Jodie Picoult: Nineteen Minutes

The prosecutor sighed wearily. “Josie just confessed to shooting Matt Royston.”

“Well,” Patrick said, handing the evidence bag to Diana, “she’s finally telling the truth.”

Jordan leaned against the bars of the holding cell. “Did you forget to tell me about this?”

“No,” Peter said.

He turned. “You know, if you’d mentioned this at the beginning, your case could have had a very different outcome.”

Peter was lying on the bench in the cell, his hands behind his head. To Jordan’s shock, he was smiling. “She was my friend again,” Peter explained. “You don’t break a promise to a friend.”

Alex sat in the dark of the conference room where defendants were usually brought during breaks, and realized that her daughter now would qualify. There would be another trial, and this time Josie would be at the center of it.

“Why?” she asked.

She could make out the silver edge of Josie’s profile. “Because you told me to tell the truth.”

“What is the truth?”

“I loved Matt. And I hated him. I hated myself for loving him, but if I wasn’t with him, I wasn’t anyone anymore.”

“I don’t understand…”

“How could you? You’re perfect.” Josie shook her head. “The rest of us, we’re all like Peter. Some of us just do a better job of hiding it. What’s the difference between spending your life trying to be invisible, or pretending to be the person you think everyone wants you to be? Either way, you’re faking.”

Alex thought of all the parties she’d ever gone to where the first question she was asked was What do you do? as if that were enough to define you. Nobody ever asked you who you really were, because that changed. You might be a judge or a mother or a dreamer. You might be a loner or a visionary or a pessimist. You might be the victim, and you might be the bully. You could be the parent, and also the child. You might wound one day and heal the next.

I’m not perfect, Alex thought, and maybe that was the first step toward becoming that way.

“What’s going to happen to me?” Josie asked, the same question she’d asked a day ago, when Alex thought herself qualified to give answers.

“What’s going to happen to us,” Alex corrected.

A smile chased over Josie’s face, gone almost as quickly as it had come. “I asked you first.”

The door to the conference room opened, spilling light from the corridor, silhouetting whatever came next. Alex reached for her daughter’s hand and took a deep breath. “Let’s go see,” she said.

Peter was convicted of eight first-degree murders and two second-degree murders. The jury decided that in the case of Matt Royston and Courtney Ignatio, he had not been acting with premeditation and deliberation. He’d been provoked.

After the verdict was handed down, Jordan met with Peter in the holding cell. He’d be brought back to the jail only until the sentencing hearing; then he would be transferred to the state prison in Concord. Serving out eight consecutive murder sentences, he would not leave it alive.

“You okay?” Jordan asked, putting his hand on Peter’s shoulder.

“Yeah.” He shrugged. “I sort of knew it was going to happen.”

“But they heard you. That’s why they came back with manslaughter for two of the counts.”

“I guess I should say thanks for trying.” He smiled crookedly at Jordan. “Have a good life.”

“I’ll come see you, if I get down to Concord,” Jordan said.

He looked at Peter. In the six months since this case had fallen into his lap, his client had grown up. Peter was as tall as Jordan now. He probably weighed a little more. He had a deeper voice, a shadow of beard on his jaw. Jordan marveled that he hadn’t noticed these things until now.

“Well,” Jordan said. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out the way I’d hoped.”

“Me, too.”

Peter held out his hand, and Jordan embraced him instead. “Take care.”

He started out of the cell, and then Peter called him back. He was holding out the eyeglasses Jordan had brought him for the trial. “These are yours,” Peter said.

“Hang on to them. You have more use for them.”

Peter tucked the glasses into the front pocket of Jordan’s jacket. “I kind of like knowing you’re taking care of them,” he said. “And there isn’t all that much I really want to see.”

Jordan nodded. He walked out of the holding cell and said good-bye to the deputies. Then he headed toward the lobby, where Selena was waiting.

As he approached her, he put on Peter’s glasses. “What’s up with those?” she asked.

“I kind of like them.”

“You have perfect vision,” Selena pointed out.

Jordan considered the way the lenses made the world curve in at the ends, so that he had to move more gingerly through it. “Not always,” he said.

In the weeks after the trial, Lewis began fooling around with numbers. He’d done some preliminary research and entered it into STATA to see what kinds of patterns emerged. And-here was the interesting thing-it had absolutely nothing to do with happiness. Instead, he’d started looking at the communities where school shootings had occurred in the past and spinning them out to the present, to see how a single act of violence might affect economic stability. Or in other words-once the world was pulled out from beneath your feet, did you ever get to stand on firm ground again?

He was teaching again at Sterling College-basic microeconomics. Classes had only just begun in late September, and Lewis found himself slipping easily into the lecture circuit. When he was talking about Keynesian models and widgets and competition, it was routine-so effortless that he could almost make himself believe this was any other freshman survey course he’d taught in the past, before Peter had been convicted.

Lewis taught by walking up and down the aisles-a necessary evil, now that the campus had gone WiFi and students would play online poker or IM each other while he lectured-which was how he happened to come across the kids in the back. Two football players were taking turns squeezing a sports-top water bottle so that the stream arced upward and sprayed onto the back of another kid’s neck. The boy, two rows forward, kept turning around to see who was squirting water at him, but by then, the jocks were looking up at the graphs on the screen in the front of the hall, their faces as smooth as choirboys’.

“Now,” Lewis said, not missing a beat, “who can tell me what happens if you set the price above point A on the graph?” He plucked the water bottle out of the hands of one of the jocks. “Thank you, Mr. Graves. I was getting thirsty.”

The boy two rows ahead raised his hand like an arrow, and Lewis nodded at him. “No one would want to buy the widget for that much money,” he said. “So demand would fall, and that means the price would have to drop, or they’d wind up with a whole boatload of extras in the warehouse.”

“Excellent,” Lewis said, and he glanced up at the clock. “All right, guys, on Monday we’ll be covering the next chapter in Mankiw. And don’t be surprised if there’s a surprise quiz.”

“If you told us, it’s not a surprise,” a girl pointed out.

Lewis smiled. “Oops.”

He stood by the chair of the boy who’d given the right answer. He was stuffing his notebook into his backpack, which was already so crammed with papers that the zipper wouldn’t close. His hair was too long, and his T-shirt had a picture of Einstein’s face on it. “Nice work today.”

“Thanks.” The boy shifted from one foot to the other; Lewis could tell that he wasn’t quite sure what to say next. He thrust out his hand. “Um, nice to meet you. I mean, you’ve already met us all, but not, like, personally.”