The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  Jason nodded, shook it off. They met for another face-off, and this time when the kids took the puck Jason skated backward slowly, making no move to go after it. Unused to playing without the boards, he tripped over the plastic edge of the rink liner and fell into the arms of the crowd. He noticed Zephyr Santorelli-Weinstein’s face, and a half-dozen others from school. “Sorry,” he muttered, staggering to his feet.

  When he stepped onto the ice again, Jason headed for the puck, hip-checking a player to get him out of the way. Except this time, his opponent was half his size and a third of his weight, and went flying.

  The boy banged into his goalie, who slid into the net in a heap, crying. Jason watched the kid’s father hurry onto the ice in his street shoes.

  “What is wrong with you today?” Moss said, skating close.

  “It was an accident,” Jason answered, and his friend reared back, smelling the alcohol.

  “Coach is going to rip you a new asshole. Get out of here. I’ll cover for you.”

  Jason stared at him.

  “Go,” Moss said.

  Jason took one last look at the boy and his father, then skated hard to the spot where he’d left his boots.

  • • •

  I did not die, and yet I lost life’s breath:

  imagine for yourself what I became,

  deprived at once of both my life and death.

  Laura read Lucifer’s lines in the last canto of the Inferno, then closed the book. Hands down, Lucifer was the most fascinating character in the poem: waist-deep in the lake of ice, with his three heads gnawing on a feast of sinners. Having once been an archangel, he certainly had the freedom of choice—in fact, it was what got him to pick a fight with God in the first place. So if Lucifer had willingly chosen his course, had he known beforehand that he was going to end up suffering?

  Did he think, on some level, that he deserved it?

  Did anyone, who was cast in the role opposite the hero?

  It occurred to Laura that she had sinned in every single circle. She’d committed adultery. She’d betrayed her benefactor—the university—by seducing a student . . . which could also be considered treachery, if you classified Seth as an innocent pawn in the game. She’d defied God by ignoring her wedding vows: She’d defied her family by distancing herself from Trixie when Trixie needed her most. She’d lied to her husband, she’d been angry and wrathful, she’d sowed discord, and she’d been a fraudulent counselor to a student who came looking for a mentor and wound up with a lover.

  About the only thing Laura hadn’t done was kill someone.

  She reached behind her desk for an antique china human head she had found at a garage sale. It was smooth and white and divided into calligraphed subsections across the brain area: wit, glory, revenge, bliss. Over the skull she’d put a headband sporting two red devil horns, a gift from a student one Halloween. Now she took the headband off and tried it on for size.

  There was a knock on her door, and a moment later Seth stepped into her office. “Are those horns on your head,” he said, “or are you just happy to see me?”

  She yanked off the headband.

  “Five minutes.” He closed the door, locked it. “You owe me that much.”

  Relationships always sounded so physically painful: You fell in love, you broke a heart, you lost your head. Was it any wonder that people came through the experience with battle scars? The problem with a marriage—or maybe its strength—was that it spanned a distance, and you were never the same person you started out being. If you were lucky, you could still recognize each other years later. If you weren’t, you wound up in your office with a boy fifteen years younger than you were, pouring his heart into your open hands.

  All right. If she was going to be honest, she had loved the way Seth knew what an anapest was, and a canzone. She loved seeing their reflection in a pane of glass as they passed a storefront and being surprised every time. She loved playing Scrabble on a rainy afternoon when she should have been grading papers or attending a departmental meeting. But just because she had called in sick that day didn’t mean she wasn’t still a professor. Just because she abandoned her family didn’t mean she wasn’t still a wife, a mother. Her biggest sin, when you got right down to it, was forgetting all that in the first place.

  “Seth,” she said, “I don’t know how to make this any easier. But—”

  She broke off, realizing the words she was about to say: But I love my husband.

  I always have.

  “We need to talk,” Seth said quietly. He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and tossed a rolled newspaper onto the table.

  Laura had seen it. The front page chronicled the newly filed charge by the district attorney. Jason Underhill would be tried as an adult, due to the presence of date rape drugs in the victim’s bloodstream.

  “Ketamine,” Seth said.

  Laura blinked at him. From what the prosecutor had said, the drug found in Trixie’s system hadn’t even been one of the more popular date rape drugs. It hadn’t been listed in the newspaper, either. “How would you know that?”

  Seth sat down on the edge of her desk. “There’s something I have to tell you,” he said.

  • • •

  “I’m coming!” Trixie yelled through the open door, as her father honked the horn for the third time. Jesus. It wasn’t like she wanted to go into town right now, and it wasn’t her fault that the pizza cheese he was using to cook dinner had grown enough mold to be classified as an antibiotic. She hadn’t been doing anything earth-shattering that she couldn’t interrupt, but it was the principle that was upsetting her: Neither parent felt comfortable letting Trixie out of sight.

  She stomped into the first pair of boots she could find and headed outside to his idling truck. “Can’t we just have soup?” Trixie said, slouching down in her seat, when what she really meant was: What will it take to make you trust me again?

  Her father put the truck into first gear to go down a long hill. “I know you want me to leave you home alone. But I hope you also know why I can’t do that.”

  Trixie rolled her eyes toward the window. “Whatever.”

  As they approached town, there was a glut of cars. People in bright parkas and scarves spilled across the street like a stream of confetti. Trixie felt her stomach turn over. “What’s the date?” she murmured. She’d seen the signs all over school: ICE = NICE. DON’T BE A SNOWFLAKE—COME TO WINTERFEST.

  Trixie shrank back in her seat as three girls she recognized from school came so close to the car they brushed the front bumper. Everyone came to the Winterfest. When she was little, her parents would take her to pat the sorry old reindeer idling near the camera store. She could remember seeing ordinary teachers and doctors and waitresses become Victorian carolers for a night. Last year, Trixie had been an elf along with Zephyr, the two of them wearing double layers of skating tights and handing out candy canes to the kids who sat on Santa’s lap.

  This year, walking down Main Street would be totally different. At first, no one would see her, because it was dark out. But then, someone would bump into her by accident. Sorry, they’d say, and then they’d realize who it was. They’d tap their friends. They would point. They’d lean close and whisper about how Trixie wasn’t wearing any makeup and how her hair looked like it hadn’t been washed in a week. Before she had made it to the other end of Main Street, their stares would have burned into the back of her coat like sunlight through a looking glass, starting a flash fire that reduced her to a pile of ashes.

  “Daddy,” she said, “can’t we just go home?”

  Her father glanced at her. He’d had to detour around Main Street and was now parked in a lot behind the grocery store. Trixie could see he was weighing the cost of reaching his destination against Trixie’s extreme discomfort. . . and factoring in her suicide attempt to boot. “You stay in the car,” her father conceded. “I’ll be right back.”

  Trixie nodded and watched him cross the parking lot. She closed her