The Tenth Circle Read online

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 dermatologist’s-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 was 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 crisscross 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 up-until 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 leçon to teach her something she’d known for years: Given anything negative or uncertain, there were ru