Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

“Why was that?”

Philip shrugged. He was a tall, thin man with freckles that appeared when his face flushed with emotion. “Ed hadn’t told everyone about…his lifestyle. And to be perfectly honest, keeping secrets in a small town is a bitch.”

“Mr. O’Shea-”

“Philip. Please.”

Patrick nodded. “I wonder if Ed ever mentioned Peter Houghton’s name to you.”

“He taught him, you know.”

“Yeah. I meant…well, beyond that.”

Philip led him to a screened porch, a set of wicker chairs. Every room he’d seen in the house looked like it had just been host to a magazine photo shoot: the pillows on the couches were tilted at a forty-five-degree angle; there were vases with glass beads in them; the plants were all lush and green. Patrick thought back to his own living room, where today he’d found a piece of toast stuffed between his sofa cushions that had what could really only be called penicillin growing on top of it by now. It might have been a ridiculous stereotype, but this home had Martha Stewart written all over it, whereas Patrick’s looked more like a crack house.

“Ed talked to Peter,” Philip said. “Or at least, he tried to.”

“About what?”

“Being a bit of a lost soul, I think. Teens are always trying to fit in. If you don’t fit into the popular crowd, you try the athletic crowd. If that doesn’t work, you go to the drama crowd…or to the druggies,” he said. “Ed thought that Peter might be trying out the gay and lesbian crowd.”

“So Peter came to talk to Ed about being gay?”

“Oh, no. Ed sought Peter out. We all remember what it was like to be figuring out what was different about us, when we were his age. Worried to death that some other kid who was gay was going to come on to you and blow your cover.”

“Do you think Peter might have been worried about Ed blowing his cover?”

“I sincerely doubt it, especially in Peter’s case.”

“Why?”

Philip smiled at Patrick. “You’ve heard of gaydar?”

Patrick felt himself coloring. It was like being in the presence of an African-American who made a racist joke, simply because he could. “I guess.”

“Gay people don’t come clearly marked-it’s not like having a different color skin or a physical disability. You learn to pick up on mannerisms, or looks that last just a little too long. You get pretty good at figuring out if someone’s gay, or just staring at you because you are.”

Before he realized what he was doing, Patrick had leaned a little farther away from Philip, who started to laugh. “You can relax. Your vibe clearly says you bat for the other team.” He looked up at Patrick. “And so does Peter Houghton.”

“I don’t understand…”

“Peter may have been confused about his sexuality, but it was crystal clear to Ed,” Philip said. “That boy is straight.”

Peter burst through the door of the conference room, bristling. “How come you haven’t come to see me?”

Jordan looked up from the notes he was making on a pad. He noticed, absently, that Peter had put on some weight-and apparently some muscle. “I’ve been busy.”

“Well, I’m stuck here all by myself.”

“Yeah, and I’m busting my ass to make sure that isn’t a permanent condition,” Jordan replied. “Sit down.”

Peter slumped into a chair, scowling. “What if I don’t feel like talking to you today? Clearly, you don’t always feel like talking to me.”

“Peter, how about we drop the bullshit so I can do my job?”

“Like I care if you can do your job.”

“Well, you should,” Jordan said. “Seeing as you’re the beneficiary.” At the end of this, Jordan thought, I will be either reviled or canonized. “I want to talk about the explosives,” he said. “Where would a person get something like that?”

“At www.boom.com,” Peter answered.

Jordan just stared at him.

“Well, it’s not all that far from the truth,” Peter said. “I mean, The Anarchist Cookbook is online. So are about ten thousand recipes for Molotov cocktails.”

“They didn’t find a Molotov cocktail at the school. They found plastic explosives with a blasting cap and a timing device.”

“Yeah,” Peter said. “Well.”

“Say I wanted to make a bomb with stuff I had lying around the house. What would I use?”

Peter shrugged. “Newspaper. Fertilizer-like Green Thumb, the chemical stuff. Cotton. And some diesel fuel, but you’d probably have to get that at a gas station, so it wouldn’t technically be in your house.”

Jordan watched him count off the ingredients. There was a matter-offactness to Peter’s voice that was chilling, but even more unsettling was the tone threaded through his words: this was something Peter had been proud of.

“You’ve done this kind of thing before.”

“The first time I built one, I just did it to see if I could.” Peter’s voice grew more animated. “I did some more after that. The kind you throw and run like hell.”

“What made this one different?”

“The ingredients, for one. You have to get the potassium chlorate from bleach, which isn’t easy, but it’s kind of like doing a chemistry lab. My dad came into the kitchen when I was filtering out the crystals,” Peter said. “That’s what I told him I was doing-extra credit.”

“Jesus.”

“Anyway, after you’ve got that, all you need is Vaseline, which we keep under the bathroom sink, and the gas you’d find in a camp stove, and the kind of wax you use to can pickles. I was kind of freaked out about using a blasting cap,” Peter said. “I mean, I’d never really done anything that big before. But you know, when I started to come up with the whole plan-”

“Stop,” Jordan interrupted. “Just stop right there.”

“You’re the one who asked in the first place,” Peter said, stung.

“But that’s an answer I can’t hear. My job is to get you acquitted, and I can’t lie in front of the jury. On the other hand, I can’t lie about the things I don’t know. And right now, I can honestly say that you did not plan in advance what happened that day. I’d like to keep it that way, and if you have any sense of self-preservation, you should, too.”

Peter walked to the window. The glass was fuzzy, scratched after all these years. From what? Jordan wondered. Inmates clawing to get out? Peter wouldn’t be able to see that the snow had all melted by now; that the first crocuses had choked their way out of the soil. Maybe it was better that way.

“I’ve been going to church,” Peter announced.

Jordan wasn’t much for organized religion, but he didn’t begrudge others their chosen comforts. “That’s great.”

“I’m doing it because they let me leave my cell to go to services,” Peter said. “Not because I’ve found Jesus or anything.”

“Okay.” He wondered what this had to do with explosives or, for that matter, anything else regarding Peter’s defense. Frankly, Jordan didn’t have time to have a philosophical discussion with Peter about the nature of God-he had to meet Selena in two hours to go over potential defense witnesses-but something kept him from cutting Peter off.

Peter turned. “Do you believe in hell?”

“Yeah. It’s full of defense attorneys. Just ask any prosecutor.”

“No, seriously,” Peter said. “I bet I’m headed there.”

Jordan forced a smile. “I don’t lay odds on bets I can’t collect on.”

“Father Moreno, he’s the priest who leads the church services here? He says that if you accept Jesus and repent, you get excused…like religion is just some giant freebie hall pass that gets you out of anything and everything. But see, that can’t be right…because Father Moreno also says that every life is worth something…and what about the ten kids who died?”