The Tenth Circle

And that, in a nutshell, was why Laura loved Dante?s Inferno. Sure, it could be seen as a study of religion or politics. Certainly it was a narrative of redemption. But when you stripped it down, it was also the story of a guy in the throes of a midlife crisis, a guy who was reevaluating the choices he?d made along the way.

  Not unlike Laura herself.

 

  As Daniel Stone waited in the long queue of cars pulling up to the high school, he glanced at the stranger in the seat beside him and tried to remember when she used to be his daughter.

  ?Traffic?s bad today,? he said to Trixie, just to fill up the space between them.

  Trixie didn?t respond. She fiddled with the radio, running through a symphony of static and song bites before punching it off entirely. Her red hair fell like a gash over her shoulder; her hands were burrowed in the sleeves of her North Face jacket. She turned to stare out the window, lost in a thousand thoughts, not a single one of which Daniel could guess.

  These days it seemed like the words between them were there only to outline the silences. Daniel understood better than anyone else that, in the blink of an eye, you might reinvent yourself. He understood that the person you were yesterday might not be the person you are tomorrow. But this time, he was the one who wanted to hold on to what he had, instead of letting go.

  ?Dad,? she said, and she flicked her eyes ahead, where the car in front of them was moving forward.

  It was a complete clich?, but Daniel had assumed that the traditional distance that came between teenagers and their parents would pass by him and Trixie. They had a different relationship, after all, closer than most daughters and their fathers, simply because he was the one she came home to every day. He had done his due diligence in her bathroom medicine cabinet and her desk drawers and underneath her mattress-there were no drugs, no accordion-pleated condoms. Trixie was just growing away from him, and somehow that was even worse.

  For years she had floated into the house on the wings of her own stories: how the butterfly they were hatching in class had one of its antennae torn off by a boy who wasn?t gentle; how the school lunch that day had been pizza when the notice said it was going to be chicken chow mein and how if she?d known that, she would have bought instead of bringing her own; how the letter I in cursive is nothing like you?d think. There had been so many easy words between them that Daniel was guilty of nodding every now and then and tuning out the excess. He hadn?t known, at the time, that he should have been hoarding these, like bits of sea glass hidden in the pocket of his winter coat to remind him that once it had been summer.

  This September-and here was another clich?-Trixie had gotten a boyfriend. Daniel had had his share of fantasies: how he?d be casually cleaning a pistol when she was picked up for her first date; how he?d buy a chastity belt on the Internet. In none of those scenarios, though, had he ever really considered how the sight of a boy with his proprietary hand around his daughter?s waist might make him want to run until his lungs burst. And in none of these scenarios had he seen Trixie?s face fill with light when the boy came to the door, the same way she?d once looked at Daniel. Overnight, the little girl who vamped for his home videos now moved like a vixen when she wasn?t even trying. Overnight, his daughter?s actions and habits stopped being cute and started being something terrifying.

  His wife reminded him that the tighter he kept Trixie on a leash, the more she?d fight the choke hold. After all, Laura pointed out, rebelling against the system was what made her start dating Daniel. So when Trixie and Jason went out to a movie, Daniel forced himself to wish her a good time. When she escaped to her room to talk to her boyfriend privately on the phone, he did not hover at the door. He gave her breathing space, and somehow, that had become an immeasurable distance.

  ?Hello?!? Trixie said, snapping Daniel out of his reverie. The cars in front of them had pulled away, and the crossing guard was furiously miming to get Daniel to drive up.

  ?Well,? he said. ?Finally.?

  Trixie pulled at the door handle. ?Can you let me out??

  Daniel fumbled with the power locks. ?I?ll see you at three.?

  ?I don?t need to be picked up.?

  Daniel tried to paste a wide smile on his face. ?Jason driving you home??

  Trixie gathered together her backpack and jacket. ?Yeah,? she said. ?Jason.? She slammed the truck door and blended into the mass of teenagers funneling toward the front door of the high school.

  ?Trixie!? Daniel called out the window, so loud that several other kids turned around with her. Trixie?s hand was clenched into a fist against her chest, as if she were holding tight to a secret. She looked at him, waiting.

  There was a game they had played when Trixie was little, and would pore over the comic book collections he kept in his studio for research when he was drawing. Best transportation? she?d challenge, and Daniel would say the Batmobile. No way, Trixie had said. Wonder Woman?s invisible plane.

  Best costume?

  Wolverine, Daniel said, but Trixie voted for the Dark Phoenix.

  Now he leaned toward her. ?Best superpower?? he asked.

  It had been the only answer they agreed upon: flight. But this time, Trixie looked at him as if he were crazy to be bringing up a stupid game from a thousand years ago. ?I?m going to be late,? she said and started to walk away.

  Cars honked, but Daniel didn?t put the truck into gear. He closed his eyes, trying to remember what he had been like at her age. At fourteen, Daniel had been living in a different world and doing everything he could to fight, lie, cheat, steal, and brawl his way out of it. At fourteen, he had been someone Trixie had never seen her father be. Daniel had made sure of it.

  ?Daddy.?

  Daniel turned to find Trixie standing beside his truck. She curled her hands around the lip of the open window, the glitter in her pink nail polish catching the sun. ?Invisibility,? she said, and then she melted into the crowd behind her.

 

  Trixie Stone had been a ghost for fourteen days, seven hours, and thirty-six minutes now, not that she was officially counting. This meant that she walked around school and smiled when she was supposed to; she pretended to listen when the algebra teacher talked about commutative properties; she even sat in the cafeteria with the other ninth-graders. But while they laughed at the lunch ladies? hairstyles (or lack thereof), Trixie studied her hands and wondered whether anyone else noticed that if the sun hit your palm a certain way, you could see right through the skin, to the busy tunnels with blood moving around inside. Corpuscles. She slipped the word into her mouth and tucked it high against her cheek like a sucking candy, so that if anyone happened to ask her a question she could just shake her head, unable to speak.

  Kids who knew (and who didn?t? the news had traveled like a forest fire) were waiting to see her lose her careful balance. Trixie had even overheard one girl making a bet about when she might fall apart in a public situation. High school students were cannibals; they fed off your broken heart while you watched and then shrugged and offered you a bloody, apologetic smile.

  Visine helped. So did Preparation H under the eyes, as disgusting as it was to imagine. Trixie would get up at five-thirty in the morning, carefully select a double layer of long-sleeved T-shirts and a pair of flannel pants, and gather her hair into a messy ponytail. It took an hour to make herself look like she?d just rolled out of bed, like she?d been losing no sleep at all over what had happened. These days, her entire life was about making people believe she was someone she wasn?t anymore.

  Trixie crested the hallway on a sea of noise-lockers gnashing like teeth, guys yelling out afternoon plans over the heads of underclassmen, change being dug out of pockets for vending machines. She turned into a doorway and steeled herself to endure the next forty-eight minutes. Psychology was the only class she had with Jason, who was a junior. It was an elective. Which was a fancy way of saying: You asked for this.

  He was already there; she knew by the way the air had taken a ch
arge 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 cocaptains. 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 father?s 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 choose how they acted. Free will. Lucifer thought that power should belong only to angels. He staged a coup, and he lost big-time.?

  Laura started walking through the aisles-one downside of free Internet access at the college was that kids used lecture hours to shop online and download porn, if the professor wasn?t vigilant. ?What makes the Inferno so brilliant are the contrapassi-the punishments that fit the crime. In Dante?s mind, sinners pay in a way that reflects what they did wrong on earth. Lucifer didn?t want man to have choices, so he winds up literally paralyzed in ice. Fortune-tellers walk aroun
d with their heads on backward. Adulterers end up joined together for eternity, without getting any satisfaction from it.? Laura shook off the image that rose in her mind. ?Apparently,? she joked, ?the clinical trials for Viagra were done in hell.?

  Her class laughed as she headed toward her podium. ?In the 1300s-before Italians could tune in to The Revenge of the Sith or Lord of the Rings-this poem was the ultimate battle of good versus evil,? she said. ?I like the word evil. Scramble it a little, and you get vile and live. Good, on the other hand, is just a command to go do.?

  The four graduate students who led the class sections for this course were all sitting in the front row with their computers balanced on their knees. Well, three of them were. There was Alpha, the self-christened retrofeminist, which as far as Laura could tell meant that she gave a lot of speeches about how modern women had been driven so far from the home they no longer felt comfortable inside it. Beside her, Aine scrawled on the inside of one alabaster arm-most likely her own poetry. Naryan, who could type faster than Laura could breathe, looked up over his laptop at her, a crow poised for a crumb. Only Seth sprawled in his chair, his eyes closed, his long hair spilling over his face. Was he snoring?

  She felt a flush rise up the back of her neck. Turning her back on Seth Dummerston, she glanced up at the clock in the back of the lecture hall. ?That?s it for today. Read through the fifth canto,? Laura instructed. ?Next Wednesday, we?ll be talking about poetic justice versus divine retribution. And have a nice weekend, folks.?

  The students gathered their backpacks and laptops, chattering about the bands that were playing later on, and the BΘΠ party that had brought in a truckload of real sand for Caribbean Night. They wound scarves around their necks like bright bandages and filed out of the lecture hall, already dismissing Laura?s class from their minds.

  Laura didn?t need to prepare for her next lecture; she was living it. Be careful what you wish for, she thought. You just might get it.

  Six months ago, she had been so sure that what she was doing was right, a liaison so natural that stopping it was more criminal than letting it flourish. When his hands roamed over her, she transformed: no longer the cerebral Professor Stone but a woman for whom feeling came before thought. Now, though, when Laura realized what she had done, she wanted to blame a tumor, temporary insanity, anything but her own selfishness. Now all she wanted was damage control: to break it off, to slip back into the seam of her family before they had a chance to realize how long she?d been missing.