She stared at the students packing the rows in the utterly6 silent lecture hall. “Don’t move,” she instructed. “Not even a twitch7.” Beside her, on the podium, an egg timer ticked away one full minute. She hid a smile as she watched the undergrads, all of whom suddenly had gotten the urge to sneeze or scratch their heads or wriggle8.
Of the three parts of Dante’s masterpiece, the Inferno was Laura’s favorite to teach - who better to think about the nature of actions and their consequences than teenagers? The story was simple: Over the course of three days - Good Friday to Easter Sunday - Dante trekked10 through the nine levels of hell, each filled with sinners worse than the next, until finally he came through the other side. The poem was full of ranting11 and weeping and demons12, of fighting lovers and traitors13 eating the brains of their victims - in other words, graphic14 enough to hold the interest of today’s college students ... and to provide a distraction15 from her real life.
The egg timer buzzed, and the entire class exhaled16 in unison17.
“Well?” Laura asked. “How did that feel?”
“Endless,” a student called out.
“Anyone want to guess how long I timed you for?”
There was speculation18: Two minutes. Five.
“Try sixty seconds,” Laura said. “Now imagine being frozen from the waist down in a lake of ice for eternity19. Imagine that the slightest movement would freeze the tears on your face and the water surrounding you. God, according to Dante, was all about motion and energy, so the ultimate punishment for Lucifer is to not be able to move at all. At the very bottom of hell, there’s no fire, no brimstone, just the utter inability to take action.” She cast her gaze across the sea of faces. “Is Dante right? After all, this is the very bottom of the barrel of hell, and the devil’s the worst of the lot. Is taking away your ability to do whatever you want, whenever you want, the very worst punishment you can imagine?”
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 narrative21 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.
“Traffics bad today,” he said to Trixie, just to fill up the space between them.
Trixie didn’t respond. She fiddled22 with the radio, running through a symphony of static and song bites before punching it off entirely23. Her red hair fell like a gash24 over her shoulder; her hands were burrowed25 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 flicked27 her eyes ahead, where the car in front of them was moving forward.
It was a complete cliche28, 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 underneath30 her mattress31 - 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 antennae32 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 / 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 tuning33 out the excess. He hadn’t known, at the time, that he should have been hoarding34 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 cliche - Trixie had gotten a boyfriend. Daniel had had his share of fantasies: how he’d be casually35 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 scenarios36, though, had he ever really considered how the sight of a boy with his proprietary37 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 leash38, the more she’d fight the choke hold. After all, Laura pointed39 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 privately40 on the phone, he did not hover41 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 miming42 to get Daniel to drive up.
“Well,” he said. “Finally.”
Trixie pulled at the door handle. “Can you let me out?”
Daniel fumbled43 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 funneling44 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 clenched45 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 Phoenix46.
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 honked47, 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 brawl48 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 standing49 beside his truck. She curled her hands around the lip of the open window, the glitter in her pink nail polish catching50 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 algebra51 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 shrugged52 and offered you a bloody53, 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 flannel54 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 crested55 the hallway on a sea of noise - lockers56 gnashing like teeth, guys yelling out afternoon plans over the heads of underclassmen, change being dug out of pockets for vending57 machines. She turned into a doorway58 and steeled herself to endure the next forty-eight minutes. Psychology59 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 charge around her body, an electric field. He was wearing the faded denim60 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 peppermint61 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 desktop62 through years of boredom63. She could feel his face heat up with the effort he was making to avoid looking at her. It felt unnatural64 to walk past, to not have him tug65 on the straps66 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 supremely68 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 binder69, 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 flute70, but instead found herself staring at Moss71 Minton, Jason’s best friend.
“Hey.” He glanced back over his shoulder to where Jason was still hunched72 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 co-captains. 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 dime74.
“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 blatantly75 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 aisle76, Torkelson clasping his hands together, and worst of all, that broken connection as Jason closed his eyes. She scribbled77 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 crouched78 in front of one of the toilets. She vomited79, although she would have wagered80 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 freshman81 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 gloss82 and her compact mirror. She had her mother’s rich copper83 hair, her fathers dark complexion84.
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 pigment85.
She snapped shut her compact and then, on second thought, opened it and set it on the floor. It took three stomps86 before the mirror inside shattered. Trixie threw out the plastic disc and all but one shard87 of glass. It was shaped like a tear, rounded on one end and sharp as a dagger88 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 rift89 between people, that’s how it started. “One day God turned to his buddy90 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 coup91, and he lost big-time.”
Laura started walking through the aislesone 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 vigilant92.
“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 literally93 paralyzed in ice. Fortune-tellers walk around 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. “Apparently95,” 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 tune94 in to The Revenge of the Sith or Lord of the Rings - this poem was the ultimate battle of good versus96 evil,” she said. “I like the word evil. Scramble97 it a little, and you get vile98 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 scrawled99 on the inside of one alabaster100 armmost likely her own poetry. Naryan, who could type faster than Laura could breathe, looked up over his laptop at her, a crow poised101 for a crumb102. Only Seth sprawled103 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 poetic104 justice versus divine retribution. And have a nice weekend, folks.”
The students gathered their backpacks and laptops, chattering105 about the bands that were playing later on, and the 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 Lauras 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 liaison106 so natural that stopping it was more criminal than letting it flourish. When his hands roamed over her, she transformed: no longer the cerebral107 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 tumor108, temporary insanity109, 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.
When the lecture hall was empty, Laura turned off the overhead lights. She dug in her pocket for her office keys. Damn, had she left them in her computer bag?
“Veil.”
Laura turned around, already recognizing the soft Southern curves of Seth Dummerston’s voice. He stood up and stretched, unfolding his long body after that nap. “It’s another anagram for evil,” he said. “The things we hide.”
She stared at him coolly. “You fell asleep during my lecture.”
“I had a late night.”
“Whose fault is that?” Laura asked.
Seth stared at her the way she used to stare at him, then bent110 forward until his mouth brushed over hers. “You tell me,” he whispered.
Trixie turned the corner and saw them: Jessica Ridgeley, with her long sweep of blond hair and her dermatologists-daughter skin, was leaning against the door of the AV room kissing Jason.
Trixie became a rock, the sea of students parting around her.
She watched Jason’s hands slip into the back pockets of Jessica’s jeans. She could see the dimple on the left side of his mouth, the one that appeared only when he was speaking from the heart.
Was he telling Jessica that his favorite sound was the thump111 that laundry made when it was turning around in a dryer112? That sometimes he could walk by the telephone and think she was going to call, and sure enough she did? That once, when he was ten, he broke into a candy machine because he wanted to know what happened to the quarters once they went inside? Was she even listening?
Suddenly, Trixie felt someone grab her arm and start dragging her down the hall, out the door, and into the courtyard. She smelled the acrid113 twitch of a match, and a minute later, a cigarette had been stuck between her lips. “Inhale,” Zephyr114 commanded.
Zephyr Santorelli-Weinstein was Trixie’s oldest friend. She had enormous doe eyes and olive skin and the coolest mother on the planet, one who bought her incense115 for her room and took her to get her navel pierced like it was an adolescent rite9. She had a father, too, but he lived in California with his new family, and Trixie knew better than to bring up the subject. “What class have you got next?”
“French.”
“Madame Wright is senile. Let’s ditch.”
Bethel High had an open campus, not because the administration was such a fervent117 promoter of teen freedom but because there is simply nowhere to go. Trixie walked beside Zephyr along the access road to the school, their faces ducked against the wind, their hands stuffed into the pockets of their North Face jackets. The criss-cross pattern where she’d cut herself an hour earlier on her arm wasn’t bleeding anymore, but the cold made it sting. Trixie automatically started breathing through her mouth, because even from a distance, she could smell the gassy, rotten-egg odor from the paper mill to the north that employed most of the adults in Bethel. “I heard what happened in psych,” Zephyr said.
“Great,” Trixie muttered. “Now the whole world thinks I’m a loser and a freak.”
Zephyr took the cigarette from Trixie’s hand and smoked the last of it. “What do you care what the whole world thinks?”
“Not the whole world,” Trixie admitted. She felt her eyes prickle with tears again, and she wiped her mitten118 across them. “I want to kill Jessica Ridgeley.”
“If I were you, I’d want to kill Jason,” Zephyr said. “Why do you let it get to you?”
Trixie shook her head. “I’m the one who’s supposed to be with him, Zephyr. I just know it.”
They had reached the turn of the river past the park-and-ride, where the bridge stretched over the Androscoggin River. This time of year, it was nearly frozen over, with great swirling119 art sculptures that formed as ice built up around the rocks that crouched in the riverbed. If they kept walking another quarter mile, they’d reach the town, which basically consisted of a Chinese restaurant, a minimart, a bank, a toy store, and a whole lot of nothing else. Zephyr watched Trixie cry for a few minutes, then leaned against the railing of the bridge. “You want the good news or the bad news?”
Trixie blew her nose in an old tissue she’d found in her pocket. “Bad news.”
“Martyr,” Zephyr said, grinning. “The bad news is that my best friend has officially exceeded her two-week grace period for mourning over a relationship, and she will be penalized120 from here on in.”
At that, Trixie smiled a little. “What’s the good news?”
“Moss Minton and I have sort of been hanging out.”
Trixie felt another stab in her chest. Her best friend, and Jason’s? “Really?”
“Well, maybe we weren’t actually hanging out. He waited for me after English class today to ask me if you were okay . . . but still, the way I figure it, he could have asked anyone, right?”
Trixie wiped her nose. “Great. I’m glad my misery121 is doing wonders for your love life.”
“Well, it’s sure as hell not doing anything for yours. You can’t keep crying over Jason. He knows you’re obsessed122.” Zephyr shook her head. “Guys don’t want high maintenance, Trix. They want. . . Jessica Ridgeley.”
“What the fuck does he see in her?”
Zephyr shrugged. “Who knows. Bra size? Neanderthal IQ?” She pulled her messenger bag forward, so that she could dig inside for a pack of M&M’s. Hanging from the edge of the bag were twenty linked pink paper clips.
Trixie knew girls who kept a record of sexual encounters in a journal, or by fastening safety pins to the tongue of a sneaker. For Zephyr, it was paper clips. “A guy can’t hurt you if you don’t let him,” Zephyr said, running her finger across the paper clips so that they danced.
These days, having a boyfriend or a girlfriend was not in vogue123; most kids trolled for random124 hookups. The sudden thought that Trixie might have been that to Jason made her feel sick to her stomach. “I can’t be like that.”
Zephyr ripped open the bag of candy and passed it to Trixie.
“Friends with benefits. It’s what the guys want, Trix.”
“How about what the girls want?”
Zephyr shrugged. “Hey, I suck at algebra, I can’t sing on key, and I’m always the last one picked for a team in gym . . . but apparently I’m quite gifted when it comes to hooking up.”
Trixie turned, laughing. “They tell you that?”
“Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. You get all the fun without any of the baggage. And the next day you just act like it never happened.”
Trixie tugged125 on the paper clip chain. “If you’re acting126 like it never happened, then why are you keeping track?”
“Once I hit a hundred, I can send away for the free decoder ring.” Zephyr shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess it’s just so I remember where I started.”
Trixie opened her palm and surveyed the M&M’s. The food coloring dye was already starting to bleed against her skin. “Why do you think the commercials say they won’t melt in your hands, when they always do?”
“Because everyone lies,” Zephyr replied.
All teenagers knew this was true. The process of growing up was nothing more than figuring out what doors hadn’t yet been slammed in your face. For years, Trixie’s own parents had told her that she could be anything, have anything, do anything. That was why she’d been so eager to grow upuntil she got to adolescence127 and hit a big, fat wall of reality. As it turned out, she couldn’t have anything she wanted. You didn’t get to be pretty or smart or popular just because you wanted it. You didn’t control your own destiny; you were too busy trying to fit in. Even now, as she stood here, there were a million parents setting their kids up for heartbreak.
Zephyr stared out over the railing. “This is the third time I’ve cut English this week.”
In French class, Trixie was missing a quiz on le subjonctif.
Verbs, apparently, had moods too: They had to be conjugated128 a whole different way if they were used in clauses to express want, doubt, wishes, judgment129. She had memorized the red-flag phrases last night: It is doubtful that. It’s not clear that. It seems that. It may be that. Even though. No matter what. Without. She didn’t need a stupid lecon to teach her something she’d known for years: Given anything negative or uncertain, there were rules that had to be followed.
If he had the choice, Daniel would draw a villain130 every time.
There just wasn’t all that much you could do with heroes. They came with a set of traditional standards: square jaw131, overdeveloped calves132, perfect teeth. They stood half a foot taller than your average man. They were anatomical marvels133, intricate displays of musculature. They sported ridiculous knee-high boots that no one without superhuman strength would be caught dead wearing.
On the other hand, your average bad guy might have a face shaped like an onion, an anvil135, a pancake. His eyes could bulge136 out or recess137 in the folds of his skin. His physique might be meaty or cadaverous, furry138 or rubberized, or covered with lizard139 scales. He could speak in lightning, throw fire, swallow mountains. A villain let your creativity out of its cage.
The problem was, you couldn’t have one without the other. There couldn’t be a bad guy unless there was a good guy to create the standard. And there couldn’t be a good guy until a bad guy showed just how far off the path he might stray.
Today Daniel sat hunched at his drafting table, procrastinating140. He twirled his mechanical pencil; he kneaded an eraser in his palm. He was having a hell of a time turning his main character into a hawk141. He had gotten the wingspan right, but he couldn’t seem to humanize the face behind the bright eyes and beak142.
Daniel was a comic book penciler. While Laura had built up the academic credentials143 to land her a tenured position at Monroe College, he’d worked out of the home with Trixie at his feet as he drew filler chapters for DC Comics. His style got him noticed by Marvel134, which asked him numerous times to come work in NYC on Ultimate X-Men, but Daniel put his family before his career. He had graphic art to pay the mortgage - logos and illustrations for corporate144 newsletters - until last year, just before his fortieth birthday, when Marvel signed him to work from home on a project all his own.
He kept a picture of Trixie over his workspace - not just because he loved her, but because for this particular graphic novel - The Tenth Circle - she was his inspiration. Well, Trixie and Laura. Laura’s obsession145 with Dante had provided the bare-bones plot of the story; Trixie had provided the impetus146. But it was Daniel who was responsible for creating his main character Wildclaw - a hero that this industry had never seen.
Historically, comics had been geared toward teenage boys.
Daniel had pitched Marvel a different concept: a character designed for the demographic group of adults who had been weaned on comic books yet who now had the spending power they’d lacked as adolescents. Adults who wanted sneakers endorsed147 by Michael Jordan and watched news programs that looked like MTV segments and played Tetris on a Nintendo DS during their business-class flights. Adults who would immediately identify with Wildclaw’s alter ego73, Duncan: a forty-something father who knew that getting old was hell, who wanted to keep his family safe, whose powers controlled him, instead of the other way around.
The narrative of the graphic novel followed Duncan, an ordinary father searching for his daughter, who had been kidnapped by the devil into Dante’s circles of hell. When provoked, through rage or fear, Duncan would morph into Wildclaw - literally becoming an animal. The catch was this: Power always involved a loss of humanity. If Duncan turned into a hawk or a bear or a wolf to elude148 a dangerous creature, a piece of him would stay that way.
His biggest fear was that if and when he did find his missing daughter, she would no longer recognize who he’d become in order to save her.
Daniel looked down at what he had on the page so far, and sighed. The problem wasn’t drawing the hawkhe could do that in his sleep - it was making sure the reader saw the human behind it. It was not new to have a hero who turned into an animal - but Daniel had come by the concept honestly. He’d grown up as the only white
boy in a native Alaskan village where his mother was a schoolteacher and his father was simply gone. In Akiak, the Yupiit spoke149 freely of children who went to live with seals, of men who shared a home with black bears. One woman had married a dog and given birth to puppies, only to peel back the fur to see they were actually babies underneath. Animals were simply nonhuman people,
with the same ability to make conscious decisions, and humanity simmered under their skins. You could see it in the way they sat together for meals, or fell in love, or grieved. And this went both ways: Sometimes, in a human, there would turn out to be a hidden bit of a beast.
Daniel’s best and only friend in the village was a Yup’ik boy named Cane150, whose grandfather had taken it upon himself to teach Daniel how to hunt and fish and everything else that his own father should have. For example, how after killing151 a rabbit, you had to be quiet, so that the animal’s spirit could visit. How at fish camp, you’d set the bones of the salmon152 free in the river, whispering Ataam taikina. Come back again.
Daniel spent most of his childhood waiting to leave. He was a kass’aq, a white kid, and this was reason enough to be teased or bullied153 or beaten. By the time he was Trixie’s age, he was getting drunk, damaging property, and making sure the rest of the world knew better than to fuck with him. But when he wasn’t doing those things, he was drawing - characters who, against all odds154, fought and won. Characters he hid in the margins155 of his schoolbooks and on the canvas of his bare palm. He drew to escape, and eventually, at age seventeen, he did.
Once Daniel left Akiak, he never looked back. He learned how to stop using his fists, how to put rage on the page instead. He got a foothold in the comics industry. He never talked about his life in Alaska, and Trixie and Laura knew better than to ask. He became a tpical suburban156 father who coached soccer and grilled157 burgers and mowed158 the lawn, a man you’d never expect had been accused of something so awful that he’d tried to outrun himself.
Daniel squeezed the eraser he was kneading and completely rubbed out the hawk he’d been attempting to draw. Maybe if he started with Duncan-the-man, instead of Wildclaw-the-beast? He took his mechanical pencil and started sketching159 the loose ovals and scribbled joints160 that materialized into his unlikely hero. No spandex, no high boots, no half mask: Duncan’s habitual161 costume was a battered162 jacket, jeans, and sarcasm163. Like Daniel, Duncan had shaggy dark hair and a dark complexion. Like Daniel, Duncan had a teenage daughter. And like Daniel, everything Duncan did or didn’t do was linked to a past that he refused to discuss.
When you got right down to it, Daniel was secretly drawing himself.
Jason’s car was an old Volvo that had belonged to his grandmother before she died. The seats had been reupholstered in pink, her favorite color, by his grandfather for her eighty-fifth birthday. Jason had told Trixie he used to think about changing them back to their original flesh tone, but how could you mess with that kind of love?
Hockey practice had ended fifteen minutes ago. Trixie waited in the cold, her hands tucked into the sleeves of her jacket, until Jason came out of the rink. His enormous hockey bag was slung164 over his shoulder, and he was laughing as he walked beside Moss.
Hope was a pathological part of puberty, like acne and surging hormones166. You might sound cynical167 to the world, but that was just a defense168 mechanism169, cover-up coating a zit, because it was too embarrassing to admit that in spite of the bum170 deals you kept getting, you hadn’t completely given up.
When Jason noticed her, Trixie tried to pretend she didn’t see the look that ghosted over his face - regret, or maybe resignation. She concentrated instead on the fact that he was walking toward her alone. “Hey,” she said evenly. “Can you give me a ride home?”
He hesitated, long enough for her to die inside all over again. Then he nodded and unlocked the car. She slid into the passenger seat while Jason stowed his gear, turned over the ignition, and blasted the heater. Trixie thought up a thousand questions – How was practice? Do you think it’ll snow again? Do you miss me? – but she couldn’t speak. It was too much, sitting there on the pink seats, just a foot away from Jason, the way she’d sat beside him in this car a hundred times before.
He pulled out of the parking spot and cleared his throat. “You feeling better?”
Than what? she thought.
“You left psych this morning,” Jason reminded her.
That class seemed like forever ago. Trixie tucked her hair behind her ear. “Yeah,” she said, and glanced down. Trixie thought of how she used to grasp the stick shift, so that when Jason reached for it, he would automatically be holding her hand. She slid her palm beneath her thigh171 and gripped the seat so she wouldn’t do anything stupid.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” Jason said.
“I wanted to ask you something.” Trixie took a deep breath for courage. “How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“All of it. You know. Go to class and practice. Make it through the day. Act like . . . like none of it mattered,”
Jason swore beneath his breath and pulled the car over. Then he reached across the seat and brushed his thumb over her cheek; until then, she hadn’t been aware she was crying. “Trix,” he sighed, “it mattered.”
By now, the tears were coming faster. “But I love you,” Trixie said. There was no easy switch that she could flip172 to stem the flow of feelings, no way to drain the memories that pooled like acid in her stomach because her heart no longer knew what to do with them. She couldn’t blame Jason; she didn’t like herself like this, either. But she couldn’t go back to being the girl she’d been before she
met him; that girl was gone. So where did that leave her?
Jason was wavering, she could tell. When he reached over the console to pull her into his arms, she tucked her head against his neck and rounded her mouth against the salt of his skin. Thank you, she murmured, to God or Jason or maybe both.
His words stirred the hair beside her ear. “Trixie, you’ve got to stop. It’s over.”
The sentence - and that’s exactly what it was, in every sense of the word - fell between them like a guillotine. Trixie disengaged herself, wiping her eyes on the puffy sleeve of her coat. “If it’s us,” she whispered, “how come you get to decide?” When he didn’t answer - couldn’t answer - she turned and stared out the front window. As it turned out, they were still in the parking lot. They hadn’t gotten anywhere at all.
The entire way home, Laura planned the way she was going to break the news to Seth. As flattering as it was to have a twenty-something man find a thirty-eight-year-old woman attractive, it was also wrong: Laura was his professor; she was married; she was a mother. She belonged in a reality made up of faculty173 meetings and papers being published and think tanks conducted at the home of the dean of humanities, not to mention parent-teacher conferences at Trixie’s school and worries about her own metabolism174 slowing down and whether she could save money on her cellular175 service if she switched companies. She told herself that it did not matter that Seth made her feel like summer fruit about to drop from a vine, something she could not remember experiencing anytime in the last decade with Daniel.
Doing something wrong, it turned out, packed a heady adrenaline rush. Seth was dark and uneven176 and unpredictable and . . . oh, God, just thinking about him was making her drive too fast on this road. On the other hand, Laura’s husband was the most solid, dependable, mild-mannered man in all of Maine. Daniel never forgot to put out the recycling bin29; he set the coffee to brew177 the night before because she was a bear when she didn’t have any in the morning; he never once complained about the fact that it had taken a good decade longer than he’d liked to make a name for himself in the comics industry because he was the stay-at-home parent. Sometimes, ridiculously, the more perfect he was the angrier she got, as if his generosity178 existed only to highlight her own selfishness. But then, she had only herself to blame for that - wasn’t she the one who’d given him the ultimatum179, who’d said he had to change?
The problem was (if she was going to be honest with herself) that when she asked him to change, she was focusing on what she thought she needed. She’d forgotten to catalog all the things she’d lose. What she had loved most about Seth - the thrill of doing something forbidden, the understanding that women like her did not connect with men like him - was exactly what had once made her fall for Daniel.
She had toyed with the idea of telling Daniel about the affair, but what good would that do, except hurt him? Instead, she would overcompensate. She would kill him with kindness. She would be the best wife, the best mother, the most attentive180 lover. She would give him back what she hoped he never realized had been missing.
Even Dante said that if you walked through hell, you could climb your way to paradise.
In the rearview mirror, Laura saw a carnival181 of flashing lights. “Goddamn,” she muttered, pulling over as the police cruiser slid neatly182 behind her Toyota. A tall officer walked toward her, silhouetted183 by the headlights of his vehicle. “Good evening, ma’am, did you know you were speeding?”
Apparently not, thought Laura.
“I’m going to need your license184 and . . . Professor Stone? Is that you?”
Laura peered up at the officer’s face. She couldn’t place it, but he was young enough; she might have taught him. She offered her most humble185 expression. Had he gotten a high enough grade in
her class to keep her from getting a ticket?
“Bernie Aylesworth,” he said, smiling down at Laura. “I took your Dante class my senior year, back in 2001. Got shut out of it the year before.”
She knew she was a popular teacher - her Dante course was rated even higher than the Intro to Physics lectures where Jeb Wetherby shot monkeys out of cannons186 to teach projectile187 motion. The Unauthorized Guide to Monroe College named her the prof students most wanted to take out for a beer. Had Seth read that? She thought suddenly.
“I’m just gonna give you a warning this time,” Bernie said, and Laura wondered where he had been six months ago, when she truly needed one. He passed her a crisp piece of paper and smiled. “So where were you hurrying off to?”
Not to, she thought, just back. “Home,” she told him. “I was headed home.” She waited until he was back in the cruiser to put on her signal - a penitent188 motion if ever there was one – and pulled into the gentle bend of the road. She drove well within the speed limit, her eyes focused ahead, as careful as you have to be when you know someone is watching.
“I’m leaving,” Laura said the minute she walked through the door. Daniel looked up from the kitchen counter, where he was chopping broccoli189 in preparation for dinner. On the stove, chicken was simmering in garlic.
“You just got here,” he said.
“I know.” Laura lifted the lid on the skillet, breathed in.
“Smells really good. I wish I could stay.”
He could not pinpoint190 what was different about her, but he thought it had to do with the fact that when she’d just said she wanted to be home, he believed her - most of the time, if she apologized for leaving, it was only because it was expected.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
She turned her back to Daniel and began to sort through the mail. “That departmental thing I told you about.”
She had not told him; he knew she hadn’t told him. She unwound her scarf and shrugged out of her coat, draped them over a chair.
She was wearing a black suit and Sorel boots, which were tracking snow in small puddles193 all over the kitchen floor. “How’s Trixie?”
“She’s in her room.”
Laura opened the refrigerator and poured herself a glass of water. “The crazy poet is trying to stage a coup,” she said.
“She’s been talking to the tenured professors. I don’t think she knows that . . .”
Suddenly, there was a crash, and Daniel turned in time to see the glass explode against the tile floor. Water spread in a puddle192, seeping194 beneath the edge of the refrigerator.
“Damn it!” Laura cried, kneeling to pick up the pieces.
“I’ve got it,” Daniel said, tossing down paper towels to absorb the spill. “You’ve got to slow down. You’re bleeding.”
Laura glanced down at the gash on the pad of her thumb as if it belonged to someone else. Daniel reached for her and wrapped her hand in a clean dish towel. They knelt inches apart on the tile floor, watching her blood soak through the checkered195 fabric196.
Daniel couldn’t remember the last time he and Laura had been this close to each other. He couldn’t remember a lot of things, like the sound of his wife’s breathing when she gave herself over to sleep, or the half smile that slipped out like a secret when something took her by surprise. He had tried to tell himself that Laura was busy, the way she always got at the beginning of a trimester. He did not ask if it could be anything more than that, because he did not want to hear the answer.
“We need to take care of that,” Daniel said. The bones of her wrist were light and fine in his hand, delicate as china.
Laura tugged herself free. “I’m fine,” she insisted, and she stood up. “It’s a scratch.” For a moment she stared at him, as if she knew, too, that there was another entire conversation going on here, one they had chosen not to have.
“Laura.” Daniel got to his feet, but she turned away.
“I really have to go change,” she said.
Daniel watched her leave, heard her footsteps on the stairs overhead. You already have, he thought.
“You didn’t,” Zephyr said.
Trixie pushed her sleeves up and stared down at the cuts on her arms, a red web of regret. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” she said. “I started walking, and I wound up at the rink ... I figured it was a sign. If we could just talk . . .”
“Trixie, right now Jason doesn’t want to talk. He wants to take out a restraining order.” Zephyr sighed. “You are so Fatal Attraction.”
“Fatal what?”
“It’s an old movie. Don’t you ever watch anything that doesn’t have Paul Walker in it?”
Trixie tucked the phone between her shoulder and her ear and carefully unwound the screw neck of the X-Acto knife that she’d taken from her father’s office. The blade came out, a tiny silver trapezoid. “I’d do anything to get him back.” Closing her eyes, Trixie scored the blade over her left arm. She sucked in her breath and imagined she was opening up a vent26, allowing some of the enormous pressure to ease.
“Are you going to complain about this until we graduate?”
Zephyr asked. “Because if that’s the case, then I’m taking matters into my own hands.”
What if her father knocked on the door right now? What if anyone, even Zephyr, found out that she was doing stuff like this?
Maybe it wasn’t relief she was feeling, but shame. Both made you burn from the inside out.
“So, do you want my help?” Zephyr asked.
Trixie clapped her hand over the cut, stanching197 the flow.
“Hello?” Zephyr said. “Are you still there?”
Trixie lifted her hand. The blood was rich and bright against her palm. “Yeah,” she sighed. “I guess I am.”
“Good timing,” Daniel said, as he heard Trixie’s footsteps pounding down the stairs. He set two plates on the kitchen table and turned around to find her waiting in her coat, carrying a backpack. Her cascade198 of hair spilled out from beneath a striped stocking cap.
“Oh,” she said, blinking at the food. “Zephyr invited me for a sleepover.”
“You can go after you eat.”
Trixie bit her lower lip. “Her mom thinks I’m coming for dinner.”
Daniel had known Zephyr since she was seven. He used to sit in the living room while she and Trixie performed the cheerleading moves they’d made up during an afternoon of play, or lip-synched to the radio, or presented tumbling routines. He could practically still hear them doing a hand-clapping game: The spades go eeny-meeny pop zoombini. . .
Last week, Daniel had walked in with a bag of groceries to find someone unfamiliar199 in the kitchen, bent over a catalog. Nice ass2, he thought, until she straightened and turned out to be Zephyr.
“Hey, Mr. Stone,” she’d said. “Trixie’s in the bathroom.”
She hadn’t noticed that he went red in the face, or that he left the kitchen before his own daughter returned. He sat on the couch with the grocery bag in his hands, the ice cream inside softening200 against his chest, as he speculated whether there were other fathers out there making the same mistake when they happened upon Trixie.
“Well,” he said now, “I’ll just save the leftovers201.” He stood up, fishing for his car keys.
“Oh, that’s okay. I can walk.”
“It’s dark out,” Daniel said.
Trixie met his gaze, challenging. “I think I can manage to get to a house three blocks away. I’m not a baby, Dad.”
Daniel didn’t know what to say. She was a baby, to him. “Then maybe before you go to Zephyrs202 you could go vote, join the army, and rent us a car... oh, hang on, that’s right. You can’t.”
Trixie rolled her eyes, took off her hat and gloves, and sat down.
“I thought you were eating at Zephyrs.”
“I will,” she said. “But I don’t want you to have to eat all by yourself.”
Daniel sank into the chair across from her. He had a sudden flashback of Trixie in ballet class, the two of them struggling to capture her fine hair in a netted bun before the session began. He had always been the sole father present; other men’s wives would rush forward to help him figure out how to secure the bobby pins, how to slick back the bangs with hair spray.
At her first and only ballet performance, Trixie had been the lead reindeer203, drawing out the sleigh that held the Sugar Plum Fairy. She wore a white leotard and an antler headband and had a painted red nose. Daniel hadn’t taken his eyes off her, not for any of the three minutes and twenty-two seconds that she stood on that stage.
He didn’t want to take his eyes off her now, but part of this new routine of adolescence meant a portion of the dance took place offstage. “What are you guys going to do tonight?” Daniel asked.
“I don’t know. Rent a movie off the dish, I guess. What are you going to do?”
“Oh, the same thing I always do when I’m alone in the house.
Dance around naked, call the psychic204 hotline, cure cancer, negotiate world peace.”
Trixie smiled. “Could you clean my room too?”
“Don’t know if I’ll have time. It depends on whether the North Koreans are being cooperative.” He pushed his food around his plate, took a few bites, and then dumped the rest into the trash.
“Okay, you’re officially free.”
She bounced up and grabbed her pack, heading toward the front door. “Thanks, Daddy.”
“Any time,” Daniel said, but the words turned up at the end, as if he were asking her for minutes that were no longer hers to give.
She wasn’t lying. Not any more than her father had when Trixie was little and he said one day they’d get a dog, although they didn’t. She was just telling him what he wanted - needed – to hear. Everyone always said the best relationships between parents and kids involved open communication, but Trixie knew that was a joke. The best relationships were the ones where both sides went out of their way to make sure the other wasn’t disappointed.
She wasn’t lying, not really. She was going to Zephyr’s house.
And she did plan to sleep over.
But Zephyr’s mother had gone to visit her older brother at Wesleyan College for the weekend, and Trixie wasn’t the only one who’d been invited for the evening. A bunch of people were coming, including some hockey players.
Like Jason.
Trixie ducked behind the fence at Mrs. Argobath’s house, opened up her backpack, and pulled out the jeans that were so low rise she had to go commando. She’d bought them a month ago and had hidden them from her father, because she knew he’d have a heart attack if he saw her wearing them. Shimmying out of her sweatpants and underwear - Jesus, it was cold out - she skimmed on the jeans.
She rummaged205 for the items she’d stolen from her mother’s closet - they were the same size now. Trixie had wanted to borrow the killer206 black-heeled boots, but she couldn’t find them. Instead, Trixie had settled for a chain-link belt and a sheer black blouse her mother had worn one year over a velvet207 camisole to a faculty Christmas dinner.
The sleeves weren’t see-through enough that you could see the Ace20 bandage she’d wrapped around the cuts on her arm, but you could totally tell that all she had on underneath was a black satin bra.
She zipped up her coat again, jammed on her hat, and started walking. Trixie honestly wasn’t sure she’d be able to do what Zephyr had suggested. Make him come to you, Zephyr had said. Get him jealous.
Maybe if she was hammered enough, or totally stoned.
Now there was a thought. When you were high, you were hardly yourself.
Then again, maybe it would be easier than she expected. Being someone else - anyone else, even for one night - would beat being Trixie Stone.
A human heart breaks harder when it’s dropped from a greater height. Seth lay on the sheets of his futon, the ones that smelled of the cigarettes he rolled and - he loved this - of Laura. He still felt her words like the recoil208 from a shotgun. It’s over. Laura had gone to pull herself together in the bathroom. Seth knew there was a hairline fracture between duty and desire; that you might think you were walking on one side of it and then find yourself firmly entrenched209 on the other. He just also had believed stupidly - that it wasn’t that way for them. He’d believed that even with the age difference, he could be Lauras future. He hadn’t counted on the chance that she might want her past instead. “I can be whatever you want me to be,” he’d promised. Please, he had said, half question, half command.
When the doorbell rang, he nearly didn’t answer. This was the last thing he needed right now. But the bell rang again, and Seth opened the door to find the kid standing in the shadows. “Later,” Seth said, and he started to shut the door.
A twenty-dollar bill was pressed into his hand. “Look,” Seth said with a sigh, “I’m out.”
“You’ve got to have something.” Two more twenties were pushed at him.
Seth hesitated. He hadn’t been lying - he really didn’t have any weed - but it was hard to turn down sixty bucks210 when you had eaten ramen noodles every night that week. He wondered how much time he had before Laura came out of the bathroom. “Wait here,” he said.
He kept his stash211 in the belly212 of an old guitar with half its strings213 missing. The battered case had travel stamps on it, from Istanbul and Paris and Bangkok, and a bumper214 sticker that said, IF YOU CAN READ THIS, GET THE FUCK AWAY.
The first time Laura had visited his apartment he’d come back from digging up a bottle of wine to find her strumming the remaining strings, the guitar still cradled inside its open case.
Do you play? she had asked.
He had frozen, but only for a moment. He took the case, snapped it shut, and put it off to the side. Depends on the game, he had answered.
Now he reached into the sound hole and rummaged around. He considered his sidelight vocation215 philosophically216: Grad school cost a fortune; his tech job at the vet’s office barely paid his rent; and selling pot wasn’t much different from buying a six-pack for a bunch of teenagers. It wasn’t like he went around selling coke or heroin217, which could really mess you up. But he still didn’t want Laura to know this about him. He could tell you how she felt about politics or affirmative action or being touched along the base of her delicate spine218, but he didn’t know what she’d say if she discovered that he was dealing219.
Seth found the vial he was looking for. “This is powerful shit,” he warned, passing it outside.
“What does it do?”
“It takes you away,” Seth answered. He heard the water stop running in the bathroom. “Do you want it or not?”
The kid took the vial and shrank back into the night. Seth shut the door just as Laura walked out of the bathroom, her eyes red and her face swollen220. Immediately, she froze. “Who were you talking to?” Although Seth would have gladly crowed to the world that he loved Laura, she had too much at stake to lose - her job, her family. He should have known that someone trying so hard to keep from being noticed would never really be able to see him.
“No one,” Seth said bitterly. “Your little secrets still safe.”
He turned away so that he would not have to bear witness as she left him. He heard the door open, felt the gasp221 of cold air.
“You’re not the one I’m ashamed of,” Laura murmured, and she walked out of his life.
Zephyr was handing out tubes of lipstickhot pink, Goth black, scarlet223, plum. She pressed one into Trixie’s hand. It was gold, and Trixie turned it upside down to read the name: All That Glitters. “You know what to do, right?” Zephyr murmured. Trixie did. She’d never played Rainbow before, she’d never had to. She’d always been with Jason instead.
As soon as Trixie had arrived at Zephyr’s, her friend had laid out the guidelines for Trixie’s surefire success that night.
First, look hot. Second, drink whenever, whatever. Third – and most important - do not break the two-and-a-half-hour rule. That much time had to pass at the party before Trixie was allowed to talk to Jason. In the meantime, Trixie had to flirt224 with everyone but him. According to Zephyr, Jason expected Trixie to still be pining for him. When the opposite happened - when he saw other guys checking Trixie out and telling him he’d blown it - it would shock him into realizing his mistake.
However, Jason hadn’t showed up yet. Zephyr told Trixie just to carry on with points one and two of the plan, so that she’d be good and wasted by the time Jason arrived and saw her enjoying herself. To that end, Trixie had spent the night dancing with anyone who wanted to, and by herself when she couldn’t find a partner. She drank until the horizon swam. She fell down across the laps of boys she could not care less about and let them pretend she liked it.
She looked at her reflection in the plate-glass window and applied225 the gold lipstick222. It made her look like a model in an MTV video.
There were three games that had been making the rounds at parties recently. Daisy-chaining meant having sex like a conga line you’d do it with a guy, who’d do it with some girl, who’d do it with another guy, and so on, until you made your way back to the beginning. During Stoneface, a bunch of guys sat at a table with their pants pulled down and their expressions wiped clean of emotion, while a girl huddled226 underneath giving one of them a blow joband they all had to try to guess the lucky recipient227.
Rainbow was a combination of the two. A dozen or so girls were given different colored lipsticks228 before having oral sex with the guys, and the boy who sported the most colors at the end of the night was the winner.
An upperclassman that Trixie didn’t know threaded his fingers through Zephyr’s and tugged her forward. Trixie watched him sit on the couch, watched her wilt229 like a flower at his feet. She turned
away, her face flaming.
It doesn’t mean anything, Zephyr had said.
It only hurts if you let it.
“Hey.”
Trixie turned around to find a guy staring at her. “Um,” she said. “Hi.”
“You want to ... go sit down?”
He was blond, where Jason had been so dark. He had brown eyes, not blue ones. She found herself studying him not in terms of who he was, but who he wasn’t. She imagined what would happen if Jason walked in the door and saw her going at it with someone. She wondered if he’d recognize her right away. If the stake through his heart would hurt as much as the one Trixie felt every time she saw him with Jessica Ridgeley.
Taking a deep breath, she led this boy - what was his name? did it even matter? - toward a couch. She reached for a beer on the table beside them and chugged the entire thing. Then she knelt between the boy’s legs and kissed him. Their teeth scraped.
She reached down and unbuckled his belt, looking down long enough to register that he wore boxers230. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine what it would be like if the bass231 in the music could beat through the pores of her skin.
His hand tangled232 in her hair, drawing her down, head to a chopping block. She smelled the musk233 of him and heard the groan234 of someone across the room and he was in her mouth and she imagined the flecks235 of gold on her lips ringing him like fairy dust.
Gagging, Trixie wrenched236 herself away and rocked back on her heels. She could still taste him, and she scrambled237 out of the pulsing living room and out the front door just in time to throw up in Mrs. Santorelli-Weinstein’s hydrangea bush.
When you fooled around without the feelings attached, it might not mean anything ... but then again, neither did you. Trixie wondered if there was something wrong with her, for not being able to act like Zephyr - cool and nonchalant, like none of this mattered anyway. Is that really what guys wanted? Or was it just what the girls thought the guys wanted?
Trixie wiped a shaking hand across her mouth and sat down on the front steps. In the distance, a car door slammed. She heard a voice that haunted her each moment before she fell asleep: “Come on, Moss. She’s a freshman. Why don’t we just call it a night?”
Trixie stared at the sidewalk until Jason came into view, haloed by a streetlight as he walked beside Moss toward Zephyrs front door.
She spun238 around, took the lipstick out of her pocket, and reapplied a fresh coat. It sparkled in the dark. It felt like wax, like a mask, like none of this was real.
Laura had called to say that since she was on campus, she was going to stay there and catch up on some grading. She might even just crash overnight in her office.
You could work at home, Daniel said, when what he really meant was, Why does it sound like you’ve been crying?
No, I’ll get more done here, Laura answered, when what she really meant was, Please don’t ask.
Love you, Daniel said, but Laura didn’t.
When your significant other was missing, it wasn’t the same bed. There was a void on the other side, a cosmic black hole, one that you couldn’t roll too close to without falling into a chasm239 of memories. Daniel lay with the covers drawn240 up to his chin, the television screen still glowing green.
He had always believed that if someone in this marriage was going to cheat, it would have been himself. Laura had never done anything wayward, had never even gotten a damn traffic ticket. On the other hand, he had a long history of behavior that would have surely landed him in jail eventually, had he not fallen in love instead. He assumed you could hide infidelity, like a wrinkle in your clothing stuffed underneath a belt line or a cuff241, a flaw you knew existed but could conceal242 from the public. Instead, cheating had its own smell, one that clung to Laura’s skin even after she’d stepped out of the shower. It took Daniel a while longer to recognize this sharp lemon scent116 for what it was: a late and unexpected confidence.
At dinner a few nights ago, Trixie had read them a logic165 problem from her psych homework: A woman is at the funeral of her mother. There, she meets a man she doesn’t know and has never met, who she thinks is her dream partner. But because of the circumstances, she forgets to ask for his number, and she can’t find him afterward243. A few days later, she kills her own sister.
Why?
Laura guessed that the sister had been involved with the man. Daniel thought it might be something to do with an inheritance. Congratulations, Trixie had said, neither one of you is a psychopath. The reason she murdered her sister was because she hoped the guy would show up at that funeral, too. Most serial244 killers245 who had been asked this question had given the right answer.
It was later, while he was lying in bed with Laura sleeping soundly beside him, that Daniel came up with a different explanation. According to Trixie, the woman at the funeral had fallen in love. And like any accelerant, that would change the equation. Add love, and a person might do something crazy. Add love, and all the lines between right and wrong were bound to disappear.
It was two-thirty in the morning, and Trixie was bluffing246. By now, the party had wound down. Only four people remained:
Zephyr and Moss and Trixie and Jason. Trixie had managed to avoid finishing out the Rainbow game by playing Quarters in the kitchen instead with Moss and Jason. When Zephyr found her there, she had pulled Trixie aside, furious. Why was Trixie being such a prude?
Wasn’t this whole night supposed to be about making Jason jealous?
And so Trixie had marched back to Moss and Jason, and suggested the four of them play strip poker247.
They had been at it long enough for the stakes to be important. Jason had folded a while ago; he stood against the wall with his arms crossed, watching the rest of the game develop.
Zephyr laid out her cards with a flourish: two pairs – threes and jacks248. On the couch across from her, Moss tipped his hand and grinned. “I have a straight.”
Zephyr had already taken off her shoes, her socks, and her pants. She stood up and started to peel off her shirt. She walked toward Moss in her bra, draping her T-shirt around his neck and then kissing him so slowly that all the pale skin on his face turned bright pink.
When she sat back down, she glanced at Trixie, as if to say, That’s how you do it.
“Stack the deck,” Moss said. “I want to see if she’s really a blonde.”
Zephyr turned to Trixie. “Stack the deck. I want to see if he’s really a guy.”
“Hey, Trixie, what about you?” Moss asked.
Trixie’s head was cartwheeling, but she could feel Jason’s eyes on her. Maybe this was where she was supposed to go in for the kill. She looked to Zephyr, hoping for a cue, but Zephyr was too busy hanging on Moss to pay attention to her.
Oh, my God, it was brilliant.
If the goal of this entire night was to get Jason jealous, the surest way to do it would be to come on to his best friend.
Trixie stood up and tumbled right into Moss’s lap. His arms came around her, and her cards spilled onto the coffee table: two of hearts, six of diamonds, queen of clubs, three of clubs, eight of spades. Moss started to laugh. “Trixie, that’s the worst hand I’ve ever seen.”
“Yeah, Trix,” Zephyr said, staring. “You’re asking for it.”
Trixie glanced at her. She knew, didn’t she, that the only reason she was flirting249 with Moss was to make Jason jealous? But before she could telegraph this with some kind of ESP, Moss snapped her bra strap67. “I think you lost,” he said, grinning, and he sat back to see what piece of clothing she was going to take off.
Trixie was down to her black bra and Ace bandage and her low-rise jeans - the ones she was wearing without underwear. She wasn’t planning on parting with any of those items. But she had a plan - she was going to remove her earrings250. She lifted her left hand up to the lobe251, only to realize that she’d forgotten to put them on. The gold hoops252 were sitting on her dresser, in her bedroom, just where she’d left them.
Trixie had already removed her watch, and her necklace, and her barrette. She’d even cut off her macrame anklet. A flush rose up her shoulders - her bare shoulders - onto her face. “I fold.”
“You can’t fold after the game,” Moss said. “Rules are rules.”
Jason pushed away from the wall and walked closer. “Give her a break, Moss.”
“I think she’d rather have something else . . .”
“I’m out,” Trixie said, her voice skating the thin edge of panic. She held her hands crossed in front of herself. Her heart was pounding so hard she thought it would burst into her palm.
Suddenly, this seemed even worse than Rainbow, because the anonymity253 was gone. Here, if she acted like a slut, everyone knew her by name.
“I’ll pinch-strip for her,” Zephyr suggested, leaning into Moss.
But at that moment, Trixie looked at Jason and remembered why she had come to Zephyr’s in the first place. It’s worth it, she thought, if it brings him back. “I’ll do it,” she said. “But just for a second.”
Turning her back to the three of them, she slipped the straps of her bra down her arms and felt her breasts come free. She took a deep breath and spun around.
Jason was staring down at the floor. But Moss was holding up his cell phone, and before Trixie could understand why, he’d snapped a picture of her.
She fastened her bra and lunged for the phone. “Give me that!”
He stuffed it in his pants. “Come and get it, baby.”
Suddenly Trixie found herself being pulled off Moss. The sound of Jason’s fist hitting Moss made her cringe. “Jesus Christ, lay off!” Moss cried. “I thought you said you were finished with her.”
Trixie grabbed for her blouse, wishing that it was something flannel or fleece that would completely obliterate254 her. She held it in front of her and ran into the bathroom down the hall. Zephyr followed, coming into the tiny room and closing the door behind her.
Shaking, Trixie slipped her hands into the sleeves of the blouse. “Make them go home.”
“But it’s just getting interesting,” Zephyr said.
Trixie looked up, stunned255. “What?”
“Well, for God’s sake, Trixie. So he had a camera phone, big fucking deal. It was a joke.”
“Why are you taking his side?”
“Why are you being such an asshole?”
Trixie felt her cheeks grow hot. “This was your idea. You told me that if I did what you said, I’d get Jason back.”
“Yeah,” Zephyr shot back. “So why were you all over Moss?”
Trixie thought of the paper clips on Zephyr’s backpack. Random hookups weren’t random, no matter what you told yourself. Or your best friend.
There was a knock on the door, and then Moss opened it. His lip was split, and he had a welt over his left eye. “Oh, my God,”
Zephyr said. “Look at what he did to you.”
Moss shrugged. “He’s done worse during a scrimmage.”
“I think you need to lie down,” she said. “Preferably with me.”
As she tugged Moss out of the bathroom and upstairs, she didn’t look back.
Trixie sat down on the lid of the toilet and buried her face in her
hands. Distantly, she heard the music being turned off. Her temples throbbed256, and her arm where she’d cut it earlier. Her throat was dry as leather. She reached for a half-empty can of Coke on the sink and drank it. She wanted to go home.
“Hey.”
Trixie glanced up to find Jason staring down at her. “I thought you left.”
“I wanted to make sure you were all right. You need a ride?”
Trixie wiped her eyes, a smear257 of mascara coming off on the heel of her hand. She had told her father she would be staying overnight, but that was before her fight with Zephyr. “That would be great,” she said, and then she began to cry.
He pulled her upright and into his arms. After tonight, after everything that had happened and how stupid she’d been, all she wanted was a place where she fit. Everything about Jason was right, from the temperature of his skin to the way that her pulse matched his. When she turned her face into the bow of his neck, she pressed her lips against his collarbone: not quite a kiss, not quite not one.
She thought, hard, about lifting her face up to his before she did it. She made herself remember what Moss had said: I thought you were done with her.
When Jason kissed her, he tasted of rum and of indecision. She kissed him back until the room spun, until she couldn’t remember how much time had passed. She wanted to stay like this forever.
She wanted the world to grow up around them, a mound258 in the landscape where only violets bloomed, because that was what happened in a soil too rich for its own good.
Trixie rested her forehead against Jason’s. “I don’t have to go home just yet,” she said.
Daniel was dreaming of hell. There was a lake of ice and a run of tundra259. A dog tied to a steel rod, its nose buried in a dish of fish soup. There was a mound of melting snow, revealing candy wrappers, empty Pepsi cans, a broken toy. He heard the hollow thump of a basketball on the slick wooden boardwalk and the tail of a green tarp rattling260 against the seat of the snow machine it covered. He saw a moon that hung too late in the sky, like a drunk unwilling261 to leave the best seat at the bar.
At the sound of the crash, he came awake immediately to find himself still alone in bed. It was three thirty-two A.M. He walked into the hall, flipping262 light switches as he passed. “Laura,” he called, “is that you?”
The hardwood floors felt cold beneath his bare feet. Nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary downstairs, yet by the time he reached the kitchen he had nearly convinced himself that he was about to come face-to-face with an intruder. An old wariness263 rose in him, a muscle memory of fight or flight that he’d thought he’d long forgotten.
There was no one in the cellar, or the half bath, or the dining room. The telephone still slept on its cradle in the living room.
It was in the mudroom that he realized Trixie must have come home early: Her coat was here, her boots kicked off on the brick floor.
“Trixie?” he called out, heading upstairs again.
But she wasn’t in her bedroom, and when he reached the bathroom, the door was locked. Daniel rattled264 it, but there was no response. He threw his entire weight against the jamb until the door burst free.
Trixie was shivering, huddled in the crease265 made by the wall and the shower stall. “Baby,” he said, coming down on one knee.
“Are you sick?” But then Trixie turned in slow motion, as if he were the last person she’d ever expected to see. Her eyes were empty, ringed with mascara. She was wearing something black and sheer that was ripped at the shoulder.
“Oh, Daddy,” she said, and started to cry.
“Trixie, what happened?”
She opened her mouth to speak, but then pressed her lips together and shook her head.
“You can tell me,” Daniel said, gathering266 her into his arms as if she were small again.
Her hands were knotted together between them, like a heart that had broken its bounds. “Daddy,” she whispered. “He raped191 me.”
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1
cocktail
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| n.鸡尾酒；餐前开胃小吃；混合物 | |
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ass
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| n.驴；傻瓜，蠢笨的人 | |
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3
inferno
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| n.火海；地狱般的场所 | |
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epic
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| n.史诗，叙事诗；adj.史诗般的，壮丽的 | |
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genre
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| n.(文学、艺术等的)类型，体裁，风格 | |
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utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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twitch
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| v.急拉，抽动，痉挛，抽搐；n.扯，阵痛，痉挛 | |
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8
wriggle
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| v./n.蠕动，扭动；蜿蜒 | |
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rite
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| n.典礼，惯例，习俗 | |
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10
trekked
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| v.艰苦跋涉，徒步旅行( trek的过去式和过去分词 )；（尤指在山中）远足，徒步旅行，游山玩水 | |
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11
ranting
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| v.夸夸其谈( rant的现在分词 )；大叫大嚷地以…说教；气愤地)大叫大嚷；不停地大声抱怨 | |
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12
demons
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| n.恶人( demon的名词复数 )；恶魔；精力过人的人；邪念 | |
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13
traitors
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| 卖国贼( traitor的名词复数 )； 叛徒； 背叛者； 背信弃义的人 | |
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14
graphic
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| adj.生动的，形象的，绘画的，文字的，图表的 | |
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15
distraction
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| n.精神涣散，精神不集中，消遣，娱乐 | |
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exhaled
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| v.呼出，发散出( exhale的过去式和过去分词 )；吐出（肺中的空气、烟等），呼气 | |
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unison
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| n.步调一致，行动一致 | |
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speculation
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| n.思索，沉思；猜测；投机 | |
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eternity
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| n.不朽，来世；永恒，无穷 | |
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20
ace
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| n.A牌；发球得分；佼佼者；adj.杰出的 | |
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21
narrative
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| n.叙述，故事；adj.叙事的，故事体的 | |
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22
fiddled
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| v.伪造( fiddle的过去式和过去分词 )；篡改；骗取；修理或稍作改动 | |
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23
entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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24
gash
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| v.深切，划开；n.(深长的)切(伤)口；裂缝 | |
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25
burrowed
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| v.挖掘（洞穴），挖洞( burrow的过去式和过去分词 )；翻寻 | |
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vent
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| n.通风口，排放口；开衩；vt.表达，发泄 | |
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27
flicked
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| （尤指用手指或手快速地）轻击( flick的过去式和过去分词 )； （用…）轻挥； （快速地）按开关； 向…笑了一下（或瞥了一眼等） | |
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28
cliche
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| n./a.陈词滥调(的)；老生常谈(的)；陈腐的 | |
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29
bin
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| n.箱柜；vt.放入箱内；[计算机] DOS文件名:二进制目标文件 | |
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30
underneath
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| adj.在...下面，在...底下；adv.在下面 | |
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31
mattress
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| n.床垫，床褥 | |
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antennae
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| n.天线；触角 | |
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tuning
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| n.调谐，调整，调音v.调音( tune的现在分词 )；调整；（给收音机、电视等）调谐；使协调 | |
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34
hoarding
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| n.贮藏；积蓄；临时围墙；囤积v.积蓄并储藏（某物）( hoard的现在分词 ) | |
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35
casually
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| adv.漠不关心地，无动于衷地，不负责任地 | |
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scenarios
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| n.[意]情节；剧本；事态；脚本 | |
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proprietary
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| n.所有权，所有的；独占的；业主 | |
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38
leash
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| n.牵狗的皮带，束缚；v.用皮带系住 | |
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39
pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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privately
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| adv.以私人的身份，悄悄地，私下地 | |
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41
hover
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| vi.翱翔，盘旋；徘徊；彷徨，犹豫 | |
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42
miming
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| v.指手画脚地表演，用哑剧的形式表演( mime的现在分词 ) | |
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43
fumbled
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| （笨拙地）摸索或处理（某事物）( fumble的过去式和过去分词 )； 乱摸，笨拙地弄； 使落下 | |
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44
funneling
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| [医]成漏斗形：描述膀胱底及膀胱尿道交接区 | |
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45
clenched
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| v.紧握，抓紧，咬紧( clench的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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46
phoenix
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| n.凤凰，长生(不死)鸟；引申为重生 | |
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47
honked
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| v.（使）发出雁叫似的声音，鸣（喇叭），按（喇叭）( honk的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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48
brawl
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| n.大声争吵，喧嚷；v.吵架，对骂 | |
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49
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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50
catching
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| adj.易传染的，有魅力的，迷人的，接住 | |
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51
algebra
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| n.代数学 | |
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52
shrugged
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| vt.耸肩（shrug的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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53
bloody
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| adj.非常的的；流血的；残忍的；adv.很；vt.血染 | |
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54
flannel
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| n.法兰绒；法兰绒衣服 | |
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55
crested
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| adj.有顶饰的，有纹章的，有冠毛的v.到达山顶（或浪峰）( crest的过去式和过去分词 )；到达洪峰，达到顶点 | |
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56
lockers
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| n.寄物柜( locker的名词复数 ) | |
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57
vending
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| v.出售（尤指土地等财产）( vend的现在分词 )；（尤指在公共场所）贩卖；发表（意见，言论）；声明 | |
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58
doorway
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| n.门口，(喻)入门；门路，途径 | |
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59
psychology
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| n.心理，心理学，心理状态 | |
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60
denim
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| n.斜纹棉布；斜纹棉布裤，牛仔裤 | |
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61
peppermint
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| n.薄荷，薄荷油，薄荷糖 | |
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62
desktop
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| n.桌面管理系统程序；台式 | |
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63
boredom
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| n.厌烦，厌倦，乏味，无聊 | |
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64
unnatural
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| adj.不自然的；反常的 | |
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65
tug
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| v.用力拖(或拉)；苦干；n.拖；苦干；拖船 | |
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66
straps
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| n.带子( strap的名词复数 )；挎带；肩带；背带v.用皮带捆扎( strap的第三人称单数 )；用皮带抽打；包扎；给…打绷带 | |
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67
strap
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| n.皮带，带子；v.用带扣住，束牢；用绷带包扎 | |
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68
supremely
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| adv.无上地，崇高地 | |
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69
binder
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| n.包扎物，包扎工具；[法]临时契约；粘合剂；装订工 | |
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70
flute
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| n.长笛；v.吹笛 | |
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71
moss
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| n.苔，藓，地衣 | |
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72
hunched
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| （常指因寒冷、生病或愁苦）耸肩弓身的，伏首前倾的 | |
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73
ego
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| n.自我，自己，自尊 | |
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74
dime
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| n.（指美国、加拿大的钱币）一角 | |
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75
blatantly
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| ad.公开地 | |
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76
aisle
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| n.（教堂、教室、戏院等里的）过道，通道 | |
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77
scribbled
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| v.潦草的书写( scribble的过去式和过去分词 )；乱画；草草地写；匆匆记下 | |
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78
crouched
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| v.屈膝，蹲伏( crouch的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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79
vomited
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80
wagered
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| v.在（某物）上赌钱，打赌( wager的过去式和过去分词 )；保证，担保 | |
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81
freshman
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| n.大学一年级学生(可兼指男女) | |
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82
gloss
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| n.光泽，光滑；虚饰；注释；vt.加光泽于；掩饰 | |
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83
copper
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| n.铜；铜币；铜器；adj.铜(制)的；(紫)铜色的 | |
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84
complexion
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| n.肤色；情况，局面；气质，性格 | |
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85
pigment
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| n.天然色素，干粉颜料 | |
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86
stomps
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| v.跺脚，践踏，重踏( stomp的第三人称单数 ) | |
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87
shard
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| n.（陶瓷器、瓦等的）破片，碎片 | |
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88
dagger
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| n.匕首，短剑，剑号 | |
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89
rift
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| n.裂口，隙缝，切口；v.裂开，割开，渗入 | |
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90
buddy
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| n.（美口）密友，伙伴 | |
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91
coup
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| n.政变；突然而成功的行动 | |
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92
vigilant
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| adj.警觉的，警戒的，警惕的 | |
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93
literally
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| adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实 | |
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94
tune
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| n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整 | |
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95
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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96
versus
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| prep.以…为对手，对；与…相比之下 | |
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97
scramble
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| v.爬行，攀爬，杂乱蔓延，碎片，片段，废料 | |
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98
vile
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| adj.卑鄙的，可耻的，邪恶的；坏透的 | |
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99
scrawled
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| 乱涂，潦草地写( scrawl的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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100
alabaster
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| adj.雪白的；n.雪花石膏；条纹大理石 | |
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101
poised
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| a.摆好姿势不动的 | |
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102
crumb
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| n.饼屑，面包屑，小量 | |
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103
sprawled
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| v.伸开四肢坐[躺]( sprawl的过去式和过去分词)；蔓延；杂乱无序地拓展；四肢伸展坐着（或躺着） | |
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104
poetic
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| adj.富有诗意的，有诗人气质的，善于抒情的 | |
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105
chattering
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| n. （机器振动发出的）咔嗒声，(鸟等)鸣，啁啾 adj. 喋喋不休的，啾啾声的 动词chatter的现在分词形式 | |
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106
liaison
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| n.联系，（未婚男女间的）暖昧关系，私通 | |
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107
cerebral
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| adj.脑的，大脑的；有智力的，理智型的 | |
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108
tumor
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| n.（肿）瘤，肿块(英)tumour | |
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109
insanity
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| n.疯狂，精神错乱；极端的愚蠢，荒唐 | |
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110
bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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111
thump
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| v.重击，砰然地响；n.重击，重击声 | |
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112
dryer
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| n.干衣机，干燥剂 | |
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113
acrid
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| adj.辛辣的，尖刻的，刻薄的 | |
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114
zephyr
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| n.和风，微风 | |
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115
incense
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| v.激怒；n.香，焚香时的烟，香气 | |
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116
scent
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| n.气味，香味，香水，线索，嗅觉；v.嗅，发觉 | |
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117
fervent
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| adj.热的，热烈的，热情的 | |
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118
mitten
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| n.连指手套，露指手套 | |
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119
swirling
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| v.旋转，打旋( swirl的现在分词 ) | |
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120
penalized
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| 对…予以惩罚( penalize的过去式和过去分词 )； 使处于不利地位 | |
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121
misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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122
obsessed
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| adj.心神不宁的,鬼迷心窍的,沉迷的 | |
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123
Vogue
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| n.时髦，时尚；adj.流行的 | |
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124
random
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| adj.随机的；任意的；n.偶然的(或随便的)行动 | |
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125
tugged
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| v.用力拉，使劲拉，猛扯( tug的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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126
acting
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| n.演戏，行为，假装；adj.代理的，临时的，演出用的 | |
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127
adolescence
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| n.青春期，青少年 | |
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128
conjugated
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| adj.共轭的，成对的v.列出（动词的）变化形式( conjugate的过去式和过去分词 )；结合，联合，熔化 | |
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129
judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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130
villain
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| n.反派演员，反面人物；恶棍；问题的起因 | |
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131
jaw
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| n.颚，颌，说教，流言蜚语；v.喋喋不休，教训 | |
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132
calves
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| n.(calf的复数)笨拙的男子，腓；腿肚子( calf的名词复数 )；牛犊；腓；小腿肚v.生小牛( calve的第三人称单数 )；（冰川）崩解；生（小牛等），产（犊）；使（冰川）崩解 | |
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133
marvels
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| n.奇迹( marvel的名词复数 )；令人惊奇的事物（或事例）；不平凡的成果；成就v.惊奇，对…感到惊奇( marvel的第三人称单数 ) | |
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134
marvel
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| vi.(at)惊叹vt.感到惊异；n.令人惊异的事 | |
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135
anvil
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| n.铁钻 | |
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136
bulge
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| n.突出，膨胀，激增；vt.突出，膨胀 | |
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137
recess
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| n.短期休息，壁凹（墙上装架子，柜子等凹处） | |
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138
furry
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| adj.毛皮的；似毛皮的；毛皮制的 | |
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139
lizard
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| n.蜥蜴，壁虎 | |
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140
procrastinating
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| 拖延，耽搁( procrastinate的现在分词 )； 拖拉 | |
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141
hawk
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| n.鹰，骗子；鹰派成员 | |
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142
beak
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| n.鸟嘴，茶壶嘴，钩形鼻 | |
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143
credentials
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| n.证明，资格，证明书，证件 | |
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144
corporate
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| adj.共同的，全体的；公司的，企业的 | |
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145
obsession
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| n.困扰，无法摆脱的思想(或情感) | |
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146
impetus
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| n.推动，促进，刺激；推动力 | |
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147
endorsed
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| vt.& vi.endorse的过去式或过去分词形式v.赞同( endorse的过去式和过去分词 )；在（尤指支票的）背面签字；在（文件的）背面写评论；在广告上说本人使用并赞同某产品 | |
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148
elude
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| v.躲避，困惑 | |
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149
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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150
cane
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| n.手杖，细长的茎，藤条；v.以杖击，以藤编制的 | |
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151
killing
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| n.巨额利润；突然赚大钱，发大财 | |
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152
salmon
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| n.鲑，大马哈鱼，橙红色的 | |
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153
bullied
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| adj.被欺负了v.恐吓，威逼( bully的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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154
odds
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| n.让步，机率，可能性，比率；胜败优劣之别 | |
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155
margins
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| 边( margin的名词复数 )； 利润； 页边空白； 差数 | |
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156
suburban
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| adj.城郊的，在郊区的 | |
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157
grilled
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| adj. 烤的, 炙过的, 有格子的 动词grill的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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158
mowed
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| v.刈，割( mow的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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159
sketching
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| n.草图 | |
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160
joints
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| 接头( joint的名词复数 )； 关节； 公共场所（尤指价格低廉的饮食和娱乐场所） （非正式）； 一块烤肉 （英式英语） | |
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161
habitual
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| adj.习惯性的；通常的，惯常的 | |
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162
battered
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| adj.磨损的；v.连续猛击；磨损 | |
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163
sarcasm
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| n.讥讽，讽刺，嘲弄，反话 （adj.sarcastic） | |
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164
slung
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| 抛( sling的过去式和过去分词 )； 吊挂； 遣送； 押往 | |
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165
logic
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| n.逻辑(学)；逻辑性 | |
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166
hormones
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| n. 荷尔蒙，激素 名词hormone的复数形式 | |
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167
cynical
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| adj.(对人性或动机)怀疑的，不信世道向善的 | |
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168
defense
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| n.防御，保卫；[pl.]防务工事；辩护，答辩 | |
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169
mechanism
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| n.机械装置；机构，结构 | |
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170
bum
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| n.臀部；流浪汉，乞丐；vt.乞求，乞讨 | |
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171
thigh
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| n.大腿；股骨 | |
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172
flip
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| vt.快速翻动；轻抛；轻拍；n.轻抛；adj.轻浮的 | |
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173
faculty
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| n.才能；学院，系；(学院或系的)全体教学人员 | |
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174
metabolism
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| n.新陈代谢 | |
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175
cellular
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| adj.移动的；细胞的，由细胞组成的 | |
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176
uneven
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| adj.不平坦的，不规则的，不均匀的 | |
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177
brew
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| v.酿造，调制 | |
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178
generosity
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| n.大度，慷慨，慷慨的行为 | |
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179
ultimatum
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| n.最后通牒 | |
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180
attentive
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| adj.注意的，专心的；关心(别人)的，殷勤的 | |
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181
carnival
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| n.嘉年华会，狂欢，狂欢节，巡回表演 | |
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182
neatly
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| adv.整洁地，干净地，灵巧地，熟练地 | |
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183
silhouetted
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| 显出轮廓的，显示影像的 | |
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184
license
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| n.执照，许可证，特许；v.许可，特许 | |
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185
humble
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| adj.谦卑的，恭顺的；地位低下的；v.降低，贬低 | |
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186
cannons
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| n.加农炮，大炮，火炮( cannon的名词复数 ) | |
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187
projectile
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| n.投射物，发射体；adj.向前开进的；推进的；抛掷的 | |
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188
penitent
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| adj.后悔的；n.后悔者；忏悔者 | |
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189
broccoli
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| n.绿菜花，花椰菜 | |
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190
pinpoint
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| vt.准确地确定；用针标出…的精确位置 | |
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191
raped
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| v.以暴力夺取，强夺( rape的过去式和过去分词 )；强奸 | |
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192
puddle
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| n.(雨)水坑，泥潭 | |
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193
puddles
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| n.水坑， （尤指道路上的）雨水坑( puddle的名词复数 ) | |
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194
seeping
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| v.（液体）渗( seep的现在分词 )；渗透；渗出；漏出 | |
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195
checkered
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| adj.有方格图案的 | |
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196
fabric
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| n.织物，织品，布；构造，结构，组织 | |
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197
stanching
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| v.使（伤口）止血( stanch的现在分词 )；止（血）；使不漏；使不流失 | |
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198
cascade
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| n.小瀑布，喷流；层叠；vi.成瀑布落下 | |
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199
unfamiliar
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| adj.陌生的，不熟悉的 | |
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200
softening
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| 变软，软化 | |
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201
leftovers
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| n.剩余物，残留物，剩菜 | |
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202
zephyrs
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| n.和风，微风( zephyr的名词复数 ) | |
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203
reindeer
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| n.驯鹿 | |
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204
psychic
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| n.对超自然力敏感的人；adj.有超自然力的 | |
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205
rummaged
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| 翻找，搜寻( rummage的过去式和过去分词 )； 已经海关检查 | |
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206
killer
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| n.杀人者，杀人犯，杀手，屠杀者 | |
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207
velvet
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| n.丝绒，天鹅绒；adj.丝绒制的，柔软的 | |
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208
recoil
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| vi.退却，退缩，畏缩 | |
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209
entrenched
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| adj.确立的，不容易改的(风俗习惯) | |
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210
bucks
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| n.雄鹿( buck的名词复数 )；钱；（英国十九世纪初的）花花公子；（用于某些表达方式）责任v.（马等）猛然弓背跃起( buck的第三人称单数 )；抵制；猛然震荡；马等尥起后蹄跳跃 | |
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211
stash
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| v.藏或贮存于一秘密处所；n.隐藏处 | |
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212
belly
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| n.肚子，腹部；(像肚子一样)鼓起的部分，膛 | |
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213
strings
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| n.弦 | |
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214
bumper
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| n.(汽车上的)保险杠；adj.特大的，丰盛的 | |
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215
vocation
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| n.职业，行业 | |
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216
philosophically
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| adv.哲学上；富有哲理性地；贤明地；冷静地 | |
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217
heroin
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| n.海洛因 | |
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218
spine
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| n.脊柱，脊椎；(动植物的)刺；书脊 | |
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219
dealing
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| n.经商方法，待人态度 | |
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220
swollen
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| adj.肿大的，水涨的；v.使变大，肿胀 | |
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221
gasp
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| n.喘息，气喘；v.喘息；气吁吁他说 | |
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222
lipstick
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| n.口红，唇膏 | |
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223
scarlet
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| n.深红色，绯红色，红衣；adj.绯红色的 | |
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224
flirt
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| v.调情，挑逗，调戏；n.调情者，卖俏者 | |
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225
applied
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| adj.应用的；v.应用，适用 | |
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226
huddled
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| 挤在一起（huddle的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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227
recipient
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| a.接受的,感受性强的 n.接受者,感受者,容器 | |
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228
lipsticks
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| n.口红，唇膏( lipstick的名词复数 ) | |
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229
wilt
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| v.(使)植物凋谢或枯萎；(指人)疲倦，衰弱 | |
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230
boxers
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| n.拳击短裤；（尤指职业）拳击手( boxer的名词复数 )；拳师狗 | |
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231
bass
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| n.男低音(歌手)；低音乐器；低音大提琴 | |
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232
tangled
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| adj. 纠缠的，紊乱的 动词tangle的过去式和过去分词 | |
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233
musk
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| n.麝香, 能发出麝香的各种各样的植物，香猫 | |
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234
groan
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| vi./n.呻吟，抱怨；(发出)呻吟般的声音 | |
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235
flecks
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| n.斑点，小点( fleck的名词复数 )；癍 | |
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236
wrenched
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| v.（猛力地）扭( wrench的过去式和过去分词 )；扭伤；使感到痛苦；使悲痛 | |
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237
scrambled
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| v.快速爬行( scramble的过去式和过去分词 )；攀登；争夺；（军事飞机）紧急起飞 | |
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238
spun
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| v.纺，杜撰，急转身 | |
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239
chasm
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| n.深坑，断层，裂口，大分岐，利害冲突 | |
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240
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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241
cuff
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| n.袖口；手铐；护腕；vt.用手铐铐；上袖口 | |
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242
conceal
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| v.隐藏，隐瞒，隐蔽 | |
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243
afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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244
serial
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| n.连本影片，连本电视节目；adj.连续的 | |
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245
killers
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| 凶手( killer的名词复数 )； 消灭…者； 致命物； 极难的事 | |
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246
bluffing
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| n. 威吓，唬人 动词bluff的现在分词形式 | |
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247
poker
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| n.扑克；vt.烙制 | |
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248
jacks
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| n.抓子游戏；千斤顶( jack的名词复数 )；（电）插孔；[电子学]插座；放弃 | |
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249
flirting
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| v.调情，打情骂俏( flirt的现在分词 ) | |
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250
earrings
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| n.耳环( earring的名词复数 )；耳坠子 | |
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251
lobe
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| n.耳垂，（肺，肝等的）叶 | |
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252
hoops
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| n.箍( hoop的名词复数 )；（篮球）篮圈；（旧时儿童玩的）大环子；（两端埋在地里的）小铁弓 | |
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253
anonymity
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| n.the condition of being anonymous | |
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254
obliterate
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| v.擦去，涂抹，去掉...痕迹，消失，除去 | |
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255
stunned
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| adj. 震惊的，惊讶的 动词stun的过去式和过去分词 | |
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256
throbbed
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| 抽痛( throb的过去式和过去分词 )； （心脏、脉搏等）跳动 | |
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257
smear
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| v.涂抹；诽谤，玷污；n.污点；诽谤，污蔑 | |
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258
mound
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| n.土墩，堤，小山；v.筑堤，用土堆防卫 | |
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259
tundra
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| n.苔原，冻土地带 | |
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260
rattling
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| adj. 格格作响的, 活泼的, 很好的 adv. 极其, 很, 非常 动词rattle的现在分词 | |
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261
unwilling
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| adj.不情愿的 | |
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262
flipping
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| 讨厌之极的 | |
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263
wariness
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| n. 注意,小心 | |
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264
rattled
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| 慌乱的，恼火的 | |
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265
crease
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| n.折缝，褶痕，皱褶；v.(使)起皱 | |
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266
gathering
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| n.集会，聚会，聚集 | |
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