Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

Jordan knew better, but he still heard himself asking Peter a question. “Why did you phrase it that way?”

“What way?”

“The ten kids who died. As if it was a natural progression.”

Peter’s brow wrinkled. “Because it was.”

“How?”

“It’s like those explosives, I guess. Once you light the fuse, either you destroy the bomb before it goes off…or the bomb destroys everything else.”

Jordan stood up and took a step toward his client. “Who struck the match, Peter?”

Peter lifted his face. “Who didn’t?”

Josie now thought of her friends as the ones who had been left behind. Haley Weaver had been sent to Boston for plastic surgery; John Eberhard was in some rehab place reading Hop on Pop and learning how to drink from a straw; Matt and Courtney and Maddie were gone forever. That left Josie and Drew and Emma and Brady: a posse that had dwindled to such a degree that you could barely call them a posse at all anymore.

They were in Emma’s basement, watching a DVD. That was about the extent of their social life these days, because Drew and Brady were still in bandages and casts and besides, even if none of them wanted to say it out loud, going anywhere they used to go reminded them of who was missing.

Brady had brought the movie-Josie couldn’t even remember the name, but it was one of those movies that had come out after American Pie, hoping to make the same killing at the box office by taking naked girls and daredevil guys and what Hollywood imagined teenage life to be like, and tossing them together like some sort of cosmic salad. Right now, a car chase filled the screen. The main character was screaming across a drawbridge that was slowly opening.

Josie knew he was going to make it across. First off, this was a comedy. Second, nobody had the guts to kill off the main character before the story was over. Third, her physics teacher had used this very movie to prove, scientifically, that given the speed of the car and the trajectory of the vectors, the actor could indeed jump the bridge-but only if the wind wasn’t blowing.

Josie also knew that the person in the car wasn’t real, wasn’t even the actor playing the role, but a stuntman who had done this a thousand times. And yet, even as she watched the action unrolling on the television screen, she saw something entirely different: the car’s fender, striking the far side of the open bridge. The twist of metal turning in midair, slapping against the water, sinking.

Grown-ups were always saying that teenagers drove too fast or got high or didn’t use condoms because they thought they were invincible. But the truth was that at any moment, you could die. Brady could have a stroke on the football field, like those young college athletes who suddenly dropped dead. Emma could be hit by lightning. Drew might walk into an ordinary high school on an extraordinary day.

Josie stood up. “I need some air,” she murmured, and she hurried up the basement stairs and out the front door of Emma’s house. She sat down on the porch and looked at the sky, at two stars that were hitched at the elbows. You weren’t invincible when you were a teenager. You were just stupid.

She heard the door open and close with a gasp. “Hey,” Drew said, coming to sit beside her. “You okay?”

“I’m great.” Josie pasted on a smile. It felt gummy, like wallpaper that hadn’t been smoothed right. But she had gotten so good at this-faking it-that it was second nature. Who would have thought that she’d inherited something from her mother after all?

Drew reached down for a blade of grass and began splitting it into hairs with his thumb. “I say the same thing when that bonehead school shrink calls me down to ask me how I’m doing.”

“I didn’t know he calls you down, too.”

“I think he calls all of us who were, you know, close…”

He didn’t finish his sentence: Close to the ones who didn’t make it? Close to dying that day? Close to finishing ourselves off?

“Do you think anyone ever tells the shrink anything worthwhile?” Josie asked.

“Doubt it. He wasn’t there that day. It’s not like he really gets it.”

“Does anyone?”

“You. Me. Those guys upstairs,” Drew said. “Welcome to the club no one wants to join. You’re a member for life.”

Josie didn’t mean to, but Drew’s words and the stupid guy in the movie trying to jump the bridge and the way the stars were pricking at her skin, like inoculations for a terminal disease, suddenly made her start to cry. Drew reached around her, wrapping his one good arm around her, and she leaned into him. She closed her eyes and pressed her face into the flannel of his shirt. It felt so familiar, as if she’d come home to her own bed after years of circumnavigating the globe, to find that the mattress still somehow melted around the curve and weight of her. And yet-the fabric of the shirt didn’t smell like it used to. The boy holding her wasn’t quite the same size, the same shape, the same boy.

“I don’t think I can do this,” Josie whispered.

Immediately, Drew pulled away from her. His face was flushed, and he could not look Josie in the eye. “I didn’t mean it like that. You and Matt…” His voice went flat. “Well, I know you’re still his.”

Josie looked up at the sky. She nodded at him, as if that was what she had meant in the first place.

It all began when the service station left a message on the answering machine. Peter had missed his car inspection appointment. Did he want to reschedule?

Lewis had been alone in the house, retrieving that message. He had dialed the number before he even realized what he was doing, and thus it was no surprise to find himself actually keeping the rescheduled appointment. He got out of the car, handed his keys to the gas station attendant. “You can wait right inside,” the man said. “There’s coffee.”

Lewis poured himself a cup, putting in three sugars and lots of milk, the way Peter would have fixed it. He sat down and instead of picking up a worn copy of Newsweek, he thumbed through PC Gamer.

One, he thought. Two, three.

On cue, the gas station attendant came into the waiting room. “Mr. Houghton,” he said, “the car out there-it’s not due for a state inspection until July.”

“I know.”

“But you…you made this appointment.”

Lewis nodded. “I don’t have that particular car with me right now.”

It was impounded somewhere. Along with Peter’s books and computer and journals and God only knew what else.

The attendant stared at him, the way you do when you realize the conversation you’re having has veered from the rational. “Sir,” he said, “we can’t inspect a car that’s not here.”

“No,” Lewis said. “Of course not.” He put the magazine back down on the coffee table, smoothed its wrinkled cover. Then he rubbed a hand over his forehead. “It’s just…my son made this appointment,” he said. “I wanted to keep it on his behalf.”

The attendant nodded, slowly backing away. “Right…so, how about I just leave the car parked outside?”

“Just so you know,” Lewis said softly, “he would have passed inspection.”

Once, when Peter was young, Lacy had sent him to the same sleepaway camp that Joey had gone to and adored. It was somewhere across the river in Vermont, and campers water-skied on Lake Fairlee and took sailing lessons and did overnight canoe trips. Peter had called the first night, begging to be brought home. Although Lacy had been ready to start the car and drive to get him, Lewis had talked her out of it. If he doesn’t stick this out, Lewis had said, how will he ever know if he can?

At the end of two weeks, when Lacy saw Peter again, there were changes in him. He was taller, and he’d put on weight. But there was also something different about his eyes-a light that had been burned to ash, somehow. When Peter looked at her, he seemed guarded, as if he understood that she was no longer an ally.