Jodie Picoult: Nineteen Minutes

He ran through hallways that seemed to circle in on each other. “Where?” he would bite out every time he passed a fleeing student-his only tool of navigation. He’d see sprays of blood, and students crumpled on the ground, and he did not let himself look twice. He pounded up the main stairwell, and just as he reached the top, a door cracked open. Patrick whirled, pointing his gun, as a young female teacher fell to her knees with her hands raised. Behind the white oval of her face were twelve others, featureless and frightened. Patrick could smell urine.

He lowered his gun and beckoned her toward the staircase. “Go,” he commanded, but he did not stay long enough to see if they did.

Turning a corner, Patrick slipped on blood and heard another gunshot, this one loud enough to ring his ears. He swept into the open double doors of the gymnasium and scanned the handful of sprawled bodies, the basketball cart overturned and the globes resting against the far wall-but no shooter. He knew, from the overtime detail he’d taken on Friday nights to monitor high school ball games, that he’d reached the far end of Sterling High. Which meant that the shooter was either hiding somewhere here or had doubled back past him when Patrick hadn’t noticed…and could even now have cornered him in this gym.

Patrick spun around to the entrance again to see if that was the case, and then heard another shot. He ran to a door that led out from the gym, one he hadn’t noticed in his first quick visual sweep of the area. It was a locker room, tiled white on the walls and the floor. He glanced down, saw the fanned spray of blood at his feet, and edged his gun around the corner wall.

Two bodies lay unmoving at one end of the locker room. At the other, closer to Patrick, a slight boy crouched beside a bank of lockers. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, crooked on his thin face. He was shivering hard.

“Are you okay?” Patrick whispered. He did not want to speak out loud and give away his position to the shooter.

The boy only blinked at him.

“Where is he?” Patrick mouthed.

The boy pulled a pistol from beneath his thigh and held it up to his own head.

A new rush of heat surged through Patrick. “Don’t fucking move,” he shouted, drawing a bead on the boy. “Drop the gun or I will shoot you.” Sweat broke out down his back and on his forehead, and he could feel his cupped hands shifting on the butt of the gun as he aimed, determined to lace the kid with bullets if he had to.

Patrick let his forefinger brush gently against the trigger just as the boy opened his fingers wide as a starfish. The pistol fell to the floor, skittering across the tile.

Immediately, he pounced. One of the other officers-whom Patrick hadn’t even noticed following him-retrieved the boy’s weapon. Patrick dropped the kid onto his stomach and cuffed him, pressing his knee hard into the boy’s spine. “Are you alone? Who’s with you?”

“Just me,” the boy ground out.

Patrick’s head was spinning and his pulse was a military tattoo, but he could vaguely hear the other officer calling this information in over the radio: “Sterling, we have one in custody; we don’t have knowledge of anyone else.”

Just as seamlessly as it had started, it was over-at least as much as something like this could be considered over. Patrick didn’t know if there were booby traps or bombs in the school; he didn’t know how many casualties there were; he didn’t know how many wounded Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and Alice Peck Day Hospital could take; he didn’t know how to go about processing a crime scene this massive. The target had been taken out, but at what irreplaceable cost? Patrick’s entire body began to shake, knowing that for so many students and parents and citizens today, he had once again been too late.

He took a few steps and sank down to his knees, mostly because his legs simply gave out from underneath them, and pretended that this was intentional, that he wanted to check out the two bodies at the other end of the room. He was vaguely aware of the shooter being pushed out of the locker room by the other officer, to a waiting cruiser downstairs. He didn’t turn to watch the kid go; instead he focused on the body directly in front of him.

A boy, dressed in a hockey jersey. There was a puddle of blood underneath his side, and a gunshot wound through his forehead. Patrick reached out for a baseball cap that had fallen a few feet away, with the words STERLING HOCKEY embroidered across it. He turned the brim around in his hands, an imperfect circle.

The girl lying next to him was facedown, blood spreading from beneath her temple. She was barefoot, and on her toenails was bright pink polish-just like the stuff Tara had put on Patrick. It made his heart catch. This girl, just like his goddaughter and her brother and a million other kids in this country, had gotten up today and gone to school never imagining she would be in danger. She trusted all the grown-ups and teachers and principals to keep her safe. It was why these schools, post-9/11, had teachers wearing ID all the time and doors locked during the day-the enemy was always supposed to be an outsider, not the kid who was sitting right next to you.

Suddenly, the girl shifted. “Help…me…”

Patrick knelt beside her. “I’m here,” he said, his touch gentle as he assessed her condition. “Everything’s all right.” He turned her enough to see that the blood was coming from a cut on her scalp, not a gunshot wound, as he’d assumed. He ran his hands over her limbs. He kept murmuring to her, words that did not always make sense, but that let her know that she wasn’t alone anymore. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“Josie…” The girl started to thrash, trying to sit up. Patrick put the bulk of his body strategically between her and the boy’s-she’d be in shock already; he didn’t need her to go over the edge. She touched her hand to her forehead, and when it came away oily with blood, she panicked. “What…happened?”

He should have stayed there and waited for the medics to come get her. He should have radioed for help. But should hardly seemed to apply anymore, and so Patrick lifted Josie into his arms. He carried her out of the locker room where she’d nearly been killed, hurried down the stairs, and pushed through the front door of the school, as if he might be able to save them both.

Seventeen Years Before

There were fourteen people sitting in front of Lacy, if you counted the fact that each of the seven women attending this prenatal class was pregnant. Some of them had come equipped with notebooks and pens, and had spent the past hour and a half writing down recommended dosages of folic acid, the names of teratogens, and suggested diets for a mother-to-be. Two had turned green in the middle of the discussion of a normal birth and had rushed to the bathroom with morning sickness-which, of course, stretched as long as the whole day, and was like saying summertime when you really meant all four seasons of the year.

She was tired. Only a week back into work after her own maternity leave, it seemed patently unfair that if she wasn’t up all night with her own baby, she had to be awake delivering someone else’s. Her breasts ached, an uncomfortable reminder that she had to go pump again, so that she’d have milk to leave the sitter tomorrow for Peter.

And yet, she loved her job too much to give it up entirely. She’d had the grades to get into medical school, and had considered being an OB/GYN, until she realized that she had a profound inability to sit bedside by a patient and not feel her pain. Doctors put a wall up between themselves and their patients; nurses broke it down. She switched into a program that would certify her as a nurse-midwife, that encouraged her to tap into the emotional health of a mother-to-be instead of just her symptomology. Maybe it made some of the doctors at the hospital consider her a flake, but Lacy truly believed that when you asked a patient How do you feel?, what was wrong wasn’t nearly as important as what was right.