Jodie Picoult: Nineteen Minutes

Peter sat down and stared only at Jordan, just as he’d told him to. Good boy, he thought. “Are you Peter Houghton?”

“Yes,” Peter said, but he wasn’t close enough to the microphone for it to carry. He leaned forward and repeated the word. “Yes,” he said, and this time, an unholy screech from the PA system rang through the courtroom speakers.

“What grade are you in, Peter?”

“I was a junior when I got arrested.”

“How old are you now?”

“Eighteen.”

Jordan walked toward the jury box. “Peter, are you the person who went to Sterling High School the morning of March 6, 2007, and shot and killed ten people?”

“Yes.”

“And wounded nineteen others?”

“Yes.”

“And caused damage to countless other people, and to a great deal of property?”

“I know,” Peter said.

“You’re not denying that today, are you?”

“No.”

“Can you tell the jury,” Jordan asked, “why you did it?”

Peter looked into his eyes. “They started it.”

“Who?”

“The bullies. The jocks. The ones who called me a freak my whole life.”

“Do you remember their names?”

“There are so many of them,” Peter said.

“Can you tell us why you felt you had to resort to violence?”

Jordan had told Peter that whatever he did, he could not get angry. That he had to stay calm and collected while he spoke, or his testimony would backfire on him-even more than Jordan already expected. “I tried to do what my mom wanted me to do,” Peter explained. “I tried to be like them, but that didn’t work out.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I tried out for soccer, but never got any time on the field. Once, I helped some kids play a practical joke on a teacher by moving his car from the parking lot into the gym…. I got detention, but the other kids didn’t, because they were on the basketball team and had a game on Saturday.”

“But, Peter,” Jordan said, “why this?”

Peter wet his lips. “It wasn’t supposed to end this way.”

“Did you plan to kill all those people?”

They had rehearsed this in the holding cell. All Peter had to say was what he’d said before, when Jordan had coached him. No. No I didn’t.

Peter looked down at his hands. “When I did it in the game,” he said quietly, “I won.”

Jordan froze. Peter had broken from the script, and now Jordan couldn’t find his line. He only knew that the curtain was going to close before he finished. Scrambling, he replayed Peter’s response in his mind: it wasn’t all bad. It made him sound depressed, like a loner.

You can salvage this, Jordan thought to himself.

He walked up to Peter, trying desperately to communicate that he needed focus here; he needed Peter to play along with him. He needed to show the jury that this boy had chosen to stand before them in order to show remorse. “Do you understand now that there weren’t any winners that day, Peter?”

Jordan saw something shine in Peter’s eyes. A tiny flame, one that had been rekindled-optimism. Jordan had done his job too well: after five months of telling Peter that he could get him acquitted, that he had a strategy, that he knew what he was doing…Peter, goddammit, had picked this moment to finally believe him.

“The game’s not over yet, right?” Peter said, and he smiled hopefully at Jordan.

As two of the jurors turned away, Jordan fought for composure. He walked back to the defense table, cursing under his breath. This had always been Peter’s downfall, hadn’t it? He had no idea what he looked like or sounded like to the ordinary observer, the person who didn’t know that Peter wasn’t actively trying to sound like a homicidal killer, but instead trying to share a private joke with one of his only friends.

“Mr. McAfee,” the judge said. “Do you have any further questions?”

He had a thousand: How could you do this to me? How could you do this to yourself? How can I make this jury understand that you didn’t mean that the way it sounded? He shook his head, puzzling through his course of action, and the judge took that for an answer.

“Ms. Leven?” he said.

Jordan’s head snapped up. Wait, he wanted to say. Wait, I was still thinking. He held his breath. If Diana asked Peter anything-even what his middle name was-then he’d have a chance to redirect. And surely, then, he could leave the jury with a different impression of Peter.

Diana riffled through the notes she’d been taking, and then she turned them facedown on the table. “The state has no questions, Your Honor,” she said.

Judge Wagner summoned a bailiff. “Take Mr. Houghton back to his seat. We’ll adjourn court for the weekend.”

As soon as the jury was dismissed, the courtroom erupted in a roar of questions. Reporters swam up the stream of onlookers toward the bar, hoping to corral Jordan for a quote. He grabbed his briefcase and hurried out the back door, the one through which the bailiffs were taking Peter.

“Hold it,” he called out. He jogged closer to the men, who stood with Peter between them, his hands cuffed. “I have to talk to my client about Monday.”

The bailiffs looked at each other, and then at Jordan. “Two minutes,” they said, but they didn’t step away. If Jordan wanted to talk to Peter, this was the only circumstance in which he was going to do it.

Peter’s face was flushed, beaming. “Did I do a good job?”

Jordan hesitated, fishing for a string of words. “Did you say what you wanted to say?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you did a really good job,” Jordan said.

He stood in the hallway and watched the bailiffs lead Peter away. Just before he turned the corner, Peter lifted his conjoined hands, a wave. Jordan nodded, his hands in his pockets.

He slipped out of the jail through a rear door and walked past three media vans with satellite dishes perched on the top like enormous white birds. Through the back window of each van, Jordan could see the producers editing video for the evening news. His face was on every television monitor.

He passed the last van and heard, through the open window, Peter’s voice. The game’s not over yet.

Jordan hiked his briefcase over his shoulder and walked a little faster. “Oh, yes it is,” he said.

Selena had made her husband what he referred to as the Executioner’s Meal, the same thing she served him each night before a closing argument: roast goose, as in, Your goose is cooked. With Sam already in bed, she slipped a plate in front of Jordan and then sat down across from him. “I don’t even really know what to say,” she admitted.

Jordan pushed the food away. “I’m not ready for this yet.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I can’t end the case with that.”

“Baby,” Selena pointed out, “after today, you couldn’t save this case with an entire squad of firefighters.”

“I can’t just give up. I told Peter he had a chance.” He turned his anguished face up to Selena’s. “I was the one who let him get up on the stand, even though I knew better. There’s got to be something I can do…something I can say so that Peter’s testimony isn’t the last one the jury’s left with.”

Selena sighed and reached for the dinner plate. She took Jordan’s knife and fork and cut herself a piece, dipped it in cherry sauce. “This is some damn fine goose, Jordan,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

“The witness list,” Jordan said, standing up and rummaging through a stack of papers on the other end of the dining room table. “There’s got to be someone we haven’t called who can help us.” He scanned the names. “Who’s Louise Herrman?”

“Peter’s third-grade teacher,” Selena said, her mouth full.