by Jodi Picoult
“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,” Peter 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?
As if he could read Jordan’s mind, Peter suddenly stared at him. “Do you have kids?”
Jordan did not talk about his personal life with clients. Their relationship existed in the confines of a court, and that was that. The few times in his career when this unwritten rule had been broken had nearly wrecked him personally and professionally. But he met Peter’s gaze and said, “Two. A six-month-old baby and a son at Yale.”
“Then you get it,” Peter said. “Everyone wants their kid to grow up and go to Harvard or be a quarterback for the Patriots. No one ever looks at their baby and thinks, Oh, I hope my kid grows up and becomes a freak. I hope he gets to school every day and prays he won’t catch anyone’s attention. But you know what? Kids grow up like that every single day.”
Jordan found himself at a loss for words. There was the finest line between unique and odd, between what made a child grow up to be as well adjusted as Thomas versus unstable, like Peter. Did every teenager have the capacity to fall on one side or the other of that tightrope, and could you identify a single moment that tipped the balance?
He suddenly thought of Sam this morning, when Jordan was changing his diaper. The baby had grabbed hold of his own toes, fascinated to have located them, and immediately stuffed his foot into his mouth. Look at that, Selena had joked over his shoulder, like father like son. As Jordan had finished dressing Sam, he’d marveled at the mystery life must be for someone that young. Imagine a world that seemed so much bigger than you. Imagine waking up one morning and finding a piece of yourself you didn’t even know existed.
When you don’t fit in, you become superhuman. You can feel everyone else’s eyes on you, stuck like Velcro. You can hear a whisper about you from a mile away. You can disappear, even when it looks like you’re still standing right there. You can scream, and nobody hears a sound.
You become the mutant who fell into the vat of acid, the Joker who can’t remove his mask, the bionic man who’s missing all his limbs and none of his heart.
You are the thing that used to be normal, but that was so long ago, you can’t even remember what it was like.
Six Years Before
Peter knew he was doomed, the first day of sixth grade, when his mother presented him with a gift over breakfast. “I know how much you wanted one,” she said, and she waited for him to open the wrapping paper.
Inside was a three-ring binder with a graphic of Superman on the cover. And he had wanted one. Three years ago, when that was a cool thing to have.
He had managed a smile. “Thanks, Mom,” he said, and she beamed at him, while he imagined all the ways carrying this totally stupid notebook would be used against him.
Josie, as usual, had come to his rescue. She told the school custodian that her bike handlebars were all screwed up and that she needed some duct tape to jury-rig it until she got home. In reality, she didn’t bike
to school—she walked with Peter, who lived a little farther out of town but picked her up along the way. Although they never saw each other outside of school—and hadn’t in years, thanks to some blowout fight between his mother and hers that neither of them could really remember the details about—Josie still hung out with Peter. And thank God for that, because no one else really did. They sat together during lunch, they read each other’s rough drafts in English, they were always each other’s lab partners. Summers were always tough. They could email, and every now and then they saw each other at the town pond, but that was about it. And then, come September, they fell back in step as if they’d never missed a beat. That, Peter figured, was the very definition of a best friend.
Today, thanks to the Superman binder, they’d started off the year with a crisis. With Josie’s help, he’d made a slipcover of sorts from the tape and an old newspaper they stole from the science lab. He could take it off when he was home, she reasoned, so that his mother wouldn’t be offended.
The sixth graders had lunch fourth period, when it was only 11:00 a.m., but by that point it felt like they hadn’t eaten in months. Josie bought—her mother’s cooking skills, she said, were limited to writing a check to the cafeteria ladies—and Peter stood beside her in the snaking line to pick up a carton of milk. His mother would have packed him a sandwich with the crusts cut off, a bag of carrot sticks, an organic fruit that might or might not be bruised.
Peter slid his binder onto the cafeteria tray, embarrassed even though it was still covered up by the newspaper. He popped a straw into his milk carton. “You know, it shouldn’t make a difference what binder you’ve got,” Josie said. “What do you care what they think?”
As they headed into the lunchroom, Drew Girard slammed into Peter. “Watch where you’re going, retard,” Drew said, but it was too late—Peter had already dropped his tray.
His milk spilled all over his splayed binder, melting the newspaper into a muddy clot and revealing the Superman graphic beneath it.
Drew started to laugh. “Are you wearing your Underoos, too, Houghton?”
“Shut up, Drew.”
“Or what? Will you melt me with your X-ray vision?”
Mrs. McDonald, the art teacher who was patrolling the lunchroom—and who Josie swore she’d once caught sniffing glue in the supply closet—took a halfhearted step forward. By seventh grade, there were kids like Drew and Matt Royston who were taller than the teachers and had deep voices and were shaving; but there were also kids like Peter, who prayed every night that puberty would hit but hadn’t seen any viable signs yet. “Peter, why don’t you just go take a seat . . .” Mrs. McDonald sighed. “Drew will bring you another carton of milk.”
Probably poisoned, Peter thought. He started mopping off his binder with a wad of napkins. Even after it dried, it would reek, now. Maybe he could tell his mother that he’d spilled his milk on it at lunch. It was the truth, after all, even if he’d had a little help doing it. And it just might be enough incentive for her to buy him a new, normal notebook, one like everyone else’s.
Inside, Peter was grinning: Drew Girard had actually just done him a favor.
“Drew,” the teacher said. “I meant now.”
As Drew took a step toward the interior of the cafeteria toward the pyramid of milk cartons, Josie stuck out her foot surreptitiously so that he tripped, landing flat on his face. In the lunchroom, other kids started to laugh. That was the way this society worked: you were only at the bottom of the totem pole until you could find someone else to take your place. “Watch out for kryptonite,” Josie whispered, just loud enough for Peter to hear.
* * *
The two best things about being a district court judge, in Alex’s mind, were, first, being able to address people’s problems and make them feel as if they are being listened to, and second, the intellectual challenge. You had so many factors to balance when you were making decisions: the victims, the police, law enforcement, society. And all of them had to be considered in the context of precedent.
The worst part of the job was that you couldn’t give people what they really needed when they came to court: for a defendant—the sentencing that would really offer treatment, instead of a punishment. For a victim—an apology.
Today there was a girl standing in front of her who wasn’t much older than Josie. She was wearing a NASCAR jacket and a black pleated skirt, and had blond hair and acne. Alex had seen kids like her, hanging out in parking lots after the Mall of New Hampshire was closed for the night, spinning 360s in their boyfriends’ I-Rocs. She wondered what this girl would have been like if she’d grown up with a judge for a mother. She wondered if, at some point, this girl had played with stuffed animals underneath the kitchen table and read books beneath her covers with a flashlight when she was supposed to be going to bed. It never failed to amaze Alex how, with the brush of a hand, the track of someone’s life might veer in a completely different direction.
The girl had been charged with receiving stolen property—a $500 gold necklace that her boyfriend gave her. Alex looked down at her from the bench. There was a reason it was up so high in a courtroom—it had nothing to do with logistics and everything to do with intimidation. “Are you knowingly, voluntarily, and intelligently waiving your rights? And you understand that by pleading guilty, you’re admitting to the truth of the charge?”
The girl blinked. “I didn’t know it was stolen. I thought it was a present from Hap.”
“If you read the face of the complaint, it says you’re charged with knowingly receiving this necklace, knowing it was stolen. If you didn’t know it was stolen, you have the right to go to trial. You have the right to mount a defense. You have the right to have me appoint a lawyer to represent you because you are charged with a Class A misdemeanor and this is punishable by up to a year in jail and a $2,000 fine. You have a right to have the prosecution prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. You have the right to see, hear, and question all the witnesses against you. You have the right to have me subpoena into court any evidence and/or witnesses in your favor. You have the right to appeal your decision to the Supreme Court, or the Superior Court for a jury trial de novo if I make an error of law or if you don’t agree with my decision. By pleading guilty, you give up these rights.”
The girl swallowed. “Well,” she repeated. “I did pawn it.”
“That’s not the essence of the charge,” Alex explained. “The essence of the charge is that you took that necklace even after you knew it was stolen.”
“But I want to plead guilty,” the girl said.
“You’re telling me you didn’t do what the charge said you did. You can’t plead guilty to something you didn’t do.”
In the rear of the courtroom, a woman stood up. She looked like a poorly aged carbon copy of the defendant. “I told her to plead not guilty,” the girl’s mother said. “She came here today and she was going to do that, but then the prosecutor said she’d get a better deal if she said she was guilty.”
The prosecutor sprung out of his chair like a jack-in-the-box. “I never said that, Your Honor. I told her what the deal on the table was, today, if she was pleading guilty, plain and simple. And that if she pled not guilty instead and went to trial, the deal was off the table and Your Honor would make the decision that you wanted to make.”
Alex tried to imagine what it would be like to be this girl, completely overwhelmed by the massive stature of this legal system, unable to speak its language. She would look at the prosecutor and see Monty Hall. Do you take the money? Or do you choose Door Number One—which might reveal a convertible, or might reveal a chicken?
This girl had taken the money.
Alex motioned the prosecutor to approach the bench. “Do you have any evidence from your investigation to prove she knew it was stolen?”
“Yes, Your Honor.” He produced the police report and handed it over. Alex scanned it—there was no way, given what she’d said to the cops and how they’d recorded it, that
she hadn’t known it was stolen.
Alex turned to the girl. “Based on the facts of the police report, coupled with the offer of proof, I find that there’s a basis for your plea. There’s enough evidence here to substantiate the fact that you knew this necklace was stolen, and you took it anyway.”
“I don’t . . . I don’t understand,” the girl said.
“It means I’ll take your plea, if you still want me to. But,” Alex added, “first you have to tell me that you’re guilty.”
Alex watched the girl’s mouth tighten and start to tremble. “Okay,” she whispered. “I did it.”
* * *
It was one of those incredibly beautiful autumn days, the kind when you drag your feet on the sidewalk in the morning as you walk to school because you cannot believe you have to waste eight hours there. Josie was sitting in math class, staring at the blue of the sky—cerulean, that was a vocabulary word this week, and just saying it made Josie feel like her mouth was full of ice crystals. She could hear the seventh graders playing Capture the Flag in gym class in the recess yard, and the drone of the lawn mower as the custodian moved past their window. A piece of paper was dropped over her shoulder, into her lap. Josie unfolded it, read Peter’s note.
Why do we always have to solve for x? Why can’t x do it himself and spare us the HELL!!!!!
She turned around, giving him a half-smile. Actually, she liked math. She loved knowing that if she worked hard enough, at the end there was going to be an answer that made sense.
She didn’t fit in with the popular crowd at school because she was a straight-A student. Peter was different—he got B’s and C’s, and once a D. He didn’t fit in either, but it wasn’t because he was a brain. It was because he was Peter.