Nineteen Minutes Read online

This year, she was supposed to be taking biology, and she was already nervous about the unit on genetics. Josie didn't know if her father had brown eyes or blue ones; if he had curly hair or freckles or six toes. Her mother had shrugged off Josie's concerns. "Surely there's someone in your class who's adopted," she said. "You know fifty percent more about your background than they do."

  This is what Josie had pieced together about her father:

  His name was Logan Rourke. He'd been a teacher at the law school her mother had attended.

  His hair had gone white prematurely, but--her mother assured her--in a cool, not creepy, way.

  He was ten years older than her mother, which meant he was fifty.

  He had long fingers and played the piano.

  He couldn't whistle.

  Not quite enough to fill a standard biography, if you asked Josie, not that anyone ever bothered to.

  She was sitting in bio lab next to Courtney. Josie ordinarily would not have picked Courtney as a lab partner--she wasn't the brightest bulb in the chandelier--but that didn't seem to matter. Mrs. Aracort was the teacher-adviser to the cheerleaders, and Courtney was one of those. No matter how skimpy their lab reports turned out, they still always managed to get A's.

  A dissected cat brain was sitting on the front desk next to Mrs. Aracort. It smelled of formaldehyde and looked like roadkill, which would have been bad enough, but in addition, last period had been lunchtime. ("That thing," Courtney had shuddered, "is going to make me even more bulimic.") Josie was trying not to look at it while she worked on her class project: each student had been given a wireless-enabled Dell laptop to surf the Net for examples of humane animal research. So far Josie had catalogued a primate study being done by an allergy pill manufacturer, where monkeys were made asthmatic and then cured, and another one that involved SIDS and puppies.

  She hit a browser button by mistake and got a home page for The Boston Globe. Splashed across the screen was election coverage: the race between the incumbent district attorney and his challenger, the dean of students at Harvard Law School, a man named Logan Rourke.

  Butterflies rose inside Josie's chest. There couldn't be more than one, could there? She squinted, leaning closer to the screen, but the photograph was grainy and there was a sunlight glare. "What's wrong with you?" Courtney whispered.

  Josie shook her head and closed the cover of her laptop, as if it, too, could hold fast to this secret.

  *

  He never used a urinal. Even if Peter just had to pee, he didn't want to do it standing next to some gargantuan twelfth grader who might make a comment about, well, the fact that he was a puny ninth grader, particularly in his nether regions. Instead, he'd go into a stall and close the door for privacy.

  He liked to read the bathroom walls. One of the stalls had a running series of knock-knock jokes. Others blurted the names of girls who gave blow jobs. There was one scribble that Peter found his eye veering toward repeatedly: TREY WILKINS IS A FAGGOT. He didn't know Trey Wilkins--didn't think he was even a student at Sterling High anymore--but Peter wondered if Trey had come into the bathroom and used the stalls to pee, too.

  Peter had left English in the middle of a pop quiz on grammar. He truly didn't think that in the grand scheme of life, it was going to matter whether or not an adjective modified a noun or a verb or just dropped off the face of the earth, which is what he was sincerely hoping would happen before he had to go back to class. He had already done his business in the bathroom; now he was just wasting time. If he failed this quiz, it would be the second in a row. It wasn't even his parents' anger that Peter was worried about. It was the way they'd look at him, disappointed that he hadn't turned out more like Joey.

  He heard the door of the bathroom open, and the busy slice of hallway noise that trailed on the heels of the two kids who entered. Peter ducked down, scanning beneath the stall door. Nikes. "I'm sweating like a pig," said one voice.

  The second kid laughed. "That's because you're a lard-ass."

  "Yeah, right. I could beat you on a basketball court with one hand tied behind my back."

  Peter could hear a faucet running, water splashing.

  "Hey, you're getting me soaked!"

  "Aaaah, much better," the first voice said. "At least now I'm not sweating. Hey, check out my hair. I look like Alfalfa."

  "Who?"

  "What are you, retarded? The kid from the Little Rascals with the cowlick thing on the back of his head."

  "Actually, you look like a total fag . . ."

  "You know . . ." More laughter. "I do sort of look like Peter."

  As soon as Peter heard his name, his heart thumped hard. He slid open the bolt in the stall door and stepped outside. Standing in front of the bank of sinks was a football player he knew only by sight, and his own brother. Joey's hair was dripping wet, standing up on the back of his head the way Peter's sometimes did, even when he tried to slick it down with his mother's hair gel.

  Joey flicked a glance his way. "Get lost, freak," he ordered, and Peter hurried out of the bathroom, wondering if that was even possible when you'd been missing most of your life.

  *

  The two men standing in front of Alex's bench shared a duplex, but hated each other. Arliss Undergroot was a Sheetrock installer with tattoos up and down both arms, a shaved head, and enough piercings in his head to have set off the metal detectors at the courthouse. Rodney Eakes was a vegan bank teller with a prized record collection of original cast recordings from Broadway shows. Arliss lived downstairs, Rodney lived upstairs. A few months back, Rodney had brought home a bale of hay, planning to use it for mulching his organic garden, but he never got around to it and the hay bale remained on Arliss's porch. Arliss asked Rodney to get rid of the hay, but Rodney hadn't moved fast enough. So one night, Arliss and his girlfriend cut the twine and spread the hay out over the front lawn.

  Rodney called the police, and they had actually arrested Arliss on the grounds of criminal mischief: legalspeak for destroying a bale of hay.

  "Why are the taxpayers of New Hampshire shelling out money for a case like this to be tried in court?" Alex asked.

  The police prosecutor shrugged. "The Chief asked me to pursue it," he said, but then he rolled his eyes.

  He had already proven that Arliss had taken the bale of hay and spread it over the lawn--the burden of proof fulfilled. But a conviction in this case would mean Arliss would have a criminal record for the rest of his life.

  He might have been a lousy neighbor, but he didn't deserve that.

  Alex turned to the prosecutor. "How much did the victim pay for that bale of hay?"

  "Four dollars, Your Honor."

  Then she faced the defendant. "Do you have four dollars with you today?"

  Arliss nodded.

  "Good. Your case is filed without a finding conditional upon your paying the victim. Take four dollars out of your wallet and give it to the police officer over there, who will bring it to Mr. Eakes in the back of the courtroom." She glanced at her clerk. "We're taking a fifteen-minute recess."

  In chambers, Alex stripped off her robe and grabbed a pack of cigarettes. She took the back stairs to the bottom floor of the building and lit up, inhaling deeply. There were days when she was proud of her job, and then there were others, like today, when she wondered why she even bothered.

  She found Liz, the groundskeeper, raking the lawn in front of the courthouse. "I brought you a cigarette," Alex said.

  "What's wrong?"

  "How did you know something was wrong?"

  "Because you've been working here for how many years, and you've never brought me a cigarette."

  Alex leaned against the tree, watching leaves as bright as jewels catch in the tines of Liz's rake. "I just wasted three hours on a case that never should have made it to a courthouse. I have a splitting headache. And I ran out of toilet paper in the bathroom in chambers and had to call the clerk in to get me a roll from maintenance."

  Liz glanced up at the tree as a gu