Nineteen Minutes

by Jodie Picoult

  She watched him lock eyes with Peter and try to smile. “Yes.”

  “Did you two hang out after school sometimes?”

  “Yes.”

  “What sort of things did you like to do?”

  “We were both really into computers. Sometimes we’d play video games, and then we started to learn programming so we could create a few of our own.”

  “Did Peter ever write any video games without you?” Diana asked.

  “Sure.”

  “What happened when he finished?”

  “We’d play them. But there are also websites where you can upload your game and have other people rate them for you.”

  Derek looked up just then and noticed the television cameras in the back of the room. His jaw dropped, and he froze.

  “Derek,” Diana said. “Derek?” She waited for him to focus on her. “Let me hand you a CD-ROM. It’s marked State’s Exhibit 302…. Can you tell me what it is?”

  “That’s Peter’s most recent game.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “Hide-n-Shriek.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “It’s one of those games where you go around shooting the bad guys.”

  “Who are the bad guys in this game?” Diana asked.

  Derek darted a glance at Peter again. “They’re jocks.”

  “Where does the game take place?”

  “In a school,” Derek said.

  From the corner of her eye, Diana could see Jordan shifting in his chair. “Derek, were you in school the morning of March 6, 2007?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What was your first-period class that morning?”

  “Honors Trig.”

  “How about second period?” Diana asked.

  “English.”

  “Then where did you go?”

  “I had gym third period, but my asthma was pretty bad, so I had a doctor’s note to excuse me from class. Since I finished my work early in English, I asked Mrs. Eccles if I could go to my car to get it.”

  Diana nodded. “Where was your car parked?”

  “In the student parking lot, behind the school.”

  “Can you show me on this diagram which door you used to leave the school at the end of second period?” Derek reached toward the easel and pointed to one of the rear doors of the school. “What did you see when you went outside?”

  “Uh, a lot of cars.”

  “Any people?”

  “Yes,” Derek said. “Peter. It looked like he was getting something out of the backseat of his car.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I went over to say hi. I asked him why he was late to school, and he stood up and looked at me in a weird way.”

  “Weird? What do you mean?”

  Derek shook his head. “I don’t know. Like he didn’t know who I was for a second.”

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  “He said, ‘Go home. Something’s about to happen.’”

  “Did you think that was unusual?”

  “Well, it was a little bit Twilight Zone…”

  “Had Peter ever said anything like that to you before?”

  “Yes,” Derek said quietly.

  “When?”

  Jordan objected, as Diana had expected, and Judge Wagner overruled it, as she’d hoped. “A few weeks before,” Derek said, “the first time we were playing Hide-n-Shriek.”

  “What did he say?” Derek looked down and mumbled a response. “Derek,” Diana said, coming closer, “I have to ask you to speak up.”

  “He said, ‘When this really happens, it’s going to be awesome.’”

  A hum rose in the gallery, like a swarm of bees. “Did you know what he meant by that?”

  “I thought…I thought he was kidding,” Derek said.

  “The day of the shooting when you found Peter in the parking lot, did you see what he was doing in the car?”

  “No…” Derek broke off, clearing his throat. “I just sort of laughed off what he said and told him I had to go to class.”

  “What happened next?”

  “I went back into the school through the same door and walked to the office to get my gym note signed by Mrs. Whyte, the secretary. She was talking to another girl, who was signing out of school for an orthodontist appointment.”

  “And then?” Diana asked.

  “Once she left, Mrs. Whyte and I heard an explosion.”

  “Did you see where it was coming from?”

  “No.”

  “What happened after that?”

  “I looked at the computer screen on Mrs. Whyte’s desk,” Derek said. “It was scrolling, like, a message.”

  “What did it say?”

  “Ready or not…here I come.” Derek swallowed. “We heard these little pops, like lots of champagne bottles, and Mrs. Whyte grabbed me and dragged me into the principal’s office.”

  “Was there a computer in that office?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was on the screen?”

  “Ready or not…here I come.”

  “How long were you in the office?”

  “I don’t know. Ten, twenty minutes. Mrs. Whyte tried to call the police, but she couldn’t. There was something wrong with the phone.”

  Diana faced the bench. “Judge, at this time, the prosecution would like to move State’s Exhibit 303 in full, and we ask that it be published to the jury.” She watched the deputy wheel out a television monitor with a computer attached, so that the CD-ROM could be inserted.

  HIDE-N-SHRIEK, the screen proclaimed. CHOOSE YOUR FIRST WEAPON!

  A 3-D animated boy wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a golf shirt crossed the screen and looked down over an array of crossbows, Uzis, AK-47s, and biological weapons. He reached for one, and then with his other hand, he loaded up on ammunition. There was a close-up of his face: freckles; braces; fever in his eyes.

  Then the screen went blue and started scrolling.

  Ready or not, it read. Here I come.

  Derek liked Mr. McAfee. He wasn’t much to look at, but he had the hottest babe of a wife. Plus, he was probably the only other person in Sterling High who wasn’t related to Peter and still felt sorry for him.

  “Derek,” the lawyer said, “you’ve been friends with Peter since sixth grade, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You spent a lot of time with him both in and outside school.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you ever see Peter getting picked on by other kids?”

  “All the time,” Derek said. “They’d call us fags and homos. They’d give us wedgies. When we walked down the hall, they’d trip us or slam us into lockers. Things like that.”

  “Did you ever talk to a teacher about this?”

  “I used to, but that just made it worse. I got creamed for being a tattletale.”

  “Did you and Peter ever talk about getting picked on?”

  Derek shook his head. “No. It was kind of nice to have someone around who just got it, you know?”

  “How often was this happening…once a week?”

  He snorted. “More like once a day.”

  “Just you and Peter?”

  “No, there are others.”

  “Who did most of the bullying?”

  “The jocks,” Derek said. “Matt Royston, Drew Girard, John Eberhard…”

  “Any girls participate in the bullying?”

  “Yeah, the ones who looked at us like we were bugs on a windshield,” Derek said. “Courtney Ignatio, Emma Alexis, Josie Cormier, Maddie Shaw.”

  “So what do you do when someone’s slamming you into a locker?” Mr. McAfee asked.

  “You can’t fight back, because you’re not as strong as they are, and you can’t stop it…so you just kind of wait it out.”

  “Would it be fair to say that this group you named-Matt and Drew and Courtney and Emma and the rest-went after one person more than any others?”

  “Yes,” Derek said. “Peter.”<
br />
  Derek watched Peter’s attorney sit back down next to him, and then the lady lawyer rose and started speaking again. “Derek, you said you were bullied, too.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You never helped Peter put together a pipe bomb to blow up someone’s car, did you?”

  “No.”

  “You never helped Peter hack into the phone lines and computers at Sterling High, so that once the shooting started, no one could call for help, did you?”

  “No,” Derek said.

  “You never stole guns and hoarded them in your bedroom, did you?”

  “No.”

  The prosecutor took a step closer. “You never put together a plan, like Peter, to go through the school, systematically killing the people who had hurt you the most, did you, Derek?”

  Derek turned to Peter, so that he could look him square in the eye when he answered. “No,” he said. “But sometimes I wish I had.”

  From time to time, over the course of her career as a midwife, Lacy had run into a former patient at the grocery store or the bank or on a bike trail. They’d present their babies-now three, seven, fifteen years old. Look at what a great job you did, they’d sometimes say, as if bringing the child into the world had anything to do with who he became.

  She did not know quite what to feel when confronted with Josie Cormier. They’d spent the day playing hangman-the irony of which, given her son’s fate, wasn’t lost on her. Lacy had known Josie as a newborn, but also as a little girl and as a playmate for Peter. Because of this, there had been a point where she had viscerally hated Josie in a way that even Peter never seemed to, for being cruel enough to leave her son behind. Josie may not have initiated the teasing that Peter suffered over his middle and high school years, but she didn’t intervene either, and in Lacy’s book, that had made her equally responsible.

  As it turned out, though, Josie Cormier had grown into a stunning young woman, one who was quiet and thoughtful and not at all like the vacuous, material girls who trolled the Mall of New Hampshire or encompassed the social elite of Sterling High-girls Lacy had always likened to black widow spiders, looking for someone they could destroy. Lacy had been surprised when Josie had peppered her with polite questions about Peter: Was he nervous about the trial? Was it hard, being in jail? Did he get picked on there? You should send him a letter, Lacy had suggested to her. I’m sure he’d like to hear from you.

  But Josie had let her glance slide away, and that was when Lacy realized that Josie had not really been interested in Peter; she had only been trying to be kind to Lacy.

  When court recessed for the day, the witnesses were told they could go home, provided they did not watch the news or read the papers or speak about the case. Lacy excused herself to go to the bathroom while she waited for Lewis, who’d be fighting the crush of reporters that would surely be packing the lobby outside the courtroom. She had just come out of the stall and was washing her hands when Alex Cormier stepped inside.

  The racket in the hallway rode in on her heels, then cut off abruptly as the door shut. Their eyes met in the long mirror over the bank of sinks. “Lacy,” Alex murmured.

  Lacy straightened and reached for a paper towel to dry her hands. She didn’t know what to say to Alex Cormier. She could barely even imagine that at one point, she’d had anything to say to her.

  There was a spider plant in Lacy’s midwifery office that had been dying by degrees, until the secretary moved a stack of books that had been blocking a window. She had forgotten to move the plant, though, and half the shoots started straining toward the light, growing in an unlikely sideways direction that seemed to defy gravity. Lacy and Alex were like that plant: Alex had moved off on a different course, and Lacy-well, she hadn’t. She’d withered up, wilted, gotten tangled in her own best intentions.

  “I’m sorry,” Alex said. “I’m sorry you have to go through this.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” Lacy replied.

  Alex looked like she was going to speak again, but she didn’t, and Lacy had run out of conversation. She started out of the bathroom to find Lewis, but Alex called her back. “Lacy,” she said. “I remember.”

  Lacy turned around to face her.

  “He used to like the peanut butter on the top half of the bread and the marshmallow fluff on the bottom.” Alex smiled a little. “And he had the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen on a little boy. He could find anything I’d dropped-an earring, a contact lens, a straight pin-before it got lost permanently.”

  She took a step toward Lacy. “Something still exists as long as there’s someone around to remember it, right?”

  Lacy stared at Alex through her tears. “Thank you,” she whispered, and left before she broke down completely in front of a woman-a stranger, really-who could do what Lacy couldn’t: hold on to the past as if it was something to be treasured, instead of combing it for clues of failure.

  “Josie,” her mother said as they were driving home. “They read an email today in court. One that Peter had written to you.”

  Josie faced her, stricken. She should have realized this would come out at the trial; how had she been so stupid? “I didn’t know Courtney had sent it out. I didn’t even see it until after everyone else had.”

  “It must have been embarrassing,” Alex said.

  “Well, yeah. The whole school knew he had a crush on me.”

  Her mother glanced at her. “I meant for Peter.”

  Josie thought about Lacy Houghton. Ten years had passed, but Josie had still been surprised by how thin Peter’s mom had gotten; how her hair was nearly all gray. She wondered if grief could make time run faster, like a glitch in a clock. It was incredibly depressing, since Josie remembered Peter’s mother as someone who never wore a wristwatch, someone who didn’t care about the mess if the end result was worthy. When Josie was little and they played over at Peter’s, Lacy would make cookies from whatever was left in her cabinet-oatmeal and wheat germ and gummy bears and marshmallows; carob and cornstarch and puffed rice. She once dumped a load of sand in the basement during the winter so that they could make castles. She let them draw on the bread of their sandwiches with food coloring and milk, so that even lunch was a masterpiece. Josie had liked being at Peter’s house; it was what she’d always imagined a family felt like.

  Now she looked out the window. “You think this is all my fault, don’t you?”

  “No-”

  “Is that what the lawyers said today? That the shooting happened because I didn’t like Peter…the way he liked me?”

  “No. The lawyers didn’t say that at all. Mostly the defense talked about how Peter got teased. How he didn’t have many friends.” Her mother stopped at a red light and turned, her wrist resting lightly on the steering wheel. “Why did you stop hanging around with Peter, anyway?”

  Being unpopular was a communicable disease. Josie could remember Peter in elementary school, fashioning the tinfoil from his lunch sandwich into a beanie with antennae, and wearing it around the playground to try to pick up radio transmissions from aliens. He hadn’t realized that people were making fun of him. He never had.

  She had a sudden flash of him standing in the cafeteria, a statue with his hands trying to cover his groin, his pants pooled around his ankles. She remembered Matt’s comment afterward: Objects in mirror are way smaller than they appear.

  Maybe Peter had finally understood what people thought of him.

  “I didn’t want to be treated like him,” Josie said, answering her mother, when what she really meant was, I wasn’t brave enough.

  Going back to jail was like devolution. You had to relinquish the trappings of humanity-your shoes, your suit and tie-and bend over to be strip-searched, probed with a rubber glove by one of the guards. You were given another prison jumpsuit, and flip-flops that were too wide for your feet, so that you looked just like everyone else again and couldn’t pretend to yourself that you were better than them.

  Peter lay down on the bunk with his arm flung over
his eyes. The inmate beside him, a guy awaiting trial for the rape of a sixty-six-year-old woman, asked him how it had gone in court, but he didn’t answer. That was the only freedom he had left, pretty much, and he wanted to keep the truth to himself: that when he’d been put in his cell, he’d actually felt relieved to be back (could he say it?) home.

  Here, no one was staring at him as if he were a growth on a petri dish. No one really looked at him at all.

  Here, no one talked about him as if he were an animal.

  Here, no one blamed him, because they were all in the same boat.

  Jail wasn’t all that different from public school, really. The correctional officers were just like the teachers-their job was to keep everyone in place, to feed them, and to make sure nobody got seriously hurt. Beyond that, you were left to your own devices. And like school, jail was an artificial society, with its own hierarchy and rules. If you did any work, it was pointless-cleaning the toilets every morning or pushing a library cart around minimum security wasn’t really that different from writing an essay on the definition of civitas or memorizing prime numbers-you weren’t going to be using them daily in your real life. And as with high school, the only way to get through jail was to stick it out and do your time.

  Not to mention: Peter wasn’t popular in jail, either.

  He thought about the witnesses that Diana Leven had marched or dragged or wheeled to the stand today. Jordan had explained that it was all about sympathy; that the prosecution wanted to present all these ruined lives before they turned to the hard-core evidence; that he would soon have a chance to show how Peter’s life had been ruined, too. Peter hardly even cared about that. He’d been more amazed, after seeing those students again, at how little had changed.

  Peter stared up at the woven springs of the upper bunk, blinking fast. Then he rolled toward the wall and stuffed the corner of his pillowcase into his mouth, so no one would be able to hear him cry.

  Even though John Eberhard couldn’t call him a fag anymore, much less speak…

  Even though Drew Girard would never be the jock that he had been…

  Even though Haley Weaver wasn’t a knockout…

  They were all still part of a group Peter could not, and would never, fit into.