There was a knock on her door, and a moment later Seth stepped into her office. “Are those horns on your head,” he said, “or are you just happy to see me?”
I
She yanked off the headband.
“Five minutes.” He closed the door, locked it. “You owe me that much.”
Relationships always sounded so physically painfuclass="underline" You fell in love, you broke a heart, you lost your head. Was it any wonder that people came through the experience with battle scars? The problem with a marriage - or maybe its strength - was that it spanned a distance, and you were never the same person you started out being. If you were lucky, you could still recognize each other years later. If you weren't, you wound up in your office with a boy fifteen years younger than you were, pouring his heart into your open hands.
All right. If she was going to be honest, she had loved the way Seth knew what an anapest was, and a canzone. She loved seeing their reflection in a pane of glass as they passed a storefront and being surprised every time. She loved playing Scrabble on a rainy afternoon when she should have been grading papers or attending a departmental meeting. But just because she had called in sick that day didn't mean she wasn't still a professor. Just because she abandoned her family didn't mean she wasn't still a wife, a mother. Her biggest sin, when you got right down to it, was forgetting all that in the first place.
“Seth,” she said, “I don't know how to make this any easier. But . . .”
She broke off, realizing the words she was about to say: But I love my husband. I always have.
“We need to talk,” Seth said quietly. He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and tossed a rolled newspaper onto the table. Laura had seen it. The front page chronicled the newly filed charge by the district attorney. Jason Underhill would be tried as an adult, due to the presence of date rape drugs in the victim's bloodstream.
“Ketamine,” Seth said.
Laura blinked at him. From what the prosecutor had said, the drug found in Trixie's system hadn't even been one of the more popular date rape drugs. It hadn't been listed in the newspaper, either. “How would you know that?”
Seth sat down on the edge of her desk. “There's something I have to tell you,” he said.
* * *
“I'm coming!” Trixie yelled through the open door, as her father honked the horn for the third time. Jesus. It wasn't like she wanted to go into town right now, and it wasn't her fault that the pizza cheese he was using to cook dinner had grown enough mold to be classified as an antibiotic. She hadn't been doing anything earthshattering that she couldn't interrupt, but it was the principle that was upsetting her; Neither parent felt comfortable letting Trixie out of sight.
She stomped into the first pair of boots she could find and headed outside to his idling truck. “Can't we just have soup?” Trixie said, slouching down in her seat, when what she really meant was: What will it take to make you trust me again?
Her father put the truck into first gear to go down a long hill. “I know you want me to leave you home alone. But I hope you also know why I can't do that.”
Trixie rolled her eyes toward the window. “Whatever.” As they approached town, there was a glut of cars. People in bright parkas and scarves spilled across the street like a stream of
confetti. Trixie felt her stomach turn over. “What's the date?” she
murmured. She'd seen the signs all over schooclass="underline" ICE = NICE.
Text file converted with freeware AcroPad - www.dreamscape.it
DON'T BE
A SNOWFLAKECOME TO WINTERFEST.
Trixie shrank back in her seat as three girls she recognized from school came so close to the car they brushed the front bumper. Everyone came to the Winterfest. When she was little, her parents would take her to pat the sorry old reindeer idling near the camera
store. She could remember seeing ordinary teachers and doctors and waitresses become Victorian carolers for a night. Last year, Trixie had been an elf along with Zephyr, the two of them wearing double layers of skating tights and handing out candy canes to the kids who sat on Santa's lap.
This year, walking down Main Street would be totally different. At first, no one would see her, because it was dark out. But then, someone would bump into her by accident. Sorry, they'd say, and then they'd realize who it was. They'd tap their friends. They would point. They'd lean close and whisper about how Trixie wasn't wearing any makeup and how her hair looked like it hadn't been washed in a week. Before she had made it to the other end of Main Street, their stares would have burned into the back of her coat like sunlight through a looking glass, starting a flash fire that reduced her to a pile of ashes.
“Daddy,” she said, “can't we just go home?” Her father glanced at her. He'd had to detour around Main Street and was now parked in a lot behind the grocery store. Trixie could see he was weighing the cost of reaching his destination against Trixie's extreme discomfort. . . and factoring in her suicide attempt to boot. “You stay in the car,” her father conceded. “I'll be right back.”
Trixie nodded and watched him cross the parking lot. She closed her eyes and counted to fifty. She listened to the sound of her own pulse.
Yet as it turned out, what Trixie had thought she wanted most of
all - being left alone - turned out to be absolutely terrifying. When the door of the car beside her slammed, she jumped. The headlights swept over her as the car backed out, and she ducked her face against the collar of her coat so that the driver couldn't see.
Her father had been gone for three minutes when she started to really panic. It didn't take much longer than that to buy some stupid cheese, did it? What if someone else came to this parking lot and
saw her sitting there? How long before a crowd gathered, calling her a slut and a whore? Who would save her if they decided to pound on the windows, start a witch hunt, lynch her?
She peered out the windshield. It would take fifteen seconds, tops, to make it to the door of the grocery store. By now her father would be in line. She might run into someone she knew there, but at least she wouldn't be alone.
Trixie got out of the car and started to race across the parking lot. She could see the buttery windows of the grocery mart and the line of wire shopping carts shivering against its outer wall.
Someone was coming. She couldn't see whether it was her father
- the figure seemed big enough, but the streetlamp was behind him, obscuring the features. If it was her father, he'd see her first, Trixie realized. And if it wasn't her father, then she was going to move past the stranger at the speed of light.
But as Trixie broke into a sprint, she hit a patch of black ice and her feet gave out from underneath her. One leg twisted, and she could feel herself falling. The moment before her left hip struck the pavement, she was wrenched upright by the very person she'd been trying to avoid. “You okay?” he said, and she looked up to find Jason holding her upper arm.
He let go almost as quickly as he'd grabbed her. Trixie's mother had said that Jason couldn't come near her, couldn't cross paths with her - if he did, he'd be shipped off to a juvenile detention center before the trial. But either her mother had been wrong or Jason had forgotten, because he shook off whatever fear had made him release her and began advancing on her instead. He smelled like a distillery, and his voice was raw. “What did you tell them? What are you trying to do to me?”
Trixie fought for breath. The cold was seeping through the back of her jeans and there was water in her boot where it had gone through the ice into a puddle. “I didn't... I'm not...”