Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

“You play a cop on TV?”

He sighed. “Never mind.” He reached over to a tape recorder in the center of the table. “I’m going to record this, just like before…mostly because I’m too dumb to remember it all correctly.” The detective pressed the button and sat down across from Josie. “Do people tell you all the time that you look like your mom?”

“Um, never.” She tilted her head. “Is that what you brought me down to ask me?”

He smiled. “No.”

“I don’t look like her, anyway.”

“Sure you do. It’s your eyes.”

Josie looked down at the table. “Mine are a totally different color than hers.”

“I wasn’t talking about the color,” the detective said. “Josie, tell me again what you saw the day of the shootings at Sterling High.”

Underneath the table, Josie gripped her hands together. She dug the nails of one hand into the palm of the other, so that something hurt more than the words he was making her say. “I had a science test. I’d studied really late for it, and I was thinking about it when I woke up in the morning. That’s all I know. I already told you, I can’t even remember being in school that day.”

“Do you remember what made you pass out in the locker room?”

Josie closed her eyes. She could picture the locker room-the tile floor, the gray lockers, the orphan sock stuffed in a corner of the shower. And then, everything went red as anger. Red as blood.

“No,” Josie said, but tears had cut her voice into lace. “I don’t even know why thinking about it makes me cry.” She hated being seen like this; she hated being like this; most of all she hated not knowing when it would happen: a shift of the wind, a turn of the tide. Josie took the tissue the detective offered. “Please,” she whispered, “can I just go now?”

There was a moment of hesitation, and Josie could feel the weight of the detective’s pity falling over her like a net, one that only held on to her words, while the rest-the shame, the anger, the fear-seeped right through. “Sure, Josie,” he said. “You can go.”

Alex was pretending to read the Town of Sterling Annual Report when Josie suddenly burst out of the secured door into the police station’s waiting area. She was crying hard, and Patrick Ducharme was nowhere in sight. I’ll kill him, Alex thought rationally, calmly, after I take care of my daughter.

“Josie,” she said, as Josie ran past her out of the building, toward the parking lot. Alex hurried after her, finally catching up to Josie in front of their car. She wrapped her arms around Josie’s waist and felt her buckle. “Leave me alone,” Josie sobbed.

“Josie, honey, what did he say to you? Talk to me.”

“I can’t talk to you! You don’t understand. None of you understand.” Josie backed away. “The people who do, they’re all dead.”

Alex hesitated, unsure of the right move. She could fold Josie tighter into an embrace and let her cry. Or she could make her see that no matter how upset she was, it was something she had the resources to handle. Sort of like an Allen charge, Alex realized-the instruction a judge would give to a jury that wasn’t getting anywhere in its deliberations, which basically reminded them of their duty as American citizens, and assured them that they could and would come to a consensus.

It had always worked for her in court.

“I know this is hard, Josie, but you’re stronger than you think, and-”

Josie shoved her hard, breaking away. “Stop talking to me like that!”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m some fucking witness or lawyer you’re trying to impress!”

“Your Honor. Sorry to interrupt.”

Alex wheeled around to find Patrick Ducharme standing two feet behind them, listening to every single word. Her cheeks reddened; this was exactly the kind of behavior you didn’t put on public display when you were a judge. He’d probably go back into the police station and send out a mass email to the entire force: Guess what I just overheard.

“Your daughter,” he said. “She forgot her sweatshirt.”

Pink and hooded, it was folded neatly over his arm. He handed it to Josie. But then, instead of backing away, he put his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry, Josie,” he said, meeting her gaze as if they were the only two people in this world. “We’re going to make this okay.”

Alex expected Josie to snap at him, too, but instead Josie went calm under his touch. She nodded, as if she believed this for the first time since the shooting had occurred.

Alex felt something rise inside her-relief, she realized, that her daughter had finally reached out for the slightest bit of hope. And regret, bitter as any almond, because she had not been the one to put the peace back into her daughter’s face.

Josie wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “You all right?” Ducharme asked.

“I guess.”

“Good.” The detective nodded in Alex’s direction. “Judge.”

“Thank you,” she murmured, as he turned and started back to the police station.

Alex heard the slam of the car door as Josie slipped into the passenger seat, but she watched Patrick Ducharme until he disappeared from sight. I wish it had been me, Alex thought, and she deliberately kept herself from filling in the rest of that sentence.

Like Peter, Derek Markowitz was a computer whiz. Like Peter, he hadn’t been blessed with muscles and height or, for that matter, any gifts of puberty. He had hair that stuck up in small tufts, as if it had been planted. He wore his shirt tucked into his pants at all times, and he had never been popular.

Unlike Peter, he hadn’t gone to school one day and killed ten people.

Selena sat at the Markowitzes’ kitchen table, while Dee Dee Markowitz watched her like a hawk. She was there to interview Derek in the hope that he could be a witness for the defense-but to be perfectly honest, the information Derek had given her so far made him a much better candidate for the prosecution.

“What if it’s all my fault?” Derek was saying. “I mean, I’m the only one who was given a clue. If I’d been listening harder, maybe I could have stopped him. I could have told someone else. But instead, I figured he was joking around.”

“I don’t think anyone would have done any differently in your situation,” Selena said gently, and she meant it. “The Peter you knew wasn’t the one who went to the school that day.”

“Yeah,” Derek said, and he nodded to himself.

“Are you about finished?” Dee Dee asked, stepping forward. “Derek’s got a violin lesson.”

“Almost, Mrs. Markowitz. I just wanted to ask Derek about the Peter he did know. How’d you two meet?”

“We were both on a soccer team together in sixth grade,” Derek said, “and we both sucked.”

“Derek!”

“Sorry, Mom, but it’s true.” He glanced up at Selena. “Then again, none of those jocks could write HTML code if their lives depended on it.”

Selena smiled. “Yeah, well, count me in the ranks of the technologically impaired. So you two got to be friends while you were on the team?”

“We hung out on the bench, because we were never put in to play,” Derek said. “But no, we weren’t really friends until after that, when he stopped hanging out with Josie.”

Selena fumbled her pen. “Josie?”

“Yeah, Josie Cormier. She goes to the school, too.”

“And she’s Peter’s friend?”

“She used to be, like, the only kid he ever hung around with,” Derek explained, “but then she became one of the cool kids, and she ditched him.” He looked at Selena. “Peter didn’t care, really. He said she’d turned into a bitch.”

“Derek!”

“Sorry, Mom,” he said. “But again, it’s true.”