Nineteen Minutes

by Jodie Picoult

  6:30 A.M., The Day Of

  Peter. Peter?!”

  He rolled over to see his father standing on the threshold of his bedroom.

  “Are you up?”

  Did it look like he was up? Peter grunted and rolled onto his back. He closed his eyes again for a moment and ran through his day. Englishfrench-mathhistorychem. One big long run-on sentence, one class bleeding into the next.

  He sat up, spearing his hands through his hair so that it stood on end. Downstairs, he could hear his father putting away pots and pans from the dishwasher, like some techno-symphony. He’d get his travel mug, pour some coffee, and leave Peter to his own devices.

  Peter’s pajama bottoms dragged underneath his heels as he shuffled from the bed to his desk and sat down on the chair. He logged onto the Internet, because he wanted to see if anyone out there had given him more feedback on Hide-n-Shriek. If it was as good as he thought it was, he was going to enter it in some kind of amateur competition. There were kids like him all over the country-all over the world-who would easily pay $39.99 to play a video game where history was rewritten by the losers. Peter imagined how rich he could get off licensing fees. Maybe he could ditch college, like Bill Gates. Maybe one day people would be calling him, pretending that they used to be his friend.

  He squinted, and then reached for his glasses, which he kept next to the keyboard. But because it was freaking six-thirty in the morning, when no one should be expected to have much coordination, he dropped his eyeglass case right on the function keys.

  The screen logging him onto the Net minimized, and instead, his Recycle Bin contents opened on the screen.

  I know you don’t think of me.

  And you certainly would never picture us together.

  Peter felt his head start to swim. He punched a finger against the Delete button, but nothing happened.

  Anyway, by myself, I’m nothing special. But with you, I think I could be.

  He tried to restart the computer, but it was frozen. He couldn’t breathe; he couldn’t move. He couldn’t do anything but stare at his own stupidity, right there in black and white.

  His chest hurt, and he thought maybe he was having a heart attack, or maybe that was just what it felt like when the muscle turned to stone. With jerky movements, Peter leaned down for the cord of his power strip and instead smacked his head on the side of the desk. It brought tears to his eyes, or that’s what he told himself.

  He pulled the plug, so that the monitor went black.

  Then he sat back down and realized it hadn’t made a difference. He could still see those words, as clear as day, written across the screen. He could feel the give of the keys under his fingers:

  Love, Peter.

  He could hear them all laughing.

  Peter glanced at his computer again. His mother always said that if something bad happened, you could look at it as a failure, or you could look at it as a chance to head in another direction.

  Maybe this had been a sign.

  Peter’s breathing was shallow as he emptied his school backpack of textbooks and three-ring binders, his calculator and pencils and crumpled tests he’d gotten back. Reaching beneath his mattress, he felt for the two pistols he’d been saving, just in case.

  When I was little I used to pour salt on slugs. I liked watching them dissolve before my eyes. Cruelty is always sort of fun until you realize that something’s getting hurt.

  It would be one thing to be a loser if it meant no one paid attention to you, but in school, it means you’re actively sought out. You’re the slug, and they’re holding all the salt. And they haven’t developed a conscience.

  There’s a word we learned in social studies: schadenfreude. It’s when you enjoy watching someone else suffer. The real question, though, is why? I think part of it is just self-preservation. And part of it is because a group always feels more like a group when it’s banded together against an enemy. It doesn’t matter if that enemy has never done anything to hurt you-you just have to pretend you hate someone even more than you hate yourself.

  You know why salt works on slugs? Because it dissolves in the water that’s part of a slug’s skin, so the water inside its body starts to flow out. The slug dehydrates. This works with snails, too. And with leeches. And with people like me.

  With any creature, really, too thin-skinned to stand up for itself.

  Five Months After

  For four hours on the witness stand, Patrick relived the worst day of his life. The signal that had come through on the radio as he was driving; the stream of students running out of the school, as if it were hemorrhaging; the slip of his shoes in an oily pool of blood as he ran through the corridors. The ceiling, falling down around him. The screams for help. The memories that imprinted on his mind but didn’t register until later: a boy dying in the arms of his friend beneath the basketball hoop in the gym; the sixteen kids who were found crammed into a custodial closet three hours after the arrest, because they hadn’t known that the threat was over; the licorice smell of the Sharpie markers used to write numbers on the foreheads of the wounded, so that they could be identified later.

  That first night, when the only people left in the school were the crime techs, Patrick had walked through the classrooms and the hallways. He felt, sometimes, like the keeper of memories-the one who had to facilitate that invisible transition between the way it used to be and the way it would be from now on. He’d stepped over bloodstains to enter rooms where students had huddled with teachers, waiting to be rescued, their jackets still draped over chairs as if they were about to return at any moment. There were bullet holes chewed into the lockers; yet in the library, some student had both the time and inclination to arrange the media specialist’s Gumby and Pokey figures into a compromising position. The fire sprinklers made a sea out of one corridor, but the walls were still plastered with bright posters advertising a spring dance.

  Diana Leven held up a videocassette, the state’s exhibit number 522. “Can you identify this, Detective?”

  “Yes, I took it from the main office of Sterling High. It showed footage from a camera posted in the cafeteria on March 6, 2007.”

  “Is there an accurate representation on that tape?”

  “Yes.”

  “When was the last time you watched it?”

  “The day before this trial started.”

  “Has it been altered in any way?”

  “No.”

  Diana walked toward the judge. “I ask that this tape be published to the jury,” she said, and the same television unit that had been wheeled out earlier in the trial was brought back by a deputy.

  The recording was grainy, but still intelligible. In the upper right-hand corner were the lunch ladies, slopping food onto plastic trays as students came through the line one by one, like drops through an intravenous tube. There were tables full of students-Patrick’s eye gravitated toward a central one, where Josie was sitting with her boyfriend.

  He was eating her French fries.

  From the left-hand door, a boy entered. He was wearing a blue knapsack, and although you could not see his face, he had the same slight build and stoop to his shoulders that someone who knew Peter Houghton would recognize. He dipped beneath the range of the camera. A shot rang out as a girl slumped backward off one of the cafeteria chairs, a bloodstain flowering on her white shirt.

  Someone screamed, and then everyone was yelling, and there were more shots. Peter reappeared on camera, holding a gun. Students started stampeding, hiding underneath the tables. The soda machine, freckled with bullets, fizzed and sprayed all over the floor. Some students crumpled where they were shot, others who were wounded tried to crawl away. One girl who’d fallen was trampled by the rest of the students and finally lay still. When the only people left in the cafeteria were either dead or wounded, Peter turned in a circle. He moved down an aisle, pausing here and there. He walked up to the table beside Josie’s and put his gun down. He opened an untouched box of cereal still on a ca
feteria tray, poured the cereal into a plastic bowl, and added milk from a carton. He swallowed five spoonfuls before he stopped eating, took a new clip out of his backpack, loaded it into his gun, and left the cafeteria.

  Diana reached beneath the defense table and pulled out a small plastic bag and handed it to Patrick. “Do you recognize this, Detective Ducharme?”

  The Rice Krispies box. “Yes.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “In the cafeteria,” he said. “Sitting on the same table you just saw in the video.”

  Patrick let himself look at Alex, sitting in the gallery. Until now, he couldn’t-he didn’t think he’d be able to do his job well, if he was worrying about how this information and level of detail were affecting her. Now, glancing at her, he could see how pale she’d gotten, how stiff she was in her chair. It took all of his self-control not to walk away from Diana, hop the bar, and kneel down beside her. It’s all right, he wanted to say. It’s almost over.

  “Detective,” Diana said, “when you cornered the defendant in the locker room, what was he holding?”

  “A handgun.”

  “Did you see any other weapons around him?”

  “Yes, a second handgun, around ten feet away.”

  Diana lifted up a picture that had been enlarged. “Do you recognize this?”

  “It’s the locker room where Peter Houghton was apprehended.” He pointed to a gun on the floor near the lockers, and then another a short distance away. “This is the weapon he dropped, Gun A,” Patrick said, “and this one, Gun B, is the other one that was on the floor.”

  About ten feet past that, on the same linear path, was the body of Matt Royston. A wide pool of blood spread beneath his hip, and the top half of his head was missing.

  There were gasps from the jury, but Patrick wasn’t paying attention. He was staring right at Alex, who was not looking at Matt’s body but at the spot beside it-a streak of blood from Josie’s forehead, where she had been found.

  Life was a series of ifs-a very different outcome if you’d only played the lottery last night; if you had picked a different college; if you had invested in stocks instead of bonds; if you had not been taking your kindergartner to his first day of school the morning of 9/11. If just one teacher had stopped a kid, once, from tormenting Peter in the hall. If Peter had put the gun in his mouth, instead of pointing it at someone else. If Josie had been standing in front of Matt, she might have been the one buried in the cemetery. If Patrick had been a second later, she still might have been shot. If he hadn’t been the detective on this case, he would not have met Alex.

  “Detective, did you collect these weapons?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were they tested for fingerprints?”

  “Yes, by the state crime lab.”

  “Did the lab find any fingerprints of value on Gun A?”

  “Yes, one, on the grip.”

  “Where did they obtain the fingerprints of Peter Houghton?”

  “From the station, when we booked him.”

  He walked the jury through the mechanics of fingerprint testing-the comparison of ten loci, the similarity in ridges and whorls, the computer program that verified the prints as a match.

  “Did the lab compare the fingerprint on Gun A to any other person’s fingerprints?” Diana asked.

  “Yes, Matt Royston’s. They were obtained from his body.”

  “When the lab collected the print off the gun’s grip and compared it to Matt Royston’s fingerprints, were they able to determine whether or not there was a match?”

  “There was no match.”

  “And when the lab compared it to Peter Houghton’s fingerprints, were they able to determine whether or not there was a match?”

  “Yes,” Patrick said. “There was.”

  Diana nodded. “What about on Gun B? Any prints?”

  “Just a partial one, on the trigger. Nothing of value.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?”

  Patrick turned to the jury. “A print of value in fingerprint typing is one that can be compared to another known print and either excluded or included as a match to that print. People leave fingerprints on items they touch all the time, but not necessarily ones we can use. They might be smudged or too incomplete to be considered forensically valuable.”

  “So, Detective, you don’t know for a fact who left the fingerprint on Gun B.”

  “No.”

  “But it could have been Peter Houghton?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any evidence that anyone else at Sterling High School was carrying a weapon that day?”

  “No.”

  “How many weapons were eventually found in the locker room?”

  “Four,” Patrick said. “One handgun with the defendant, one on the floor, and two sawed-off shotguns in a knapsack.”

  “In addition to processing the weapons found in the locker room for fingerprints, did the lab do any other forensic testing on them?”

  “Yes, a ballistics test.”

  “Can you explain that?”

  “Well,” Patrick said, “you shoot the gun into water, basically. Every bullet that comes out of a gun has markings on it that are put in place when a bullet twists its way through the barrel of the gun. That means you can type each bullet to a gun that has been fired by test-firing a gun to see what a bullet would look like once fired from it, and then matching up bullets that have been retrieved. You can also tell whether a gun has ever been fired at all by examining residue within the barrel.”

  “Did you test all four weapons?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what were the results of your tests?”

  “Only two of the four guns were actually fired,” Patrick said. “The handguns, A and B. Of the bullets that we found, all were determined to have come from Gun A. Gun B, when we retrieved it, had been jammed with a double feed. That means two bullets had entered the chamber at the same time, which keeps the gun from properly functioning. When the trigger was pulled, it locked up.”

  “But you said Gun B was fired.”

  “At least once.” Patrick looked up at Diana. “The bullet has not been recovered to date.”

  Diana Leven led Patrick meticulously through the discovery of ten dead students and nineteen wounded ones. He started with the moment that he walked out of Sterling High with Josie Cormier in his arms and placed her in an ambulance, and ended with the last body being moved to the medical examiner’s morgue; then the judge adjourned court for the day.

  After he got off the stand, Patrick talked with Diana for a moment about what would happen tomorrow. The double doors of the courtroom were open, and through them, Patrick could see reporters sucking the stories out of any angry parent who was willing to give an interview. He recognized the mother of a girl-Jada Knight-who’d been shot in the back while she was running from the cafeteria. “My daughter won’t go to school this year until eleven o’clock, because she can’t handle being there when third period starts,” the woman said. “Everything scares her. This has ruined her whole life; why should Peter Houghton’s punishment be any less?”

  He had no desire to run the media gauntlet, and as the only witness for the day, he was bound to be mobbed. So instead, Patrick sat down on the wooden railing that separated the court professionals from the gallery.

  “Hey.”

  He turned at the sound of Alex’s voice. “What are you still doing here?” He would have assumed she was upstairs, springing Josie out of the sequestered witness room, as she had done yesterday.

  “I could ask you the same thing.”

  Patrick nodded toward the doorway. “I wasn’t in the mood to do battle.”

  Alex came closer, until she was standing between his legs, and wrapped her arms around him. She buried her face against his neck, and when she took a deep, rattling breath, Patrick felt it in his own chest. “You could have fooled me,” she said.

  Jordan McAfee was not having a good day. The baby
had spit up on him on his way out the door. He had been ten minutes late for court because the goddamn media were multiplying like jackrabbits and there were no parking spots, and Judge Wagner had reprimanded him for his tardiness. Add to this the fact that for whatever reason, Peter had stopped communicating with Jordan except for the odd grunt, and that his first order of the morning would be to cross-examine the knight in shining armor who’d rushed into the school to confront the evil shooter-well, being a defense attorney didn’t get much more fabulous than this.

  “Detective,” he said, approaching Patrick Ducharme on the witness stand, “after you finished with the medical examiner, you went back to the police department?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were holding Peter there, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “In a jail cell…with bars and a lock on it?”

  “It’s a holding cell,” Ducharme corrected.

  “Had Peter been charged with any crime yet?”

  “No.”

  “He wasn’t actually charged with anything until the following morning, is that right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Where did he stay that night?”

  “At the Grafton County Jail.”

  “Detective, did you speak to my client at all?” Jordan asked.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “What did you ask him?”

  The detective folded his arms. “If he wanted some coffee.”

  “Did he take you up on the offer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ask him at all about the incident at the school?”

  “I asked him what had happened,” Ducharme said.

  “How did Peter respond?”

  The detective frowned. “He said he wanted his mother.”

  “Did he start crying?”

  “Yes.”

  “In fact, he didn’t stop crying, not the whole time you tried to question him, isn’t that true?”