Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

Jordan tapped his pencil on the edge of his briefcase. Had Peter’s anger been born of jealousy or loneliness? Or was his massacre a way to turn attention to himself, finally, instead of Joey? How could he formulate a defense that Peter’s act was one of desperation, not an attempt to one-up his brother’s notoriety?

“Do you miss him?” Jordan asked.

Peter smirked. “My brother,” he said, “my brother, the captain of the baseball team; my brother who placed first in the state in a French competition; my brother who was friends with the principal; my brother, my fabulous brother, used to drop me off a half mile away from the gates of the high school so that he didn’t have to be seen driving all the way in with me.”

“How come?”

“You don’t exactly get any perks for hanging around with me, or haven’t you noticed yet.”

Jordan had a flash of his car tires, slashed to their metal haunches. “Joey wouldn’t stick up for you if you were being bullied?”

“Are you kidding? Joey was the one to start it.”

“How?”

Peter walked toward the window in the small room. A mottled flush rose up his neck, as if memory could be burned into the flesh. “He used to tell people I was adopted. That my mother was a crack whore, and that’s why my brain was all fucked up. Sometimes he did it right in front of me, and when I’d get pissed off and whale on him he’d just laugh and knock me on my ass and then he’d look back to his friends, as if this was proof of everything he’d been saying in the first place. So, do I miss him?” Peter repeated, and he faced Jordan. “I’m glad he’s dead.”

Jordan wasn’t often surprised, and yet Peter Houghton had shocked him several times already. Peter was, simply, what a person would look like if you boiled down the most raw emotions and filtered them of any social contract. If you hurt, cry. If you rage, strike out.

If you hope, get ready for a disappointment.

“Peter,” Jordan murmured, “did you mean to kill them?”

Immediately Jordan cursed himself-he’d just asked the one question a defense attorney is never supposed to ask, setting Peter up to admit to premeditation. But instead of answering, Peter threw a question back at him that had just as unsettling an answer. “Well,” he said, “what would you have done?”

Jordan stuffed another bite of vanilla pudding into Sam’s mouth and then licked the spoon himself.

“That’s not for you,” Selena said.

“It tastes good. Unlike that pea crap you make him eat.”

“Excuse me for being a good mother.” Selena took a wet washcloth and wiped down Sam’s mouth, then applied the same treatment to Jordan, who squirmed away from her hand.

“I am totally screwed,” he said. “I can’t make Peter sympathetic over losing his brother, because he hated Joey. I don’t even have a valid legal defense for him, unless I try for insanity, and it’s going to be impossible to prove that with the mountain of evidence the prosecution’s got for premeditation.”

Selena turned to him. “You know what the problem is here, don’t you?”

“What?”

“You think he’s guilty.”

“Well, for Christ’s sake. So are ninety-nine percent of my clients, and it’s never stopped me from getting acquittals before.”

“Right. But deep down, you don’t want Peter Houghton to get acquitted.”

Jordan frowned. “That’s crap.”

“It’s true crap. You’re scared of someone like him.”

“He’s a kid-”

“-who freaks you out, just a little bit. Because he wasn’t willing to sit down and let the world shit on him anymore, and that’s not supposed to happen.”

Jordan looked up at her. “Shooting ten students doesn’t make you a hero, Selena.”

“It does to the millions of other kids who wish they’d had the guts to do it,” she said flatly.

“Excellent. You can be the leader of Peter Houghton’s fan club.”

“I don’t condone what he did, Jordan, but I do see where he’s coming from. You were born with six silver spoons up your ass. I mean, honestly, have you ever not been in the elite group? At school, or in court, or wherever? People know you, people look up to you. You’re granted passage and you don’t even realize that other people never get to walk that way.”

Jordan folded his arms. “Are you about to do your African pride thing again? Because to tell you the truth-”

“You’ve never gone down the street and had someone cross it just because you’re black. You’ve never had someone look at you with disgust because you’re holding a baby and you forgot to put on your wedding ring. You want to do something about it-take action, scream at them, tell them they’re idiots-but you can’t. Being on the fringe is the most disempowering feeling, Jordan. You get so used to the world being a certain way, there seems to be no escape from it.”

Jordan smirked. “You took that last part from my closing in the Katie Riccobono case.”

“The battered wife?” Selena shrugged. “Well, even if I did, it fits.”

Suddenly Jordan blinked. He stood up, grabbed his wife, and kissed her. “You are so fucking brilliant.”

“I’m not going to argue, but do tell me why.”

“Battered woman syndrome. It’s a valid legal defense. Battered women get stuck in a world that slams them down; eventually they feel so constantly threatened that they take action, and truly believe they’re protecting themselves-even if their husbands are fast asleep. That fits Peter Houghton, to a T.”

“Far be it from me to point this out to you, Jordan,” Selena said, “but Peter’s not female, and he’s not married.”

“That’s not the point. It’s post-traumatic stress disorder. When these women go ballistic and shoot their husbands or slice off their dicks, they aren’t thinking about the consequences…just about stopping the aggression. That’s what Peter’s been saying all along-he just wanted it to stop. And this is even better, because I don’t have to fight the prosecutor’s usual rebuttal about a grown woman being old enough to know what she’s doing when she picks up the knife or the gun. Peter’s a kid. By definition, he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

Monsters didn’t grow out of nowhere; a housewife didn’t turn into a murderer unless someone turned her into one. The Dr. Frankenstein, in her case, was a controlling husband. And in Peter’s case, it was the whole of Sterling High School. Bullies kicked and teased and punched and pinched, all behaviors meant to force someone back where he belonged. It was at the hands of his tormentors that Peter learned how to fight back.

In the high chair, Sam started to fuss. Selena pulled him out and into her arms. “No one’s ever done this,” she said. “There is no bullied victim syndrome.”

Jordan reached for Sam’s jar of vanilla custard and scraped out the leftovers with his forefinger. “There is now,” he said, and he savored the last of the sweet.

Patrick sat at his office computer in the dark, moving a cursor through the video game created by Peter Houghton.

You started by picking a character-one of three boys: the spelling bee champ, the math genius, the computer nerd. One was small and thin, with acne. One wore glasses. One was grossly overweight.

You did not come equipped with a weapon. Instead, you had to go to various rooms of the school and use your wits: the teachers’ lounge had vodka, to make hand grenades. The boiler room had a bazooka. The science lab had burning acid. The English classroom had heavy books. The math room had compasses for stabbing and metal rulers for slicing. The computer room had wires, for garrotes. The wood shop had chain saws. The home arts class had blenders and knitting needles. The art room had a kiln. You could combine materials to make combo assault weapons: flaming bullets from the bazooka and vodka, acid daggers from the chemicals and compasses, snares from the computer wires and the heavy books.