He was already there; she knew by the way the air had taken a charge around her body, an electric field. He was wearing the faded denim shirt she'd borrowed once when he spilled Coke on her while they were studying, and his black hair was a mess. You need a part, she used to tell him, and he'd laugh. I've got better ones, he'd say.
She could smell him - shampoo and peppermint gum and, believe it or not, the cool white mist of utter ice. It was the same smell on the T-shirt she'd hidden in the bottom of her pajama drawer, the one he didn't know she had, the one she wrapped around her pillow each night before she went to sleep. It kept the details in her dreams: a callus on the edge of Jason's wrist, rubbed raw by his hockey glove. The flannel-covered sound of his voice when she called him on the
phone and woke him. The way he twirled a pencil around the fingers of one hand when he was nervous or thinking too hard. He'd been doing that when he broke up with her.
She took a deep breath and headed past the seat where Jason slouched, his eyes focused on the four-letter words students had worn into the desktop through years of boredom. She could feel his face heat up with the effort he was making to avoid looking at her. It felt unnatural to walk past, to not have him tug on the straps of her backpack until she gave him her full attention.
“You're coming to practice,” he'd say, “right?” As if there had ever been any question.
Mr. Torkelson had assigned seating, and Trixie had been placed in the first row - something she had hated for the first three months of the school year and now was supremely grateful for, because it meant she could stare at the board and not have to see Jason or anyone else out of the corner of her eye. She slipped into the chair and opened her binder, her eyes avoiding the big Wite-Out centipede that used to be Jason's name.
When she felt a hand on her shoulder - a warm, broad, guy's hand - all the breath left her body. Jason was going to apologize; he'd realized that he'd made a mistake; he wanted to ask her if she'd ever forgive him. She turned around, the word yes playing over her lips like the call of a flute, but instead found herself staring at Moss Minton, Jason's best friend.
“Hey.” He glanced back over his shoulder to where Jason was still hunched over his own desk. “You okay?” Trixie smoothed the edges of her homework. “Why wouldn't I be?”
“I just want you to know we all think he's an idiot.” We. We could be the state champion hockey team, of which Moss and Jason were co-captains. It could be the whole of the junior class. It could be anyone who wasn't her. That part of it was almost as hard as the not having Jason: trying to negotiate through the minefield of the friends they'd shared, to learn who still belonged to her.
“I think she's just something he needs to get out of his system,” Moss said, his words a handful of stones dropped from a cliff.
Trixie's handwriting started to swim on the page before her. Please leave, she thought, praying fiercely for the telekinetic power to cause a distraction, and for once in her life something went right. Mr. Torkelson walked in, slammed the door, and came to the front of the classroom. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced,
“why do we dream?”
A stoner in the back row answered. “Because Angelina Jolie doesn't go to Bethel High.”
The teacher laughed. “Well, that's one reason. Sigmund Freud might even agree with you. He called dreams a 'royal road' into the unconscious, made up of all the forbidden wishes you had and wished you didn't.”
Dreams, Trixie thought, were like soap bubbles. You could look at them from a distance, and they were lovely. It's when you stuck your face too close that your eyes wound up stinging. She wondered if Jason had the same dreams she did, the kind where you wake up with all your breath gone and your heart as flat as a dime.
“Ms. Stone?” the teacher repeated.
Trixie blushed. She had no idea what Torkelson had asked. She could feel Jason's gaze rising like a welt on the back of her neck.
“I've got one, Mr. T,” Moss called out from somewhere behind her. “I'm skating out at the regionals, and a pass comes my way, but all of a sudden my stick is like a piece of spaghetti . . .”
“As blatantly Freudian as that is, Moss, I'd really like to hear from Trixie.”
Like one of her father's superheroes, Trixie's senses narrowed. She could hear the girl in the back of the class scratching out a secret note to her friend across the aisle, Torkelson clasping his hands together, and worst of all, that broken connection as Jason closed his eyes. She scribbled on her thumbnail with her pen. “I don't remember any dreams.”
“You spend a sixth of your life dreaming, Ms. Stone. Which in your case amounts to about two and a half years. Certainly you haven't blocked out two and a half years of your life?” She shook her head, looked up at the teacher, and opened her mouth. “I... I'm going to be sick,” Trixie managed, and with the classroom wheeling around her, she grabbed her books and fled. In the bathroom, she flung her backpack under the row of square white sinks that looked like a giant's dentures and crouched in front of one of the toilets. She vomited, although she would have wagered that there was nothing inside of her. Then she sat on the floor and pressed her hot cheek against the metal wall of the stall.
It was not that Jason had broken up with her on their three-month anniversary. It was not that Trixie - a freshman who'd seemed to have hit the jackpot, a nobody elevated to the level of queen by association - had lost her Cinderella status. It was that she truly believed you could be fourteen when you learned how love could change the speed your blood ran through you, how it made you dream in kaleidoscope color. It was that Trixie knew she couldn't have loved Jason this hard if he hadn't loved her that way too. Trixie came out of the stall and turned the water on in the sink.
She splashed her face, wiped it with a brown paper towel. She didn't want to go back to class, not ever, so she took out her eyeliner and mascara, her lip gloss and her compact mirror. She had her mother's rich copper hair, her fathers dark complexion. Her ears were too pointed and her chin was too round. Her lips were okay, she guessed. Once, in art class, a teacher had said they were classic and made the rest of the students draw them. It was her eyes, though, that scared her. Although they used to be a dark mossy color, nowadays they were a frosted green so pale it was barely a color at all. Trixie wondered if you could cry away the pigment.
She snapped shut her compact and then, on second thought, opened it and set it on the floor. It took three stomps before the mirror inside shattered. Trixie threw out the plastic disc and all but one shard of glass. It was shaped like a tear, rounded on one end and sharp as a dagger on the other.
She slid down along the tiled wall of the bathroom until she was sitting underneath the sink. Then she dragged the makeshift knife over the white canvas of her inner arm. As soon as she did it, she wished she could take it back. Crazy girls did this, girls who walked like zombies through YA novels.
But.
Trixie felt the sting of the skin as it split, the sweet welling rise of blood.
It hurt, though not as much as everything else.
* * *
“You have to do something pretty awful to wind up in the bottom level of hell,” Laura said rhetorically, surveying her class. “And Lucifer used to be God's right-hand man. So what went wrong?” It had been a simple disagreement, Laura thought. Like almost every other rift between people, that's how it started. "One day God turned to his buddy Lucifer and said that he was thinking of giving those cool little toys he created - namely, people - the right to