Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

Happiness wasn’t just what you reported; it was also how you chose to remember.

There was one other finding he’d catalogued: happiness was U-shaped. People were happiest when they were very young and very old. The trough came, roughly, when you hit your forties.

Or in other words, Lewis thought with relief, this is as bad as it gets.

Although Josie got A’s in math and liked the subject, it was the one grade she had to fight for. Numbers did not come easily to her, although she could reason with logic and write an essay without breaking a sweat. In this, she supposed, she was like her mother.

Or possibly her father.

Mr. McCabe, their math teacher, was walking through the rows of desks, tossing a tennis ball against the ceiling and singing a bastardized Don McLean song:

“Bye, bye, what’s the value of pi

Gotta fidget with the digits

Till this class has gone by…

Them ninth graders were workin’ hard with a sigh

Sayin’, Mr. McCabe, come on, why?

Oh Mr. McCabe, come on, why-y-y…”

Josie erased a coordinate from the graph paper in front of her. “We’re not even using pi,” one kid said.

The teacher whirled around and tossed the tennis ball so that it bounced on the boy’s desk. “Andrew, I’m so glad to see you woke up in time to notice that.”

“Does this count as a pop quiz?”

“No. Maybe I should go on TV,” Mr. McCabe mused. “Is there a Math Idol?”

“God, I hope not,” Matt muttered from the desk behind Josie. He poked her shoulder and she pushed her paper to the upper left corner of her desk, because she knew he could see the homework answers better there.

This week they were working on graphing. In addition to a bazillion assignments that made you take data and force it into bar graphs and charts, each student had had to create and present a graph of something near and dear to them. Mr. McCabe left ten minutes at the end of each class period for the presentation. Yesterday, Matt had shown off a graph of relative age of hockey players in the NHL. Josie, who was presenting hers tomorrow, had polled her friends to see if there was a ratio between the number of hours you spent doing your homework and your grade point average.

Today was Peter Houghton’s turn. She had seen him carrying his graph into school, a rolled-up piece of poster board. “Well, look at that,” Mr. McCabe said. “Turns out we are talking about pie. The other one, that is.”

Peter’s graph was a pie chart. It had been clearly shaded with colors, and computer labels identified each section. The title at the top of the chart said POPULARITY.

“Whenever you’re ready, Peter,” Mr. McCabe said.

Peter looked a little bit like he was going to pass out, but then, Peter always looked like that. Since Josie had started working at the copy shop, they’d been talking again, but-by unwritten rule-only outside of school. Inside was different: a fishbowl where anything you said and did was being watched by everyone else.

When they were kids, Peter had never seemed to notice when he was drawing attention just by being himself. Like when he’d decide to speak Martian during recess, for example. Josie supposed that the flip side of this, the optimistic angle, was that Peter never tried to be like anyone else. She couldn’t lay claim to that herself.

Peter cleared his throat. “My graph is about status in this school. My statistical sample came from the twenty-four students in this class. You can see here”-he pointed at one wedge of the pie-“that a little less than a third of the class are popular.”

Shaded violet-the color of popularity-were seven wedges, each sporting a different classmate’s name. There was Matt, and Drew. A few girls who hung out at lunchtime with Josie. But the class clown was also lumped in that group, Josie noticed, and the new kid who’d transferred from Washington, D.C.

“Over here are the geeks,” Peter said, and Josie could see the names of the class brain and the girl who played tuba in the marching band. “The largest group is what I call normal. And roughly five percent are outcasts.”

Everyone had grown quiet. This was one of those moments, Josie realized, when the guidance counselors would get called in to give everyone a booster shot of tolerance for differences. She could see Mr. McCabe’s brow furrow like origami as he tried to figure out how to turn Peter’s presentation into an After School Special moment; she saw Drew and Matt grinning at each other; and most of all, she noticed Peter, who was blissfully unaware that all hell was about to break loose.

Mr. McCabe cleared his throat. “You know, Peter, maybe you and I should-”

Matt’s hand shot up. “Mr. McCabe, I have a question.”

“Matt-”

“No, seriously. I can’t read that skinny piece of the pie chart. The orange one.”

“Oh,” Peter said. “That’s a bridge. You know. A person who can fit into more than one category, or who hangs out with different kinds of people. Like Josie.”

He turned to her, beaming, and Josie felt everyone’s eyes on her-a hail of arrows. She curled over her desk like a midnight rose, letting her hair fall over her face. To be honest, she was used to being stared at-walk anywhere with Courtney and it was bound to happen-but there was a difference between people looking at you because they wanted to be like you, and people looking at you because your misfortune brought them one rung higher.

At the very least, kids would remember that once, Josie had been an outcast who used to hang out with Peter. Or they’d assume that Peter had some weird crush on her, which was just sick, and she’d never hear the end of it. A murmur ran through the classroom like an electric shock. Freak, someone whispered, and Josie prayed prayed prayed that they were not talking about her.

Because there was a God, the bell rang.

“So, Josie,” Drew said. “Are you the Tobin or the Golden Gate?”

Josie tried to stuff her books into her backpack, but they scattered to the ground, pages splayed. “London,” John Eberhard snickered. “Look, she’s falling down.”

By now, someone in her math class had surely told someone else down the hall what had happened. Josie would hear laughter following her like a kite’s tail for that whole day-maybe even longer.

She realized that someone was trying to help her pick up her books, and then-one beat later-that this someone was Peter. “Don’t,” Josie said, holding up a hand, a force field that stopped Peter in his tracks. “Don’t ever talk to me again, all right?”

In the hallway, she turned corners blindly until she found the little alley that led to the wood shop. Josie had been so naïve, thinking that once she belonged, she was firmly entrenched. But In only existed because someone had drawn a line in the sand, so that everyone else was Out; and that line changed constantly. You might find yourself, through no fault of your own, suddenly standing on the wrong side.

What Peter hadn’t graphed was how fragile popularity was. Here was the irony: she wasn’t a bridge at all; she’d completely crossed over to become part of her group. She’d excluded other people to get to where she so badly wanted to be. Why would those kids ever welcome her back?

“Hey.”

At the sound of Matt’s voice, Josie drew in a sharp breath. “Just so you know, I’m not friends with him.”

“Well, actually, he’s right about you.”

Josie blinked at him. She’d witnessed, firsthand, Matt’s cruelty-how he’d shoot rubber bands at ESL students who didn’t know the words to report him to the faculty; how he called one overweight girl the Walking Earthquake; how he’d hide a shy kid’s math textbook in order to watch him freak out, thinking it was lost. It was funny then, because it hadn’t been about Josie. But being the object of his humiliation felt like a slap. She’d thought, mistakenly, that hanging with the right crowd granted her immunity, but that turned out to be a joke. They’d cut you down anyway, as long as it made them seem funnier, cooler, different from you.