Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

The reason he was working was because he needed a new computer with a better graphics card, so that he could do some of the gaming design he and Derek had been into lately. It never failed to amaze Peter how you could take a seemingly senseless string of commands and-magic!-it would become a knight or a sword or a castle on the screen. He liked the very concept: that something the ordinary person might dismiss as gibberish was actually vibrant and eye-catching, if you knew how to look at it.

Last week, when his boss said he’d hired another high school student, Peter had become so nervous that he actually had to lock himself in the bathroom for twenty minutes until he could act like it was no big deal. As stupid and boring as this job was, it was a haven. Peter was alone here most of the afternoon; he didn’t have to worry about crossing paths with the cool kids.

But if Mr. Cargrew was hiring someone else from Sterling High, then that person knew who Peter was. And even if the kid wasn’t part of the popular crowd, the copy center would no longer be a comfortable place. Peter would have to think twice about what he said or did, because otherwise, it would become fodder for rumors around school.

To Peter’s great surprise, however, his co-worker turned out to be Josie Cormier.

She had walked in behind Mr. Cargrew. “This is Josie,” he said, by way of introduction. “You two know each other?”

“Sort of,” Josie had replied, as Peter answered, “Yeah.”

“Peter will show you the ropes,” Mr. Cargrew said, and then he left to go play golf.

Occasionally when Peter walked down the hall in school and he saw Josie with her new group of friends, he didn’t recognize her. She dressed differently now-in jeans that showed off her flat belly and a rainbow of T-shirts layered one over the other. She wore makeup that made her eyes look enormous. And a little sad, he sometimes thought, but he doubted she knew that.

The last major conversation he’d had with Josie had been five years ago, when they were in sixth grade. He had been certain that the real Josie would come out of this fog of popularity and realize that the people she was hanging around with were about as scintillating as cardboard cutouts. He was sure that as soon as they started ripping on other people, she’d come back to Peter. Oh my God, she would say, and they’d laugh about her journey to the underworld. What was I thinking?

But Josie never came crawling back to him, and then he started to hang out with Derek from the soccer team, and by the time he was in seventh grade he found it really hard to believe that once, he and Josie had spent two weeks coming up with a secret handshake that no one else would ever be able to duplicate.

“So,” Josie had said that first day, as if she’d never met him before, “what do we do?”

They had been working together for a week now. Well, not together-it was more like they were doing a dance punctuated with the sighs and throaty grumbles of the copiers and the shrill ring of the telephone. Mostly, if they spoke, it was informational: Do we have any more toner for the color copier? How much do I charge someone to receive a fax here?

This afternoon, Peter was photocopying articles for a psychology course at the college. Every now and then, as the pages whipped through the automatic collating machine, he’d see brain scans of schizophrenics-bright pink circles at the frontal lobes that reproduced in shades of gray. “What’s that word you use when you call something by its brand name instead of what it really is?”

Josie was stapling together another job. She shrugged.

“Like Xerox,” Peter said. “Or Kleenex.”

“Jell-O,” Josie answered after a moment.

“Google.”

Josie glanced up. “Band-Aid,” she said.

“Q-tip.”

She thought for a second, a grin spreading over her face. “FedEx. Wiffle ball.”

Peter smiled. “Rollerblade. Frisbee.”

“Crock-Pot.”

“That’s not-”

“Go look it up,” Josie said. “Jacuzzi. Post-it.”

“Magic Marker.”

“Ping-Pong!”

By now they’d both stopped working. They were standing next to each other, laughing, when the bell over the door chimed.

Matt Royston walked into the store. He was wearing a Sterling hockey cap-even though the season wouldn’t start for another month, everyone knew he would be tapped for varsity, even as a freshman. Peter-who’d been reveling in the miracle that here was Josie, again, like she used to be-watched her turn to Matt. Her cheeks pinkened; her eyes leaped like the brightest part of a flame. “What are you doing here?”

He leaned against the counter. “Is that how you treat all your customers?”

“Do you need something copied?”

Matt’s mouth cocked up in a grin. “No way. I’m an original.” He glanced around the store. “So this is where you work.”

“No, I just come here for the free caviar and champagne,” Josie joked.

Peter watched this exchange from behind the counter. He waited for Josie to tell Matt that she was in the middle of doing something, which might not necessarily be true, but they had been having a conversation. Sort of.

“When do you get off?” Matt asked.

“Five.”

“Some of us are going over to Drew’s tonight to hang out.”

“Is that an invitation?” she said, and Peter noticed that when she smiled, really hard, she had a dimple he’d never noticed before. Or maybe she just hadn’t smiled that way around him.

“Do you want it to be?” Matt answered.

Peter walked toward the counter. “We have to get back to work,” he blurted out.

Matt’s eyes flicked over Peter. “Stop looking at me, homo.”

Josie moved so that her body was blocking Peter’s view of Matt. “What time?”

“Seven.”

“I’ll see you over there,” she said.

Matt rapped his hands against the counter. “Cool,” he replied, and he walked out of the store.

“Saran Wrap,” Peter said. “Vaseline.”

Josie turned to him, confused. “What? Oh. Right.” She picked up the materials she’d been stapling, stacked a few more packets on top of each other, aligned their edges.

Peter added paper to the machine that was working on his job. “Do you like him?” he asked.

“Matt? I guess.”

“Not like that,” Peter said. He pressed the Copy button, watched the machine begin to birth a hundred identical babies.

When Josie didn’t answer, he went to stand next to her at the sorting table. He gathered a packet of papers in his hands and stapled it, then handed it to her. “What does it feel like?” he asked.

“What does what feel like?”

Peter thought for a moment. “Being at the top.”

Josie reached across him for another packet of material and fed it into the stapler. She did three of these, and Peter was certain that she was going to ignore him, but then she spoke. “Like if you take one wrong step,” she said, “you’re going to fall.”

When she said that, Peter could hear a note in her voice that was like a lullaby. He could vividly remember sitting on Josie’s driveway in the heat of July, trying to make a fire with sawdust, sunlight, and his glasses. He could hear her yelling over her shoulder as they ran home from school, daring Peter to catch up. He saw a faint flush paint her face and realized that the Josie who used to be his friend was still there, trapped inside several cocoons, like one of those Russian nesting dolls that hides another and another, until you reach the one that fits snug in the palm of your hand.

If he could just somehow make her remember those things, too. Maybe being popular wasn’t what had made Josie start hanging out with Matt and Company. Maybe it was just because she’d forgotten that she liked hanging out with Peter.