Nineteen Minutes Read online

  She took a step toward Lacy. "Something still exists as long as there's someone around to remember it, right?"

  Lacy stared at Alex through her tears. "Thank you," she whispered, and left before she broke down completely in front of a woman--a stranger, really--who could do what Lacy couldn't: hold on to the past as if it was something to be treasured, instead of combing it for clues of failure.

  *

  "Josie," her mother said as they were driving home. "They read an email today in court. One that Peter had written to you."

  Josie faced her, stricken. She should have realized this would come out at the trial; how had she been so stupid? "I didn't know Courtney had sent it out. I didn't even see it until after everyone else had."

  "It must have been embarrassing," Alex said.

  "Well, yeah. The whole school knew he had a crush on me."

  Her mother glanced at her. "I meant for Peter."

  Josie thought about Lacy Houghton. Ten years had passed, but Josie had still been surprised by how thin Peter's mom had gotten; how her hair was nearly all gray. She wondered if grief could make time run faster, like a glitch in a clock. It was incredibly depressing, since Josie remembered Peter's mother as someone who never wore a wristwatch, someone who didn't care about the mess if the end result was worthy. When Josie was little and they played over at Peter's, Lacy would make cookies from whatever was left in her cabinet--oatmeal and wheat germ and gummy bears and marshmallows; carob and cornstarch and puffed rice. She once dumped a load of sand in the basement during the winter so that they could make castles. She let them draw on the bread of their sandwiches with food coloring and milk, so that even lunch was a masterpiece. Josie had liked being at Peter's house; it was what she'd always imagined a family felt like.

  Now she looked out the window. "You think this is all my fault, don't you?"

  "No--"

  "Is that what the lawyers said today? That the shooting happened because I didn't like Peter . . . the way he liked me?"

  "No. The lawyers didn't say that at all. Mostly the defense talked about how Peter got teased. How he didn't have many friends." Her mother stopped at a red light and turned, her wrist resting lightly on the steering wheel. "Why did you stop hanging around with Peter, anyway?"

  Being unpopular was a communicable disease. Josie could remember Peter in elementary school, fashioning the tinfoil from his lunch sandwich into a beanie with antennae, and wearing it around the playground to try to pick up radio transmissions from aliens. He hadn't realized that people were making fun of him. He never had.

  She had a sudden flash of him standing in the cafeteria, a statue with his hands trying to cover his groin, his pants pooled around his ankles. She remembered Matt's comment afterward: Objects in mirror are way smaller than they appear.

  Maybe Peter had finally understood what people thought of him.

  "I didn't want to be treated like him," Josie said, answering her mother, when what she really meant was, I wasn't brave enough.

  *

  Going back to jail was like devolution. You had to relinquish the trappings of humanity--your shoes, your suit and tie--and bend over to be strip-searched, probed with a rubber glove by one of the guards. You were given another prison jumpsuit, and flip-flops that were too wide for your feet, so that you looked just like everyone else again and couldn't pretend to yourself that you were better than them.

  Peter lay down on the bunk with his arm flung over his eyes. The inmate beside him, a guy awaiting trial for the rape of a sixty-six-year-old woman, asked him how it had gone in court, but he didn't answer. That was the only freedom he had left, pretty much, and he wanted to keep the truth to himself: that when he'd been put in his cell, he'd actually felt relieved to be back (could he say it?) home.

  Here, no one was staring at him as if he were a growth on a petri dish. No one really looked at him at all.

  Here, no one talked about him as if he were an animal.

  Here, no one blamed him, because they were all in the same boat.

  Jail wasn't all that different from public school, really. The correctional officers were just like the teachers--their job was to keep everyone in place, to feed them, and to make sure nobody got seriously hurt. Beyond that, you were left to your own devices. And like school, jail was an artificial society, with its own hierarchy and rules. If you did any work, it was pointless--cleaning the toilets every morning or pushing a library cart around minimum security wasn't really that different from writing an essay on the definition of civitas or memorizing prime numbers--you weren't going to be using them daily in your real life. And as with high school, the only way to get through jail was to stick it out and do your time.

  Not to mention: Peter wasn't popular in jail, either.

  He thought about the witnesses that Diana Leven had marched or dragged or wheeled to the stand today. Jordan had explained that it was all about sympathy; that the prosecution wanted to present all these ruined lives before they turned to the hard-core evidence; that he would soon have a chance to show how Peter's life had been ruined, too. Peter hardly even cared about that. He'd been more amazed, after seeing those students again, at how little had changed.

  Peter stared up at the woven springs of the upper bunk, blinking fast. Then he rolled toward the wall and stuffed the corner of his pillowcase into his mouth, so no one would be able to hear him cry.

  Even though John Eberhard couldn't call him a fag anymore, much less speak . . .

  Even though Drew Girard would never be the jock that he had been . . .

  Even though Haley Weaver wasn't a knockout . . .

  They were all still part of a group Peter could not, and would never, fit into.

  6:30 A.M., The Day Of

  Peter. Peter?!"

  He rolled over to see his father standing on the threshold of his bedroom.

  "Are you up?"

  Did it look like he was up? Peter grunted and rolled onto his back. He closed his eyes again for a moment and ran through his day. Englishfrenchmathhistorychem. One big long run-on sentence, one class bleeding into the next.

  He sat up, spearing his hands through his hair so that it stood on end. Downstairs, he could hear his father putting away pots and pans from the dishwasher, like some techno-symphony. He'd get his travel mug, pour some coffee, and leave Peter to his own devices.

  Peter's pajama bottoms dragged underneath his heels as he shuffled from the bed to his desk and sat down on the chair. He logged onto the Internet, because he wanted to see if anyone out there had given him more feedback on Hide-n-Shriek. If it was as good as he thought it was, he was going to enter it in some kind of amateur competition. There were kids like him all over the country--all over the world--who would easily pay $39.99 to play a video game where history was rewritten by the losers. Peter imagined how rich he could get off licensing fees. Maybe he could ditch college, like Bill Gates. Maybe one day people would be calling him, pretending that they used to be his friend.

  He squinted, and then reached for his glasses, which he kept next to the keyboard. But because it was freaking six-thirty in the morning, when no one should be expected to have much coordination, he dropped his eyeglass case right on the function keys.

  The screen logging him onto the Net minimized, and instead, his Recycle Bin contents opened on the screen.

  I know you don't think of me.

  And you certainly would never picture us together.

  Peter felt his head start to swim. He punched a finger against the Delete button, but nothing happened.

  Anyway, by myself, I'm nothing special. But with you, I think I could be.

  He tried to restart the computer, but it was frozen. He couldn't breathe; he couldn't move. He couldn't do anything but stare at his own stupidity, right there in black and white.

  His chest hurt, and he thought maybe he was having a heart attack, or maybe that was just what it felt like when the muscle turned to stone. With jerky movements, Peter leaned down for the