The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  “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
e went around selling coke or heroin, which could really mess you up. But he still didn’t want Laura to know this about him. He could tell you how she felt about politics or affirmative action or being touched along the base of her delicate spine, but he didn’t know what she’d say if she discovered that he was dealing.

  Seth found the vial he was looking for. “This is powerful shit,” he warned, passing it outside.

  “What does it do?”

  “It takes you away,” Seth answered. He heard the water stop running in the bathroom. “Do you want it or not?”

  The kid took the vial and shrank back into the night. Seth shut the door just as Laura walked out of the bathroom, her eyes red and her face swollen. Immediately, she froze. “Who were you talking to?”

  Although Seth would have gladly crowed to the world that he loved Laura, she had too much at stake to lose—her job, her family. He should have known that someone trying so hard to keep from being noticed would never really be able to see him.

  “No one,” Seth said bitterly. “Your little secret’s still safe.”

  He turned away so that he would not have to bear witness as she left him. He heard the door open, felt the gasp of cold air. “You’re not the one I’m ashamed of,” Laura murmured, and she walked out of his life.

  • • •

  Zephyr was handing out tubes of lipstick—hot pink, Goth black, scarlet, plum. She pressed one into Trixie’s hand. It was gold, and Trixie turned it upside down to read the name: All That Glitters. “You know what to do, right?” Zephyr murmured.

  Trixie did. She’d never played Rainbow before, she’d never had to. She’d always been with Jason instead.

  As soon as Trixie had arrived at Zephyr’s, her friend had laid out the guidelines for Trixie’s surefire success that night. First, look hot. Second, drink whenever, whatever. Third—and most important—do not break the two-and-a-half-hour rule. That much time had to pass at the party before Trixie was allowed to talk to Jason. In the meantime, Trixie had to flirt with everyone but him. According to Zephyr, Jason expected Trixie to still be pining for him. When the opposite happened—when he saw other guys checking Trixie out and telling him he’d blown it—it would shock him into realizing his mistake.

  However, Jason hadn’t showed up yet. Zephyr told Trixie just to carry on with points one and two of the plan, so that she’d be good and wasted by the time Jason arrived and saw her enjoying herself. To that end, Trixie had spent the night dancing with anyone who wanted to, and by herself when she couldn’t find a partner. She drank until the horizon swam. She fell down across the laps of boys she could not care less about and let them pretend she liked it.

  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 reap-plied 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 gue
ssed 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.”