The Tenth Circle Read online

  Because Jason was seventeen, the district court judge was sitting as a juvenile judge. And because Jason was seventeen, the courtroom was closed to spectators. Jason was wearing the brand-new blazer and tie his mother had bought him for college interviews. He’d gotten a haircut. His attorney had made sure of that, said sometimes a judge’s decisions could hinge on something as frivolous as whether or not he could see your eyes.

  Dutch Oosterhaus, his lawyer, was so smooth that every now and then Jason was tempted to look at the floor as he walked by, to see if he’d left a slick trail. He wore shoes that squeaked and the kind of shirts that required cuff links. But his father said Dutch was the best in the state and that he’d be able to make this mess go away.

  Jason didn’t know what the hell Trixie was trying to pull. They had been going at it, full force-consensual, Dutch called it. If that was how she communicated no, then it was a foreign language Jason had never learned.

  And yet. Jason tried to hide the way his hands were shaking under the table. He tried to look confident and maybe a little bit pissed off, when in fact he was so scared he felt like he could throw up at any moment.

  The district attorney made him think of a shark. She had a wide, flat face and blond hair that was nearly white, but it was the teeth that did it-they were pointy and large and looked like they’d be happy to rip into a person. Her name was Marita Soorenstad, and she had a brother who’d been a legend about ten years ago on the Bethel hockey team, although it hadn’t seemed to soften her any toward Jason himself. “Your Honor,” she said, “although the State isn’t asking for the defendant to be held at a detention facility, there are several conditions we’d ask for. We’d like to make sure that he has no contact with the victim or her family. We’d prefer that he enter a drug and alcohol treatment program. With the exception of the academic school day, the State would like to request that the defendant not be allowed to leave his house-which would include attending sporting events.”

  The judge was an older man with a bad comb-over. “I’m going to pick and choose the conditions of release, Mr. Underhill. If you violate any of them, you’re going to be locked up in Portland. You understand?”

  Jason swallowed hard and nodded.

  “You are not to have any contact with the victim or her family. You are to be in bed, alone, by ten P.M. You will steer clear of alcohol and drugs, and will begin mandatory substance abuse counseling. But as for the State’s request for house arrest…I’m disinclined to agree to that. No need to ruin the Buccaneers’ chance for a repeat state championship when there will be plenty of other people around the rink in a supervisory context.” He closed the folder. “We’re adjourned.”

  Behind him, Jason could hear his mother weeping. Dutch started packing up his files and stepped across the aisle to speak to the Shark. Jason thought of Trixie, kissing him first that night at Zephyr’s. He thought of Trixie hours before that, sobbing in his car, saying that without him, her life was over.

  Had she been planning, even then, to end his?

  Two days after being sexually assaulted, Trixie felt her life crack, unequally, along the fault line of the rape. The old Trixie Stone used to be a person who dreamed of flying and wanted, when she got old enough, to jump out of a plane and try it. The new Trixie couldn’t even sleep with the light off. The old Trixie liked wearing T-shirts that hugged her tight; the new Trixie went to her father’s dresser for a sweatshirt that she could hide beneath. The old Trixie sometimes showered twice a day, so that she could smell like the pear soap that her mother always put in her Christmas stocking. The new Trixie felt dirty, no matter how many times she scrubbed herself. The old Trixie felt like part of a group. The new Trixie felt alone, even when she was surrounded by people. The old Trixie would have taken one look at the new Trixie and dismissed her as a total loser.

  There was a knock on her door. That was new, too-her father used to just stick his head in, but even he’d become sensitive to the fact that she jumped at her own shadow. “Hey,” he said. “You feel up to company?”

  She didn’t, but she nodded, thinking he meant himself, until he pushed the door wider and she saw that woman Janice, the sexual assault advocate who’d been at the hospital with her. She was wearing a sweater with a jack-o’-lantern on it, although it was closer to Christmas, and enough eyeshadow to cover a battalion of super-models. “Oh,” Trixie said. “It’s you.”

  She sounded rude, and there was something about that that made a little spark flare under her heart. Being a bitch felt surprisingly good, a careful compromise that nearly made up for the fact that she couldn’t ever be herself again.

  “I’ll just, um, let you two talk,” Trixie’s father said, and even though she tried to send him silent urgent messages with her eyes to keep him from leaving her alone with this woman, he couldn’t hear her SOS.

  “So,” Janice said, after he closed the door. “How are you holding up?”

  Trixie shrugged. How had she not noticed at the hospital how much this woman’s voice annoyed her? Like a Zen canary.

  “I guess you’re still sort of overwhelmed. That’s perfectly normal.”

  “Normal,” Trixie repeated sarcastically. “Yeah, that’s exactly how I’d describe myself right now.”

  “Normal’s relative,” Janice said.

  If it was relative, Trixie thought, then it was the crazy uncle that nobody could stand to be around at family functions, the one who talked about himself in the third person and ate only blue foods and whom everyone else made fun of on the way home.

  “It’s a whole bunch of baby steps. You’ll get there.”

  For the past forty-eight hours, Trixie had felt like she was swimming underwater. She would hear people talking and it might as well have been Croatian for all that she could understand the words. When it got to be too quiet, she was sure that she heard Jason’s voice, soft as smoke, curling into her ear.

  “It gets a little easier every day,” Janice said, and Trixie all of a sudden hated her with a passion. What the hell did Janice know? She wasn’t sitting here, so tired that the insides of her bones ached. She didn’t understand how even right now, Trixie wished she could fall asleep, because the only thing she had to look forward to was the five seconds when she woke up in the morning and hadn’t remembered everything, yet.

  “Sometimes it helps to get it all out,” Janice suggested. “Play an instrument. Scream in the shower. Write it all down in a journal.”

  The last thing Trixie wanted to do was write about what had happened, unless she got to burn it when she was done.

  “Lots of women find it helpful to join a survivors’ group…”

  “So we can all sit around and talk about how we feel like shit?” Trixie exploded. Suddenly she wanted Janice to crawl back from whatever hole good Samaritans came from. She didn’t want to make believe that she had a snowball’s chance in hell of fitting back into her room, her life, this world. “You know,” she said, “this has been real, but I think I’d rather contemplate suicide or something fun like that. I don’t need you checking up on me.”

  “Trixie-”

  “You have no idea what I feel like,” Trixie shouted. “So don’t stand here and pretend we’re in this together. You weren’t there that night. That was just me.”

  Janice stepped forward, until she was close enough for Trixie to touch. “It was 1972 and I was fifteen. I was walking home and I took a shortcut through the elementary school playground. There was a man there and he said he’d lost his dog. He wanted to know if I’d help him look. When I was underneath the slide, he knocked me down and raped me.”

  Trixie stared at her, speechless.

  “He kept me there for three hours. The whole time, all I could think about was how I used to play there after school. The boys and the girls always kept to separate sides of the jungle gym. We used to dare each other. We’d run up to the boys’ side, and then back to safety.”

  Trixie looked down at her feet. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “Baby steps,” Janice said.

  That weekend, Laura learned that there are no cosmic referees. Time-outs do not get ca