Nineteen Minutes

by Jodie Picoult

  In spite of the commonalities described within, we caution the use of this report to create a checklist that might predict future school shooters. In the hands of the media, this might result in labeling many nonviolent students as potentially lethal. In fact, a great many adolescents who will never commit violent acts will show some of the traits on the list.

  Lewis Houghton was a creature of habit. Every morning, he woke up at 5:35 and went for a run on the treadmill in the basement. He showered and he ate a bowl of cornflakes while he scanned the headlines in the paper. He wore the same overcoat, no matter how cold or hot the weather, and he parked in the same spot in the faculty lot.

  He’d once tried to mathematically figure the effect of routine on happiness, but there was an interesting twist to the calculation: The measure of joy brought by the familiar was amplified or reduced by the individual’s resistance to change. Or-as Lacy would have said, English, Lewis-for every person like himself who liked the worn grooves of the familiar, there was another person who found it stifling. In those cases, the comfort quotient became a negative number, and doing what came habitually actually detracted from happiness. It was that way, he supposed, for Lacy, who wandered around the house as if she’d never seen it before, who couldn’t stand the thought of going back to her practice. How can you expect me to think of someone else’s child right now? she had argued.

  She kept insisting that they needed to do something, but Lewis didn’t know what that was supposed to be. And because he couldn’t comfort either his wife or his son, Lewis decided he was left to comfort himself. After sitting at home for five days after Peter’s arraignment, one morning he woke up and packed his briefcase, ate his cornflakes, read the paper, and headed off to work.

  He was thinking of the equation for happiness as he headed to the office. One of the tenets of his breakthrough-H = R/E, or happiness equals reality divided by expectation-was based on the universal truth that you always had some expectation for what was to come. In other words, E was always a real number, since you could not divide by zero. But recently, he wondered about the truth of that. Math could only take a man so far. In the middle of the night, when he was wide awake and staring up at the ceiling, knowing that his wife lay beside him pretending to be asleep and doing the very same thing, Lewis had come to believe that you might be conditioned to expect absolutely nothing from one’s life. That way, when you lost your first son, you didn’t grieve. When your second son was jailed for a massacre, you were not shattered. You could divide by zero; it felt like a canyon where your heart used to be.

  As soon as he set foot on the campus, Lewis felt better. Here, he was not the father of the shooter and never had been. He was Lewis Houghton, professor of economics. Here, he was still at the top of his game; he didn’t have to look at the body of his research and wonder at what point it had begun to unravel.

  Lewis had just pulled a sheaf of papers out of his briefcase that morning when the chair of the econ department poked his head through the open doorway. Hugh Macquarie was a big man-Huge Andhairy is what the college students called him behind his back-who had taken over the position with gusto. “Houghton? What are you doing here?”

  “Last I checked, the college was still paying me to work,” Lewis said, trying to make a joke. He couldn’t make jokes, never had been able to do so. His timing was off; he gave away punch lines by accident.

  Hugh walked into the room. “My God, Lewis, I don’t know what to say.” He hesitated.

  Lewis didn’t blame Hugh. He barely knew what to say himself. There were Hallmark cards for bereavement, for loss of a beloved pet, for getting laid off from a job, but no one seemed to have the right words of comfort for someone whose son had just killed ten people.

  “I thought about calling you at home. Lisa even wanted to bring a casserole or something. How’s Lacy holding up?”

  Lewis pushed his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose. “Oh,” he said. “You know. We’re trying to keep things as normal as possible.”

  When he said this, he pictured his life as a graph. Normal was a line that stretched on and on, teasing its way closer to an axis but never really reaching it.

  Hugh sat down in the chair across from Lewis’s desk-the same chair that was sometimes filled by a student who needed a tutorial in microeconomics. “Lewis, take some time off,” he said.

  “Thanks, Hugh. I appreciate that.” Lewis glanced at an equation on the far blackboard that he’d been puzzling out. “Right now, though, I really need to be here. It keeps me from thinking about being there.” Reaching for some chalk, Lewis began to print across the board, a long and lovely stream of numbers that calmed him inside.

  He knew that there was a difference between something that makes you happy and something that doesn’t make you unhappy. The trick was convincing yourself these were one and the same.

  Hugh put his hand on Lewis’s arm, stilling it mid-equation. “Maybe I said that wrong. We need you to take time off.”

  Lewis stared at him. “Oh. Um. I see,” he said, although he didn’t. If Lewis was willing to segregate his work life from his home life, why couldn’t Sterling College do the same?

  Unless.

  Had that been his mistake in the first place? If you were uncertain in the decisions you made as a father, could you patch over your insecurities with the confidence you had as a professional? Or would the fix always be flimsy, a paper wall that couldn’t bear weight?

  “It’s just for a bit,” Hugh said. “It’s what’s best.”

  For whom? Lewis thought, but he remained silent until he heard Hugh close the door behind himself on his way out.

  When the chairman was gone, Lewis lifted the chalk again. He stared at the equations until they melded together, and then he began to scrawl furiously, a composer with a symphony moving too fast for his fingers. Why hadn’t he realized this before? Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you inverted the equation-expectation divided by reality-you didn’t get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.

  Pure logic: Assuming reality was constant, expectation had to be greater than reality to create optimism. On the other hand, a pessimist was someone with expectations lower than reality, a fraction of diminishing returns. The human condition meant that this number approached zero without reaching it-you never really completely gave up hope; it might come flooding back at any provocation.

  Lewis stepped back from the blackboard, surveying his handiwork. Someone who was happy would have little need to hope for change. But, conversely, an optimistic person was that way because he wanted to believe in something better than his reality.

  He started wondering if there were exceptions to the rule: if happy people might be hopeful, if the unhappy might have given up any anticipation that things might get better.

  And that made Lewis think of his son.

  He stood in front of the blackboard and started to cry, his hands and his sleeves covered in fine white chalk dust, as if he had become a ghost.

  The office of the Geek Squad, as Patrick affectionately referred to the tech guys who hacked into hard drives to find proof of pornography and downloads from The Anarchist Cookbook, was filled with computers. Not just the one seized from Peter Houghton’s room, but also several from Sterling High, including the one from the secretary’s main office and another batch from the library.

  “He’s good,” said Orestes, a tech that Patrick would have sworn was not old enough to have graduated from high school himself. “We’re not just talking HTML programming. Guy knew his shit.”

  He pulled up a few files from the bowels of Peter’s computer, graphics files that didn’t make much sense to Patrick until the tech typed a few buttons and suddenly a three-dimensional dragon appeared on the screen and breathed fire at them. “Wow,” Patrick said.

  “Yeah. From what I can tell, he actually made up a few computer games, even posted them for gamers on a couple of
sites where you can do that and get feedback.”

  “Any message boards on those sites?”

  “Dude, give me an iota of credit,” Orestes said, and he clicked onto one he’d already flagged. “Peter went by the screen name DeathWish. They’re a-”

  “-band,” Patrick finished. “I know.”

  “They’re not just a band,” Orestes said with reverence, his fingers flying over the keyboard. “They’re the modern voice of the collective human conscience.”

  “Tell that to Tipper Gore.”

  “Who?”

  Patrick laughed. “She was before your time, I guess.”

  “What did you used to listen to when you were a kid?”

  “The cavemen, banging rocks together,” Patrick said dryly.

  The screen filled with a series of posts from DeathWish. Most of them were entries about how to enhance a certain graphic or reviews of other games that had been posted on the site. Two quoted lyrics from the band Death Wish. “This is my personal favorite,” Orestes said, and he scrolled down.

  From: DeathWish

  To: Hades 1991

  This town blows. This weekend there is a craft festival where old bags come to show off the ticky tacky shit they made. They should call it a CRAP festival. I’m gonna hide in the bushes outside the church. Target practice as they cross the street-ten points each! Yee ha!

  Patrick leaned back in the chair. “Well, that doesn’t prove anything.”

  “Yeah,” Orestes said. “Craft festivals do kind of suck. But check this out.” He swiveled in his own chair to reach another terminal, set up on a table. “He hacked into the school’s secure computer system.”

  “To do what? Change his grades?”

  “Nope. The program he wrote broke through the firewalls on the school system at 9:58 a.m.”

  “That’s when the car bomb went off,” Patrick murmured.

  Orestes pivoted the monitor so that Patrick could see. “This was on every single screen on every single computer at the school.”

  Patrick stared at the purple background, the flaming red letters that scrolled like a marquee: READY OR NOT…HERE I COME.

  Jordan was already sitting at the table of the conference room when Peter Houghton was brought in by a correctional officer. “Thanks,” he said to the guard, his eyes on Peter, who immediately canvassed the room, his gaze lighting on the only window. Jordan had seen this over and over in prisoners he’d represented-an ordinary human could so quickly turn into a caged animal. Then again, it was a chicken-and-egg conundrum: were they animals because they were in jail…or were they in jail because they were animals?

  “Have a seat,” he said, and Peter remained standing.

  Unfazed, Jordan started talking. “I want to lay out the ground rules, Peter,” he said. “Everything I say to you is confidential. Everything you say to me is confidential. I can’t tell anyone what you say. I can tell you, however, not to talk to the media or the police or anyone else for that matter. If anyone tries to contact you, you contact me immediately-call me collect. As your lawyer, I get to do the talking for you. From now on, I’m your best friend, your mother, your father, your priest. Are we clear on that?”

  Peter glared at him. “Crystal.”

  “Good. So.” Jordan pulled a legal pad out of his briefcase, a pencil. “I imagine you’ve got a few questions; we can start with those.”

  “I hate it here,” Peter burst out. “I don’t get why I have to stay here.”

  Most of Jordan’s clients started out quiet and terrified in jail-which quickly gave way to anger and indignation. But at that moment Peter sounded like any other ordinary teenage kid-like Thomas had sounded at his age, when the world apparently revolved around him and Jordan just happened to be living on it as well. However, the lawyer in Jordan trumped the parent in him, and he started to wonder if Peter Houghton truly might not know why he was in jail. Jordan would be the first to tell you insanity defenses rarely worked and were grossly overrated, but maybe Peter could be passed off as the real deal-and that was the key to securing an acquittal. “What do you mean?” he pressed.

  “They’re the ones who did this to me, and now I’m the one who’s being punished.”

  Jordan sat back and crossed his arms. Peter didn’t feel remorse for what he’d done, that much was clear. In fact, he considered himself a victim.

  And here was the remarkable thing about being a defense attorney: Jordan didn’t really care. There was no room in his line of work for his own personal feelings. He had worked with the scum of the earth before-killers and rapists who fancied themselves martyrs. His job wasn’t to believe them or to pass judgment. It was simply to do or say whatever he had to in order to get them free. In spite of what he’d just told Peter, he was not a clergyman or a shrink or a friend to a client. He was simply a spin doctor.

  “Well,” Jordan said evenly, “you need to understand the jail’s position. To them, you’re just a murderer.”

  “Then they’re all hypocrites,” Peter said. “If they saw a roach, they’d step on it, wouldn’t they?”

  “Is that how you’d describe what happened at the school?”

  Peter flicked his eyes away. “Do you know that I’m not allowed to read magazines?” he said. “I can’t even go into the exercise yard like everyone else.”

  “I’m not here to register your complaints.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “To help you get out,” Jordan said. “And if that’s going to happen, then you need to talk to me.”

  Peter folded his arms across his chest and glanced from Jordan’s collared shirt to his tie to his polished black shoes. “Why? You don’t really give a shit about me.”

  Jordan stood up and stuffed his notebook into his briefcase. “You know what? You’re right. I don’t really give a shit about you. I’m just doing my job, because unlike you, I won’t have the state paying my room and board for the rest of my life.” He started for the door, but was called back by the sound of Peter’s voice.

  “Why is everyone so upset that those jerks are dead?”

  Jordan turned slowly, making a mental note that kindness had not worked especially well with Peter, nor had the voice of authority. What had made him respond was pure and simple anger.

  “I mean, people are crying over them…and they were assholes. Everyone’s saying I ruined their lives, but no one seemed to care when my life was the one being ruined.”

  Jordan sat down on the edge of the table. “How?”

  “Where do you want me to start,” Peter answered, bitter. “In nursery school, when the teacher would bring out snacks, and one of them would pull out my chair so I’d fall down and everyone else would crack up? Or in second grade, when they held my head down in the toilet and they flushed it over and over, just because they knew they could? Or that time they beat me up on my way home from school and I needed stitches?”

  Jordan picked up his pad and wrote STITCHES. “Who’s they?”

  “A whole bunch of kids,” Peter said.

  The ones you wanted to kill? Jordan thought, but he didn’t ask. “Why do you think they targeted you?”

  “Because they’re dickheads? I don’t know. They’re like a pack. They have to make someone else feel like shit in order to feel good about themselves.”

  “What did you try to do to stop it?”

  Peter snorted. “In case you haven’t noticed, Sterling’s not exactly a metropolis. Everyone knows everyone. You wind up in high school with the same kids who were in the sandbox in your preschool.”

  “Couldn’t you stay out of their path?”

  “I had to go to school,” Peter said. “You’d be surprised how small it gets when you’re there for eight hours every day.”

  “So did they do this outside of school, too?”

  “When they could catch me,” Peter said. “If I was by myself.”

  “How about harassment-phone calls, letters, threats?” Jordan asked.

  “Online,” P
eter said. “They’d send me instant messages, saying I was a loser, things like that. And they took an email I wrote and spammed it out to the whole school…made it a joke…” He looked away, falling silent.

  “Why?”

  “It was…” He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Jordan made a note on his pad. “Did you ever tell anyone about what was going on? Parents? Teachers?”

  “No one gives a crap,” Peter said. “They tell you to ignore it. They say they’ll be watching out to make sure it doesn’t happen, but they never watch.” He walked to the window and pressed his palms against the glass. “There was this kid in my first-grade class who had that disease, the one where your spine grows outside your body-”

  “Spina bifida?”

  “Yeah. She had a wheelchair and she couldn’t sit up or anything, and before she came to class the teacher told us we had to treat her like she was just like us. The thing is, she wasn’t like us, and we all knew it, and she knew it. So we were supposed to lie to her face?” Peter shook his head. “Everyone talks like it’s all right to be different, but America’s supposed to be this melting pot, and what the hell does that mean? If it’s a melting pot, then you’re really just trying to make everyone the same, aren’t you?”

  Jordan found himself thinking about his son Thomas’s transition to middle school. They’d moved from Bainbridge to Salem Falls, a small enough school system that the cliques had already developed thick cellular walls against outsiders. For a while, Thomas had been a chameleon-he’d come home from school and hole up in his room, emerging as a soccer player, a thespian, a “mathlete.” It took him several sheddings of his own adolescent skin to find a group of friends who let him be whoever he wanted; and the rest of Thomas’s high school career was a fairly peaceful one. But what if he hadn’t found that group of friends? What if he’d continued peeling off layers of himself until there was nothing left at his core?