Jodie Picoult: Nineteen Minutes

She glanced up then, and her eyes locked on Peter’s. For a long moment, she just stared at him, and then she closed her eyes and turned away.

“Did you know what was going on?”

“No.”

“Did you see anyone shooting?”

“No.”

“Where did you go?”

“To the gym. We ran across it, toward the locker room. I knew he was coming closer, because I kept hearing gunshots.”

“Who was with you when you went into the locker room?”

“I thought Drew and Matt, but when I turned around, I realized that Drew wasn’t there. He’d been shot.”

“Did you see Drew getting shot?”

Josie shook her head. “No.”

“Did you see Peter before you got into the locker room?”

“No.” Her face crumpled, and she wiped at her eyes.

“Josie,” Jordan said, “what happened next?”

10:16 A.M., The Day Of

Get down,” Matt hissed, and he shoved Josie so that she fell behind the wooden bench.

It wasn’t a good place to hide, but then, nowhere in the locker room was a good place to hide. Matt’s plan had been to climb out the window in the shower, and he’d even opened it up, but then they’d heard the shots in the gym and realized they didn’t have time to drag the bench over and climb through. They’d boxed themselves in, literally.

She curled herself into a ball and Matt crouched down in front of her. Her heart thundered against his back, and she kept forgetting to breathe.

He reached behind him until he found her hand. “If anything happens, Jo,” he whispered, “I loved you.”

Josie started to cry. She was going to die; they were all going to die. She thought of a hundred things she hadn’t done yet that she so badly wanted to do: go to Australia, swim with dolphins. Learn all the words to “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Graduate.

Get married.

She wiped her face against the back of Matt’s shirt, and then the locker room burst open. Peter stumbled inside, his eyes wild, holding a handgun. His left sneaker was untied, Josie noticed, and then she couldn’t believe she noticed. He lifted his gun at Matt, and she couldn’t help it; she screamed.

Maybe it was the noise; maybe it was her voice. It startled Peter, and he dropped his backpack. It slid off his shoulder, and as it did, another gun fell out of an open pocket.

It skittered across the floor, landing just behind Josie’s left foot.

Do you know how there are moments when the world moves so slowly you can feel your bones shifting, your mind tumbling? When you think that no matter what happens to you for the rest of your life, you will remember every last detail of that one minute forever? Josie watched her hand stretch back, watched her fingers curl around the cold black butt of the gun. Fumbling it, she staggered upright, pointing the gun at Peter.

Matt backed away toward the showers, under Josie’s cover. Peter held his gun steady, still pointing it at Matt, even though Josie was closer. “Josie,” he said. “Let me finish this.”

“Shoot him, Josie,” Matt said. “Fucking shoot him.”

Peter pulled back the slide of the gun so that a bullet from the clip would cycle into place. Watching him carefully, Josie mimicked his actions.

She remembered being in nursery school with Peter-how other boys would pick up sticks or rocks and run around yelling Hands up. What had she and Peter used the sticks for? She couldn’t recall.

“Josie, for Christ’s sake!” Matt was sweating, his eyes wide. “Are you fucking stupid?”

“Don’t talk to her like that,” Peter cried.

“Shut up, asshole,” Matt said. “You think she’s going to save you?” He turned to Josie. “What are you waiting for? Shoot.”

So she did.

As the gun fired, it ripped two stripes of her skin from the base of her thumb. Her hands jerked upward, numb, humming. The blood was black on Matt’s gray T-shirt. He stood for a moment, shocked, his hand over the wound in his stomach. She saw his mouth close around her name, but she couldn’t hear it, her ears were ringing so loudly. Josie? and then he fell to the floor.

Josie’s hand started shaking violently; she wasn’t surprised when the gun just fell out of it, as singularly repelled by her grasp as it had been glued to it moments before. “Matt,” she cried, running toward him. She pressed her hands against the blood, because that’s what you were supposed to do, wasn’t it, but he writhed and screamed in agony. Blood began to bubble out of his mouth, trailing down his neck. “Do something,” she sobbed, turning to Peter. “Help me.”

Peter walked closer, lifted the gun he was holding, and shot Matt in the head.

Horrified, she scrambled backward, away from them both. That wasn’t what she’d meant; that couldn’t have been what she meant.

She stared at Peter, and she realized that in that one moment, when she hadn’t been thinking, she knew exactly what he’d felt as he moved through the school with his backpack and his guns. Every kid in this school played a role: jock, brain, beauty, freak. All Peter had done was what they all secretly dreamed of: be someone, even for just nineteen minutes, who nobody else was allowed to judge.

“Don’t tell,” Peter whispered, and Josie realized he was offering her a way out-a deal sealed in blood, a partnership of silence: I won’t share your secrets, if you don’t share mine.

Josie nodded slowly, and then her world went black.

I think a person’s life is supposed to be like a DVD. You can see the version everyone else sees, or you can choose the director’s cut-the way he wanted you to see it, before everything else got in the way.

There are menus, probably, so that you can start at the good spots and not have to relive the bad ones. You can measure your life by the number of scenes you’ve survived, or the minutes you’ve been stuck there.

Probably, though, life is more like one of those dumb video surveillance tapes. Grainy, no matter how hard you stare at it. And looped: the same thing, over and over.

Five Months After

Alex pushed past the people in the gallery who had erupted in confusion in the wake of Josie’s confession. Somewhere in this crowd of people were the Roystons, who had just heard that their son had been shot by her daughter, but she could not think of that right now. She could only see Josie, trapped on that witness stand, while Alex struggled to get past the bar. She was a judge, dammit; she should have been allowed to go there, but two bailiffs were firmly holding her back.

Wagner was smacking his gavel, although nobody gave a damn. “We’ll take a fifteen-minute recess,” he ordered, and as another bailiff hauled Peter through a rear door, the judge turned to Josie. “Young lady,” he said, “you are still under oath.”

Alex watched Josie being taken through another door, and she called out after her. A moment later, Eleanor was at her side. The clerk took Alex’s arm. “Judge, come with me. You’re not safe out here right now.”

For the first time she could actively remember, Alex allowed herself to be led.

Patrick arrived in the courtroom just as it exploded. He saw Josie on the stand, crying desperately; he saw Judge Wagner fighting for control-but most of all, he saw Alex single-mindedly trying to get to her daughter.

He would have drawn his gun right then and there to help her do it.

By the time he fought his way down the central aisle of the courtroom, Alex was gone. He caught a glimpse of her as she slipped into a room behind the bench, and he hurdled the bar to follow her but felt someone grab his sleeve. Annoyed, he glanced down to see Diana Leven.

“What the hell is going on?” he asked.

“You first.”

He sighed. “I spent the night at Sterling High, trying to check Josie’s statement. It didn’t make sense-if Matt had fired at Peter, there should have been physical evidence of destruction in the wall behind him. I assumed that she was lying again-that Peter had been the one to shoot Matt unprovoked. Once I figured out where that first bullet hit, I used a laser to see where it could have ricocheted-and then I understood why we didn’t find it the first time around.” Digging in his coat, he extracted an evidence bag with a slug inside. “The fire department helped me dig it out of a maple tree outside the window in the shower stall. I drove it straight to the lab for testing-and stood over them all night with a whip until they agreed to do the work on the spot. Not only was the bullet fired from Gun B, it’s got blood and tissue on it that types to Matt Royston. The thing is, when you reverse the angle of that bullet-when you stand in the tree and ricochet the laser off the tile where it struck, to see where the shot originated from-you don’t get anywhere close to where Peter was standing. It was-”