The Tenth Circle Read online

She looked at her reflection in the plate-glass window and applied the gold lipstick. It made her look like a model in an MTV video.

  There were three games that had been making the rounds at parties recently. Daisy-chaining meant having sex like a conga line-you’d do it with a guy, who’d do it with some girl, who’d do it with another guy, and so on, until you made your way back to the beginning. During Stoneface, a bunch of guys sat at a table with their pants pulled down and their expressions wiped clean of emotion, while a girl huddled underneath giving one of them a blow job-and they all had to try to guess the lucky recipient.

  Rainbow was a combination of the two. A dozen or so girls were given different colored lipsticks before having oral sex with the guys, and the boy who sported the most colors at the end of the night was the winner.

  An upperclassman that Trixie didn’t know threaded his fingers through Zephyr’s and tugged her forward. Trixie watched him sit on the couch, watched her wilt like a flower at his feet. She turned away, her face flaming.

  It doesn’t mean anything, Zephyr had said.

  It only hurts if you let it.

  “Hey.”

  Trixie turned around to find a guy staring at her. “Um,” she said. “Hi.”

  “You want to…go sit down?”

  He was blond, where Jason had been so dark. He had brown eyes, not blue ones. She found herself studying him not in terms of who he was, but who he wasn’t.

  She imagined what would happen if Jason walked in the door and saw her going at it with someone. She wondered if he’d recognize her right away. If the stake through his heart would hurt as much as the one Trixie felt every time she saw him with Jessica Ridgeley.

  Taking a deep breath, she led this boy-what was his name? did it even matter?-toward a couch. She reached for a beer on the table beside them and chugged the entire thing. Then she knelt between the boy’s legs and kissed him. Their teeth scraped.

  She reached down and unbuckled his belt, looking down long enough to register that he wore boxers. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine what it would be like if the bass in the music could beat through the pores of her skin.

  His hand tangled in her hair, drawing her down, head to a chopping block. She smelled the musk of him and heard the groan of someone across the room and he was in her mouth and she imagined the flecks of gold on her lips ringing him like fairy dust.

  Gagging, Trixie wrenched herself away and rocked back on her heels. She could still taste him, and she scrambled out of the pulsing living room and out the front door just in time to throw up in Mrs. Santorelli-Weinstein’s hydrangea bush.

  When you fooled around without the feelings attached, it might not mean anything…but then again, neither did you. Trixie wondered if there was something wrong with her, for not being able to act like Zephyr-cool and nonchalant, like none of this mattered anyway. Is that really what guys wanted? Or was it just what the girls thought the guys wanted?

  Trixie wiped a shaking hand across her mouth and sat down on the front steps. In the distance, a car door slammed. She heard a voice that haunted her each moment before she fell asleep: “Come on, Moss. She’s a freshman. Why don’t we just call it a night?”

  Trixie stared at the sidewalk until Jason came into view, haloed by a streetlight as he walked beside Moss toward Zephyr’s front door.

  She spun around, took the lipstick out of her pocket, and reapplied a fresh coat. It sparkled in the dark. It felt like wax, like a mask, like none of this was real.

 

  Laura had called to say that since she was on campus, she was going to stay there and catch up on some grading. She might even just crash overnight in her office.

  You could work at home, Daniel said, when what he really meant was, Why does it sound like you’ve been crying?

  No, I’ll get more done here, Laura answered, when what she really meant was, Please don’t ask.

  Love you, Daniel said, but Laura didn’t.

  When your significant other was missing, it wasn’t the same bed. There was a void on the other side, a cosmic black hole, one that you couldn’t roll too close to without falling into a chasm of memories. Daniel lay with the covers drawn up to his chin, the television screen still glowing green.

  He had always believed that if someone in this marriage was going to cheat, it would have been himself. Laura had never done anything wayward, had never even gotten a damn traffic ticket. On the other hand, he had a long history of behavior that would have surely landed him in jail eventually, had he not fallen in love instead. He assumed you could hide infidelity, like a wrinkle in your clothing stuffed underneath a belt line or a cuff, a flaw you knew existed but could conceal from the public. Instead, cheating had its own smell, one that clung to Laura’s skin even after she’d stepped out of the shower. It took Daniel a while longer to recognize this sharp lemon scent for what it was: a late and unexpected confidence.

  At dinner a few nights ago, Trixie had read them a logic problem from her psych homework: A woman is at the funeral of her mother. There, she meets a man she doesn’t know and has never met, who she thinks is her dream partner. But because of the circumstances, she forgets to ask for his number, and she can’t find him afterward. A few days later, she kills her own sister. Why?

  Laura guessed that the sister had been involved with the man. Daniel thought it might be something to do with an inheritance. Congratulations, Trixie had said, neither one of you is a psychopath. The reason she murdered her sister was because she hoped the guy would show up at that funeral, too. Most serial killers who had been asked this question had given the right answer.

  It was later, while he was lying in bed with Laura sleeping soundly beside him, that Daniel came up with a different explanation. According to Trixie, the woman at the funeral had fallen in love. And like any accelerant, that would change the equation. Add love, and a person might do something crazy. Add love, and all the lines between right and wrong were bound to disappear.

  It was two-thirty in the morning, and Trixie was bluffing.

  By now, the party had wound down. Only four people remained: Zephyr and Moss and Trixie and Jason. Trixie had managed to avoid finishing out the Rainbow game by playing Quarters in the kitchen instead with Moss and Jason. When Zephyr found her there, she had pulled Trixie aside, furious. Why was Trixie being such a prude? Wasn’t this whole night supposed to be about making Jason jealous? And so Trixie had marched back to Moss and Jason, and suggested the four of them play strip poker.

  They had been at it long enough for the stakes to be important. Jason had folded a while ago; he stood against the wall with his arms crossed, watching the rest of the game develop.

  Zephyr laid out her cards with a flourish: two pairs-threes and jacks. On the couch across from her, Moss tipped his hand and grinned. “I have a straight.”

  Zephyr had already taken off her shoes, her socks, and her pants. She stood up and started to peel off her shirt. She walked toward Moss in her bra, draping her T-shirt around his neck and then kissing him so slowly that all the pale skin on his face turned bright pink.

  When she sat back down, she glanced at Trixie, as if to say, That’s how you do it.

  “Stack the deck,” Moss said. “I want to see if she’s really a blonde.”

  Zephyr turned to Trixie. “Stack the deck. I want to see if he’s really a guy.”

  “Hey, Trixie, what about you?” Moss asked.

  Trixie’s head was cartwheeling, but she could feel Jason’s eyes on her. Maybe this was where she was supposed to go in for the kill. She looked to Zephyr, hoping for a cue, but Zephyr was too busy hanging on Moss to pay attention to her.

  Oh, my God, it was brilliant.

  If the goal of this entire night was to get Jason jealous, the surest way to do it would be to come on to his best friend.

  Trixie stood up and tumbled right into Moss’s lap. His arms came around her, and her cards spilled onto the coffee table: two of hearts, six of diamonds, queen of clubs, three of clubs, eight of s