Nineteen Minutes Read online

  "Margaret, then," he answered, and he slipped back inside.

  On the way to the car, Josie opened her fingers like a flower. She watched the bills fall to the ground near a plant that looked, like everything else here, as if it was thriving.

  *

  Honestly, the whole idea for the game came to Peter when he was asleep.

  He'd created computer games before--Pong replicates, racing courses, and even one sci-fi scenario that let you play online with someone in another country if they logged onto the site--but this was the biggest idea he'd conceived of yet. It came about because, after one of Joey's football games, they'd stopped off at a pizza place where Peter had eaten way too much meatball and sausage pizza, and had been staring at an arcade game called DEER HUNT. You put in your quarter and shot your fake rifle at the bucks that poked their heads out from behind trees; if you hit a doe, you lost.

  That night Peter dreamed about hunting with his father, but instead of going after deer, they were looking for real people.

  He had awakened in a sweat, his hand cramped as if he'd been holding a gun.

  It wouldn't be all that hard to create avatars--computerized personas. He'd done some experimenting, and even if the skin tone wasn't right and the graphics weren't perfect, he knew how to differentiate between races and hair color and build through programming language. It might be kind of cool to do a game where the prey was human.

  But war games were old hat, and even gangs had been totally overdone, thanks to Grand Theft Auto. What he needed, Peter realized, was a new villain, one that other people would want to gun down, too. That was the joy of a video game: watching someone who deserved it getting his comeuppance.

  He tried to think of other microcosms of the universe that might be battlegrounds: alien invasions, Wild West shootouts, spy missions. Then Peter thought about the front line he braved every day.

  What if you took the prey . . . and made them the hunters?

  Peter got out of bed and sat down at his desk, pulling his eighth-grade yearbook from the drawer where he'd banished it months ago. He'd create a computer game that was Revenge of the Nerds, but updated for the twenty-first century. A fantasy world where the balance of power was turned on its head, where the underdog finally got a chance to beat the bullies.

  He took a marker and started to look through the yearbook, circling portraits.

  Drew Girard.

  Matt Royston.

  John Eberhard.

  Peter turned the page and stopped for a moment. Then he circled Josie Cormier's face, too.

  *

  "Can you stop here?" Josie said, when she really didn't think she was going to be able to spend another minute riding in the car and pretending that her meeting with her father had gone well. Matt had barely pulled over when she opened the door, flew through the high grass into the woods at the edge of the road.

  She sank down on the carpet of pine needles and started to cry. What she'd been expecting, she really couldn't say--except that this wasn't it. Unconditional acceptance, maybe. Curiosity, at the very least.

  "Josie?" Matt said, coming up behind her. "You okay?"

  She tried to say yes, but she was so sick of lying. She felt Matt's hand stroke her hair, and that only made her cry harder; tenderness cut as sharp as any knife. "He didn't give a shit about me."

  "Then you shouldn't give a shit about him," Matt answered.

  Josie glanced up at him. "It's not that simple."

  He pulled her into his arms. "Aw, Jo."

  Matt was the only one who'd ever given her a nickname. She couldn't remember her mother calling her anything silly, like Pumpkin or Ladybug, the way other parents did. When Matt called her Jo, it reminded her of Little Women, and although she was pretty sure Matt had never read the Alcott novel, secretly she was pleased to be associated with a character so strong and sure of herself.

  "It's stupid. I don't even know why I'm crying. I just . . . I wanted him to like me."

  "I'm crazy about you," Matt said. "Does that count?" He leaned forward and kissed her, right on the trail of her tears.

  "It counts a lot."

  She felt Matt's lips move from her cheek to her neck to the spot behind her ear that always made her feel like she was dissolving. She was a novice at fooling around, but Matt had coaxed her further and further each time they were alone. It's your fault, he'd say, and give her that smile. If you weren't this hot, I'd be able to keep my hands off you. That alone was an aphrodisiac to Josie. Her? Hot? And--just as Matt had promised every time--it did feel good to let him touch her everywhere, to let him taste her. Every incremental intimacy with Matt felt as if she were falling off a cliff--that loss of breath, those butterflies in her stomach. One step, and she'd be flying. It didn't occur to Josie, when she leaped, that she was just as likely to fall.

  Now she felt his hands moving under her T-shirt, slipping beneath the lace of her bra. Her legs tangled with his; he rubbed up against her. When Matt tugged up her shirt, so that the cool air feathered over her skin, she snapped back to reality. "We can't do this," she whispered.

  Matt's teeth scraped over her shoulder.

  "We're parked on the side of the road."

  He looked up at her, drugged, feverish. "But I want you," Matt said, like he had a dozen times.

  This time, though, she glanced up.

  I want you.

  Josie could have stopped him, but she realized she did not intend to. He wanted her, and right now, that was what she most needed to hear.

  There was a moment when Matt went still, wondering if the fact that she hadn't shoved his hands away meant what he thought it meant. She heard the rip of a foil condom packet--How long had he been carrying that around? Then he tore at his jeans and hiked up her skirt, as if he still expected her to change her mind. Josie felt Matt pulling aside the elastic of her underwear, the burn of his finger pushing inside her. This was nothing like the times before, when his touch had left a track like a comet over her skin; when she found herself aching after she told him she wanted to stop. Matt shifted his weight and came down on top of her again, only this time there was more burning, more pressure. "Ow," she whimpered, and Matt hesitated.

  "I don't want to hurt you," he said.

  She turned her head away. "Just do it," Josie said, and Matt pushed his hips flush against hers. It was the kind of pain that--even though she was expecting it--made her cry out.

  Matt mistook that for passion. "I know, baby," he groaned. She could feel his heartbeat, but from the inside, and then he started to move faster, bucking against her like a fish released from a hook onto a dock.

  Josie wanted to ask Matt whether it had hurt the first time he had done it, too. She wondered if it always would hurt. Maybe pain was the price everyone paid for love. She turned her face into Matt's shoulder and tried to understand why, even with him still inside of her, she felt empty.

  *

  "Peter," Mrs. Sandringham said at the end of English class. "Could I see you for a moment?"

  At the sound of his teacher's summons, Peter sank down in his chair. He began to think of excuses he could give his parents when he came home with another failing grade.

  He actually liked Mrs. Sandringham. She was only in her late twenties--you could actually look at her while she was prattling on about grammar and Shakespeare and imagine not so long ago, when she might have been slouched in a seat like any ordinary kid and wondering why the clock never seemed to move.

  Peter waited until the rest of the class had cleared out before he approached the teacher's desk. "I just wanted to talk to you about your essay," Mrs. Sandringham said. "I haven't graded everyone's yet, but I did have a chance to look over yours and--"

  "I can redo it," Peter blurted out.

  Mrs. Sandringham raised her brows. "But Peter . . . I wanted to tell you that you're getting an A." She handed it to him; Peter stared at the bright red grade in the margin.

  The assignment had been to write about a significant event t