Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

Everyone, that is, except for Peter himself. At work, he didn’t seem to be able to pick up on the clues that Josie gave him-turning her back when he came into the room, ignoring him when he asked her a question. He finally cornered her in the supply room one afternoon. How come you’re acting like this? he said.

Because when I was nice to you, you thought we were friends.

But we are friends, he replied.

Josie had faced him. You don’t get to decide that, she said.

One afternoon at work, when Josie went out to the Dumpster with a load of trash, Peter was already there. It was his fifteen-minute break; usually he walked across the street and bought himself an apple juice, but today he was leaning over the metal lip of the Dumpster. “Move,” she said, and she hefted the bags of garbage up and over.

As soon as they struck bottom, a shower of sparks rose.

Almost immediately, fire climbed up the cardboard stacked inside the Dumpster; it roared against the metal. “Peter, get down from there,” Josie yelled. Peter didn’t move. The flames danced in front of his face, the heat distorted his features. “Peter, now!” She reached up, grabbing his arm, pulling him down to the pavement as something-toner? oil?-exploded inside the Dumpster.

“We have to call 911,” Josie cried, and she scrambled to her feet.

The firemen arrived in minutes, spraying some noxious chemical into the Dumpster. Josie paged Mr. Cargrew, who’d been on the golf course. “Thank God you weren’t hurt,” he said to both of them.

“Josie saved me,” Peter replied.

While Mr. Cargrew spoke to the firemen, she went back into the copy shop with Peter following. “I knew you’d save me,” Peter said. “That’s why I did it.”

“Did what?” But Peter didn’t have to answer, because Josie already knew why Peter had been up on the Dumpster when he should have been on break. She knew who’d tossed the match, the moment he heard her exiting the back door with bags of garbage.

Josie told herself, even as she pulled Mr. Cargrew aside, that she was only doing what any responsible employee would do: tell the boss who had tried to destroy his property. She did not admit that she was scared by what Peter had said, by the truth of it. And she pretended not to feel that small fanning in her chest-a smaller version of the fire that Peter had started-which she identified, for the very first time in her life, as revenge.

When Mr. Cargrew fired Peter, Josie didn’t listen to the conversation. She felt his gaze on her-hot, accusing-as he left, but she focused her attention on a job from a local bank instead. As she stared at the papers coming out of the machine, she considered how strange it was to measure success by how closely each product resembled the one that had come before.

After school, Josie waited for Matt at the flagpole. He’d sneak up behind her and she’d pretend she didn’t notice him coming, until he kissed her. People watched, and Josie loved that. In a way, she thought of her status as a secret identity: now, if she got straight A’s or said she actually liked to read for fun, she wouldn’t be thought of as a freak, simply because when people saw her, they noticed her popularity first. It was, she figured, a little like what her mother experienced wherever she went: when you were the judge, no other trait really mattered.

Sometimes she had nightmares in which Matt realized she was a fraud-that she wasn’t beautiful; she wasn’t cool; she wasn’t anyone worthy of admiration. What were we thinking? she imagined her friends saying, and maybe for that reason, it was so hard even when she was awake to think of them as friends.

She and Matt had plans for this weekend-important plans that she could hardly keep to herself. As she sat on the stone steps leading up to the flagpole, waiting for him, she felt someone tap her on the shoulder. “You’re late,” she accused, grinning, and then she turned around to see Peter.

He looked just as shocked as she felt, even though he’d been the one to seek her out. In the months since Josie had gotten Peter fired from the copy shop, she had gone out of her way to avoid coming in contact with him-no easy feat, given that they were in math class together every day and passed in the halls numerous times. Josie would always make sure she had her nose in a book or her attention firmly focused on another conversation.

“Josie,” he said, “can we talk for a minute?”

Students were streaming out of the school; she could feel their glances flick over her like a whip. Were they staring at her because of who she was, or because of who she was with?

“No,” she said flatly.

“It’s just…I really need Mr. Cargrew to give me my job back. I know it was a mistake, what I did. I thought maybe-maybe if you told him…” He broke off. “He likes you,” Peter said.

Josie wanted to tell him to go away; that she didn’t want to work with him again, much less be seen having a conversation with him. But something had happened during the months since Peter had set that Dumpster fire. The payback she’d thought he was due, after his math-class elegy to Josie, had burned in her chest every time she thought about it. And Josie had started to wonder if maybe Peter had gotten the wrong idea not because he was crazy, but because she’d led him to it. After all, when no one was around at the copy shop, they’d talked to each other, they’d laughed. He was an okay kid-just not someone you wanted to be associated with, necessarily, in public. But feeling that way was different than acting on it, right? She wasn’t like Drew and Matt and John, who’d shove Peter into the wall when they walked by him in the halls, or who stole his brown-bag lunch and played monkey in the middle with it, until it ripped and the contents spilled onto the floor-was she?

She didn’t want to talk to Mr. Cargrew. She didn’t want Peter to think that she wanted to be his friend, that she even wanted to be his acquaintance.

But she didn’t want to be like Matt either, whose comments to Peter sometimes made her feel sick inside.

Peter was sitting across from her, waiting for an answer, and then suddenly he wasn’t. He tumbled down the stone steps as Matt stood over him. “Get away from my girlfriend, homo,” Matt said. “Go find a nice little boy to play with.”

Peter had landed facedown on the pavement. When he lifted his head, his lip was bleeding. He looked at Josie first, and to her surprise, he didn’t seem upset or even angry-just truly, deeply tired. “Matt,” Peter said, coming up on his knees. “Do you have a big dick?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Matt said.

“Not really.” Peter staggered to his feet. “I just wondered if it was long enough for you to go fuck yourself.”

Josie felt the air charge between them the moment before Matt was on Peter like a hurricane, punching him in the face, wrestling him bodily to the ground. “You like this, don’t you,” Matt spat as he pinned Peter down.

Peter shook his head, tears streaming down his cheeks, streaking the blood. “Get…off…”

“I bet you wish you could,” Matt sneered.

By now a crowd had gathered. Josie glanced around frantically, looking for a teacher, but it was after school and there were none around. “Stop,” she cried, watching Peter squirm away as Matt went after him again. “Matt, just stop it.”

He pulled his next punch and got to his feet, leaving Peter curled on his side like a fiddlehead. “You’re right. Why waste my time,” Matt said, and he started walking, waiting for Josie to fall into place beside him.

They were heading toward his car. Josie knew that they’d swing into town and grab a coffee before going back to her house. There, Josie would focus on her homework until it became impossible to ignore Matt rubbing her shoulders or kissing her neck, and then they’d make out until they heard her mother’s car pulling into the garage.