Nineteen Minutes Read online

  "An independent study."

  "What's that?"

  She lifted a crutch. "It's what you do for credit when you can't play gym. What were you doing here?"

  "I work here now," Peter said, and they both fell silent.

  Logistically, Peter thought, they'd be found sooner or later. The custodian would probably discover them when he was moving his floor buffer upstairs, but if not, the longest they'd have to wait was morning when everyone arrived again. He smiled a little, thinking about what he could truthfully tell Derek: Guess what, I slept with Josie Cormier.

  He opened an iBook and pressed a button, starting a PowerPoint presentation on the screen. Amoebas, blastospheres. Cell division. An embryo. Amazing to think that we all started out like that--microscopic, indistinguishable.

  "How long before they find us?"

  "I don't know."

  "Won't the librarians notice if you don't come back?"

  "My own parents wouldn't notice if I didn't come back."

  "Oh, God . . . what if we run out of air?" Josie banged on the doors with a crutch. "Help!"

  "We're not going to run out of air," Peter said.

  "How do you know that?"

  He didn't, not really. But what else was he going to say?

  "I get freaked out in small spaces," Josie said. "I can't do this."

  "You're claustrophobic?" He wondered how he hadn't known that about Josie. But then again, why should he? It wasn't as though he'd been such an active part of her life for the past six years.

  "I think I'm going to throw up," Josie moaned.

  "Oh, shit," Peter said. "Don't. Just close your eyes, then you won't even realize you're in an elevator."

  Josie closed her eyes, but when she did, she swayed on her crutches.

  "Hang on." Peter took her crutches away, so that she was balancing on one foot. Then he held on to her hands while she sank to the floor, extending her bad leg.

  "How'd you get hurt?" he asked, nodding at the cast.

  "I fell on some ice." She started to cry, and gasp--hyperventilate, Peter guessed, although he'd only seen the word written, not live. You were supposed to breathe into a paper bag, right? Peter searched the elevator for something that would suffice. There was a plastic bag with some documents in it on the AV trolley, but somehow putting that on your head didn't seem particularly brilliant. "Okay," he said, brainstorming, "let's do something to get your mind off where you are."

  "Like what?"

  "Maybe we should play a game," Peter suggested, and he heard the same words repeated in his head, Kurt's voice from the Front Runner. He shook his head to clear it. "Twenty Questions?"

  Josie hesitated. "Animal, vegetable, or mineral?"

  After six rounds of Twenty Questions, and an hour of geography, Peter was getting thirsty. He also had to pee, and that was really troubling him, because he didn't think he could last until morning and there was absolutely no way he was going to take a whiz with Josie watching. Josie had gotten quiet, but at least she'd stopped shaking. He thought she might be asleep.

  Then she spoke. "Truth or dare," Josie said.

  Peter turned toward her. "Truth."

  "Do you hate me?"

  He ducked his head. "Sometimes."

  "You should," Josie said.

  "Truth or dare?"

  "Truth," Josie said.

  "Do you hate me?"

  "No."

  "Then why," Peter asked, "do you act like you do?"

  She shook her head. "I have to act the way people expect me to act. It's part of the whole . . . thing. If I don't . . ." She picked at the rubber brace of her crutch. "It's complicated. You wouldn't understand."

  "Truth or dare," Peter said.

  Josie grinned. "Dare."

  "Lick the bottom of your own foot."

  She started to laugh. "I can't even walk on the bottom of my own foot," she said, but she bent down and slipped off her loafer, stuck out her tongue. "Truth or dare?"

  "Truth."

  "Chicken," Josie said. "Have you ever been in love?"

  Peter looked at Josie, and thought of how they had once tied a note with their addresses to a helium balloon and let it go in her backyard, certain it would reach Mars. Instead, they had received a letter from a widow who lived two blocks away. "Yeah," he said. "I think so."

  Her eyes widened. "With who?"

  "That wasn't the question. Truth or dare?"

  "Truth," Josie said.

  "What's the last lie you told?"

  The smile faded from Josie's face. "When I told you I slipped on the ice. Matt and I were having a fight and he hit me."

  "He hit you?"

  "It wasn't like that. . . . I said something I shouldn't have, and when he--well, I lost my balance, anyway, and hurt my ankle."

  "Josie--"

  She ducked her head. "No one knows. You won't tell, will you?"

  "No." Peter hesitated. "Why didn't you tell anyone?"

  "That wasn't the question," Josie said, parroting him.

  "I'm asking it now."

  "Then I'll take a dare."

  Peter curled his hands into fists at his sides. "Kiss me," he said.

  She leaned toward him slowly, until her face was too close to be in focus. Her hair fell over Peter's shoulder like a curtain and her eyes closed. She smelled like autumn--like apple cider and slanting sun and the snap of the coming cold. He felt his heart scrambling, caught inside the confines of his own body.

  Josie's lips landed just on the edge of his, almost his cheek and not quite his mouth. "I'm glad I wasn't stuck in here alone," she said shyly, and he tasted the words, sweet as mint on her breath.

  Peter glanced down at his lap and prayed that Josie wouldn't notice that he was hard as a rock. He started to smile so wide that it hurt. It wasn't that he didn't like girls; it was that there was only one right one.

  Just then there was a knock on the metal door. "Anyone in here?"

  "Yes!" Josie cried, struggling to stand with her crutches. "Help!"

  There was a bang and a hammering, the sound of a crowbar breaching a seam. The doors flew open, and Josie hurried out of the elevator. Matt Royston was waiting next to the janitor. "I got worried when you weren't home," he said, and pulled Josie into his embrace.

  But you hit her, Peter thought, and then he remembered that he had made a promise to Josie. He listened to her whoop with surprise as Matt swept her into his arms, carrying her so that she wouldn't have to use her crutches.

  Peter wheeled the iBook and projector back to the library and locked the AV room. It was late now, and he had to walk home, but he almost didn't mind. He decided that the first thing he'd do was erase the circle around Josie's portrait in his yearbook, take her characteristics off the roster of villains in his video game.

  He was mentally reviewing the logistics of that, in terms of programming, when he finally reached home. It took Peter a moment to realize something wasn't right--the lights weren't on in the house, but the cars were there. "Hello?" he called out, wandering from the living room to the dining room to the kitchen. "Anyone here?"

  He found his parents sitting in the dark at the kitchen table. His mother looked up, dazed. It was clear that she'd been crying.

  Peter felt something warm break free in his chest. He'd told Josie his parents wouldn't notice his absence, but that wasn't true at all. Clearly, his parents had been frantic. "I'm fine," Peter told them. "Really."

  His father stood up, blinking back tears, and hauled Peter into his arms. Peter couldn't remember the last time he'd been hugged like this. In spite of the fact that he wanted to seem cool, that he was sixteen years old, he melted against his father's frame and held on tightly. First Josie, and now this? It was turning out to be the best day of Peter's life.

  "It's Joey," his father sobbed. "He's dead."

  Ask a random kid today if she wants to be popular and she'll tell you no, even if the truth is that if she was in a desert dying of thirst and had the choice between a gl