by Jodi Picoult
If there was a totem pole of unpopularity, Josie knew she still ranked relatively higher than some. Every now and then she wondered if she hung out with Peter because she enjoyed his company or because being with him made her feel better about herself.
While the class worked on the review sheet, Mrs. Rasmussin surfed the Internet. It was a schoolwide joke—who could catch her buying a pair of pants from Gap.com, or reading soap opera fansites. One kid swore he’d found her looking at porn one day when he went to her desk to ask a question.
Josie finished early, as usual, and looked up to see Mrs. Rasmussin at her computer . . . but there were tears streaming down her cheeks, in that strange way that happens when people do not even realize they are crying.
She stood up and walked out of the room without even saying a word to the class about being quiet in her absence.
The minute she left, Peter tapped on Josie’s shoulder. “What’s wrong with her?”
Before Josie could answer, Mrs. Rasmussin returned. Her face was as white as marble, and her lips were pressed together like a seam. “Class,” she said, “something terrible has happened.”
* * *
In the media center, where the middle school students had been herded, the principal told them what he knew: two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. Another one had just crashed into the Pentagon. The south tower of the World Trade Center had collapsed.
The librarian had set up a television so that they could all watch the unfolding coverage. Even though they had been pulled out of class—usually a cause for celebration—it was so quiet in that library that Peter could hear his own heart pounding. He looked around the walls of the room, at the sky outside the windows. This school wasn’t a safety zone. Nothing was, no matter what you’d been told.
Was this what it felt like to be at war?
Peter stared at the screen. People were sobbing and screaming in New York City, but you could barely see because of the dust and smoke in the air. There were fires everywhere, and the ululations of screaming fire engines and car alarms. It looked nothing like the New York Peter remembered the one time he’d vacationed there with his parents. They’d gone to the top of the Empire State Building and they were planning to have a fancy dinner at Windows on the World, but then Joey had gotten sick from eating too much popcorn and instead they’d headed back to the hotel.
Mrs. Rasmussin had left school for the day. Her brother was a bond trader in the World Trade Center.
Had been.
Josie was sitting next to Peter. Even with a few inches of space separating their chairs, he could feel her shaking. “Peter,” she whispered, horrified, “there’s people jumping.”
He couldn’t see as well as she could, even with his glasses, but when he squinted he could tell Josie was right. It made his chest hurt to watch, as if his ribs were suddenly a size too small. What kind of person would do that?
He answered his own question: The kind who doesn’t see any other way out.
“Do you think they could get us here?” Josie whispered.
Peter glanced at her. He wished he knew what to say to make her feel better, but the truth was, he didn’t feel all that great himself and he didn’t know if there were even any words in the English language to take away this kind of stunning shock, this understanding that the world isn’t the place you thought it was.
He turned back to the screen so that he didn’t have to answer Josie. More people leaped out of the windows of the north tower; then there was a massive roar as if the ground itself were opening its jaws. When the building collapsed, Peter let out the breath he’d been holding—relieved, because now he couldn’t see anything at all.
* * *
The switchboards to the schools were completely jammed, and so parents fell into two categories: the ones who didn’t want to scare their kids to death by showing up at school and shepherding them into a basement bunker, and those who wanted to ride out this tragedy with their children close at hand.
Lacy Houghton and Alex Cormier both fell into the latter category, and both arrived at the school simultaneously. They parked beside each other in the bus circle and got out of their cars, and only then recognized each other—they had not seen each other since the day Alex marched her daughter out of Lacy’s basement, where the guns were kept. “Is Peter—” Alex began.
“I don’t know. Josie?”
“I’m here to get her.”
They went into the main office together, and were directed down the hall to the media center. “I can’t believe they’re letting them watch the news,” Lacy said, running beside Alex.
“They’re old enough to understand what’s happening,” Alex said.
Lacy shook her head. “I’m not old enough to understand what’s happening.”
The media center was spread with students—on chairs, on tables, sprawled on the floor. It took Alex a moment to realize what was so unnatural about the crowd: no one was making a sound. Even the teachers stood with their hands over their mouths, as if they were afraid to let out any of the emotion, because once the floodgates opened, everything else in their path would be swept away.
In the front of the room was a single television, and every eye was on it. Alex spotted Josie because she had stolen one of Alex’s headbands—a leopard print. “Josie,” she called, and her daughter whipped around, then nearly climbed over other kids in her effort to reach Alex.
Josie hit her like a hurricane, all emotion and fury, but Alex knew that somewhere inside was the eye of that storm. And then, like any force of nature, you had to brace yourself for another onslaught before things went back to normal. “Mommy,” she sobbed. “Is it over?”
Alex didn’t know what to say. As the parent, she was supposed to have all the answers, but she didn’t. She was supposed to be able to keep her daughter safe, but she couldn’t promise that either. She had to put on a brave face and tell Josie it was going to be fine, when she really didn’t know that herself. Even driving here from court, she had been aware of the fragility of the roads beneath her wheels, of the divider of sky that could so easily be breached. She passed wells and thought about drinking-water contamination; she wondered how far away the closest nuclear power plant was.
And yet, she had spent years being the judge others expected her to be—someone cool and collected, someone who could reach conclusions without getting hysterical. She could certainly put on that demeanor for her daughter, too.
“We’re fine,” Alex said calmly. “It’s over.” She did not know that even as she spoke, a fourth plane was crashing into a field in Pennsylvania. She did not realize that her fierce grip on Josie contradicted her words.
Over Josie’s shoulder Alex nodded to Lacy Houghton, who was leaving with her two sons in tow. With some shock she realized Peter was tall now, nearly as tall as a man.
How many years had it been since she’d seen him?
You could lose track of someone when you blinked, Alex realized. She vowed not to let that happen to her and her daughter. Because when it came down to it, being a judge didn’t matter nearly as much as being a mother. When Alex’s clerk had told her the news about the World Trade Center, her first thought had not been for her constituents . . . only for Josie.
For a few weeks, Alex held to her promises. She rearranged her docket so that she was home when Josie got there; she left legal briefs in the office instead of bringing them home to read on weekends; every night, over dinner, they talked—not just chatter, but real conversation: about why To Kill a Mockingbird might very well be the best book ever written; about how you could tell if you’d fallen in love; even about Josie’s father. But then, one week, a particularly knotty case had her staying late at the office. And Josie started being able to sleep through the night again, instead of waking up screaming. Part of going back to normal meant erasing the boundaries of what was abnormal, and within a few months, the way Alex had felt on 9/11 was slowly forgotten, like a tide washing out a message she’d onc
e scrawled on the sand.
* * *
Peter hated soccer, but he was on the middle school team. They had an anyone-can-play policy, so that even kids who might not normally make varsity or JV or—who was he kidding? the team, period—could join. It was this—plus his mother’s belief that part of fitting in meant being in the crowd to begin with—that led him to a season of afternoon practices where he found himself doing passing drills and running after the ball more often than he returned it; and games twice a week where he warmed middle school soccer field benches all over Grafton County.
There was only one thing Peter hated more than soccer, and that was getting dressed for it. After school, he’d purposely find something to do at his locker, or a question to ask a teacher, so that he wound up in the locker room after most of his teammates were outside stretching and warming up. Then, in a corner section, Peter would strip without having to listen to anyone make fun of the way his chest sort of caved in at the bottom, or having the elastic of his boxers twisted to give him a wedgie. They called him Peter Homo, instead of Peter Houghton, and even when he was the only one in the locker room he could still hear the slap of their high-fives and the laughter that rolled toward him like an oil slick.
After practice, he usually was able to do something that ensured he would be the last one in the locker room—picking up the practice balls, asking the coach a question about an upcoming game, even retying his cleats. If he was really lucky, by the time he reached the showers, everyone else would already have left for home. But today, just as practice had ended, a thunderstorm had rolled in. The coach herded all the kids off the field and into the locker room.
Peter walked slowly into his corner bank of lockers. Several guys were already headed to the showers, towels wrapped around their waists. Drew, for one, and his friend Matt Royston. They were laughing as they walked, punching each other in the arms to see who could land the harder hit.
Peter turned his back to the other locker sections and skimmed off his uniform, then covered himself quickly with a towel. His heart was pounding. He could already imagine what everyone else saw when they looked at him, because he saw it, too, in the mirror: skin white as the belly of a fish; knobs sticking out of his spine and collarbones. Arms without a single rope of muscle.
The last thing Peter did was take off his glasses and put them on the shelf of his open locker. It made everything blissfully fuzzy.
He ducked his head and walked into the shower, pulling off his towel at the last possible minute. Matt and Drew were already soaping themselves up. Peter let the spray hit him in the forehead. He imagined being an adventurer on some wild white river, being pummeled by a waterfall as he was sucked into a vortex.
When he wiped his eyes and turned around, he could see the blurred edges of the bodies that were Matt and Drew. And the dark patch between their legs—pubic hair.
Peter didn’t have any yet.
Matt suddenly twisted sideways. “Jesus Christ. Stop looking at my dick.”
“Fucking fag,” Drew said.
Peter immediately turned away. What if it turned out they were right? What if that was the reason his gaze had fallen right there at that moment? Worse, what if he got hard right now, which was happening more and more lately?
That would mean he was gay, wouldn’t it?
“I wasn’t looking at you,” Peter blurted. “I can’t see anything.”
Drew’s laughter bounced against the tile walls of the shower. “Maybe your dick’s too small, Mattie.”
Suddenly Matt had Peter by the throat. “I don’t have my glasses on,” Peter choked out. “That’s why.”
Matt let go, shoving Peter against the wall, then stalked out of the shower. He reached over and plucked Peter’s towel from a hook, tossing it into the spray. It fell, soaked, to cover the central drain.
Peter picked it up and wrapped it around his waist. The cotton was sopping wet, and he was crying, but he thought maybe people couldn’t tell because the rest of him was dripping, too. Everyone was staring.
When he was around Josie, he didn’t feel anything—didn’t want to kiss her or hold her hand or anything like that. He didn’t think he felt those things about guys, either; but surely you had to be gay or straight. You couldn’t be neither.
He hurried to the corner bank of lockers and found Matt standing in front of his. Peter squinted, trying to see what Matt was holding, and then he heard it: Matt took his glasses, slammed the locker door on them, and let the mangled frames drop to the floor. “Now you can’t look at me,” he said, and he walked away.
Peter knelt down on the floor, trying to pick up the broken pieces of glass. Because he couldn’t see, he cut his hand. He sat, cross-legged, with the towel puddled in his lap. He brought his palm closer to his face, until everything was clear.
* * *
In her dream, Alex was walking down Main Street stark naked. She went into the bank and deposited a check. “Your Honor,” the teller said, smiling. “Isn’t it beautiful out today?”
Five minutes later, she went into the coffee shop and ordered a latte with skim milk. The barista was a girl with improbable purple hair and a straight piercing that went across the bridge of her nose at the level of her eyebrows; when Josie was little and they’d come here, Alex would have to tell her not to stare. “Would you like biscotti with that, Judge?” the barista asked.
She went into the bookstore, the pharmacy, and the gas station, and in each place, she could feel people staring at her. She knew she was naked. They knew she was naked. But no one said anything until she got to the post office. The postal clerk in Sterling was an old man who had been working there, probably, since the changeover from the Pony Express. He handed Alex a roll of stamps, and then furtively covered her hand with his own. “Ma’am, it might not be my place to say so . . .”
Alex lifted her gaze, waited.
The worry lines on the clerk’s forehead smoothed. “But that’s a beautiful dress you’ve got on, Your Honor,” he said.
* * *
Her patient was screaming. Lacy could hear the girl sobbing all the way down the hall. She ran as fast as she could, turning the corner and entering the hospital room.
Kelly Gamboni was twenty-one years old, orphaned, and had an IQ of 79. She had been gang-raped by three high school boys who were now awaiting trial at a juvy facility in Concord. Kelly lived at a group home for Catholics, so abortion was never an option. But now, an ER doctor had deemed it medically necessary to induce Kelly, at thirty-six weeks. She lay in the hospital bed with a nurse trying ineffectually to comfort her, as Kelly clutched a teddy bear. “Daddy,” she cried, to a parent who had died years ago. “Take me home. Daddy, it hurts!”
The doctor walked into the room, and Lacy rounded on him.
“How dare you,” she said. “This is my patient.”
“Well, she was brought into the ER and became mine,” the doctor countered.
Lacy looked at Kelly and then walked into the hall; it would do Kelly no good to have them fighting in front of her. “She came in complaining of wetting her underwear for two days. The exam was consistent with premature rupture of membranes,” the doctor said. “She’s afebrile and the fetal monitor tracing is reactive. It’s completely reasonable to induce. And she signed off on the consent form.”
“It may be reasonable, but it’s not advisable. She’s mentally retarded. She doesn’t know what’s happening to her right now; she’s terrified. And she certainly doesn’t have the ability to consent.” Lacy turned on her heel. “I’m calling psych.”
“Like hell you are,” the doctor said, grabbing her arm.
“Let go of me!”
They were still screaming at each other five minutes later when the psych consult arrived. The boy who stood in front of Lacy looked to be about Joey’s age. “You’ve got to be kidding,” the doctor said, the first comment he’d made that she agreed with.
They both followed the shrink into Kelly’s room. By now, the girl wa
s curled into a ball around her belly, whimpering. “She needs an epidural,” Lacy muttered.
“It’s not safe to give one at two centimeters,” the doctor argued.
“I don’t care. She needs one.”
“Kelly?” the psychiatrist said, squatting down in front of her. “Do you know what a C-section is?”
“Uh-huh,” Kelly groaned.
The psychiatrist stood up. “She’s capable of consent, unless a court’s ruled otherwise.”
Lacy’s jaw dropped. “That’s it?”
“I have six other consults waiting for me,” the psychiatrist snapped. “Sorry to disappoint you.”
Lacy yelled after him. “I’m not the one you’re disappointing!” She sank down beside Kelly and squeezed her hand. “It’s okay. I’m going to take care of you.” She winged a prayer to whoever might move the mountains that could be men’s hearts. Then she lifted her face to the doctor’s. “First do no harm,” she said softly.
The doctor pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’ll get her an epidural,” he sighed; and only then did Lacy realize she had been holding her breath.
* * *
The last place Josie wanted to go was out to dinner with her mother, so that she could spend three hours watching maître d’s and chefs and other guests suck up to her. This was Josie’s birthday celebration, so she didn’t really understand why she couldn’t just demand take-out Chinese and a video. But her mother was insisting that it wouldn’t be a celebration if they just stayed at home, and so here she was, trailing after her mother like a lady-in-waiting.
She’d been counting. There were four Nice to see you, Your Honors. Three Yes, Your Honors. Two My pleasure, Your Honors. And one For Your Honor, we have the best table in the house. Sometimes Josie read about celebrities in People magazine who were always getting handouts from purse companies and shoe stores and free tickets to opening nights on Broadway and Yankee Stadium—when you got right down to it, her mother was a celebrity in the town of Sterling.
“I cannot believe,” her mother said, “that I have a twelve-year-old.”
“Is that my cue to say something like, you must have been a child prodigy?”
