Nineteen Minutes

by Jodie Picoult

  “Where have you been?” Drew asked, making room for John to sit down beside him. “I thought I’d see you around this summer, for sure.”

  He nodded at them. “I’m…John.”

  Drew’s smile faded like paint.

  “This…is…”

  “This is fucking unbelievable,” Drew murmured.

  “He can hear you,” Josie snapped, and she crouched down in front of John. “Hi, John. I’m Josie.”

  “Jooooz.”

  “Right. Josie.”

  “I’m…John,” he said.

  John Eberhard had played goalie on the all-star state hockey team since his freshman year. Whenever the team won, the coach had always credited John’s reflexes.

  “Shoooo,” he said, and he shuffled his foot.

  Josie looked down at the undone Velcro strap of John’s sneaker. “There you go,” she said, fixing it for him.

  Suddenly she could not stand being here, seeing this. “I’ve got to get back,” Josie said, standing up. As she walked away, blindly turning the corner, she crashed into someone. “Sorry,” she murmured, and then heard Patrick’s voice.

  “Josie? You all right?”

  She shrugged, and then she shook her head.

  “That makes two of us.”

  Patrick was holding a cup of coffee and a donut. “I know,” he said. “I’m a walking cliché. You want it?” He held the pastry out to her, and she took it, even though she wasn’t hungry. “You coming or going?”

  “Coming,” she lied, before she even realized she was doing it.

  “Then keep me company for a few minutes.” He led her to a table across the room from Drew and John; she could feel them looking at her, wondering why she might be hanging out with a cop. “I hate the waiting part,” Patrick said.

  “At least you’re not nervous about testifying.”

  “Sure I am.”

  “Don’t you do this all the time?”

  Patrick nodded. “But that doesn’t make it any easier to get up in front of a room full of people. I don’t know how your mom does it.”

  “So what do you do to get over the stage fright? Imagine the judge in his underwear?”

  “Well, not this judge,” Patrick said, and then, realizing what he’d just implied, he blushed deep red.

  “That’s probably a good thing,” Josie said.

  Patrick reached for the donut and took a bite, then handed it back to her. “I just try to tell myself, when I get out there, that I can’t get into trouble telling the truth. Then I let Diana do all the work.” He took a sip of his coffee. “You need anything? A drink? More food?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Then I’ll walk you back. Come on.”

  The room for the defense’s witnesses was tiny, because there were so few of them. An Asian man Josie had never seen before was sitting with his back to her, typing away at a laptop. There was a woman inside who hadn’t been there when Josie left, but Josie couldn’t see her face.

  Patrick paused in front of the door. “How do you think it’s going in court?” she asked.

  He hesitated. “It’s going.”

  She slipped past the bailiff who was babysitting them, heading toward the window seat where she’d been curled before, reading. But at the last minute she sat down at the table in the middle of the room. The woman already seated there had her hands folded in front of her and was staring at absolutely nothing.

  “Mrs. Houghton,” Josie murmured.

  Peter’s mother turned. “Josie?” She squinted, as if that might bring Josie into better focus.

  “I’m so sorry,” Josie whispered.

  Mrs. Houghton nodded. “Well,” she said, and then she just stopped, as if the sentence were no more than a cliff to jump from.

  “How are you doing?” Josie immediately wished she could take back her question-how did she think Peter’s mother was doing, for God’s sake? She was probably using all of her self-control right now to keep from dissolving into foam, blowing off into the atmosphere. Which, Josie realized, meant they had something in common.

  “I wouldn’t have expected to see you here,” Mrs. Houghton said softly.

  By here she didn’t mean the courthouse; she meant this room. With the other meager witnesses who had been tapped to stick up for Peter.

  Josie cleared her throat, to make way for the words she hadn’t said for years, the words she still would have been afraid to use in front of nearly anyone else, for fear of the echo. “He’s my friend,” she said.

  “We started running,” Drew said. “It was like this mass exodus. I just wanted to get as far away from the cafeteria as I could, so I headed for the gym. Two of my friends had heard the shots, but they didn’t know where they were coming from, so I grabbed them and told them to follow me.”

  “Who were they?” Leven asked.

  “Matt Royston,” Drew said. “And Josie Cormier.”

  At the sound of her daughter’s name being spoken aloud, Alex shivered. It made it so…real. So immediate. Drew had located Alex in the gallery, and was staring right at her when he said Josie’s name.

  “Where did you go?”

  “We figured if we could get to the locker room, we could climb out the window onto the maple tree and we’d be safe.”

  “Did you get to the locker room?”

  “Josie and Matt did,” Drew said. “But I got shot.”

  Alex listened as the prosecutor walked Drew through the extent of his injuries and how they had effectively ended his hockey career. Then she faced him squarely. “Did you know Peter before the day of the shooting?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “We were in the same grade. Everyone knows everyone.”

  “Were you friends?” Leven asked.

  Alex glanced across the aisle at Lewis Houghton. He was sitting directly behind his son, his eyes fixed straight on the bench. Alex had a flash of him, years ago, opening the front door when she’d gone to pick Josie up from a playdate. Here come da judge, he’d said, and he laughed at his own joke.

  Were you friends?

  “No,” Drew said.

  “Did you have any problems with him?”

  Drew hesitated. “No.”

  “Did you ever get in an argument with him?” Leven asked.

  “We probably had a few words,” Drew said.

  “Did you ever make fun of him?”

  “Sometimes. We were just kidding around.”

  “Did you ever physically attack him?”

  “When we were younger, I might have pushed him around a little bit.”

  Alex looked at Lewis Houghton. His eyes were squeezed shut.

  “Have you done that since you’ve been in high school?”

  “Yes,” Drew admitted.

  “Did you ever threaten Peter with a weapon?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever threaten to kill him?”

  “No…we were, you know. Just being kids.”

  “Thank you.” She sat down, and Alex watched Jordan McAfee rise.

  He was a good lawyer-better than she would have given him credit for. He put on a fine show-whispering with Peter, putting his hand on the boy’s arm when he got upset, taking copious notes on the direct examination and sharing them with his client. He was humanizing Peter, in spite of the fact that the prosecution was making him out to be a monster, in spite of the fact that the defense hadn’t even yet begun to have their turn.

  “You had no problems with Peter,” McAfee repeated.

  “No.”

  “But he had problems with you, didn’t he?”

  Drew didn’t respond.

  “Mr. Girard, you’re going to have to speak up,” Judge Wagner said.

  “Sometimes,” Drew conceded.

  “Have you ever stuck your elbow in Peter’s chest?”

  Drew’s gaze slid sideways. “Maybe. By accident.”

  “Ah, yes. It’s always easy to find yourself sticking out an elbow when you lea
st expect to…”

  “Objection-”

  McAfee smiled. “In fact, it wasn’t an accident, was it, Mr. Girard?”

  At the prosecutor’s table, Diana Leven raised her pen and dropped it on the floor. The noise made Drew glance over, and a muscle flexed in his jaw. “We were just joking around,” he said.

  “Ever shove Peter into a locker?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Just joking around?” McAfee said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” he continued. “Did you ever trip him?”

  “I guess.”

  “Wait…let me guess…joke, right?”

  Drew glowered. “Yes.”

  “Actually, you’ve been doing this sort of stuff as a joke to Peter since you were little kids, right?”

  “We just never were friends,” Drew said. “He wasn’t like us.”

  “Who’s us?” McAfee asked.

  Drew shrugged. “Matt Royston, Josie Cormier, John Eberhard, Courtney Ignatio. Kids like that. We had all hung out together for years.”

  “Did Peter know everyone in that group?”

  “It’s a small school, sure.”

  “Does Peter know Josie Cormier?”

  In the gallery, Alex drew in her breath.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ever see Peter talking to Josie?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, a month or so before the shooting, when you all were together in the cafeteria, Peter came over to speak to Josie. Can you tell us about that?”

  Alex leaned forward on her chair. She could feel eyes on her, hot as the sun in a desert. She realized, from the direction, that now Lewis Houghton was staring at her.

  “I don’t know what they were talking about.”

  “But you were there, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Josie’s a friend of yours? Not one of the people who hung out with Peter?”

  “Yeah,” Drew said. “She’s one of us.”

  “Do you remember how that conversation in the cafeteria ended?” McAfee asked.

  Drew looked down at the ground.

  “Let me help you, Mr. Girard. It ended with Matt Royston walking behind Peter and pulling his pants down while he was trying to speak to Josie Cormier. Does that sound about right?”

  “Yes.”

  “The cafeteria was packed with kids that day, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And Matt didn’t just pull down Peter’s pants…he pulled down his underwear too, correct?”

  Drew’s mouth twitched. “Yeah.”

  “And you saw all of this.”

  “Yes.”

  McAfee turned to the jury. “Let me guess,” he said. “Joke, right?”

  The courtroom had gone utterly silent. Drew was glaring at Diana Leven, subliminally begging to be dragged off the witness stand, Alex assumed. This was the first person, other than Peter, who had been offered up for sacrifice.

  Jordan McAfee walked back to the table where Peter sat and picked up a piece of paper. “Do you remember what day Peter was pantsed, Mr. Girard?”

  “No.”

  “Let me show you, then, Defense Exhibit One. Do you recognize this?”

  He handed the piece of paper to Drew, who took it and shrugged.

  “This is a piece of email that you received on February third, two days before Peter was pantsed in the Sterling High School cafeteria. Can you tell us who sent it to you?”

  “Courtney Ignatio.”

  “Was it a letter that had been written to her?”

  “No,” Drew said. “It had been written to Josie.”

  “By whom?” McAfee pressed.

  “Peter.”

  “What did he say?”

  “It was about Josie. And how he was into her.”

  “You mean romantically.”

  “I guess,” Drew said.

  “What did you do with that email?”

  Drew looked up. “I spammed it out to the student body.”

  “Let me get this straight,” McAfee said. “You took a very private note that didn’t belong to you, a piece of paper with Peter’s deepest, most secret feelings, and you forwarded this to every kid at your school?”

  Drew was silent.

  Jordan McAfee slapped the email down on the railing in front of him. “Well, Drew?” he said. “Was it a good joke?”

  Drew Girard was sweating so much that he couldn’t believe all those people weren’t pointing at him. He could feel the perspiration running between his shoulder blades and making looped circles beneath his arms. And why not? That bitch of a prosecutor had left him in the hot seat. She’d let him get skewered by this dickwad attorney, so that now, for the rest of his life, everyone would think he was an asshole when he-like every other kid in Sterling High-had just been having a little fun.

  He stood up, ready to bolt out of the courtroom and possibly run all the way to the town boundary of Sterling-but Diana Leven was walking toward him. “Mr. Girard,” she said, “I’m not quite finished.”

  He sank back into his seat, deflated.

  “Have you ever called anyone other than Peter Houghton names?”

  “Yes,” he said warily.

  “It’s what guys do, right?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Did anyone you ever called names ever shoot you?”

  “No.”

  “Ever seen anyone other than Peter Houghton be pantsed?”

  “Sure,” Drew said.

  “Did any of those other kids who were pantsed ever shoot you?”

  “No.”

  “Ever spammed anyone else’s email out as a joke?”

  “Once or twice.”

  Diana folded her arms. “Any of those folks ever shoot you?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said.

  She headed back to her seat. “Nothing further.”

  Dusty Spears understood kids like Drew Girard, because he had once been one. The way he saw it, bullies either were good enough to get football scholarships to Big Ten schools, where they could make the business connections to play on golf courses for the rest of their lives, or they busted their knees and wound up teaching gym at the middle school.

  He was wearing a collared shirt and tie, and that pissed him off, because his neck still looked like it had when he was a tight end at Sterling in ’88, even if his abs didn’t. “Peter wasn’t a real athlete,” he said to the prosecutor. “I never really saw him outside of class.”

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

  Dusty shrugged. “The usual locker room stuff, I guess.”

  “Did you intervene?”

  “I probably told the kids to knock it off. But it’s part of growing up, right?”

  “Did you ever hear of Peter threatening anyone else?”

  “Objection,” said Jordan McAfee. “That’s a hypothetical question.”

  “Sustained,” the judge replied.

  “If you had heard that, would you have intervened?”

  “Objection!”

  “Sustained. Again.”

  The prosecutor didn’t miss a beat. “But Peter didn’t ask for help, did he?”

  “No.”

  She sat back down, and Houghton’s lawyer stood up. He was one of those smarmy guys that rubbed Dusty the wrong way-probably had been a kid who could barely field a ball, but smirked when you tried to teach him how, as if he already knew he’d be making twice as much money as Dusty one day, anyway. “Is there a bullying policy in place at Sterling High?”

  “We don’t allow it.”

  “Ah,” McAfee said dryly. “Well, that’s refreshing to hear. So let’s say you witness bullying on an almost daily basis in a locker room right under your nose…according to the policy, what are you supposed to do?”

  Dusty stared at him. “It’s in the policy. Obviously I don’t have it right in front of me.”

  “Luckily, I do,” McAfee said. “Let me show you what’s been mark
ed as Defense Exhibit Two. Is this the bullying policy for Sterling High School?”

  Reaching out, Dusty took a look at the printed page. “Yes.”

  “You get this in your teacher handbook every year in August, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And this is the most recent version, for the academic year of 2006-2007?”

  “I assume so,” Dusty said.

  “Mr. Spears, I want you to go through that policy very carefully-all two pages-and show me where it tells you what to do if you, as a teacher, witness bullying.”

  Dusty sighed and began to scan the papers. Usually, when he got the handbook, he shoved it in a drawer with his take-out menus. He knew the important things: don’t miss an in-service day; submit curriculum changes to the department heads; refrain from being alone in a room with a female student. “It says right here,” he said, reading, “that the Sterling School Board is committed to providing a learning and working environment that ensures the personal safety of its members. Physical or verbal threats, harassment, hazing, bullying, verbal abuse, and intimidation will not be tolerated.” Glancing up, Dusty said, “Does that answer your question?”

  “No, actually, it doesn’t. What are you, as a teacher, supposed to do if a student bullies another student?”

  Dusty read further. There was a definition of hazing, of bullying, of verbal abuse. There was mention of a teacher or school administrator being reported to, if the behavior had been witnessed by another student. But there was no set of rules, no chain of events to be set in motion by the teacher or administrator himself.

  “I can’t find it in here,” he said.

  “Thank you, Mr. Spears,” McAfee replied. “That’ll be all.”

  It would have been simple for Jordan McAfee to notice up his intent to call Derek Markowitz to testify, as he was one of the only character witnesses Peter Houghton had, in terms of friends. But Diana knew he had value for the prosecution because of what he had seen and heard-not because of his loyalties. She’d seen plenty of friends rat each other out over the years she’d been in this business.

  “So, Derek,” Diana said, trying to make him comfortable, “you were Peter’s friend.”