Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

Not to mention: Peter wasn’t popular in jail, either.

He thought about the witnesses that Diana Leven had marched or dragged or wheeled to the stand today. Jordan had explained that it was all about sympathy; that the prosecution wanted to present all these ruined lives before they turned to the hard-core evidence; that he would soon have a chance to show how Peter’s life had been ruined, too. Peter hardly even cared about that. He’d been more amazed, after seeing those students again, at how little had changed.

Peter stared up at the woven springs of the upper bunk, blinking fast. Then he rolled toward the wall and stuffed the corner of his pillowcase into his mouth, so no one would be able to hear him cry.

Even though John Eberhard couldn’t call him a fag anymore, much less speak…

Even though Drew Girard would never be the jock that he had been…

Even though Haley Weaver wasn’t a knockout…

They were all still part of a group Peter could not, and would never, fit into.

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.