Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

At one end of the maximum-security catwalk was a small television. Because there was only room for one chair in front of the TV, the guy who’d been in the longest got to sit down. Everyone else stood behind him, like hoboes in a soup line, to watch. There were not a lot of programs the inmates could agree upon. Mostly it was MTV, although they always turned on Jerry Springer. Peter figured that was because no matter how much you’d screwed up in your life, you liked knowing that there were people out there even more stupid than you.

If anyone on the tier did something wrong-not even Peter, but for example an asshole like Satan Jones (Satan not being his real name; that was Gaylord, but if you mentioned it even in a whisper he’d go for your jugular), who had drawn a caricature of two of the COs doing the horizontal hora on the wall of his cell-everyone lost the television privilege for the week. Which left the other end of the catwalk to mosey on down toward: a shower with a plastic curtain, and the phone, where you could call collect for a dollar a minute, and every few seconds you’d hear This call has originated at the Grafton County Department of Corrections, just in case you had been lucky enough to forget.

Peter was doing sit-ups, which he hated. He hated all exercise, really. But the alternative was sitting around and getting soft enough for everyone to think they could pick on you, or going outside during his exercise hour. He went, a couple of times-not to shoot hoops or to jog or even make secret deals near the fence for the drugs or cigarettes that got smuggled into jail, but just to be outside and breathing in air that hadn’t already been breathed by the other inmates in this place. Unfortunately, from the exercise yard you could see the river. You’d think that was a bonus, but in fact, it was the most awful tease. Sometimes the wind blew so that Peter could even smell it-the soil along the edge, the frigid water-and it nearly broke him to know that he couldn’t just walk down there and take off his shoes and socks and wade in, swim, fucking drown himself if he wanted to. After that, he stopped going outdoors at all.

Peter finished his hundredth sit-up-the irony was that after a month, he was so much stronger that he could probably have kicked Matt Royston’s and Drew Girard’s asses simultaneously-and sat down on his bunk with the commissary form. Once a week, you got to go shopping for things like mouthwash and paper, with the prices jacked up ridiculously high. Peter remembered going to St. John one year with his family; in the grocery store, cornflakes cost, like, ten dollars, because they were such a rare commodity. It wasn’t like shampoo was a rare commodity, but in jail, you were at the mercy of the administration, which meant they could charge $3.25 for a bottle of Pert, or $16 for a box fan. Your other alternative was to hope that an inmate who left for the state prison would will you his belongings, but to Peter, that felt a little like being a vulture.

“Houghton,” a correctional officer said, his heavy boots ringing down the metal catwalk, “you’ve got mail.”

Two envelopes zoomed into the cell and slid underneath Peter’s bunk. He reached for them, scraping his fingernails against the cement floor. The first letter was from his mother, which he was almost expecting. Peter got mail from his mother at least three or four times a week. The letters were usually about stupid things like editorials in the local paper or how well her spider plants were doing. He’d thought, for a while, that she was writing in code-something he needed to know, something transcendent and inspirational-but then he started to realize that she was just writing to fill up space. That’s when he stopped opening mail from his mother. He didn’t feel bad about this, really. The reason his mother wrote to him, Peter knew, wasn’t so that he’d read the letters. It was so that she could tell herself she’d written them.

He didn’t really blame his parents for being clueless. First of all, he’d had plenty of practice with that particular condition. Second, the only people who understood him, really, were the ones who had been at the high school that day, and they weren’t exactly jamming his mailbox with missives.

Peter tossed his mother’s letter onto the floor again and stared at the address on the second envelope. He didn’t recognize it; it wasn’t from Sterling, or even New Hampshire, for that matter. Elena Battista, he read. Elena from Ridgewood, New Jersey.

He ripped open the envelope and scanned her note.

Peter,

I feel like I already know you, because I’ve been following what happened at the high school. I’m in college now, but I think I know what it was like for you…because it was like that for me. In fact, I’m writing my thesis now on the effects of being bullied at school. I know it’s presumptuous to think that you’d want to talk to someone like me…but I think if I’d known someone like you when I was in high school, my life would have been different, and maybe it’s never too late????

Sincerely,

Elena Battista

Peter tapped the ragged envelope against his thigh. Jordan had specifically told him he was to talk to nobody-that is, except his parents, and Jordan himself. But his parents were useless, and to be honest, it wasn’t like Jordan had been holding up his end of the bargain, which involved being physically present often enough for Peter to get whatever was bugging him off his chest.

Besides. She was a college girl. It was kind of cool to think that a college girl wanted to talk to him; and it wasn’t like he was going to tell her anything she didn’t already know.

Peter reached for his commissary form again and checked off the box for a generic greeting card.

A trial could be split into halves: what happened the day of the event, which was the prosecution’s baby; and everything that led up to it, which was what the defense had to present. To that end, Selena busied herself interviewing everyone who had come in contact with their client during the past seventeen years of his life. Two days after Peter’s arraignment in superior court, Selena sat down with the principal of Sterling High in his modified elementary school office. Arthur McAllister had a sandy beard and a round belly and teeth that he didn’t show when he smiled. He reminded Selena of one of those freaky talking bears that had come onto the market when she was a kid-Teddy Ruxpin-which made it all the more strange when he started answering her questions about anti-bullying policies at the high school. “It’s not tolerated,” McAllister said, although Selena had expected that party line. “We’re completely on top of it.”

“So, if a kid comes to you to complain about being picked on, what are the repercussions for the bully?”

“One of the things we’ve found, Selena-can I call you Selena?-is that if the administration intervenes, it makes it worse for the kid who’s being bullied.” He hesitated. “I know what people are saying about the shooting. How they’re comparing it to Columbine and Paducah and the ones that came before them. But I truly believe that it wasn’t bullying, per se, that led Peter to do what he did.”

“What he allegedly did,” Selena automatically corrected. “Do you keep records of bullying incidents?”

“If it escalates, and the kids are brought in to me, then yes.”

“Was anyone ever brought to you for bullying Peter Houghton?”

McAllister stood up and pulled a file out of a cabinet. He began to leaf through it, and then stopped at a page. “Actually, Peter was brought in to see me twice this year. He was put into detention for fighting in the halls.”

“Fighting?” Selena said. “Or fighting back?”

When Katie Riccobono had plunged a knife into her husband’s chest while he was fast asleep-forty-six times-Jordan had called upon Dr. King Wah, a forensic psychiatrist who specialized in battered woman syndrome. It was a specific tangent of post-traumatic stress disorder, one that suggested a woman who’d been repeatedly victimized both mentally and physically might so constantly fear for her life that the line between reality and fantasy blurred, to the point where she felt threatened even when the threat was dormant, or in Joe Riccobono’s case, as he lay sleeping off a three-day drinking spree.