Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

It wasn’t until he got to school the next day that he understood that with better vision came perfect hearing: Four-eyes; blind as a bat. His glasses were no longer a mark of distinction but only a scar, something else that made him different from everyone else. And that wasn’t even the worst of it.

As the world came into focus, Peter realized how people looked when they glanced at him. As if he were the punch line to a joke.

And Peter, with his 20/20 vision, cast his eyes downward, so that he wouldn’t see.

“We are subversive parents,” Alex whispered to Lacy as they sat with their knees bent high as a grasshopper’s at one of the undersize tables during Open School Day. She took the Cuisenaire rods used for math-bright colored unit strips of twos, threes, fours, fives-and fashioned them to spell a curse word.

“It’s all fun and games until someone turns out to be a judge,” Lacy chided, and she scattered the word with her hand.

“Afraid I’m going to get you kicked out of kindergarten?” Alex laughed. “And as for the judge thing, that’s about as much of a long shot as me winning the lottery.”

“We’ll see,” Lacy said.

The teacher leaned down between them and handed each woman a small piece of paper. “Today I’m inviting all the parents to write down one word that best describes their child. Later, we’ll make a love collage out of them.”

Alex glanced at Lacy. “A love collage?”

“Stop being anti-kindergarten.”

“I’m not. In fact, I think everything you need to know about the law you learn in kindergarten. You know: Don’t hit. Don’t take what’s not yours. Don’t kill people. Don’t rape them.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember that lesson. Right after snack time,” Lacy said.

“You know what I mean. It’s a social contract.”

“What if you wound up on the bench and had to uphold a law you didn’t believe in?”

“First off, that’s a big if. And second, I’d do it. I’d feel horrible about it, but I’d do it,” Alex said. “You don’t want a judge with a personal agenda, believe me.”

Lacy tore the edge of her paper into a fringe. “If you become the job, then when do you get to be you?”

Alex grinned and pushed the Cuisenaire rods into another four-letter word. “At kindergarten open houses, I guess.”

Suddenly Josie appeared, rosy-cheeked and flushed. “Mommy,” she said, tugging on Alex’s hand as Peter climbed onto Lacy’s lap. “We’re all done.”

They had been in the block corner, creating a surprise. Lacy and Alex stood up, letting themselves be led past the book rack and the stacks of tiny carpets and the science table with its rotting pumpkin experiment whose pitted skin and sunken flesh reminded Alex of the face of a prosecutor she knew. “This is our house,” Josie announced, pushing open a block that served as the front door. “We’re married.”

Lacy nudged Alex. “I always wanted to get along with my in-laws.”

Peter stood at a wooden stove, mixing imaginary food in a plastic pot. Josie put on an oversize lab coat. “Time to go to work. I’ll be home for dinner.”

“Okay,” Peter said. “We’re having meatballs.”

“What’s your job?” Alex asked Josie.

“I’m a judge. I send people to jail all day long and then I come home and eat pisghetti.” She walked around the perimeter of the block house and reentered through the front door.

“Sit down,” Peter said. “You’re late again.”

Lacy closed her eyes. “Is it just me, or is this like looking into a really unflattering mirror?”

They watched Josie and Peter put aside their plates and then move to another part of their block house, a smaller square within the square. They lay down inside it. “This is the bed,” Josie explained.

The teacher came up behind Alex and Lacy. “They play house all the time,” she said. “Isn’t it sweet?”

Alex watched Peter curl up on his side. Josie spooned against him, wrapping her arm around his waist. She wondered how her daughter had ever formed an image of a couple like this in her mind, given that she’d never even seen her mother go out on a date.

She watched Lacy lean against the block cubby and write, on her small slip of paper, tender. That did describe Peter-he was tender, almost to the point of being raw. It took someone like Josie-curled around him like a shell-to protect him.

Alex reached for a pencil and smoothed out the piece of paper. Adjectives tumbled through her mind-there were so many for her daughter: dynamic, loyal, bright, breathtaking-but she found herself forming different letters.

Mine, she wrote.

This time when the lunch box hit the pavement, it broke wide across its hinges and the car behind the school bus ran right over his tuna fish sandwich and his bag of Doritos. The bus driver, as usual, didn’t notice. The fifth-grade boys were so good at doing this by now that the window was opened and closed before you could even yell for them to stop. Peter felt his eyes welling with tears as the boys high-fived each other. He could hear his mother’s voice in his head-this was the moment where he was supposed to stick up for himself!-but his mother did not realize that would only make it worse.

“Oh, Peter,” Josie sighed as he sat down again beside her.

He stared down at his mittens. “I don’t think I can go to your house on Friday.”

“How come?”

“Because my mom said she’ll punish me if I lose my lunch box again.”

“That’s not fair,” Josie said.

Peter shrugged. “Nothing is.”

No one was more surprised than Alex when the governor of New Hampshire officially picked her from a short list of three candidates for a district court judicial position. Although it made sense that Jeanne Shaheen-a young, Democratic female governor-would want to appoint a young, Democratic female judge, Alex was still a little light-headed over the news when she went for her interview.

The governor was younger than Alex had expected, and prettier. Which is exactly what most people will think about me if I’m on the bench, she thought. She sat down and slipped her hands under her thighs to keep them from shaking.

“If I nominate you,” the governor said, “is there anything I should know?”

“You mean skeletons in my closet?”

Shaheen nodded. What it really came down to, for a gubernatorial appointee, was whether or not that nominee would in some way reflect poorly on the governor herself. Shaheen was trying to cross her t’s and dot her i’s before making an official decision, and for that, Alex could only admire her. “Is anyone going to come to your Executive Council hearing and oppose your nomination?” the governor asked.

“That depends. Are you giving out furloughs at the state prison?”

Shaheen laughed. “I take it that’s where your disgruntled clients have ended up.”

“That’s exactly why they’re disgruntled.”

The governor stood up and shook Alex’s hand. “I think we’ll get along well,” she said.

Maine and New Hampshire were the only two states left in the country with an Executive Council-a group that acted as a direct check on the governor’s power. For Alex, this meant that in the month between her nomination and her confirmation hearing, she had to do whatever she could to placate five Republican men before they put her through the wringer.

She called them weekly, asking if they had any questions they needed answered. She also had to arrange for witnesses to appear on her behalf at the confirmation hearing. After years in the public defender’s office, this should have been simple, but the Executive Council did not want to hear from lawyers. They wanted to hear from the community where Alex worked and lived-from her first-grade teacher to a state trooper who liked her in spite of her allegiance to the Dark Side. The tricky part was that Alex had to call in all her favors to get these people to prepare and testify, but she also had to make it clear that if she did get confirmed as a judge, she could give them nothing in return.