“Yeah.”
“Did you reciprocate?”
“No.”
“Did she say anything to you?”
Jason felt himself getting hot beneath the collar of his shirt.
“She said my name a lot. And she kept talking about doing this in someone's living room. But it wasn't like she was freaked out about it . . . it was more like it was exciting for her, hooking up in someone else's house.”
“Did she tell you she was interested in having intercourse?” Jason thought for a second. “She didn't tell me she wasn't,” he replied.
“Did she ask you to stop?”
“No,” Jason said.
“Did you know she was a virgin?”
Jason felt all the thoughts in his head solidify into one hard, black mass, as he understood that he'd been played the fool.
“Yeah,” he said, angry. “Back in October. The first time we had sex.”
* * *
Trixie looked like she'd been fighting a war. The minute she threw herself into the truck beside Daniel, he was seized with the urge to storm into the school and demand retribution from the student
body that had done this to her. He imagined himself raging through the halls, and then, quickly, shook the vision out of his mind. The last thing Trixie needed, after being raped, was to see that violence could beget more violence.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he said after they had driven for a few moments.
Trixie shook her head. She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, as if she was trying to make herself as small as possible.
Daniel pulled off the road. He reached over the console to awkwardly draw Trixie into his arms. “You don't have to go back,” he promised. “Ever.” Her tears soaked through his flannel shirt. He
would teach Trixie at home, if he had to. He would find her a tutor. He would pick up the whole family and move.
Janice, the sexual assault advocate, had warned him against just that. She said that fathers and brothers always wanted to protect the victim after the fact, because they felt guilty about not doing it right the first time. But if Daniel fought Trixie's battles, she might never figure out for herself how to be strong again.
Well, fuck Janice. She didn't have a daughter who'd been raped. And even if she did, it wasn't Trixie.
Suddenly there was the sound of glass breaking, as a car drove by and the boys inside threw a six-pack of empty beer bottles at the truck. “Whore!” The word was yelled through open windows. Daniel saw the retreating taillights of a Subaru. The backseat passenger reached through his window to high-five the driver. Daniel let go of Trixie and stepped out of the car onto the shoulder of the road. Beneath his shoes, glass crunched. The bottles had scratched the paint on the door of the truck, had shattered under his tires. The word they'd called his daughter still hung in the air.
He had an artist's visionof Duncan, his hero, turning into Wildclaw . . . this time in the shape of a jaguar. He imagined what it would be like to run faster than the wind, to race around the tight corner and leap through the narrow opening of the driver's side window. He pictured the car, careening wildly. He smelled their fear. He went for blood.
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Instead, Daniel leaned down and picked up the biggest pieces of glass. He carefully cleared a path, so that he could get Trixie back home.
* * *
The night that Trixie met Jason, she'd had the flu. Her parents had been at some fancy shindig at Marvel headquarters in New York City, and she was spending the night at Zephyr's house. Zephyr had wangled her way into an upperclass party that evening, and it had been all the two of them could talk about. But no sooner had school
let out than Trixie started throwing up.
“I think I'm going to die,” Trixie had told Zephyr.
“Not before you hang out with seniors,” Zephyr said. They told Zephyr's mother that they were going to study for an algebra test with Bettina Majuradee, the smartest girl in ninth grade, who in reality wouldn't have given them the time of day. They walked two miles to the house party, which was being held by a guy named Orson. Twice, Trixie had to double up at the side of the road and barf into some bushes. “Actually, this is cool,” Zephyr had told her. “They're going to think you're already trashed.”
The party was a writhing, pulsing mass of noise and bodies and motion. Trixie moved from a quartet of gyrating girls to a table of faceless guys playing the drinking game Beirut, to a posse of kids trying to make a pyramid out of empty cans of Bud. Within fifteen minutes, she felt feverish and dizzy and headed to the bathroom to be sick.
Five minutes later, she opened up the door and started down the hallway, intent on finding Zephyr and leaving. “Do you believe in love at first sight,” a voice asked, “or should I ask you to walk by me again?”
Trixie glanced down to find a guy sitting on the floor, his back to the wall. He was wearing a T-shirt so faded she couldn't read the writing on it. His hair was jet-black, and his eyes were the color of ice, but it was his smile - lopsided, as if it had been built on a slope - that made her heart hitch.
“I don't think I've seen you before,” he said. Trixie suddenly lost the power of conversation.
