The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  “Oh,” she said, blinking at the food. “Zephyr invited me for a sleepover.”

  “You can go after you eat.”

  Trixie bit her lower lip. “Her mom thinks I’m coming for dinner.”

  Daniel had known Zephyr since she was seven. He used to sit in the living room while she and Trixie performed the cheerleading moves they’d made up during an afternoon of play, or lip-synched to the radio, or presented tumbling routines. He could practically still hear them doing a hand-clapping game: The spades go eeny-meeny pop zoombini . . .

  Last week, Daniel had walked in with a bag of groceries to find someone unfamiliar in the kitchen, bent over a catalog. Nice ass, he thought, until she straightened and turned out to be Zephyr. “Hey, Mr. Stone,” she’d said. “Trixie’s in the bathroom.”

  She hadn’t noticed that he went red in the face, or that he left the kitchen before his own daughter returned. He sat on the couch with the grocery bag in his hands, the ice cream inside softening against his chest, as he speculated whether there were other fathers out there making the same mistake when they happened upon Trixie.

  “Well,” he said now, “I’ll just save the leftovers.” He stood up, fishing for his car keys.

  “Oh, that’s okay. I can walk.”

  “It’s dark out,” Daniel said.

  Trixie met his gaze, challenging. “I think I can manage to get to a house three blocks away. I’m not a baby, Dad.”

  Daniel didn’t know what to say. She was a baby, to him. “Then maybe before you go to Zephyr’s you could go vote, join the army, and rent us a car . . . oh, hang on, that’s right. You can’t.”

  Trixie rolled her eyes, took off her hat and gloves, and sat down.

  “I thought you were eating at Zephyr’s.”

  “I will,” she said. “But I don’t want you to have to eat all by yourself.”

  Daniel sank into the chair across from her. He had a sudden flashback of Trixie in ballet class, the two of them struggling to capture her fine hair in a netted bun before the session began. He had always been the sole father present; other men’s wives would rush forward to help him figure out how to secure the bobby pins, how to slick back the bangs with hair spray.

  At her first and only ballet performance, Trixie had been the lead reindeer, drawing out the sleigh that held the Sugar Plum Fairy. She wore a white leotard and an antler headband and had a painted red nose. Daniel hadn’t taken his eyes off her, not for any of the three minutes and twenty-two seconds that she stood on that stage.

  He didn’t want to take his eyes off her now, but part of this new routine of adolescence meant a portion of the dance took place off-stage.

  “What are you guys going to do tonight?” Daniel asked.

  “I don’t know. Rent a movie off the dish, I guess. What are you going to do?”

  “Oh, the same thing I always do when I’m alone in the house. Dance around naked, call the psychic hotline, cure cancer, negotiate world peace.”

  Trixie smiled. “Could you clean my room too?”

  “Don’t know if I’ll have time. It depends on whether the North Koreans are being cooperative.” He pushed his food around his plate, took a few bites, and then dumped the rest into the trash. “Okay, you’re officially free.”

  She bounced up and grabbed her pack, heading toward the front door. “Thanks, Daddy.”

  “Any time,” Daniel said, but the words turned up at the end, as if he were asking her for minutes that were no longer hers to give.

  • • •

  She wasn’t lying. Not any more than her father had when Trixie was little and he said one day they’d get a dog, although they didn’t. She was just telling him what he wanted—needed—to hear. Everyone always said the best relationships between parents and kids involved open communication, but Trixie knew that was a joke. The best relationships were the ones where both sides went out of their way to make sure the other wasn’t disappointed.

  She wasn’t lying, not really. She was going to Zephyr’s house. And she did plan to sleep over.

  But Zephyr’s mother had gone to visit her older brother at Wesleyan College for the weekend, and Trixie wasn’t the only one who’d been invited for the evening. A bunch of people were coming, including some hockey players.

  Like Jason.

  Trixie ducked behind the fence at Mrs. Argobath’s house, opened up her backpack, and pulled out the jeans that were so low rise she had to go commando. She’d bought them a month ago and had hidden them from her father, because she knew he’d have a heart attack if he saw her wearing them. Shimmying out of her sweatpants and underwear—Jesus, it was cold out—she skimmed on the jeans. She rummaged for the items she’d stolen from her mother’s closet—they were the same size now. Trixie had wanted to borrow the killer black-heeled boots, but she couldn’t find them. Instead, Trixie had settled for a chain-link belt and a sheer black blouse her mother had worn one year over a velvet camisole to a faculty Christmas dinner. The sleeves weren’t see-through enough that you could see the Ace bandage she’d wrapped around the cuts on her arm, but you could totally tell that all she had on underneath was a black satin bra.

  She zipped up her coat again, jammed on her hat, and started walking. Trixie honestly wasn’t sure she’d be able to do what Zephyr had suggested. Make him come to you, Zephyr had said. Get him jealous.

  Maybe if she was hammered enough, or totally stoned.

  Now there was a thought. When you were high, you were hardly yourself.

  Then again, maybe it would be easier than she expected. Being someone else—anyone else, even for one night—would beat being Trixie Stone.

  • • •

  A human heart breaks harder when it’s dropped from a greater height. Seth lay on the sheets of his futon, the ones that smelled of the cigarettes he rolled and—he loved this—of Laura. He still felt her words like the recoil from a shotgun. It’s over.

  Laura had gone to pull herself together in the bathroom. Seth knew there was a hairline fracture between duty and desire; that you might think you were walking on one side of it and then find yourself firmly entrenched on the other. He just also had believed—stupidly—that it wasn’t that way for them. He’d believed that even with the age difference, he could be Laura’s future. He hadn’t counted on the chance that she might want her past instead.

  “I can be whatever you want me to be,” he’d promised. Please, he had said, half question, half command.

  When the doorbell rang, he nearly didn’t answer. This was the last thing he needed right now. But the bell rang again, and Seth opened the door to find the kid standing in the shadows. “Later,” Seth said, and he started to shut the door.

  A twenty-dollar bill was pressed into his hand. “Look,” Seth said with a sigh, “I’m out.”

  “You’ve got to have something.” Two more twenties were pushed at him.

  Seth hesitated. He hadn’t been lying—he really didn’t have any weed—but it was hard to turn down sixty bucks when you had eaten ramen noodles every night that week. He wondered how much time he had before Laura came out of the bathroom. “Wait here,” he said.

  He kept his stash in the belly of an old guitar with half its strings missing. The battered case had travel stamps on it, from Istanbul and Paris and Bangkok, and a bumper sticker that said, IF YOU CAN READ THIS, GET THE FUCK AWAY.

  The first time Laura had visited his apartment he’d come back from digging up a bottle of wine to find her strumming the remaining strings, the guitar still cradled inside its open case. Do you play? she had asked.

  He had frozen, but only for a moment. He took the case, snapped it shut, and put it off to the side. Depends on the game, he had answered.

  Now he reached into the sound hole and rummaged around. He considered his sidelight vocation philosophically: Grad school cost a fortune; his tech job at the vet’s office barely paid his rent; and selling pot wasn’t much different from buying a six-pack for a bunch of teenagers. It wasn’t like h