Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

“Would you excuse me?” Selena asked.

She walked out of the kitchen and into the bathroom, where she pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and dialed home. “It’s me,” she said when Jordan answered, and then she hesitated. “Why is it so quiet?”

“Sam’s asleep.”

“You didn’t pop in another Wiggles video just to get your discovery read, did you?”

“Did you call specifically to accuse me of lousy parenting?”

“No,” Selena said. “I called to tell you that Peter and Josie used to be best friends.”

In maximum security, Peter was allowed only one real visitor a week, but certain people didn’t count. For example, your lawyer could come and see you as many times as necessary. And-here’s the crazy thing-so could reporters. All Peter had to do was sign a little release that said he was willingly making the choice to speak to the media, and Elena Battista was allowed to meet him.

She was hot. Peter noticed that right away. Instead of wearing some shapeless oversized sweater, she had dressed in a tight blouse with buttons. If he leaned forward, he could even see cleavage.

She had long, thick curly hair and doe-brown eyes, and Peter found it really hard to believe that she had ever been teased by anyone in high school. But she was sitting in front of him, that much was true, and she could barely look him in the eyes. “I can’t believe this,” she said, her toes coming right up to the red line that separated them. “I can’t believe I’m actually meeting you.”

Peter pretended he heard this all the time. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s cool that you drove up here.”

“Oh, God, that was the least I could do,” Elena said. Peter thought of stories he’d heard, of groupies who’d written to inmates and eventually married them in a prison ceremony. He thought of the correctional officer who’d brought Elena in, and wondered if he was telling everyone else that Peter Houghton had some hot girl visiting him.

“You don’t mind if I take notes, do you?” Elena asked. “For my paper?”

“That’s cool.”

He watched her pull out a pencil and hold the cap in her mouth while she opened her notebook to a fresh page. “So, like I told you, I’m writing about the effects of bullying.”

“How come?”

“Well, there were times when I was in high school that I thought I’d rather just kill myself than go back to class the next day, because it would be easier. I figured if I was thinking it, there had to be other people thinking it, too…and that’s where I came up with the idea.” She leaned forward-cleavage alert-and met Peter’s eyes. “I’m hoping I can get it published in a psychology journal or something.”

“That would be cool.” He winced; God, how many times was he going to use the word cool? He probably sounded like a total retard.

“So, maybe you could start by telling me how often it used to happen. The bullying, I mean.”

“Every day, I guess.”

“What sorts of things did they do?”

“The usual,” Peter said. “Stuffing me into a locker, throwing my books out the bus window.” He gave her a litany he’d already given Jordan a thousand times: memories of being elbowed on his way up a staircase, moments where his glasses were ripped off and crushed, slurs pitched like fastballs.

Elena’s eyes melted. “That must have been so hard for you.”

Peter didn’t know what to say. He wanted her to stay interested in his story, but not if it meant that she thought he was a total wimp. He shrugged, hoping that was a good enough response.

She stopped writing. “Peter, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Even if it’s kind of off topic?”

Peter nodded.

“Did you plan to kill them?”

She was leaning forward again, her lips parted, as if whatever Peter was about to say was some wafer, a communion host that she’d been waiting for her whole life. Peter could hear the footsteps of a guard walking past the doorway behind him, could practically taste Elena’s breath through the receiver. He wanted to give her the right answer-sound dangerous enough for her to be intrigued, to want to come back.

He smiled, in a way that he hoped was sort of seductive. “Let’s just say it needed to stop,” Peter answered.

The magazines in Jordan’s dentist’s office had the shelf life of plutonium. They were so old that the celebrity bride on the cover now had two babies named for biblical characters, or pieces of fruit; that the president listed as Man of the Year had already left office. To that end, when he stumbled upon the latest issue of Time while awaiting his appointment for a filling, Jordan felt like he’d hit the mother lode.

HIGH SCHOOL: THE NEWEST FRONT LINE FOR BATTLE? the cover read, and there was a still image of Sterling High from a chopper, kids still streaming out of all the building’s orifices. He absently leafed toward the article and its subsections, not expecting to see anything he didn’t already know or hadn’t already seen in the papers, but one piece caught his eye. “Inside the Mind of a Killer,” he read, and he saw the much-used school picture of Peter from his eighth-grade yearbook.

Then he started to read.

“Goddamn,” he said, and he got to his feet, starting for the door.

“Mr. McAfee,” the secretary said, “the dentist is ready for you.”

“I’ll have to reschedule-”

“Well, you can’t take our magazine…”

“Add it to my bill,” Jordan snapped, and he hurried downstairs to his car. His cell phone rang just as he turned the key in the ignition-he completely expected it to be Diana Leven, gloating over her good fortune-but instead, it was Selena.

“Hey, are you done at the dentist? I need you to swing by CVS and grab some diapers on the way home. I ran out.”

“I’m not coming home. I’ve got bigger problems right now.”

“Honey,” Selena said, “there are no bigger problems.”

“I’ll explain later,” Jordan said, and he turned off his phone, so that even if Diana called, she wouldn’t be able to reach him.

He got to the jail in twenty-six minutes-a personal record-and stormed into the entryway. There, he plastered the magazine up to the plastic that separated him from the CO who was signing him in. “I need to bring this in when I see my client,” Jordan said.

“Well, I’m sorry,” the officer said, “but you can’t take in anything that’s got staples.”

Frustrated, Jordan balanced the magazine against his leg and ripped out the binding staples. “Fine. Can I see my client now?”

He was brought to the same conference room he always used at the jail, and he paced while he waited for Peter to arrive. When he did, Jordan slammed the magazine down on the table, open to the article. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

Peter’s mouth dropped open. “She…she never mentioned that she wrote for Time!” He scanned the pages. “I can’t believe it,” he murmured.

Jordan could feel all the blood in his body rushing to his head. Surely, this was how people had strokes. “Do you have any idea how serious the charges against you are? How awful your case is? How much evidence there is against you?” He smacked an open hand on the article. “Do you really think that this makes you look at all sympathetic?”

Peter scowled. “Well, thanks for the lecture. Maybe if you’d been here to deliver it a few weeks ago we wouldn’t be having this discussion at all.”

“Oh, that’s priceless,” Jordan said. “I don’t come by often enough, so you decide to get back at me by talking to the media?”

“She wasn’t the media. She was my friend.”

“Guess what,” Jordan said. “You don’t get to have any friends.”