“Our house was attached to the school. The last person who'd lived in it was the old principal, who'd hanged himself from a beam in the kitchen. Everyone knew about it. Sometimes, in the school, the audiovisual equipment would turn on even when it was unplugged. Or the basketballs lying on the floor of the gym would start to bounce by themselves. In our house, drawers would fly open every now and then, and sometimes you could smell aftershave, out of nowhere.” Trixie's father looked up at her. “The Yupiit are afraid of ghosts. Sometimes, in school, I'd see kids spit into the air, to check if the ghost was close enough to steal their saliva. Or they'd walk around the building three times so that the ghost couldn't follow them back to their own homes.” He shrugged. “The thing is ... I was the white kid. I talked funny and I looked funny and I got picked on for that on a daily basis. I was terrified of that ghost just like they were, but I never let anyone know it. That way, I knew they might call me a lot of awful names . . . but one of them wasn't coward.”
“Jason's not a ghost,” Trixie said quietly. Her father tugged her hat down over her ears. His eyes were so dark she could see herself shining in them. “Well, then,” he said,
“I guess you've got nothing to be afraid of.”
* * *
Daniel nearly ran after Trixie as she navigated the slippery sidewalk up to the front of the school. What if he was wrong about this? What if Janice and the doctors and everyone else didn't know how cruel teenagers could be? What if Trixie came home even more devastated?
Trixie walked with her head down, bracing against the cold. Her green jacket was a stain against the snow. She didn't turn back to look at him.
When she was little, Daniel had always waited for Trixie to enter the school building before he drove away. There was too much that could go wrong: She might trip and fall; she could be approached by a bully; she might be teased by a pack of girls. He'd liked to imagine that just by keeping an eye on her, he could imbue her with the power of safety, much like the way he'd draw it onto one of his comics panels in a wavy, flowing force field. The truth was, though, that Daniel had needed Trixie far more than Trixie had ever needed him. Without realizing it, she'd put on a show for him every day: hopping, twirling, spreading her arms and taking a running leap, as if she thought that one of these mornings she might actually get airborne. He'd watch her and he'd see how easy it was for kids to believe in a world different from the one presented to them. Then he'd drive home and translate that stroke by stroke onto a fresh page.
He could remember wondering how long it would take for reality to catch up to his daughter. He could remember thinking: The saddest day in the world will be the one when she stops pretending.
Daniel waited until Trixie slipped through the double doors of the school, and then pulled carefully away from the curb. He needed a load of sand in the back of his pickup to keep it from fishtailing in the snow. Whatever it took, right now, to keep his balance.
3
Trixie knew the story behind her real name, but that didn't mean she hated it any less. Beatrice Portinari had been Dante's one true love, the woman who'd inspired him to write a whole batch of epic poems. Her mother the classics professor had singlehandedly filled out the birth certificate when her father (who'd wanted to name his newborn daughter Sarah) was in the bathroom.
Dante and Beatrice, though, were no Romeo and Juliet. Dante met her when he was only nine and then didn't see her again until he was eighteen. They both married other people and Beatrice died young. If that was everlasting love, Trixie didn't want any part of it.
When Trixie had complained to her father, he said Nicolas Cage had named his son Kal-el, Superman's Kryptonian name, and that she should be grateful. But Bethel High was brimming with Mallorys, Dakotas, Crispins, and Willows. Trixie had spent most of her life pulling the teacher aside on the first day of school, to make sure she said Trixie when she read the attendance sheet, instead of Beatrice, which made the other kids crack up. There was a time in fourth grade when she started calling herself Justine, but it didn't catch on.
Summer Friedman was in the main office with Trixie, signing into school late. She was tall and blonde, with a perpetual tan, although Trixie knew for a fact she'd been born in December. She turned around, clutching her blue hall pass. “Slut,” she hissed at Trixie as she walked past.
“Beatrice?” the secretary said. “The principal's ready for you.”
Trixie had been in the principal's office only once, when she made honor roll during the first quarter of freshman year. She'd been sent during homeroom, and the whole time she'd been shaking, trying to figure out what she'd done wrong. Principal Aaronsen had been waiting with a Cookie Monster grin on his face and his hand extended. “Congratulations, Beatrice,” he had said, and he'd handed her a little gold honor roll card with her own disgusting name printed across it.
“Beatrice,” he said again this time, when she went into his office. She realized that the guidance counselor, Mrs. Gray, was waiting there for her too. Did they think that if she saw a man alone she might freak out? “It's good to have you back,” Mr. Aaronsen said.
It's good to be back. The lie sat too sour on Trixie's tongue, so she swallowed it down again.
The principal was staring at her hair, or lack of it, but he was too polite to say anything. “Mrs. Gray and I just want you to know that our doors are open any time for you,” the principal said.
Trixie's father had two names. She had discovered this by accident when she was ten and snooping in his desk drawers. Wedged into the back of one, behind all the smudged erasers and tubes of mechanical pencil leads, was a photograph of two boys squatting in front of a cache of fish. One of the boys was white, one was native. On the back was written: Cane & Wass, fish camp. Akiak, Alaska 1976.
Trixie had taken the photo to her father, who'd been out mowing the lawn. Who are these people? she had asked.
Her father had turned off the lawn mower. They're dead.
“If you feel the slightest bit uncomfortable,” Principal Aaronsen was saying. “If you just want a place to catch your breath ...”
Three hours later, Trixie's father had come looking for her. The one on the right is me, he'd said, showing her the photo again. And that's Cane, a friend of mine.
Your name's not Wass, Trixie had pointed out.
Her father had explained that the day after he'd been born and named, a village elder came to visit and started calling him Wass
- short for Wassilieafter her husband, who'd fallen through the ice and died a week before. It was perfectly normal for a Yup'ik Eskimo who had recently died to take up residence in a newborn. Villagers would laugh when they met Daniel as a baby, saying things like, Oh, look. Wass has come back with blue eyes! or Maybe that's why Wass took that English as a Second Language class!
For eighteen years, he'd been known as Daniel to his white mother and as Wass to everyone else. In the Yup'ik world, he told Trixie, souls get recycled. In the Yup'ik world, no one ever really gets to leave.
“... a policy of zero tolerance,” the principal said, and Trixie nodded, although she hadn't really been listening. The night after her father told Trixie about his second name, she had a question ready when he came to tuck her in. How come when I first asked, you said those boys were dead?