Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

She’d been counting. There were four Nice to see you, Your Honors. Three Yes, Your Honors. Two My pleasure, Your Honors. And one For Your Honor, we have the best table in the house. Sometimes Josie read about celebrities in People magazine who were always getting handouts from purse companies and shoe stores and free tickets to opening nights on Broadway and Yankee Stadium-when you got right down to it, her mother was a celebrity in the town of Sterling.

“I cannot believe,” her mother said, “that I have a twelve-year-old.”

“Is that my cue to say something like, you must have been a child prodigy?”

Her mother laughed. “Well, that would work.”

“I’m going to be driving in three and a half years,” Josie pointed out.

Her mother’s fork clattered against the plate. “Thanks for that.”

The waiter came over to the table. “Your Honor,” he said, setting a platter of caviar down in front of Josie’s mother, “the chef would like you to have this appetizer with his compliments.”

“That’s so gross. Fish eggs?”

“Josie!” Her mother smiled stiffly at the waiter. “Please thank the chef.”

She could feel her mother’s eyes on her as she picked at her food. “What?” she challenged.

“Well, you sounded like a spoiled brat, that’s all.”

“Why? Because I don’t like fish embryos sitting under my nose? You don’t eat them either. I was at least being honest.”

“And I was being discreet,” her mother said. “Don’t you think that the waiter is going to tell the chef that Judge Cormier’s daughter is a piece of work?”

“Like I care?”

“I do. What you do reflects on me, and I have a reputation I have to protect.”

“As what? A suck-up?”

“As someone who’s above criticism both in and out of the courtroom.”

Josie tilted her head to one side. “What if I did something bad?”

“Bad? How bad?”

“Let’s say I was smoking pot,” Josie said.

Her mother froze. “Is there something you want to tell me, Josie?”

“God, Mom, I’m not doing it. This is hypothetical.”

“Because you know, now that you’re in middle school, you’re going to start coming across kids who do things that are dangerous-or just plain stupid-and I would hope you’d be-”

“-strong enough to know better than that,” Josie finished, echoing her in a singsong. “Yeah. Got it. But what if, Mom? What if you came home and found me getting stoned in the living room? Would you turn me in?”

“What do you mean, turn you in?”

“Call the cops. Hand over my stash.” Josie grinned. “Of hash.”

“No,” her mother said. “I would not report you.”

Josie used to think, when she was younger, that she would grow up to look like her mother-fine-boned, dark-haired, light-eyed. The combination of elements were all there in her features, but as she’d gotten older, she started to look like someone else entirely-someone she had never met. Her father.

She wondered if her father-like Josie herself-could memorize things in a snap and picture them on the page just by closing his eyes. She wondered if her father sang off key and liked to watch scary movies. She wondered if he had the straight slash of eyebrows, so different from her mother’s delicate arches.

She wondered, period.

“If you didn’t report me because I’m your daughter,” Josie said, “then you’re not really being fair, are you?”

“I’d be acting like a parent, not a judge.” Her mother reached across the table and put her hand on Josie’s, which felt weird-her mother wasn’t one of these touchy-feely types. “Josie, you can come to me, you know. If you need to talk, I’m there to listen. You’re not going to get into legal trouble, no matter what you tell me-not if it’s about you, not even if it’s about your friends.”

To be perfectly honest, Josie didn’t have many of those. There was Peter, who she’d known forever-although Peter no longer came to her house and vice versa, they still hung out together in school, and he was the last person in the world Josie could ever imagine doing anything illegal. She knew that one of the reasons other girls excluded Josie was because she always stuck up for Peter, but she told herself that it didn’t matter. She didn’t really want to be surrounded by people who only cared about what happened on One Life to Live and who saved their babysitting money to go to The Limited; they seemed so fake sometimes that Josie thought if she poked one of them with a sharp pencil they’d burst like a balloon.

So what if she and Peter weren’t popular? She was always telling Peter it didn’t matter; she might as well start to believe it herself.

Josie pulled her hand away from her mother and pretended to be fascinated by her cream of asparagus soup. There was something about asparagus that she and Peter found hilarious. They’d done an experiment, once, to see how much you had to eat before your pee smelled weird, and it was less than two bites, swear to God.

“Stop using your Judge Voice,” Josie said.

“My what?”

“Your Judge Voice. It’s the one you use when you answer the phone. Or when you’re out in public. Like now.”

Her mother frowned. “That’s crazy. It’s the same voice I-”

The waiter glided over, as if he were skating across the dining room. “I don’t mean to interrupt…is everything to your liking, Your Honor?”

Without missing a beat, her mother turned her face up to the waiter. “It’s gorgeous,” she said, and she smiled until he walked away. Then she turned to Josie. “It’s the same voice I always use.”

Josie looked at her, and then at the waiter’s back. “Maybe it is,” she said.

The other kid on the soccer team who would rather have been anywhere else was named Derek Markowitz. He’d introduced himself to Peter when they were sitting on the bench during a game against North Haverhill. “Who forced you to play?” Derek had asked, and Peter had told him his mother. “Mine too,” Derek admitted. “She’s a nutritionist and she’s nuts about fitness.”

At dinner, Peter would tell his parents that practice was going fine. He made up stories based on plays he’d seen other kids execute-athletic feats that he himself could never have done. He did this so that he could see his mother glance at Joey and say things like, “Guess there’s more than one athlete in this family.” When they came to cheer him on during games, and Peter never left the bench, he said it was because Coach played his favorites; and in a way, that was true.

Like Peter, Derek was just about the worst soccer player on the planet. He was so fair that his veins looked like a road map underneath his skin, and he had such pale hair that you had to search hard to find his eyebrows. Now, when they were at games, they sat next to each other on the bench. Peter liked him because he smuggled Snickers bars into practice and ate them when Coach wasn’t looking, and because he knew how to tell a good joke: Why did the ref stop the leper hockey game? There was a face-off in the corner. What’s more fun than stapling Drew Girard to a wall? Ripping him off. It got to the point where Peter actually was looking forward to soccer practice, just to hear what Derek had to say-although then Peter began to worry again if he liked Derek just because he was Derek, or because Peter was gay; and then he’d sit a little farther away, or tell himself that no matter what, he wouldn’t look Derek in the eye for the whole practice, so that he didn’t get the wrong idea.

They were sitting on the bench one Friday afternoon, watching everyone else play Rivendell. Sterling was expected to be able to kick their collective ass with their eyes closed (not that that was reason enough for the coach to put Peter or Derek in to actually play during a real league game). The score was climbing to something humiliating in the last minute of the final quarter-Sterling 24, Rivendell 2-and Derek was telling Peter another joke.