The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

Daniel pretended that he could hear Trixie’s breathing, even and untroubled, through the bedroom wall. “Was it really so bad? The two of us?”

  Laura shook her head.

  “Then why did you do it?”

  For a long time, she did not answer. Daniel assumed she’d fallen asleep. But then her voice pricked on the edges of the stars strung outside the window. “Because,” she said, “he reminded me of you.”

  • • •

  Trixie knew that at the slightest provocation, she could stand up and walk out of class and head down to the office for refuge without any teacher even blinking. She had been given her father’s cell phone. Call me anytime, he said, and I will be there before you hang up. She had stumbled through an awkward conversation with the school principal, who phoned to tell her that he would certainly do his best to make Bethel High a haven of safety for her. To that end, she was no longer taking psych with Jason; she had an independent study instead in the library. She could write a report on anything. Right now, she was thinking of a topic: Girls Who Would Rather Disappear.

  “I’m sure that Zephyr and your other friends will be happy to see you,” her father said. Neither of them mentioned that Zephyr hadn’t called, not once, to see how she was doing. Trixie tried to convince herself that was because Zephyr felt guilty, with the fight they’d had and what had happened afterward as a direct result. She didn’t explain to her father that she didn’t really have any other friends in the ninth grade. She’d been too busy filling her world with Jason to maintain old relationships, or to bother starting new ones.

  “What if I’ve changed my mind?” Trixie asked softly.

  Her father looked at her. “Then I’ll take you home. It’s that easy, Trix.”

  She glanced out the car window. It was snowing, a fine fat-flaked dusting that hung in the trees and softened the edges of the landscape. The cold seeped through the stocking cap she wore—who knew her hair had actually kept her so warm? She kept forgetting she’d cut it all off in all the smallest ways: when she looked in the mirror and got the shock of her life, when she tried to pull a long nonexistent ponytail out from beneath the collar of her coat. To be honest, she looked horrible—the short cap of hair made her eyes look even bigger and more anxious; the severity of the cut was better suited to a boy—but Trixie liked it. If people were going to stare, she wanted to know it was because she looked different, not because she was different.

  The gates of the school came into view through the windshield wipers, the student parking lot to the right. Under the cover of snow, the cars looked like a sea of beached whales. She wondered which one was Jason’s. She imagined him inside the building already, where he’d been for two whole days longer than her, sowing the seeds of his side of the story that by now, surely, had grown into a thicket.

  Her father pulled to the curb. “I’ll walk you in,” he said.

  All live wires inside Trixie tripped. Could there be anything that screamed out loser! more than a rape victim who had to be walked into school by her daddy? “I can do it myself,” she insisted, but when she went to unbuckle her seat belt she found that her mind couldn’t make her fingers do the work they needed to.

  Suddenly she felt her father’s hands on the fastenings, the harness coming free. “If you want to go home,” he said gently, “that’s okay.”

  Trixie nodded, hating the tears that welled at the base of her throat. “I know.”

  It was stupid to be scared. What could possibly happen inside that school that was any worse than what already had? But you could reason with yourself all day and still have butterflies in your stomach.

  “When I was growing up in the village,” Trixie’s father said, “the place we lived was haunted.”

  Trixie blinked. She could count on one hand the number of times in her life that her father had talked about growing up in Alaska. There were certain remnants of his childhood that labeled him as different—like the way, if it got too loud, he’d have to leave the room, and the obsession he had with conserving water even though they had an endless supply through their home well. Trixie knew this much: Her father had been the only white boy in a native Yup’ik Eskimo village called Akiak. His mother, who raised him by herself, had taught school there. He had left Alaska when he was eighteen, and he swore he’d never go back.

  “Our house was attached to the school. The last person who’d lived in it was the old principal, who’d hanged himself from a beam in the kitchen. Everyone knew about it. Sometimes, in the school, the audiovisual equipment would turn on even when it was unplugged. Or the basketballs lying on the floor of the gym would start to bounce by themselves. In our house, drawers would fly open every now and then, and sometimes you could smell aftershave, out of nowhere.” Trixie’s father looked up at her. “The Yupiit are afraid of ghosts. Sometimes, in school, I’d see kids spit into the air, to check if the ghost was close enough to steal their saliva. Or they’d walk around the building three times so that the ghost couldn’t follow them back to their own homes.”

  He shrugged. “The thing is . . . I was the white kid. I talked funny and I looked funny and I got picked on for that on a daily basis. I was terrified of that ghost just like they were, but I never let anyone know it. That way, I knew they might call me a lot of awful names . . . but one of them wasn’t coward.”

  “Jason’s not a ghost,” Trixie said quietly.

  Her father tugged her hat down over her ears. His eyes were so dark she could see herself shining in them. “Well, then,” he said, “I guess you’ve got nothing to be afraid of.”

  • • •

  Daniel nearly ran after Trixie as she navigated the slippery sidewalk up to the front of the school. What if he was wrong about this? What if Janice and the doctors and everyone else didn’t know how cruel teenagers could be? What if Trixie came home even more devastated?

  Trixie walked with her head down, bracing against the cold. Her green jacket was a stain against the snow. She didn’t turn back to look at him.

  When she was little, Daniel had always waited for Trixie to enter the school building before he drove away. There was too much that could go wrong: She might trip and fall; she could be approached by a bully; she might be teased by a pack of girls. He’d liked to imagine that just by keeping an eye on her, he could imbue her with the power of safety, much like the way he’d draw it onto one of his comics panels in a wavy, flowing force field.

  The truth was, though, that Daniel had needed Trixie far more than Trixie had ever needed him. Without realizing it, she’d put on a show for him every day: hopping, twirling, spreading her arms and taking a running leap, as if she thought that one of these mornings she might actually get airborne. He’d watch her and he’d see how easy it was for kids to believe in a world different from the one presented to them. Then he’d drive home and translate that stroke by stroke onto a fresh page.

  He could remember wondering how long it would take for reality to catch up to his daughter. He could remember thinking: The saddest day in the world will be the one when she stops pretending.

  Daniel waited until Trixie slipped through the double doors of the school, and then pulled carefully away from the curb. He needed a load of sand in the back of his pickup to keep it from fishtailing in the snow. Whatever it took, right now, to keep his balance.

  3

  Trixie knew the story behind her real name, but that didn’t mean she hated it any less. Beatrice Portinari had been Dante’s one true love, the woman who’d inspired him to write a whole batch of epic poems. Her mother the classics professor had single-handedly filled out the birth certificate when her father (who’d wanted to name his newborn daughter Sarah) was in the bathroom.

  Dante and Beatrice, though, were no Romeo and Juliet. Dante met her when he was only nine and then didn’t see her again until he was eighteen. They both married other people and Beatrice died young. If that was everlasting love, Trixie didn’t want any part of it.

  When Trixie had complained to her f
ather, he said Nicolas Cage had named his son Kal-el, Superman’s Kryptonian name, and that she should be grateful. But Bethel High was brimming with Mallorys, Dakotas, Crispins, and Willows. Trixie had spent most of her life pulling the teacher aside on the first day of school, to make sure she said Trixie when she read the attendance sheet, instead of Beatrice, which made the other kids crack up. There was a time in fourth grade when she started calling herself Justine, but it didn’t catch on.

  Summer Friedman was in the main office with Trixie, signing into school late. She was tall and blonde, with a perpetual tan, although Trixie knew for a fact she’d been born in December. She turned around, clutching her blue hall pass. “Slut,” she hissed at Trixie as she walked past.

  “Beatrice?” the secretary said. “The principal’s ready for you.”

  Trixie had been in the principal’s office only once, when she made honor roll during the first quarter of freshman year. She’d been sent during homeroom, and the whole time she’d been shaking, trying to figure out what she’d done wrong. Principal Aaronsen had been waiting with a Cookie Monster grin on his face and his hand extended. “Congratulations, Beatrice,” he had said, and he’d handed her a little gold honor roll card with her own disgusting name printed across it.

  “Beatrice,” he said again this time, when she went into his office. She realized that the guidance counselor, Mrs. Gray, was waiting there for her too. Did they think that if she saw a man alone she might freak out? “It’s good to have you back,” Mr. Aaronsen said.

  It’s good to be back. The lie sat too sour on Trixie’s tongue, so she swallowed it down again.

  The principal was staring at her hair, or lack of it, but he was too polite to say anything. “Mrs. Gray and I just want you to know that our doors are open any time for you,” the principal said.

  Trixie’s father had two names. She had discovered this by accident when she was ten and snooping in his desk drawers. Wedged into the back of one, behind all the smudged erasers and tubes of mechanical pencil leads, was a photograph of two boys squatting in front of a cache of fish. One of the boys was white, one was native. On the back was written: Cane & Wass, fish camp. Akiak, Alaska—1976.

  Trixie had taken the photo to her father, who’d been out mowing the lawn. Who are these people? she had asked.

  Her father had turned off the lawn mower. They’re dead.

  “If you feel the slightest bit uncomfortable,” Principal Aaronsen was saying. “If you just want a place to catch your breath . . .”

  Three hours later, Trixie’s father had come looking for her. The one on the right is me, he’d said, showing her the photo again. And that’s Cane, a friend of mine.

  Your name’s not Wass, Trixie had pointed out.

  Her father had explained that the day after he’d been born and named, a village elder came to visit and started calling him Wass—short for Wassilie—after her husband, who’d fallen through the ice and died a week before. It was perfectly normal for a Yup’ik Eskimo who had recently died to take up residence in a newborn. Villagers would laugh when they met Daniel as a baby, saying things like, Oh, look. Wass has come back with blue eyes! or Maybe that’s why Wass took that English as a Second Language class!

  For eighteen years, he’d been known as Daniel to his white mother and as Wass to everyone else. In the Yup’ik world, he told Trixie, souls get recycled. In the Yup’ik world, no one ever really gets to leave.

  “ . . . a policy of zero tolerance,” the principal said, and Trixie nodded, although she hadn’t really been listening.

  The night after her father told Trixie about his second name, she had a question ready when he came to tuck her in. How come when I first asked, you said those boys were dead?

  Because, her father answered, they are.

  Principal Aaronsen stood up, and so did Mrs. Gray, and that was how Trixie realized that they intended to accompany her to class. Immediately she panicked. This was way worse than being walked in by her father; this was like having fighter jets escort a plane into a safe landing: Was there any person at the airport who wouldn’t be watching out the windows and trying to guess what had happened on board?

  “Um,” Trixie said, “I think I’d kind of like to go by myself.”

  It was almost third period, which meant she’d have time to go to her locker before heading to English class. She watched the principal look at the guidance counselor. “Well,” Mr. Aaronsen said, “if that’s what you want.”

  Trixie fled the principal’s office, blindly navigating the maze of halls that made up the high school. Class was still in session, so it was quiet—the faint jingle of a kid with a bathroom pass, the muted click of high heels, the wheezy strains of the wind instruments upstairs in the band room. She twisted the combination on her own locker, 40-22-38. Hey, Jason had said, a lifetime ago. Aren’t those Barbie’s measurements?

  Trixie rested her forehead against the cool metal. All she had to do was sit in class for another four hours. She could fill her mind with Lord of the Flies and A = Πr2 and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. She didn’t have to talk to anyone if she didn’t want to. All of her teachers had been briefed. She would be an army of one.

  When she pulled open the door of her locker, a sea of snakes poured out of the narrow cubby, spilling over her feet. She reached down to pick one up. Eight small foil squares, accordion-pleated at the perforations.

  Trojan, Trixie read. Twisted Pleasure Lubricated Latex Condoms.

  • • •

  “They’re all having sex,” Marita Soorenstad said, tilting her head and pouring the last of the lime-colored powder into her mouth. In the fifteen minutes that Mike Bartholemew had been sitting with the assistant district attorney, she’d consumed three Pixy Stix. “Teenage girls want guys to be attracted to them, but no one’s taught them how to deal with the emotions that come with that stuff. I see this all the time, Mike. Teenage girls wake up to find someone having sex with them, and they don’t say a word.” She crushed the paper straw in her fist and grimaced. “Some judge told me these were a godsend when he was trying to quit smoking. But I swear all I’m getting is a sugar high and a green tongue.”

  “Trixie Stone said no,” the detective pointed out. “It’s in her statement.”

  “And Trixie Stone was drinking. Which the defense attorney will use to call her judgment into question. Oosterhaus is going to say that she was intoxicated, and playing strip poker, and saying yes yes yes all the way up till afterward, which is about when she decided to say no. He’s going to ask her what time it was when she said it and how many pictures were on the walls of the room and what song was playing on the stereo and whether the moon was in Scorpio—details she won’t be able to remember. Then he’ll say that if she can’t remember particulars like this, how on earth could she be sure of whether she told Jason to stop?” Marita hesitated. “I’m not saying that Trixie Stone wasn’t raped, Mike. I’m just telling you that not everyone is going to see it as clearly.”

  “I think the family knows that,” Bartholemew said.

  “The family never knows that, no matter what they say.” Marita opened the file on Trixie Stone. “What the hell else did they think their kid was out doing at two in the morning?”

  Bartholemew pictured a car overturned on the side of the road, the rescue crews clustered around the body that had been thrown through the windshield. He imagined the EMT who pulled up the sleeve of his daughter’s shirt and saw the bruises and needle marks along the map of her veins. He wondered if that tech had looked at Holly’s long-sleeved shirt, worn on the hottest night of July, and asked himself what this girl’s parents had been thinking when they saw her leave the house in it.

  The answer to this question, and to Marita’s: We weren’t thinking. We didn’t let ourselves think, because we didn’t want to know.

  Bartholemew cleared his throat. “The Stones thought their daughter was having a parent-supervised sleepover at a friend’s house.”

 
; Marita ripped open a yellow Pixy Stix. “Great,” she said, upending the contents into her mouth. “So Trixie’s already lied once.”

  • • •

  Even though parents don’t want to admit it, school isn’t about what a kid absorbs while she’s sitting at a cramped desk, but what happens around and in spite of that. It’s the five minutes between bells when you find out whose house is hosting the party that evening; it’s borrowing the right shade of lip gloss from your friend before you have French with the cute guy who moved here from Ohio; it’s being noticed by everyone else and pretending you are above that sort of celebrity.

  Once all this social interaction was surgically excised from Trixie’s school day, she noticed how little she cared about the academic part. In English, she focused on the printed text in her book until the letters jumped like popcorn in a skillet. From time to time she would hear a snide comment: What did she do to her hair? Only once did someone have the guts to actually speak to her in class. It was in phys ed, during an indoor soccer game. A girl on her own team had come up to her after the teacher called a time-out. “Someone who got raped for real,” she’d whispered, “wouldn’t be out here playing soccer.”

  The part of the day that Trixie was most dreading was lunch. In the cafeteria, the mass of students split like amoebas into socially polarized groups. There were the drama kids and the skateboarders and the brains. There were the Sexy Seven—a group of girls who set the school’s unwritten fashion rules, like what months you should wear shorts to school and how flip-flops were totally passé. There were the caffies, who hung out all morning drinking java with their friends until the voc-tech bus came to ferry them to classes on hairstyling and child care. And then there was the table where Trixie used to belong—the one with the popular kids, the one where Zephyr and Moss and a carefree knot of hockey players hung out pretending they didn’t know that everyone else was looking at them and saying they were so fake, when in reality those same kids went home and wished that their own group of friends could be as cool.