hoping to finish this up before then.”

  Her mother turned. “Why, Trixie Stone. Was that a joke?”

  Since coming home from the hospital, there had been precious few of those in the household. When a television sitcom came on, the channel was immediately changed. When you felt a smile coming on, you squelched it. Feeling happy didn’t seem particularly appropriate, not with everything that had gone on lately. It was as if, Trixie thought, they were all waiting for someone to wave a magic wand and say, It’s okay, now. Carry on.

  What if she was the one who was supposed to wave that wand?

  Her mother began to sculpt a snow ramp. Trixie fell into place beside her, pushing the middle snowball higher and higher until it tipped onto the bigger base. She packed snow between the seams. Then she lifted the head and perched it at the very top.

  Her mother clapped…just as snowman listed and fell. His head rolled into one of the basement window gutters; his midsection cracked like an egg. Only the massive base sphere remained intact.

  Frustrated, Trixie slapped a snowball against the side of it. Her mother watched and then packed her own snowball. Within seconds they were both firing shots at the boulder until it cleaved down the center, until it succumbed to the assault and lay between them in fat iceberg chunks.

  By then, Trixie was lying on her back, panting. She had not felt-well, this normal in some time. It occurred to her that had things ended differently a week ago, she might not be doing any of this. She’d been so focused on what she had wanted to get away from in this world she forgot to consider what she might miss.

  When you die, you don’t get to catch snowflakes on your tongue. You don’t get to breathe winter in, deep in your lungs. You can’t lie in bed and watch for the lights of the passing town plow. You can’t suck on an icicle until your forehead hurts.

  Trixie stared up at the dizzy flakes. “I’m kind of glad.”

  “About what?”

  “That it didn’t…you know…work out.”

  She felt her mother’s hand reach over to grab her own. Their mittens were both soaked.

  They’d go inside, stick their clothes inside the dryer. Ten minutes later, they’d be good as new.

  Trixie wanted to cry. It was that beautiful, knowing what came next.

  Because of the storm, hockey practice had been canceled. Jason came home after school, as per the conditions of his bail, and holed himself up in his bedroom listening to the White Stripes on his iPod. He closed his eyes and executed mental passes to Moss, wrist shots and slapshots and pucks that hit the top shelf.

  One day, people would be talking about him, and not just because of this rape case. They’d say things like, Oh, Jason Underhill, we always knew he’d make it. They’d put up a replica jersey of his over the mirror behind the town bar, with his name facing out, and the Bruins games would take precedence over any other programming on the one TV mounted in the corner.

  Jason had a lot of work cut out ahead of him, but he could do it. A year or two postgrad, then some college hockey, and maybe he’d even be like Hugh Jessiman at Dartmouth and get signed in the first round of the NHL draft. Coach had told Jason that he’d never seen a forward with as much natural talent as Jason. He’d said that if you wanted something bad enough, all you had to learn was how to go out and take it.

  He was living out his fantasy for the hundredth time when the door to his room burst open. Jason’s father strode in, fuming, and yanked the iPod’s headphones out of Jason’s ears.

  “What the hell?” Jason said, sitting up.

  “You want to tell me what you left out the first time? You want to tell me where you got the goddamned drugs?”

  “I don’t do drugs,” Jason said. “Why would I do something that’s going to screw up my game?”

  “Oh, I believe you,” his father said, sarcastic. “I believe you didn’t take any of those drugs yourself.”

  The conversation was spinning back and forth in directions Jason couldn’t follow. “Then why are you flipping out?”

  “Because Dutch Oosterhaus called me at work to discuss a little lab report he got today. The one they did on Trixie Stone’s blood that proves someone knocked her out by slipping her a drug.”

  Heat climbed the ladder of Jason’s spine.

  “You know what else Dutch told me? Now that drugs are in the picture, the prosecutor’s got enough evidence to try you as an adult.”

  “I didn’t-”

  A vein pulsed in his father’s temple. “You threw it all away, Jason. You fucking threw it all away for a small-town whore.”

  “I didn’t drug her. I didn’t rape her. She must have fooled around with that blood sample, because…because…” Jason’s voice dropped off. “Jesus Christ…you don’t believe me.”

  “No one does,” his father said, weary. He reached into his back pocket for a letter that had already been opened and passed it to Jason before leaving the room.

  Jason sank down onto his bed. The letter was embossed with a return address for Bethel Academy; the name of the hockey coach had been scrawled above it in pen. He began to read: In lieu of recent circumstances…withdrawing its initial offer of a scholarship for a postgraduate year…sure you understand our position and its reflection on the academy.

  The letter dropped from his hands, fluttering to land on the carpet. The iPod, without its headphones, glowed a mute blue. Who would have imagined that the sound your life made as it disintegrated was total silence?

  Jason buried his face in his hands and, for the first time since all this had begun, started to cry.

  Once the storm had stopped and the streets were cleared, the storekeepers in Bethel cam