ought to know who you wanted when you stopped wanting me.”
Laura turned away from him. “I want to stop talking about this.”
Suddenly, Daniel was on his feet, pinning Laura against the wall, his body a fortress, his anger an electric current. He grabbed Laura's upper arms and shook her so hard that her head snapped back and her eyes went wide with fear. He threw her own words back at her: “What you want,” he said, his voice raw. '“What you want?”
Then Laura shoved at him, stronger than he'd given her credit for being. She circled him, never losing eye contact, a lion tamer unwilling to turn her back on the beast. It was enough to bring Daniel to his senses. He stared down at his hands - the ones that had seized
her - as if they belonged to someone else.
In that instant, he was standing again in the spring bog behind the school in Akiak, striped with mud and blood, holding his fists high. During the fight, he'd broken two ribs, he had lost a tooth, he had opened a gash over his left eye. He was weaving, but he wasn't about to give in to the pain. Who else, Daniel had challenged, until one by one, their hot black gazes fell to the ground like stones.
Shaken, Daniel tried to shove the violence back from wherever it had spilled, but it was like repacking a parachute - part of it trailed between him and Laura, a reminder that the next time he jumped off that cliff of emotion, he might not wind up safe. “I didn't mean to hurt you,” he muttered. “I'm sorry.” Laura bowed her head, but not before he saw the tears in her eyes. “Oh, Daniel,” she said. “Me too.”
* * *
Trixie slept through Jason Underhill's unofficial interrogation in the lobby of the hockey rink, and the moment shortly thereafter when he was officially taken into custody. She slept while the secretary at the police department took her lunch break and called her husband on the phone to tell him who'd been booked not ten minutes before. She slept as that man told his coworkers at the paper mill that Bethel might not win the Maine State hockey championship after all, and why. She was still sleeping when one of the millworkers had a beer on the way home that night with his brother, a reporter for the Augusta Tribune, who made a few phone calls and found out that a warrant had indeed been sworn out that morning, charging a minor with gross sexual assault. She slept while the reporter phoned the Bethel PD pretending to be the father of a girl who'd been in earlier that day to give a statement, asking if he'd left a hat behind. “No, Mr. Stone,” the secretary had said, “but I'll call you if it turns up.” Trixie continued to sleep while the story was filed, while it was printed. She stayed asleep while the paper was bound with string and sent off in newspaper vans, tossed from the windows of the delivery boys' ratty Hondas. She was asleep still the next morning when everyone in Bethel read the front page. But by then, they already knew why Jason Underhill had been summoned away from a Bethel High School hockey game the previous day. They knew that Roy Underhill had hired his son a Portland lawyer and was telling anyone who'd listen that his son had been framed. And even though the article was ethical enough never to refer to her by name, everyone knew that it was Trixie Stone, still asleep, who had set this tragedy in motion.
* * *
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 housewhich 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 States 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
