hugged her tight; the new Trixie went to her father's dresser for a sweatshirt that she could hide beneath. The old Trixie sometimes
The Tenth Circle
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 supermodels. “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 called, not even when your world has taken a blow that renders you senseless. The dishwasher still needs to be emptied and the hamper overflows with dirty clothes and the high school buddy you haven't spoken to in six months calls to catch up, not realizing that you cannot tell her what's been going on in your life without breaking down. The twelve students in your class section still expect you to show up on Monday morning. Laura had anticipated hunkering down with Trixie, protecting her while she licked her wounds. However, Trixie wanted to be by herself, and that left Laura
