The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  “Well,” Jordan said evenly, “you need to understand the jail’s position. To them, you’re just a murderer.”

  “Then they’re all hypocrites,” Peter said. “If they saw a roach, they’d step on it, wouldn’t they?”

  “Is that how you’d describe what happened at the school?”

  Peter flicked his eyes away. “Do you know that I’m not allowed to read magazines?” he said. “I can’t even go into the exercise yard like everyone else.”

  “I’m not here to register your complaints.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “To help you get out,” Jordan said. “And if that’s going to happen, then you need to talk to me.”

  Peter folded his arms across his chest and glanced from Jordan’s collared shirt to his tie to his polished black shoes. “Why? You don’t really give a shit about me.”

  Jordan stood up and stuffed his notebook into his briefcase. “You know what? You’re right. I don’t really give a shit about you. I’m just doing my job, because unlike you, I won’t have the state paying my room and board for the rest of my life.” He started for the door, but was called back by the sound of Peter’s voice.

  “Why is everyone so upset that those jerks are dead?”

  Jordan turned slowly, making a mental note that kindness had not worked especially well with Peter, nor had the voice of authority. What had made him respond was pure and simple anger.

  “I mean, people are crying over them . . . and they were assholes. Everyone’s saying I ruined their lives, but no one seemed to care when my life was the one being ruined.”

  Jordan sat down on the edge of the table. “How?”

  “Where do you want me to start,” Peter answered, bitter. “In nursery school, when the teacher would bring out snacks, and one of them would pull out my chair so I’d fall down and everyone else would crack up? Or in second grade, when they held my head down in the toilet and they flushed it over and over, just because they knew they could? Or that time they beat me up on my way home from school and I needed stitches?”

  Jordan picked up his pad and wrote STITCHES. “Who’s they?”

  “A whole bunch of kids,” Peter said.

  The ones you wanted to kill? Jordan thought, but he didn’t ask. “Why do you think they targeted you?”

  “Because they’re dickheads? I don’t know. They’re like a pack. They have to make someone else feel like shit in order to feel good about themselves.”

  “What did you try to do to stop it?”

  Peter snorted. “In case you haven’t noticed, Sterling’s not exactly a metropolis. Everyone knows everyone. You wind up in high school with the same kids who were in the sandbox in your preschool.”

  “Couldn’t you stay out of their path?”

  “I had to go to school,” Peter said. “You’d be surprised how small it gets when you’re there for eight hours every day.”

  “So did they do this outside of school, too?”

  “When they could catch me,” Peter said. “If I was by myself.”

  “How about harassment—phone calls, letters, threats?” Jordan asked.

  “Online,” Peter said. “They’d send me instant messages, saying I was a loser, things like that. And they took an email I wrote and spammed it out to the whole school . . . made it a joke . . .” He looked away, falling silent.

  “Why?”

  “It was . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Jordan made a note on his pad. “Did you ever tell anyone about what was going on? Parents? Teachers?”

  “No one gives a crap,” Peter said. “They tell you to ignore it. They say they’ll be watching out to make sure it doesn’t happen, but they never watch.” He walked to the window and pressed his palms against the glass. “There was this kid in my first-grade class who had that disease, the one where your spine grows outside your body—”

  “Spina bifida?”

  “Yeah. She had a wheelchair and she couldn’t sit up or anything, and before she came to class the teacher told us we had to treat her like she was just like us. The thing is, she wasn’t like us, and we all knew it, and she knew it. So we were supposed to lie to her face?” Peter shook his head. “Everyone talks like it’s all right to be different, but America’s supposed to be this melting pot, and what the hell does that mean? If it’s a melting pot, then you’re really just trying to make everyone the same, aren’t you?”

  Jordan found himself thinking about his son Thomas’s transition to middle school. They’d moved from Bainbridge to Salem Falls, a small enough school system that the cliques had already developed thick cellular walls against outsiders. For a while, Thomas had been a chameleon—he’d come home from school and hole up in his room, emerging as a soccer player, a thespian, a “mathlete.” It took him several sheddings of his own adolescent skin to find a group of friends who let him be whoever he wanted; and the rest of Thomas’s high school career was a fairly peaceful one. But what if he hadn’t found that group of friends? What if he’d continued peeling off layers of himself until there was nothing left at his core?

  As if he could read Jordan’s mind, Peter suddenly stared at him. “Do you have kids?”

  Jordan did not talk about his personal life with clients. Their relationship existed in the confines of a court, and that was that. The few times in his career when this unwritten rule had been broken had nearly wrecked him personally and professionally. But he met Peter’s gaze and said, “Two. A six-month-old baby and a son at Yale.”

  “Then you get it,” Peter said. “Everyone wants their kid to grow up and go to Harvard or be a quarterback for the Patriots. No one ever looks at their baby and thinks, Oh, I hope my kid grows up and becomes a freak. I hope he gets to school every day and prays he won’t catch anyone’s attention. But you know what? Kids grow up like that every single day.”

  Jordan found himself at a loss for words. There was the finest line between unique and odd, between what made a child grow up to be as well adjusted as Thomas versus unstable, like Peter. Did every teenager have the capacity to fall on one side or the other of that tightrope, and could you identify a single moment that tipped the balance?

  He suddenly thought of Sam this morning, when Jordan was changing his diaper. The baby had grabbed hold of his own toes, fascinated to have located them, and immediately stuffed his foot into his mouth. Look at that, Selena had joked over his shoulder, like father like son. As Jordan had finished dressing Sam, he’d marveled at the mystery life must be for someone that young. Imagine a world that seemed so much bigger than you. Imagine waking up one morning and finding a piece of yourself you didn’t even know existed.

  When you don’t fit in, you become superhuman. You can feel everyone else’s eyes on you, stuck like Velcro. You can hear a whisper about you from a mile away. You can disappear, even when it looks like you’re still standing right there. You can scream, and nobody hears a sound.

  You become the mutant who fell into the vat of acid, the Joker who can’t remove his mask, the bionic man who’s missing all his limbs and none of his heart.

  You are the thing that used to be normal, but that was so long ago, you can’t even remember what it was like.

  Six Years Before

  Peter knew he was doomed, the first day of sixth grade, when his mother presented him with a gift over breakfast. “I know how much you wanted one,” she said, and she waited for him to open the wrapping paper.

  Inside was a three-ring binder with a graphic of Superman on the cover. And he had wanted one. Three years ago, when that was a cool thing to have.

  He had managed a smile. “Thanks, Mom,” he said, and she beamed at him, while he imagined all the ways carrying this totally stupid notebook would be used against him.

  Josie, as usual, had come to his rescue. She told the school custodian that her bike handlebars were all screwed up and that she needed some duct tape to jury-rig it until she got home. In reality, she didn’t bike