Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

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 least 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.