Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

Jordan found himself thinking about his son Thomas’s transition to middle school. They’d moved from Bainbridge to Salem Falls, a small enough school system that the cliques had already developed thick cellular walls against outsiders. For a while, Thomas had been a chameleon-he’d come home from school and hole up in his room, emerging as a soccer player, a thespian, a “mathlete.” It took him several sheddings of his own adolescent skin to find a group of friends who let him be whoever he wanted; and the rest of Thomas’s high school career was a fairly peaceful one. But what if he hadn’t found that group of friends? What if he’d continued peeling off layers of himself until there was nothing left at his core?

As if he could read Jordan’s mind, Peter suddenly stared at him. “Do you have kids?”

Jordan did not talk about his personal life with clients. Their relationship existed in the confines of a court, and that was that. The few times in his career when this unwritten rule had been broken had nearly wrecked him personally and professionally. But he met Peter’s gaze and said, “Two. A six-month-old baby and a son at Yale.”

“Then you get it,” Peter said. “Everyone wants their kid to grow up and go to Harvard or be a quarterback for the Patriots. No one ever looks at their baby and thinks, Oh, I hope my kid grows up and becomes a freak. I hope he gets to school every day and prays he won’t catch anyone’s attention. But you know what? Kids grow up like that every single day.”

Jordan found himself at a loss for words. There was the finest line between unique and odd, between what made a child grow up to be as well adjusted as Thomas versus unstable, like Peter. Did every teenager have the capacity to fall on one side or the other of that tightrope, and could you identify a single moment that tipped the balance?

He suddenly thought of Sam this morning, when Jordan was changing his diaper. The baby had grabbed hold of his own toes, fascinated to have located them, and immediately stuffed his foot into his mouth. Look at that, Selena had joked over his shoulder, like father like son. As Jordan had finished dressing Sam, he’d marveled at the mystery life must be for someone that young. Imagine a world that seemed so much bigger than you. Imagine waking up one morning and finding a piece of yourself you didn’t even know existed.

When you don’t fit in, you become superhuman. You can feel everyone else’s eyes on you, stuck like Velcro. You can hear a whisper about you from a mile away. You can disappear, even when it looks like you’re still standing right there. You can scream, and nobody hears a sound.

You become the mutant who fell into the vat of acid, the Joker who can’t remove his mask, the bionic man who’s missing all his limbs and none of his heart.

You are the thing that used to be normal, but that was so long ago, you can’t even remember what it was like.

Six Years Before

Peter knew he was doomed, the first day of sixth grade, when his mother presented him with a gift over breakfast. “I know how much you wanted one,” she said, and she waited for him to open the wrapping paper.

Inside was a three-ring binder with a graphic of Superman on the cover. And he had wanted one. Three years ago, when that was a cool thing to have.

He had managed a smile. “Thanks, Mom,” he said, and she beamed at him, while he imagined all the ways carrying this totally stupid notebook would be used against him.

Josie, as usual, had come to his rescue. She told the school custodian that her bike handlebars were all screwed up and that she needed some duct tape to jury-rig it until she got home. In reality, she didn’t bike to school-she walked with Peter, who lived a little farther out of town but picked her up along the way. Although they never saw each other outside of school-and hadn’t in years, thanks to some blowout fight between his mother and hers that neither of them could really remember the details about-Josie still hung out with Peter. And thank God for that, because no one else really did. They sat together during lunch, they read each other’s rough drafts in English, they were always each other’s lab partners. Summers were always tough. They could email, and every now and then they saw each other at the town pond, but that was about it. And then, come September, they fell back in step as if they’d never missed a beat. That, Peter figured, was the very definition of a best friend.

Today, thanks to the Superman binder, they’d started off the year with a crisis. With Josie’s help, he’d made a slipcover of sorts from the tape and an old newspaper they stole from the science lab. He could take it off when he was home, she reasoned, so that his mother wouldn’t be offended.

The sixth graders had lunch fourth period, when it was only 11:00 a.m., but by that point it felt like they hadn’t eaten in months. Josie bought-her mother’s cooking skills, she said, were limited to writing a check to the cafeteria ladies-and Peter stood beside her in the snaking line to pick up a carton of milk. His mother would have packed him a sandwich with the crusts cut off, a bag of carrot sticks, an organic fruit that might or might not be bruised.

Peter slid his binder onto the cafeteria tray, embarrassed even though it was still covered up by the newspaper. He popped a straw into his milk carton. “You know, it shouldn’t make a difference what binder you’ve got,” Josie said. “What do you care what they think?”

As they headed into the lunchroom, Drew Girard slammed into Peter. “Watch where you’re going, retard,” Drew said, but it was too late-Peter had already dropped his tray.

His milk spilled all over his splayed binder, melting the newspaper into a muddy clot and revealing the Superman graphic beneath it.

Drew started to laugh. “Are you wearing your Underoos, too, Houghton?”

“Shut up, Drew.”

“Or what? Will you melt me with your X-ray vision?”

Mrs. McDonald, the art teacher who was patrolling the lunchroom-and who Josie swore she’d once caught sniffing glue in the supply closet-took a halfhearted step forward. By seventh grade, there were kids like Drew and Matt Royston who were taller than the teachers and had deep voices and were shaving; but there were also kids like Peter, who prayed every night that puberty would hit but hadn’t seen any viable signs yet. “Peter, why don’t you just go take a seat…” Mrs. McDonald sighed. “Drew will bring you another carton of milk.”

Probably poisoned, Peter thought. He started mopping off his binder with a wad of napkins. Even after it dried, it would reek, now. Maybe he could tell his mother that he’d spilled his milk on it at lunch. It was the truth, after all, even if he’d had a little help doing it. And it just might be enough incentive for her to buy him a new, normal notebook, one like everyone else’s.

Inside, Peter was grinning: Drew Girard had actually just done him a favor.

“Drew,” the teacher said. “I meant now.”

As Drew took a step toward the interior of the cafeteria toward the pyramid of milk cartons, Josie stuck out her foot surreptitiously so that he tripped, landing flat on his face. In the lunchroom, other kids started to laugh. That was the way this society worked: you were only at the bottom of the totem pole until you could find someone else to take your place. “Watch out for kryptonite,” Josie whispered, just loud enough for Peter to hear.

The two best things about being a district court judge, in Alex’s mind, were, first, being able to address people’s problems and make them feel as if they are being listened to, and second, the intellectual challenge. You had so many factors to balance when you were making decisions: the victims, the police, law enforcement, society. And all of them had to be considered in the context of precedent.