Because, her father answered, they are.
Principal Aaronsen stood up, and so did Mrs. Gray, and that was how Trixie realized that they intended to accompany her to class. Immediately she panicked. This was way worse than being walked in by her father; this was like having fighter jets escort a plane into a safe landing: Was there any person at the airport who wouldn't be watching out the windows and trying to guess what had happened on board?
“Um,” Trixie said, “I think I'd kind of like to go by myself.” It was almost third period, which meant she'd have time to go to
her locker before heading to English class. She watched the principal look at the guidance counselor. “Well,” Mr. Aaronsen said, “if that's what you want.”
Trixie fled the principal's office, blindly navigating the maze of halls that made up the high school. Class was still in session, so it was quiet - the faint jingle of a kid with a bathroom pass, the muted click of high heels, the wheezy strains of the wind instruments upstairs in the band room. She twisted the combination on her own
locker, 40-22-38. Hey, Jason had said, a lifetime ago. Aren't those Barbie's measurements?
Trixie rested her forehead against the cool metal. All she had to do was sit in class for another four hours. She could fill her mind
with Lord of the Flies and A = nr2 and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. She didn't have to talk to anyone if she didn't want to. All of her teachers had been briefed. She would be an army of one.
When she pulled open the door of her locker, a sea of snakes poured out of the narrow cubby, spilling over her feet. She reached down to pick one up. Eight small foil squares, accordion-pleated at the perforations.
Trojan, Trixie read. Twisted Pleasure Lubricated Latex Condoms.
* * *
“They're all having sex,” Marita Soorenstad said, tilting her head and pouring the last of the lime-colored powder into her mouth. In the fifteen minutes that Mike Bartholemew had been sitting with the assistant district attorney, she'd consumed three Pixy Stix. "Teenage girls want guys to be attracted to them, but no one's taught them how to deal with the emotions that come with that stuff. I see this all
the time, Mike. Teenage girls wake up to find someone having sex with them, and they don't say a word.“ She crushed the paper straw in her fist and grimaced. ”Some judge told me these were a godsend when he was trying to quit smoking. But I swear all I'm getting is a sugar high and a green tongue."
“Trixie Stone said no,” the detective pointed out. “It's in her statement.”
“And Trixie Stone was drinking. Which the defense attorney will use to call her judgment into question. Oosterhaus is going to say that she was intoxicated, and playing strip poker, and saying yes yes yes all the way up till afterward, which is about when she decided to say no. He's going to ask her what time it was when she said it and how many pictures were on the walls of the room and what song was playing on the stereo and whether the moon was in Scorpio . . . details she won't be able to remember. Then he'll say that if she can't remember particulars like this, how on earth could she be sure of whether she told Jason to stop?” Marita hesitated. “I'm not saying that Trixie Stone wasn't raped, Mike. I'm just telling you that not everyone is going to see it as clearly.”
“I think the family knows that,” Bartholemew said.
“The family never knows that, no matter what they say.” Marita opened the file on Trixie Stone. “What the hell else did they think their kid was out doing at two in the morning?” Bartholemew pictured a car overturned on the side of the road, the rescue crews clustered around the body that had been thrown through the windshield. He imagined the EMT who pulled up the sleeve of his daughter's shirt and saw the bruises and needle marks along the map of her veins. He wondered if that tech had looked at Holly's long-sleeved shirt, worn on the hottest night of July, and asked himself what this girl's parents had been thinking when they saw her leave the house in it.
The answer to this question, and to Marita's: We weren't thinking. We didn't let ourselves think, because we didn't want to know.
Bartholemew cleared his throat. “The Stones thought their daughter was having a parent-supervised sleepover at a friend's house.”
Marita ripped open a yellow Pixy Stix. “Great,” she said, upending the contents into her mouth. “So Trixie's already lied once.”
* * *
Even though parents don't want to admit it, school isn't about what a kid absorbs while she's sitting at a cramped desk, but what happens around and in spite of that. It's the five minutes between bells when you find out whose house is hosting the party that evening; it's borrowing the right shade of lip gloss from your friend before you have French with the cute guy who moved here from Ohio; it's being noticed by everyone else and pretending you are above that sort of celebrity.
Once all this social interaction was surgically excised from Trixie's school day, she noticed how little she cared about the academic part. In English, she focused on the printed text in her book until the letters jumped like popcorn in a skillet. From time to time she would hear a snide comment: What did she do to her hair? Only once did someone have the guts to actually speak to her in class. It was in phys ed, during an indoor soccer game. A girl on her own team had come up to her after the teacher called a time-out. “Someone who got raped for real,” she'd whispered,
“wouldn't be out here playing soccer.”
The part of the day that Trixie was most dreading was lunch. In the cafeteria, the mass of students split like amoebas into socially polarized groups. There were the drama kids and the skateboarders and the brains. There were the Sexy Sevena group of girls who set the school's unwritten fashion rules, like what months you should wear shorts to school and how flip-flops were totally passe. There were the caffies, who hung out all morning drinking Java with their friends until the voc-tech bus came to ferry them to classes on hairstyling and child care. And then there was the table where Trixie used to belong - the one with the popular kids, the one where Zephyr and Moss and a carefree knot of hockey players hung out pretending they didn't know that everyone else was looking at them and saying they were so fake, when in reality those same kids went home and wished that their own group of friends could be as cool.
Trixie bought herself french fries and chocolate milk - her comfort lunch, for when she screwed up on a test or had period cramps - and stood in the middle of the cafeteria, trying to find a place for herself. Since Jason had broken up with Trixie, she'd been sitting somewhere else, but Zephyr had always joined her in solidarity. Today, though, she could see Zephyr sitting at their old table. One sentence rose from the collective din: “She wouldn't dare.”
Trixie held her plastic tray like a shield. She finally moved toward the Heater Hos, congregating near the radiator. They were girls who wore white pants with spandex in them and had boyfriends who drove raised I-Rocs; girls who got pregnant at fifteen and then brought the ultrasounds to school to show off. One of them - a ninth-grader in what looked like her ninth month - smiled at Trixie, and the action was so unexpected, she nearly stumbled. “There's room,” the girl said, and she slid her backpack off the table so that Trixie could sit down. A lot of kids at Bethel High made fun of the Heater Hos, but Trixie never had. She found them too depressing to be the butt of jokes. They seemed to be so nonchalant about throwing their lives away - not that their lives were the kind that anyone would have wanted in the first place, but still. Trixie had wondered if those bellybaring T-shirts they wore and the pride they took in their situation were just for show, a way to cover up how sad they really were about what had happened to them. After all, if you acted like you really wanted something even when you didn't, you just might convince yourself along with everyone else. Trixie ought to know.