by Jodi Picoult
“To see you—”
“Then look at me,” Peter cried. “Why won’t you fucking look at me?”
He put his head in his hands, his narrow shoulders rounding with the sound of a sob.
It came down to this, Lacy realized: You stared at the stranger in front of you and decided, categorically, that this was no longer your son. Or you made the decision to find whatever scraps of your child you still could in what he had become.
Was that even really a choice, if you were a mother?
People could argue that monsters weren’t born, they were made. People could criticize her parenting skills, point to moments when Lacy had let Peter down by being too lax or too firm, too removed or too smothering. The town of Sterling would analyze to death what she had done to her son—but what about what she would do for him? It was easy to be proud of the kid who got straight A’s and who made the winning basket—a kid the world already adored. But true character showed when you could find something to love in a child everyone else hated. What if the things she had or hadn’t done for Peter were the wrong criteria for measurement? Wasn’t it just as telling a mark of motherhood to see how, from this awful moment on, she behaved?
She reached across the red line until she could embrace Peter. She didn’t care if it was allowed or not. The guards could come and pull her off him, but until that happened, Lacy was not planning to let her son go.
* * *
On the surveillance video taken from the cafeteria, students were carrying trays and doing homework and chatting when Peter entered the room holding a handgun. There was a discharge of bullets and a cacophony of screaming. A smoke alarm went off. When everyone started to run, he shot again, and this time two girls fell down. Other students ran right over them in an effort to get away.
When the only people left in the cafeteria were Peter and the victims, he walked through the rows of tables, surveying his handiwork. He passed by the boy he’d shot who lay in a puddle of blood on top of a book, but he stopped to pick up an iPod that had been left on the table and put the earphones in his ears before turning it off and setting it down again. He turned the page in an open notebook. And then he sat down at one untouched tray and placed the gun on it. He opened a box of Rice Krispies and poured them into a Styrofoam bowl. He added the contents of a milk container and ate all the cereal before standing up again, retrieving his pistol, and exiting the cafeteria.
It was the most chilling, deliberate thing Patrick had ever seen in his life.
He looked down at the bowl of ramen noodles he had cooked himself for dinner, and realized he’d lost his appetite. Setting it aside on a stack of old newspapers, he rewound the video and forced himself to watch it again.
When the phone rang, he picked it up, still distracted by the sight of Peter on his television screen. “Yeah.”
“Well, hello to you, too,” Nina Frost said.
He melted when he heard her voice; old habits died hard. “Sorry. I’m just in the middle of something.”
“I can imagine. It’s all over the news. How are you holding up?”
“Oh, you know,” he said, when what he really meant was that he was not sleeping at night; that he saw the faces of the dead whenever he closed his eyes; that his mouth was full of the questions he was certain he’d forgotten to ask.
“Patrick,” she said, because she was his oldest friend and because she knew him better than anyone, including himself, “don’t blame yourself.”
He bent his head. “It happened in my town. How can’t I?”
“If you had a videophone, I’d be able to tell if you’re wearing your hair shirt or your cape and boots,” Nina said.
“It’s not funny.”
“No, it’s not,” she agreed. “But you must know it’s a slam dunk at trial. You have, what? A thousand witnesses?”
“Something like that.”
Nina grew quiet. Patrick did not have to explain to her—a woman who’d lived with regret as a constant companion—that convicting Peter Houghton was not enough. For Patrick to lay this to rest, he’d have to understand why Peter had done this in the first place.
So that he could keep it from happening again.
* * *
From an FBI investigatory report, published by special agents in charge of examining school shootings around the globe:
Among school shooters, we have seen a similarity of family dynamics. Often the shooter will have a turbulent relationship with his parents, or will have parents who accept pathological behavior. There is a lack of intimacy within the family. There are no limits for television or computer use imposed on the shooter, and sometimes there is access to weapons.
Within the school environment, we found a tendency toward detachment from the learning process on the part of the shooter. The school itself tended to tolerate disrespectful behavior, exhibited inequitable discipline and an inflexible culture—with certain students enjoying prestige given to them by teachers and staff.
Shooters are more likely to have access to violent movies, television, and video games; to use drugs and alcohol; to have a peer group that exists outside of school and supports their behavior.
In addition, prior to a violent act, there is evidence of leakage—a clue that something is coming. These hints might take the form of poems, writings, drawings, Internet posts, or threats made in person or in absentia.
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 Death Wish. 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 Death Wish. 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: Hades1991
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.
