Trixie got out of the backseat. She hunched her shoulders, so that her wrists were even more hidden by the sleeves of her coat.
“Hey,” she said cautiously.
Zephyr looked the way Trixie had felt for the past twenty-four hours - like she was completely made up of tears and trying to hold some semblance of human form together before someone noticed that she was actually just a puddle. She followed Trixie into the house, up to her bedroom. There was one terrifying moment when Trixie passed the bathroom - had anyone cleaned up since yesterday? But the door was closed, and she fled into her own room before she had to think about it anymore. “Are you okay?” Zephyr said. Trixie wasn't about to fall for the false sympathy routine.
'Who
dared you?'
“What?”
“Are you, like, supposed to come back with a lock of my hair to prove you got close? Oh, that's right, I don't have any hair. I cut it off when I started to go psycho.”
Zephyr swallowed. “I heard you almost died.” Almost doesn't count, Trixie's father used to say. Except in horseshoes and hand grenades.
What about in rape cases?
“Do you almost care?” Trixie said.
Suddenly Zephyr's face crumpled. “I've been a total asshole. I was mad at you, because I thought you planned this whole revenge thing for Jason and didn't trust me enough to tell me . . .”
“I never . . .”
“No, wait, let me finish,” Zephyr said. “And I was mad at you for that night, when Moss paid more attention to you than to me. I wanted to get back at you, so I said . . . I said what they all were saying. But then I heard that you were in the hospital and I kept thinking about how awful it would have been if you ... if you, you know, before I had a chance to tell you I believe you.” Her face crumpled, 'I feel like this was all my fault. I'd do anything to make it up to you.
There was no way to tell whether Zephyr was telling the truth and even if she was, that didn't mean Trixie trusted her anymore. There was every chance that Zephyr was going to run to Moss and Jason and the rest of the hockey team and regale them with tales of the freak. But then again . . . maybe she wasn't; maybe the reason Zephyr was here had nothing to do with guilt or her mom telling her to be here but simply because she remembered, like Trixie did, that once when they were five they had been the only two people in the world who knew that fairies lived inside the kitchen cabinets and hid under the pots and pans when you opened the doors.
Trixie looked at her. “Do you want to know how I did it?” Zephyr nodded, drawn forward.
She slowly pulled the tape that sealed the bandage around her wrist and unraveled the gauze until the wound was visible: gaping and saw-edged, angry.
“Wow,” Zephyr breathed. “That is sick. Did it hurt?” Trixie shook her head.
“Did you see lights or angels or, like, God?” Trixie thought about it, hard. The last thing she could remember was the rusted edge of the radiator, which she focused on before blacking out. “I didn't see anything.”
“Figures,” Zephyr sighed, and then she looked at Trixie and grinned.
Trixie felt like smiling back. For the first time in a long time when she told her brain to do it, it actually worked.
* * *
Three days after Trixie tried to kill herself, Daniel and Laura found themselves in Marita Soorenstad's office, with Trixie between them
Detective Bartholemew was seated to their left, and behind the desk the DA was ripping open a Pixy Stix. “Help yourselves,” she said, and then she turned to Trixie. “I'm certainly glad to see you're with us. From what I understand, that wasn't a sure thing a few days ago.”
Daniel reached over and took his daughter's hand. It felt like ice. “Trixie's feeling much better.”
“For how long?” the district attorney asked, folding her hands on the desk. “I don't mean to sound insensitive, Mr. Stone, but the only thing consistent in this case so far has been the lack of consistency.”
The Tenth Circle
Laura shook her head. “I don't understand ...”
“As a prosecutor, my job is to present facts to a jury that make it possible for them to find, beyond a reasonable doubt, that your daughter was the victim of a rape perpetrated by Jason Underhill. However, the facts I'm presenting are the ones that your daughter presented to us. And that means our case is only as good as the information she's provided me with and as strong as the picture she paints on the stand.”
Daniel felt his jaw tighten. “I'd think that when a girl tries to kill herself, it's a pretty good indicator that she's suffering from trauma.”
“Either that, or mental instability.”
“So, you just give up?” Laura said, incredulous. “You don't try a case if you think it's going to be a tough sell?”
“I never said that, Mrs. Stone. But I do have an ethical obligation not to bring a case to court if even I'm unsure a crime happened.”
