Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

Patrick leaned back in the chair. “Well, that doesn’t prove anything.”

“Yeah,” Orestes said. “Craft festivals do kind of suck. But check this out.” He swiveled in his own chair to reach another terminal, set up on a table. “He hacked into the school’s secure computer system.”

“To do what? Change his grades?”

“Nope. The program he wrote broke through the firewalls on the school system at 9:58 a.m.”

“That’s when the car bomb went off,” Patrick murmured.

Orestes pivoted the monitor so that Patrick could see. “This was on every single screen on every single computer at the school.”

Patrick stared at the purple background, the flaming red letters that scrolled like a marquee: READY OR NOT…HERE I COME.

Jordan was already sitting at the table of the conference room when Peter Houghton was brought in by a correctional officer. “Thanks,” he said to the guard, his eyes on Peter, who immediately canvassed the room, his gaze lighting on the only window. Jordan had seen this over and over in prisoners he’d represented-an ordinary human could so quickly turn into a caged animal. Then again, it was a chicken-and-egg conundrum: were they animals because they were in jail…or were they in jail because they were animals?

“Have a seat,” he said, and Peter remained standing.

Unfazed, Jordan started talking. “I want to lay out the ground rules, Peter,” he said. “Everything I say to you is confidential. Everything you say to me is confidential. I can’t tell anyone what you say. I can tell you, however, not to talk to the media or the police or anyone else for that matter. If anyone tries to contact you, you contact me immediately-call me collect. As your lawyer, I get to do the talking for you. From now on, I’m your best friend, your mother, your father, your priest. Are we clear on that?”

Peter glared at him. “Crystal.”

“Good. So.” Jordan pulled a legal pad out of his briefcase, a pencil. “I imagine you’ve got a few questions; we can start with those.”

“I hate it here,” Peter burst out. “I don’t get why I have to stay here.”

Most of Jordan’s clients started out quiet and terrified in jail-which quickly gave way to anger and indignation. But at that moment Peter sounded like any other ordinary teenage kid-like Thomas had sounded at his age, when the world apparently revolved around him and Jordan just happened to be living on it as well. However, the lawyer in Jordan trumped the parent in him, and he started to wonder if Peter Houghton truly might not know why he was in jail. Jordan would be the first to tell you insanity defenses rarely worked and were grossly overrated, but maybe Peter could be passed off as the real deal-and that was the key to securing an acquittal. “What do you mean?” he pressed.

“They’re the ones who did this to me, and now I’m the one who’s being punished.”

Jordan sat back and crossed his arms. Peter didn’t feel remorse for what he’d done, that much was clear. In fact, he considered himself a victim.

And here was the remarkable thing about being a defense attorney: Jordan didn’t really care. There was no room in his line of work for his own personal feelings. He had worked with the scum of the earth before-killers and rapists who fancied themselves martyrs. His job wasn’t to believe them or to pass judgment. It was simply to do or say whatever he had to in order to get them free. In spite of what he’d just told Peter, he was not a clergyman or a shrink or a friend to a client. He was simply a spin doctor.

“Well,” Jordan said evenly, “you need to understand the jail’s position. To them, you’re just a murderer.”

“Then they’re all hypocrites,” Peter said. “If they saw a roach, they’d step on it, wouldn’t they?”

“Is that how you’d describe what happened at the school?”

Peter flicked his eyes away. “Do you know that I’m not allowed to read magazines?” he said. “I can’t even go into the exercise yard like everyone else.”

“I’m not here to register your complaints.”

“Why are you here?”

“To help you get out,” Jordan said. “And if that’s going to happen, then you need to talk to me.”

Peter folded his arms across his chest and glanced from Jordan’s collared shirt to his tie to his polished black shoes. “Why? You don’t really give a shit about me.”

Jordan stood up and stuffed his notebook into his briefcase. “You know what? You’re right. I don’t really give a shit about you. I’m just doing my job, because unlike you, I won’t have the state paying my room and board for the rest of my life.” He started for the door, but was called back by the sound of Peter’s voice.

“Why is everyone so upset that those jerks are dead?”

Jordan turned slowly, making a mental note that kindness had not worked especially well with Peter, nor had the voice of authority. What had made him respond was pure and simple anger.

“I mean, people are crying over them…and they were assholes. Everyone’s saying I ruined their lives, but no one seemed to care when my life was the one being ruined.”

Jordan sat down on the edge of the table. “How?”

“Where do you want me to start,” Peter answered, bitter. “In nursery school, when the teacher would bring out snacks, and one of them would pull out my chair so I’d fall down and everyone else would crack up? Or in second grade, when they held my head down in the toilet and they flushed it over and over, just because they knew they could? Or that time they beat me up on my way home from school and I needed stitches?”

Jordan picked up his pad and wrote STITCHES. “Who’s they?”

“A whole bunch of kids,” Peter said.

The ones you wanted to kill? Jordan thought, but he didn’t ask. “Why do you think they targeted you?”

“Because they’re dickheads? I don’t know. They’re like a pack. They have to make someone else feel like shit in order to feel good about themselves.”

“What did you try to do to stop it?”

Peter snorted. “In case you haven’t noticed, Sterling’s not exactly a metropolis. Everyone knows everyone. You wind up in high school with the same kids who were in the sandbox in your preschool.”

“Couldn’t you stay out of their path?”

“I had to go to school,” Peter said. “You’d be surprised how small it gets when you’re there for eight hours every day.”

“So did they do this outside of school, too?”

“When they could catch me,” Peter said. “If I was by myself.”

“How about harassment-phone calls, letters, threats?” Jordan asked.

“Online,” Peter said. “They’d send me instant messages, saying I was a loser, things like that. And they took an email I wrote and spammed it out to the whole school…made it a joke…” He looked away, falling silent.

“Why?”

“It was…” He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Jordan made a note on his pad. “Did you ever tell anyone about what was going on? Parents? Teachers?”

“No one gives a crap,” Peter said. “They tell you to ignore it. They say they’ll be watching out to make sure it doesn’t happen, but they never watch.” He walked to the window and pressed his palms against the glass. “There was this kid in my first-grade class who had that disease, the one where your spine grows outside your body-”

“Spina bifida?”

“Yeah. She had a wheelchair and she couldn’t sit up or anything, and before she came to class the teacher told us we had to treat her like she was just like us. The thing is, she wasn’t like us, and we all knew it, and she knew it. So we were supposed to lie to her face?” Peter shook his head. “Everyone talks like it’s all right to be different, but America’s supposed to be this melting pot, and what the hell does that mean? If it’s a melting pot, then you’re really just trying to make everyone the same, aren’t you?”