The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  “Hey.” He glanced back over his shoulder to where Jason was still hunched over his own desk. “You okay?”

  Trixie smoothed the edges of her homework. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “I just want you to know we all think he’s an idiot.”

  We. We could be the state champion hockey team, of which Moss and Jason were cocaptains. It could be the whole of the junior class. It could be anyone who wasn’t her. That part of it was almost as hard as the not having Jason: trying to negotiate through the minefield of the friends they’d shared, to learn who still belonged to her.

  “I think she’s just something he needs to get out of his system,” Moss said, his words a handful of stones dropped from a cliff.

  Trixie’s handwriting started to swim on the page before her. Please leave, she thought, praying fiercely for the telekinetic power to cause a distraction, and for once in her life something went right. Mr. Torkelson walked in, slammed the door, and came to the front of the classroom. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “why do we dream?”

  A stoner in the back row answered. “Because Angelina Jolie doesn’t go to Bethel High.”

  The teacher laughed. “Well, that’s one reason. Sigmund Freud might even agree with you. He called dreams a ‘royal road’ into the unconscious, made up of all the forbidden wishes you had and wished you didn’t.”

  Dreams, Trixie thought, were like soap bubbles. You could look at them from a distance, and they were lovely. It’s when you stuck your face too close that your eyes wound up stinging. She wondered if Jason had the same dreams she did, the kind where you wake up with all your breath gone and your heart as flat as a dime.

  “Ms. Stone?” the teacher repeated.

  Trixie blushed. She had no idea what Torkelson had asked. She could feel Jason’s gaze rising like a welt on the back of her neck.

  “I’ve got one, Mr. T,” Moss called out from somewhere behind her. “I’m skating out at the regionals, and a pass comes my way, but all of a sudden my stick is like a piece of spaghetti—”

  “As blatantly Freudian as that is, Moss, I’d really like to hear from Trixie.”

  Like one of her father’s superheroes, Trixie’s senses narrowed. She could hear the girl in the back of the class scratching out a secret note to her friend across the aisle, Torkelson clasping his hands together, and worst of all, that broken connection as Jason closed his eyes. She scribbled on her thumbnail with her pen. “I don’t remember any dreams.”

  “You spend a sixth of your life dreaming, Ms. Stone. Which in your case amounts to about two and a half years. Certainly you haven’t blocked out two and a half years of your life?”

  She shook her head, looked up at the teacher, and opened her mouth. “I . . . I’m going to be sick,” Trixie managed, and with the classroom wheeling around her, she grabbed her books and fled.

  In the bathroom, she flung her backpack under the row of square white sinks that looked like a giant’s dentures and crouched in front of one of the toilets. She vomited, although she would have wagered that there was nothing inside of her. Then she sat on the floor and pressed her hot cheek against the metal wall of the stall.

  It was not that Jason had broken up with her on their three-month anniversary. It was not that Trixie—a freshman who’d seemed to have hit the jackpot, a nobody elevated to the level of queen by association—had lost her Cinderella status. It was that she truly believed you could be fourteen when you learned how love could change the speed your blood ran through you, how it made you dream in kaleidoscope color. It was that Trixie knew she couldn’t have loved Jason this hard if he hadn’t loved her that way too.

  Trixie came out of the stall and turned the water on in the sink. She splashed her face, wiped it with a brown paper towel. She didn’t want to go back to class, not ever, so she took out her eyeliner and mascara, her lip gloss and her compact mirror. She had her mother’s rich copper hair, her father’s dark complexion. Her ears were too pointed and her chin was too round. Her lips were okay, she guessed. Once, in art class, a teacher had said they were classic and made the rest of the students draw them. It was her eyes, though, that scared her. Although they used to be a dark mossy color, nowadays they were a frosted green so pale it was barely a color at all. Trixie wondered if you could cry away the pigment.

  She snapped shut her compact and then, on second thought, opened it and set it on the floor. It took three stomps before the mirror inside shattered. Trixie threw out the plastic disc and all but one shard of glass. It was shaped like a tear, rounded on one end and sharp as a dagger on the other.

  She slid down along the tiled wall of the bathroom until she was sitting underneath the sink. Then she dragged the makeshift knife over the white canvas of her inner arm. As soon as she did it, she wished she could take it back. Crazy girls did this, girls who walked like zombies through YA novels.

  But.

  Trixie felt the sting of the skin as it split, the sweet welling rise of blood.

  It hurt, though not as much as everything else.

  • • •

  “You have to do something pretty awful to wind up in the bottom level of hell,” Laura said rhetorically, surveying her class. “And Lucifer used to be God’s right-hand man. So what went wrong?”

  It had been a simple disagreement, Laura thought. Like almost every other rift between people, that’s how it started. “One day God turned to his buddy Lucifer and said that he was thinking of giving those cool little toys he created—namely, people—the right to choose how they acted. Free will. Lucifer thought that power should belong only to angels. He staged a coup, and he lost big-time.”

  Laura started walking through the aisles—one downside of free Internet access at the college was that kids used lecture hours to shop online and download porn, if the professor wasn’t vigilant. “What makes the Inferno so brilliant are the contrapassi—the punishments that fit the crime. In Dante’s mind, sinners pay in a way that reflects what they did wrong on earth. Lucifer didn’t want man to have choices, so he winds up literally paralyzed in ice. Fortune-tellers walk around with their heads on backward. Adulterers end up joined together for eternity, without getting any satisfaction from it.” Laura shook off the image that rose in her mind. “Apparently,” she joked, “the clinical trials for Viagra were done in hell.”

  Her class laughed as she headed toward her podium. “In the 1300s—before Italians could tune in to The Revenge of the Sith or Lord of the Rings—this poem was the ultimate battle of good versus evil,” she said. “I like the word evil. Scramble it a little, and you get vile and live. Good, on the other hand, is just a command to go do.”

  The four graduate students who led the class sections for this course were all sitting in the front row with their computers balanced on their knees. Well, three of them were. There was Alpha, the self-christened retrofeminist, which as far as Laura could tell meant that she gave a lot of speeches about how modern women had been driven so far from the home they no longer felt comfortable inside it. Beside her, Aine scrawled on the inside of one alabaster arm—most likely her own poetry. Naryan, who could type faster than Laura could breathe, looked up over his laptop at her, a crow poised for a crumb. Only Seth sprawled in his chair, his eyes closed, his long hair spilling over his face. Was he snoring?

  She felt a flush rise up the back of her neck. Turning her back on Seth Dummerston, she glanced up at the clock in the back of the lecture hall. “That’s it for today. Read through the fifth canto,” Laura instructed. “Next Wednesday, we’ll be talking about poetic justice versus divine retribution. And have a nice weekend, folks.”

  The students gathered their backpacks and laptops, chattering about the bands that were playing later on, and the BÈΠ party that had brought in a truckload of real sand for Caribbean Night. They wound scarves around their necks like bright bandages and filed out of the lecture hall, already dismissing Laura’s class from their minds.

  Laura didn’t need to prepare for