"Nineteen Minutes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Picoult Jodie)

PART TWO

Sterling isn’t the inner city. You don’t find crack dealers on Main Street, or households below the poverty level. The crime rate is virtually nonexistent.

That’s why people are still so shell-shocked.

They ask, How could this happen here?

Well. How could it not happen here?

All it takes is a troubled kid with access to guns.

You don’t have to go to an inner city to find someone who meets those criteria. You only have to open your eyes. The next likely candidate might be upstairs, or sprawled in front of your TV right now. But hey, you just go right on pretending it won’t happen here. Tell yourself that you’re immune because of where you live or who you are.

It’s easier that way, isn’t it?

Five Months After

You can tell a lot about people by their habits. For example, Jordan had come across potential jurors who religiously took their cups of coffee to their computers and read the entire New York Times online. There were others whose welcome screen on AOL didn’t even include news updates, because they found it too depressing. There were rural people who owned televisions but only got a grainy public broadcasting station because they couldn’t afford the money it would take to bring cable lines up their dirt road; and there were others who had bought elaborate satellite systems so that they could catch Japanese soaps or Sister Mary Margaret’s Prayer Hour at three in the morning. There were those who watched CNN, and those who watched FOX News.

It was the sixth hour of individual voir dire, the process by which the jury for Peter’s trial would be selected. This involved long days in the courtroom with Diana Leven and Judge Wagner, as the pool of jurors dribbled one by one into the witness seat to be asked a variety of questions by the defense and the prosecution. The goal was to find twelve folks, plus an alternate, who weren’t personally affected by the shooting; a jury that could commit to a long trial if necessary, instead of worrying about their home business or who was taking care of their toddlers. A group of people who had not been living and breathing the news about this trial for the past five months-or, as Jordan was affectionately starting to think of them: the blessed few that had been living under a rock.

It was August, and for the past week the temperatures had climbed to nearly a hundred degrees during the day. To make matters worse, the air-conditioning in the courtroom was on the fritz, and Judge Wagner smelled like mothballs and feet when he sweated.

Jordan had already taken off his jacket and loosened the top button of his shirt beneath his tie. Even Diana-who he secretly believed had to be some kind of Stepford robot-had twisted her hair up and jammed a pencil into the bun to secure it. “What are we up to?” Judge Wagner asked.

“Juror number six million seven hundred and thirty thousand,” Jordan murmured.

“Juror number eighty-eight,” the clerk announced.

It was a man this time, wearing khaki pants and a short-sleeved shirt. He had thinning hair, boat shoes, and a wedding band. Jordan noted all of this on his pad.

Diana stood up and introduced herself, then began asking her litany of questions. The answers would determine if a potential juror could be dismissed for cause-if they had a kid, for example, who’d been killed at Sterling High and couldn’t be impartial. If not, Diana could choose to use one of her peremptory strikes. Both she and Jordan had fifteen opportunities to dismiss a potential juror out of gut instinct. So far, Diana had used one of hers against a short, bald, quiet software developer. Jordan had dismissed a former Navy SEAL.

“What do you do for work, Mr. Alstrop?” Diana asked.

“I’m an architect.”

“You’re married?”

“For twenty years, this October.”

“Do you have any children?”

“Two, a fourteen-year-old boy and a nineteen-year-old girl.”

“Do they go to public high school?”

“Well, my son does. My daughter’s in college. Princeton,” he said proudly.

“Do you know anything about this case?”

Saying he did, Jordan knew, wouldn’t exclude him. It was what he believed or didn’t believe, in spite of what the media had said.

“Well, only what I read in the papers,” Alstrop said, and Jordan closed his eyes.

“Do you read a certain newspaper daily?”

“I used to get the Union Leader,” he said, “but the editorials drove me crazy. I try to read the main section of The New York Times now, at least.”

Jordan considered this. The Union Leader was a notoriously conservative paper, The New York Times a liberal one.

“What about television?” Diana asked. “Any shows you particularly like?”

You probably didn’t want a juror who watched ten hours of Court TV per day. You also didn’t want the guy who savored Pee-wee Herman marathons.

“60 Minutes,” Alstrop replied. “And The Simpsons.”

Now that, Jordan thought, was a normal guy. He got to his feet as Diana turned the questioning over to him. “What do you remember reading about this case?” he asked.

Alstrop shrugged. “There was a shooting at the high school and one of the students was charged.”

“Did you know any of the students?”

“No.”

“Do you know anyone who works at Sterling High?”

Alstrop shook his head. “No.”

“Have you talked to anyone involved in this case?”

“No.”

Jordan walked up to the witness stand. “There’s a rule in this state that says you can take a right on red, if you stop first at the red light. You familiar with it?”

“Sure,” Alstrop said.

“What if the judge told you that you can’t turn right on red-that you must stay stopped until the light goes green again, even if there’s a sign in front of you that specifically says RIGHT TURN ON RED. What would you do?”

Alstrop looked at Judge Wagner. “I guess I’d do what he said.”

Jordan smiled to himself. He didn’t give a damn about Alstrop’s driving habits-that setup and question was a way to weed out the people who couldn’t see past convention. There would be information in this trial that wasn’t necessarily intuitive, and he needed people on a jury who were open-minded enough to understand that rules weren’t always what you thought they were, who could listen to the new regulations and follow them accordingly.

When he finished his questioning, he and Diana walked toward the bench. “Is there any reason to dismiss this juror for cause?” Judge Wagner asked.

“No, Your Honor,” Diana said, and Jordan shook his head.

“So?”

Diana nodded. Jordan glanced at the man, still sitting on the witness stand. “This one works for me,” he said.

When Alex woke up, she pretended not to. Instead, she kept her eyes nearly closed so that she could stare at the man sprawled on the other side of her bed. This relationship-four months old now-was still a mystery to her, as much as the constellation of freckles on Patrick’s shoulders, the valley of his spine, the startling contrast of his black hair against a white sheet. It seemed that he had invaded her life by osmosis: she’d find his shirt mixed in with her laundry; she’d smell his shampoo on her pillowcase; she would pick up the phone, thinking to call him, and he’d already be on the line. Alex had been single for so long; she was practical, resolute, and set in her ways (oh, who was she kidding…those were all just euphemisms for what she really was: stubborn)-she would have guessed that this sudden attack on her privacy would be unnerving. Instead, though, she found herself feeling disoriented when Patrick wasn’t around, like the sailor who’s just landed after months at sea and who still feels the ocean rolling beneath him even when it isn’t there.

“I can feel you staring, you know,” Patrick murmured. A lazy smile heated his face, but his eyes were still shut.

Alex leaned over, slipping her hand under the covers. “What can you feel?”

“What can’t I?” Striking quick as lightning, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her underneath him. His eyes, still softened by sleep, were a crisp blue that made Alex think of glaciers and northern seas. He kissed her, and she vined around him.

Then suddenly her eyes snapped open. “Oh, shit,” she said.

“That wasn’t really what I was going for…”

“Do you know what time it is?”

They had drawn the shades in her bedroom because of a full moon last night. But by now, the sun was streaming through the thinnest crack at the bottom of the windowsill. Alex could hear Josie banging pots and pans downstairs in the kitchen.

Patrick reached over Alex for the wristwatch he’d left on her nightstand. “Oh, shit,” he repeated, and he threw back the covers. “I’m an hour late for work already.”

He grabbed his boxers as Alex jumped out of bed and reached for her robe. “What about Josie?”

It wasn’t that they had been hiding their relationship from Josie-Patrick often dropped by after work or for dinner or to hang out in the evenings. A few times, Alex had tried to talk to Josie about him, to see what she thought of the whole miracle of her mother dating again, but Josie did whatever it took to avoid having that conversation. Alex wasn’t sure herself where this was all going, but she did know that she and Josie had been a unit for so long that adding Patrick to the mix meant Josie became the loner-and right now, Alex was determined to keep that from happening. She was making up for lost time, really, thinking of Josie before she thought of anything else. To that end, if Patrick spent the night, she made sure he left before Josie could wake up to find him there.

Except today, when it was a lazy summer Thursday and nearly ten o’clock.

“Maybe this is a good time to tell her,” Patrick suggested.

“Tell her what?”

“That we’re…” He looked at her.

Alex stared at him. She couldn’t finish his sentence; she didn’t really know the answer herself. She never expected that this was the way she and Patrick would have this conversation. Was she with Patrick because he was good at that-rescuing the underdog who needed it? When this trial was over, would he move on? Would she?

“We’re together,” Patrick said decisively.

Alex turned her back to him and yanked shut the tie of her robe. That wasn’t, to paraphrase Patrick earlier, what she had been going for. But then again, how would he know that? If he asked her right now what she wanted out of this relationship…well, she knew: she wanted love. She wanted to have someone to come home to. She wanted to dream about a vacation they’d take when they were sixty and know he’d be there the day she stepped onto the plane. But she’d never admit any of this to him. What if she did, and he just looked at her blankly? What if it was too soon to think about things like this?

If he asked her right now, she wouldn’t answer, because answering was the surest way to get your heart handed back to you.

Alex rummaged underneath the bed, searching for her slippers. Instead, she located Patrick’s belt and tossed it to him. Maybe the reason she hadn’t openly told Josie she was sleeping with Patrick had nothing to do with protecting Josie, and everything to do with protecting herself.

Patrick threaded the belt through his jeans. “It doesn’t have to be a state secret,” he said. “You are allowed to…you know.”

Alex glanced at him. “Have sex?”

“I was trying to come up with something a little less blunt,” Patrick admitted.

“I’m also allowed to keep things private,” Alex pointed out.

“Guess I ought to get back the deposit on the billboard, then.”

“That might be a good idea.”

“I suppose I could just get you jewelry instead.”

Alex looked down at the carpet so that Patrick couldn’t see her trying to pick apart that sentence, find the commitment strung between the words.

God, was it always this frustrating when you weren’t the one running the show?

“Mom,” Josie yelled up the stairs, “I’ve got pancakes ready, if you want some.”

“Look,” Patrick sighed. “We can still keep Josie from finding out. All you have to do is distract her while I sneak out.”

She nodded. “I’ll try to keep her in the kitchen. You…” She glanced at Patrick. “Just hurry.” As Alex started out of the room, Patrick grabbed her hand and yanked.

“Hey,” he said. “Good-bye.” He leaned down and kissed her.

“Mom, they’re getting cold!”

“See you later,” Alex said, pushing away.

She hurried downstairs and found Josie eating a plate of blueberry pancakes. “Those smell so good…I can’t believe I slept this late,” Alex began, and then she realized that there were three place settings at the kitchen table.

Josie folded her arms. “So how does he take his coffee?”

Alex sank into a chair across from her. “You weren’t supposed to find out.”

“A. I am a big girl. B. Then the brilliant detective shouldn’t have left his car in the driveway.”

Alex picked at a thread on the place mat. “No milk, two sugars.”

“Well,” Josie said. “Guess I’ll know for next time.”

“How do you feel about that?” Alex asked quietly.

“Getting him coffee?”

“No. The next time part.”

Josie poked at a fat blueberry on the top of her pancake. “It’s not really something I get to choose, is it?”

“Yes,” Alex said. “Because if you’re not all right with this, Josie, then I’ll stop seeing him.”

“You like him?” Josie asked, staring down at her plate.

“Yeah.”

“And he likes you?”

“I think so.”

Josie lifted her gaze. “Then you shouldn’t worry about what anyone else thinks.”

“I worry about what you think,” Alex said. “I don’t want you to feel like you’re any less important to me because of him.”

“Just be responsible,” Josie answered, with a slow smile. “Every time you have sex, you can get pregnant or you can not get pregnant. That’s fifty-fifty.”

Alex raised her brows. “Wow. I didn’t even think you were listening when I gave that speech.”

Josie pressed her finger against a spot of maple syrup that had fallen onto the table, her eyes trained on the wood. “So, do you…like…love him?”

The words seemed bruised, tender. “No,” Alex said quickly, because if she could convince Josie, then she surely could convince herself that what she felt for Patrick had everything to do with passion and nothing to do with…well…that. “It’s only been a few months.”

“I don’t think there’s a grace period,” Josie said.

Alex decided that the best road to take through this minefield was the one that would keep both Josie and herself from being hurt: pretend this was nothing, a fling, a fancy. “I wouldn’t know what being in love felt like if it hit me in the face,” she said lightly.

“It’s not like on TV, like everything’s perfect all of a sudden.” Josie’s voice shrank until it was barely a thought. “It’s more like, once it happens, you spend all your time realizing how much can go wrong.”

Alex looked up at her, frozen. “Oh, Josie.”

“Anyway.”

“I didn’t mean to make you-”

“Let’s just drop it, okay?” Josie forced a smile. “He’s not bad-looking, you know, for someone that old.”

“He’s a year younger than I am,” Alex pointed out.

“My mother, the cradle robber.” Josie picked up the plate of pancakes and passed it. “These are getting cold.”

Alex took the plate. “Thank you,” she said, but she held Josie’s gaze just long enough for her daughter to realize what Alex was really grateful for.

Just then Patrick came creeping down the stairs. At the landing, he turned to give Alex a thumbs-up sign. “Patrick,” she called out. “Josie’s made us some pancakes.”

Selena knew the party line-you were supposed to say that there was no difference between boys and girls-but she also knew if you asked any mom or nursery school teacher, they’d tell you differently, off the record. This morning, she sat on a park bench watching Sam negotiate a sandbox with a group of fellow toddlers. Two little girls were pretending to bake pizzas made out of sand and pebbles. The boy beside Sam was trying to demolish a dump truck by smashing it repeatedly into the sandbox’s wooden frame. No difference, Selena thought. Yeah, right.

She watched with interest as Sam turned from the boy beside him and started to copy the girls, sifting sand into a bucket to make a cake.

Selena grinned, hoping that this was some small clue that her son would grow up to act against stereotype and do whatever he was most comfortable doing. But did it work that way? Could you look at a child and see who he’d become? Sometimes when she studied Sam, she could glimpse the adult he’d be one day-it was there in his eyes, the shell of the man he would grow to inhabit. But it was more than physical attributes you could sometimes puzzle out. Would these little girls become stay-at-home Betty Crocker moms, or business entrepreneurs like Mrs. Fields? Would the little boy’s destructive behavior bloom into drug addiction or alcoholism? Had Peter Houghton shoved playmates or stomped on crickets or done something else as a child that might have predicted his future as a killer?

The boy in the sandbox put down the truck and moved on to digging, seemingly to China. Sam abandoned his baking to reach for the plastic vehicle, and then he lost his balance and fell down, smacking his knee on the wooden frame.

Selena was out of her seat in a shot, ready to scoop up her son before he started to bawl. But Sam glanced around at the other kids, as if realizing he had an audience. And although his little face furrowed and reddened, a raisin of pain, he didn’t cry.

It was easier for girls. They could say This hurts, or I don’t like how this feels, and have the complaint be socially acceptable. Boys, though, didn’t speak that language. They didn’t learn it as children and they didn’t manage to pick it up as adults, either. Selena remembered last summer, when Jordan had gone fishing with an old friend whose wife had just filed for divorce. What did you talk about? she asked when Jordan came home.

Nothing, Jordan had said. We were fishing.

This had made no sense to Selena; they’d been gone for six hours. How could you sit beside someone in a small boat for that long and not have a heart-to-heart about how he was doing; if he was holding up in the wake of this crisis; if he worried about the rest of his life.

She looked at Sam, who now had the dump truck in his hand and was rolling it across his former pizza. Change could come that quickly, Selena knew. She thought of how Sam would wrap his tiny arms around her and kiss her; how he’d come running to her if she held out her arms. But sooner or later he’d realize that his friends didn’t hold their mothers’ hands when they crossed the street; that they didn’t bake pizzas and cakes in the sandbox, instead they built cities and dug caverns. One day-in middle school, or even earlier-Sam would start to hole himself up in his room. He would shy away from her touch. He would grunt his responses, act tough, be a man.

Maybe it was our own damn fault that men turned out the way they did, Selena thought. Maybe empathy, like any unused muscle, simply atrophied.

Josie told her mother that she had gotten a summer job volunteering with the school system to tutor middle and elementary school kids in math. She talked about Angie, whose parents had split up during the school year and who had failed algebra as an indirect consequence. She described Joseph, a leukemia patient who’d missed school for treatment and had the hardest time understanding fractions. Every day at dinner, her mother would ask her about work, and Josie would have a story. The problem was, it was just that-a fiction. Joseph and Angie didn’t exist; and for that matter, neither did Josie’s tutoring job.

This morning, like every morning, Josie left the house. She got on the Advance Transit bus and said hello to Rita, the driver who’d been on this route all summer. When the other passengers got off at the stop that was closest to the school, Josie stayed in her seat. She didn’t get up, in fact, until the very last stop-the one that was a mile south of the Whispering Pines Cemetery.

She liked it there. At the cemetery, she didn’t run into anyone she didn’t feel like talking to. She didn’t have to speak at all if she wasn’t in the mood. Josie walked up the winding trail, which was so familiar to her by now that she could tell, with her eyes closed, when the pavement was going to make a dip and when it would veer left. She knew that the violently blue hydrangea bush was halfway to Matt’s grave; that you could smell honeysuckle when you were only steps away from it.

By now, there was a headstone, a pristine block of white marble with Matt’s name carefully carved. Grass had started to grow. Josie sat down on the raised hummock of dirt, which was warm, as if the sun had been seeping into the earth and holding that heat in wait for her. She reached into her backpack and took out a bottle of water, a peanut butter sandwich, a bag of saltines.

“Can you believe school’s starting in a week?” she said to Matt, because sometimes she did that. It wasn’t like she expected him to answer; it just felt better talking to him after so many months of not talking. “They’re not opening the real school yet, though. They said maybe by Thanksgiving, when the construction’s done.”

What they were actually doing to the school was a mystery-Josie had driven by enough to know that the gymnasium and library had been torn down, as had the cafeteria. She wondered if the administration was na#239;ve enough to think that if they got rid of the scene of the crime, the students could be fooled into thinking it had never happened.

She’d read somewhere that ghosts didn’t just hang around physical locations-that sometimes, a person could be haunted. Josie hadn’t really considered herself big on the paranormal, but this she believed. There were some memories, she knew, you could run from forever and never shake.

Josie lay down, her hair spread over the newborn grass. “Do you like having me here?” she whispered. “Or would you tell me to get lost, if you were the one who could talk?”

She didn’t want to hear the answer. She didn’t even really want to think about it. So she opened her eyes as wide as she could and stared into the sky, until the brilliant blue burned the backs of her eyes.

Lacy stood in the men’s department at Filene’s, touching her hands to the bristled tweeds and hallowed blue and puckered seersucker fabrics of the sports jackets. She’d driven two hours to Boston so that she would have the best choices to outfit Peter for his trial. Brooks Brothers, Hugo Boss, Calvin Klein, Ermenegildo Zegna. They had been made in Italy, France, Britain, California. She peeked at a price tag, sucked in her breath, and then realized she did not care. This would most likely be the last time she would ever buy clothes for her son.

Lacy moved systematically through the department. She picked up boxer shorts made of the finest Egyptian cotton, a packet of Ralph Lauren white tees, cashmere socks. She found khaki trousers-30 x 30. She plucked a button-down oxford shirt off a rack, because Peter had always hated having his collar peek out from a crewneck sweater. She chose a blue blazer, as Jordan had instructed. We want him dressed as if you’re sending him to Phillips Exeter, he had said.

She remembered how, when Peter was around eleven, he’d developed an aversion to buttons. You’d think it would be easy to get around something like that, but it eliminated most pants. Lacy could remember driving to the ends of the earth to find elastic-waist flannel plaid pajama pants that might double for daily wear. She remembered seeing kids wearing pajama bottoms to school as recently as last year and wondering if Peter had started the trend, or simply been slightly out of sync.

Even after Lacy had gathered what she needed, she continued to walk through the men’s department. She touched a rainbow of silk handkerchiefs that melted over her fingers, choosing one that was the color of Peter’s eyes. She rifled through leather belts-black, brown, stippled, alligator-and neckties printed with dots, with fleurs-de-lis, with stripes. She picked up a bathrobe that was so soft it nearly brought her to tears, shearling slippers, a cherry-red bathing suit. She shopped until the weight in her arms was as heavy as a child.

“Oh, let me help you with those,” a saleswoman said, taking some of the items from her arms and carrying them to the counter. She began to fold them, one by one. “I know how it feels,” she said, smiling sympathetically. “When my son went away, I thought I was going to die.”

Lacy stared at her. Was it possible that she wasn’t the only woman who had gone through something as awful as this? Once you had, like this salesperson, would you be able to pick others out of a crowd, as if there were a secret society of those mothers whose children cut them to the quick?

“You think it’s forever,” the woman said, “but believe me, once they come home for Christmas break or summer vacation and start eating you out of house and home again, you’ll be wishing college was year-round.”

Lacy’s face froze. “Right,” she said. “College.”

“I’ve got a girl at the University of New Hampshire, and my son’s at Rochester,” the saleswoman said.

“Harvard. That’s where my son’s going.”

They had talked about it once-Peter liked the computer science department at Stanford better, and Lacy had joked around, saying she’d throw away any brochures from colleges west of the Mississippi, because they were so far away.

The state prison was sixty miles south, in Concord.

“Harvard,” the saleswoman said. “He must be a smart one.”

“He is,” Lacy said, and she continued to tell this woman about Peter’s fictional transition to college, until the lie did not taste like licorice on her tongue; until she could nearly believe it herself.

Just after three o’clock, Josie rolled over onto her belly, spread her arms wide, and pressed her face into the grass. It looked like she was trying to hold on to the ground, which, she supposed, wasn’t all that far from the truth. She breathed in deeply-usually, she smelled nothing but weeds and soil, but every now and then when it had just rained, she got the barest scent of ice and Pert shampoo, as if Matt were still himself just under that surface.

She gathered the wrapper from her sandwich and her empty water bottle and put them into her backpack, then headed down the winding path to the cemetery gates. There was a car blocking the entrance-only twice this summer had Josie been present when a funeral procession came, and it had made her a little sick to her stomach. She started to walk faster, in the hope that she would be long gone and sitting on her Advance Transit bus before the service began-and then she realized that the car blocking the gates was not a hearse, not even black for that matter. It was the same car that had been parked in their driveway this morning, and Patrick was leaning against it with his arms crossed.

“What are you doing here?” Josie asked.

“I could ask you the same thing.”

She shrugged. “It’s a free country.”

Josie didn’t really have anything against Patrick Ducharme himself. He just made her nervous, on so many counts. She couldn’t look at him without thinking of That Day. But now she had to, because he also was her mother’s lover (how weird was it to say that?) and in a way, that was even more upsetting. Her mother was on cloud nine, falling in love, while Josie had to sneak off to a graveyard to visit her boyfriend.

Patrick pushed himself off the car and took a step toward her. “Your mother thinks you’re teaching long division right now.”

“Did she tell you to stalk me?” Josie said.

“I prefer surveillance,” Patrick corrected.

Josie snorted. She didn’t want to sound like such a snot, but she couldn’t help it. Sarcasm was like a force field; once she turned it off, he might be able to see that she was this close to falling to pieces.

“Your mother doesn’t know I’m here,” Patrick said. “I wanted to talk to you.”

“I’m going to miss my bus.”

“Then I’ll drive you wherever you want to go,” he said, exasperated. “You know, when I’m doing my job, I spend a lot of time wishing I could turn back the clock-get to the rape victim before it happened, stake out the house before the thief comes by. I know what it’s like to feel like nothing you do or say is ever going to make things better. And I know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night replaying one moment over and over so vividly that you might as well be living it again. In fact, I bet you and I replay the same moment.”

Josie swallowed. In all these months, out of all the well-meaning conversations she’d had with doctors and psychiatrists and even other kids from the school, no one had captured, so succinctly, what it felt like to be her. But she couldn’t let Patrick know that-couldn’t admit to her weakness, even though she had the feeling that he could spot it all the same. “Don’t pretend we have anything in common,” Josie said.

“But we do,” Patrick replied. “Your mother.” He looked Josie in the eye. “I like her. A lot. And I’d like to know that you’re okay with that.”

Josie felt her throat closing. She tried to remember Matt saying that he liked her; she wondered if anyone would ever say it again. “My mother’s a big girl. She can make her own decisions about who she f-”

“Don’t,” Patrick interrupted.

“Don’t what.”

“Don’t say something you’re going to wish you hadn’t.”

Josie stepped back, her eyes glittering. “If you think that buddying up to me is going to win her over, you’re wrong. You’re better off with flowers and chocolate. She couldn’t care less about me.”

“That’s not true.”

“You haven’t exactly been around long enough to know, have you?”

“Josie,” Patrick said, “she’s crazy about you.”

Josie felt herself choke on the truth, even harder to speak than it was to swallow. “But not as crazy as she is about you. She’s happy. She’s happy and I…I know I should be happy for her…”

“But you’re here,” Patrick said, gesturing at the cemetery. “And you’re alone.”

Josie nodded and burst into tears. She turned away, embarrassed, and then felt Patrick fold his arms around her. He didn’t say anything, and for that one moment, she even liked him-any word at all, even a well-meaning one, would have taken up the space where her hurt needed to be. He just let her cry until finally it all stopped, and Josie rested for a moment against his shoulder, wondering if this was only the eye of the storm or its endpoint.

“I’m a bitch,” she whispered. “I’m jealous.”

“I think she’d understand.”

Josie drew away from him and wiped her eyes. “Are you going to tell her I come here?”

“No.”

She glanced up at him, surprised. She would have thought that he’d take her mother’s side.

“You’re wrong, you know,” Patrick said.

“About what?”

“Being alone.”

Josie glanced up the hill. You couldn’t see Matt’s grave from the gates, but it was still there-just like everything else about That Day. “Ghosts don’t count.”

Patrick smiled. “Mothers do.”

What Lewis hated the most was the sound of the metal doors slamming. It hardly mattered that, thirty minutes from now, he’d be able to leave the jail. What was important was that the inmates couldn’t. And that one of those inmates was the same boy he’d taught to ride a bike without training wheels; the same boy whose nursery school paperweight was still sitting on Lewis’s desk; the same boy he’d watched take his very first breath.

He knew it would be a shock for Peter to see him-how many months had he told himself that this would be the week he got up the courage to see his son in jail, only to find another errand to run or paper to study? But, as a correctional officer opened up a door and led Peter into the visitation room, Lewis realized that he’d underestimated what a shock it would be for him to see Peter.

He was bigger. Maybe not taller, but broader-his shoulders filled out his shirt; his arms had thickened with muscle. His skin was translucent, almost blue under this unnatural light. His hands didn’t stop moving-they were twitching at his sides and then, when he sat down, on the sides of the chair.

“Well,” Peter said. “What do you know.”

Lewis had rehearsed six or seven speeches, explanations of why he had not been able to bring himself to see his son, but when he saw Peter sitting there, only two words rose to his lips. “I’m sorry.”

Peter’s mouth tightened. “For what? Blowing me off for six months?”

“I was thinking,” Lewis admitted, “more like eighteen years.”

Peter sat back in his chair, staring at Lewis. He forced himself to return the stare. Could Peter grant him absolution, even if Lewis still wasn’t entirely sure he could return the favor?

Rubbing a hand down his face, Peter shook his head. Then he started to smile. Lewis felt his bones loosen, his muscles relax. Until this moment, he hadn’t really known what to expect from Peter. He could reason with himself all he wanted and assert that an apology would always be accepted; he could remind himself that he was the parent here, the one in charge-but all of that was extremely hard to remember when you were sitting in a visiting room at a jail, with a woman on your left who was trying to play footsie with her lover across that forbidden red line, and a man on your right who was cursing a blue streak.

The smile on Peter’s face hardened, twisted into a sneer. “Fuck you,” he spat out. “Fuck you for coming here. You don’t give a shit about me. You don’t want to tell me you’re sorry. You just want to hear yourself say it. You’re here for yourself, not me.”

Lewis’s head felt as if it were filled with stones. He bent forward, the stalk of his neck unable to bear the weight anymore, until he could rest his forehead in his hands. “I can’t do anything, Peter,” he whispered. “I can’t work, I can’t eat. I can’t sleep.” Then he lifted his face. “The new students, they’re coming onto the college campus right now. I look at them, out my window-they’re always pointing at the buildings or down Main Street or listening to the tour guides who take them across the courtyard-and I think of how much I was looking forward to doing those same things with you.”

He had written a paper years ago, after Joey was born, about the exponential increases of happiness-the moments that the quotient changed by leaps and bounds after a triggering incident. What he’d concluded was that the outcome was variable, based not on the event that caused the happiness, but rather the state you were in when it happened. For example, the birth of your child was one thing when you were happily married and planning a family; it was something entirely different when you were sixteen and had gotten a girl knocked up. Cold weather was perfect if you were on a skiing vacation, but disappointing if you happened to be enjoying a week at the beach. A man who was once rich might be deliriously happy with a dollar in the middle of a depression; a gourmet chef would eat worms if stranded on a desert island. A father who’d hoped for a son that was educated and successful and independent might, under different circumstances, simply be happy to have him alive and safe, so that he could tell the boy he’d never stopped loving him.

“But you know what they say about college,” Lewis said, sitting up a little straighter. “It’s overrated.”

His words surprised Peter. “All those parents forking over forty thousand a year,” Peter said, smiling faintly. “And here I am, getting the most out of your tax dollar.”

“What more could an economist ask for?” Lewis joked, although this wasn’t funny; never would be funny. And he realized that this was a sort of happiness, too: you would say anything-do anything-to keep your son smiling like that, as if there was something to still smile about, even if every word felt like you were swallowing glass.

Patrick’s feet were crossed on the prosecutor’s desk, as Diana Leven scanned the reports that had come from ballistics days after the shooting, in preparation for his testimony at the trial. “There were two shotguns, which were never used,” Patrick explained, “and two matching handguns-Glock 17s-that were registered to a neighbor across the street. A retired cop.”

Diana glanced up over the papers. “Lovely.”

“Yeah. Well, you know cops. What’s the point of putting the gun in a locked cabinet when you have to get at it quickly? Anyway, Gun A is the one that was fired around most of the school-the striations on the bullets we recovered match it. Gun B was fired-ballistics told us that-but there hasn’t been a bullet recovered that matches its barrel. That gun was found jammed, on the floor of the locker room. Houghton was still holding Gun A when he was apprehended.”

Diana leaned back in her chair, her fingers steepled in front of her chest. “McAfee’s going to ask you why Houghton would have pulled out Gun B at all in the locker room, if Gun A had worked so splendidly up till that point.”

Patrick shrugged. “He might have used it to shoot Royston in the belly, and then when it jammed, switched back to Gun A. Or then again, it might be even simpler than that. Since the bullet from Gun B wasn’t recovered, it’s possible it was the very first shot fired. The slug could be lodged in the fiberglass insulation in the cafeteria, for all we know. It jammed, the kid switched to Gun A and stuffed the jammed gun in his pocket…and then at the end of his killing spree, he either discarded it or dropped it by accident.”

“Or. I hate that word. It’s two letters long and stuffed to the gills with reasonable doubt-”

She broke off as there was a knock at the door, and her secretary stuck her head inside. “Your two o’clock’s here.”

Diana turned to him. “I’m preparing Drew Girard for testifying. Why don’t you stay for this one?”

Patrick moved to a chair on the side of the room to give Drew the spot across from the prosecutor. The boy entered with a soft knock. “Ms. Leven?”

Diana came around her desk. “Drew. Thanks for coming in.” She gestured at Patrick. “You remember Detective Ducharme?”

Drew nodded at him. Patrick surveyed the boy’s pressed pants, his collared shirt, his manners on display. This was not the cocky, big-man-on-campus hockey star, as he had been painted by students during Patrick’s investigations, but then again, Drew had watched his best friend get killed; he’d been shot himself in the shoulder. Whatever world he had lorded over was gone now.

“Drew,” Diana said, “we brought you in here because you got a subpoena, and that means you’re going to be testifying sometime next week. We’ll let you know when, for sure, as we get closer…but for now, I wanted to make sure you weren’t nervous about going to court. Today, we’ll go over some of the things you’ll be asked, and how the procedure works. If you have any questions, we can cover those as well. Okay?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Patrick leaned forward. “How’s the shoulder?”

Drew swiveled to face him, unconsciously flexing that body part. “I still have to do physical therapy and stuff, but it’s a lot better. Except…” His voice trailed off.

“Except what?” Diana asked.

“I’ll miss hockey season this whole year.”

Diana met Patrick’s eye; this was sympathy for a witness. “Do you think you’ll be able to play again, eventually?”

Drew flushed. “The doctors say no, but I think they’re wrong.” He hesitated. “I’m a senior this year, and I was sort of counting on an athletic scholarship for college.”

There was an uncomfortable silence, as no one acknowledged either Drew’s courage or the truth. “So, Drew,” Diana said. “When we get into court, I’ll start by asking your name, where you live, if you were in school that day.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s try it out a bit, all right? When you got to school that morning, what was your first class?”

Drew sat up a little straighter. “American History.”

“And second period?”

“English.”

“Where did you go after English class?”

“I had third period free, and most people with free periods hang out in the caf.”

“Is that where you went?”

“Yeah.”

“Was anyone with you?” Diana continued.

“I went down by myself, but when I got there, I hung out with a bunch of people.” He looked at Patrick. “Friends.”

“How long were you in the cafeteria?”

“I don’t know, a half hour, maybe?”

Diana nodded. “What happened then?”

Drew looked down at his pants and drew his thumb along the crease. Patrick noticed that his hand was shaking. “We were all just, you know, talking…and then I heard this really big boom.”

“Could you tell where the sound was coming from?”

“No. I didn’t know what it was.”

“Did you see anything?”

“No.”

“So,” Diana asked, “what did you do when you heard it?”

“I made a joke,” Drew said. “I said it was probably the school lunch, igniting or something. Oh, finally, that radioactive mac and cheese.”

“Did you stay in the cafeteria after the boom?”

“Yeah.”

“And then?”

Drew looked down at his hands. “There was this sound like firecrackers. Before anyone could figure out what it was, Peter came into the cafeteria. He was carrying a knapsack and holding a gun, and he started shooting.”

Diana held up her hand. “I’m going to stop you there for a moment, Drew…. When you’re on the stand, and you say that, I’ll ask you to look at the defendant and identify him for the record. Got it?”

“Yes.”

Patrick realized that he was not just seeing the shooting the way he’d have seen any other crime. He wasn’t even visualizing it playing out as a prequel to the chilling cafeteria videotape he’d watched. He was imagining Josie-one of Drew’s friends-sitting at a long table, hearing those firecrackers, not imagining in the least what came next.

“How long have you known Peter?” Diana asked.

“We both grew up in Sterling. We’ve been in the same school, like, forever.”

“Were you friends?” Drew shook his head. “Enemies?”

“No,” he said. “Not really enemies.”

“Ever have any problems with him?”

Drew glanced up. “No.”

“Did you ever bully him?”

“No, ma’am,” he said.

Patrick felt his hands curl into fists. He knew, from interviewing hundreds of kids, that Drew Girard had stuffed Peter Houghton into lockers; had tripped him while he was walking down the stairs; had thrown spitballs into his hair. None of that condoned what Peter had done…but still. There was a kid rotting in jail; there were ten people decomposing in graves; there were dozens in rehab and corrective surgery; there were hundreds-like Josie-who still could not get through the day without bursting into tears; there were parents-like Alex-who trusted Diana to get justice done on their behalf. And this little asshole was lying through his teeth.

Diana looked up from her notes and stared at Drew. “So if you get asked under oath whether you’ve ever picked on Peter, what’s your answer going to be?”

Drew looked up at her, the bravado fading just enough for Patrick to realize he was scared to death that they knew something more than they were admitting to him. Diana glanced at Patrick and threw down her pen. That was all the invitation he needed-he was out of his chair in an instant, his hand grabbing Drew Girard’s throat. “Listen, you little fuck,” Patrick said, “don’t screw this up. We know what you did to Peter Houghton. We know you were sitting front and center. There are ten dead victims, and eighteen more who are never going to have the lives they thought they would, and there are so many families in this community that are never going to stop grieving that I can’t even count them. I don’t know what your game plan is here-if you want to play the choirboy to protect your reputation, or if you’re just scared to tell the truth-but believe me, if you get on that witness stand and you lie about your actions in the past, I will make sure you wind up in jail for obstruction of justice.”

He let go of Drew and turned away, staring out the window in Diana’s office. He had no authority to arrest Drew for anything-even if the kid did perjure himself-much less send him to jail, but Drew would never know that. And maybe it was enough to scare him into behaving. Taking a deep breath, Patrick bent down and picked up the pen Diana had dropped and handed it to her.

“Let me ask you again, Drew,” she said smoothly. “Did you ever bully Peter Houghton?”

Drew glanced at Patrick and swallowed. Then he opened his mouth and started to speak.

“It’s barbecued lasagna,” Alex announced after Patrick and Josie had each taken their first bite. “What do you think?”

“I didn’t know you could barbecue lasagna,” Josie said slowly. She began to peel the noodles back from the cheese, as if she were scalping it.

“How’s that work, exactly?” Patrick asked, reaching for the pitcher of water to refill his glass.

“It was regular lasagna. But some of the insides spilled out into the oven, and there was all this smoke…and I was going to start over, but then I sort of realized that I was only adding an extra, charcoal sort of flavor into the mix.” She beamed. “Ingenious, right? I mean, I looked in all the cookbooks, Josie, and it’s never been done before, as far as I can tell.”

“Go figure,” Patrick said, and he coughed into his napkin.

“I actually like cooking,” Alex said. “I like taking a recipe and, you know, going off on a tangent to see what happens.”

“Recipes are kind of like laws,” Patrick replied. “You might want to try to stick to them, before you commit a felony…”

“I’m not hungry,” Josie said suddenly. She pushed her plate away, stood up, and ran upstairs.

“The trial starts tomorrow,” Alex said, by way of explanation. She went after Josie, not even excusing herself first, because she knew Patrick would understand. Josie had slammed the door shut and turned up her music; it would do no good to knock. Alex turned the knob and stepped inside, reaching to the stereo to turn down the volume.

Josie lay on her bed facedown, the pillow over her head. When Alex sat down on the mattress beside her, she didn’t move. “You want to talk about it?” Alex asked.

“No,” Josie said, her voice muffled.

Alex reached out and yanked the pillow off her head. “Try.”

“It’s just-God, Mom-what’s wrong with me? It’s like the world’s started spinning again for everyone else, but I can’t even get back on the carousel. Even you two-you both must be thinking like crazy about the trial, too-but here you are, laughing and smiling like you can put what happened and what’s going to happen out of your head, when I can’t not think about it every waking second.” Josie looked up at Alex, her eyes filling with tears. “Everyone’s moved on. Everyone but me.”

Alex put her hand on Josie’s arm and rubbed it. She could remember delighting in the sheer physical proof of Josie after she was born-that somehow, out of nothing, she’d created this tiny, warm, squirming, flawless creature. She’d spend hours on her bed with Josie beside her, touching her baby’s skin, her seed-pearl toes, the pulse of her fontanel. “Once,” Alex said, “when I was working as a public defender, a guy in the office threw a Fourth of July party for all the lawyers and their families. I took you, even though you were only about three years old. There were fireworks, and I looked away for a second to see them, and when I turned back you were gone. I started to scream, and someone noticed you-lying at the bottom of the pool.”

Josie sat up, riveted by a story she had never heard before.

“I dove in and dragged you out and gave you mouth-to-mouth, and you spit up. I couldn’t even speak, I was so scared. But you came back fighting and furious at me. You told me you’d been looking for mermaids, and I interrupted you.”

Tucking her knees up under her chin, Josie smiled a little. “Really?”

Alex nodded. “I said that next time, you had to take me with you.”

“Was there a next time?”

“Well, you tell me,” Alex said, and she hesitated. “You don’t need water to feel like you’re drowning, do you?”

When Josie shook her head, the tears spilled over. She shifted, fitting herself into her mother’s arms.

This, Patrick knew, was his downfall. For the second time in his life, he was growing so close to a woman and her child that he forgot he might not really be part of their family. He looked around the table at the detritus of Alex’s awful dinner and started clearing the untouched plates.

The barbecued lasagna had congealed in its serving dish, a blackened brick. He piled the dishes in the sink and began to run warm water, then picked up a sponge and started to scrub.

“Oh my gosh,” Alex said behind him. “You really are the perfect man.”

Patrick turned, his hands still soapy. “Far from it.” He reached for a dish towel. “Is Josie-”

“She’s fine. She’ll be fine. Or at least we’re both going to keep saying that until it’s true.”

“I’m sorry, Alex.”

“Who isn’t?” She straddled a kitchen chair and rested her cheek on its spine. “I’m going to the trial tomorrow.”

“I wouldn’t have expected any less.”

“Do you really think McAfee can get him acquitted?”

Patrick folded the dish towel beside the sink and walked toward Alex. He knelt in front of her chair. “Alex,” he said, “that kid walked into the school like he was executing a battle plan. He started in the parking lot and set off a bomb to cause a distraction. He went around to the front of the school and took out a kid on the steps. He went into the cafeteria, shot at a bunch of kids, murdered some of them-and then he sat down and had a bowl of fucking cereal before he continued his killing spree. I don’t see how, presented with that kind of evidence, a jury could dismiss the charges.”

Alex stared at him. “Tell me something…why was Josie lucky?”

“Because she’s alive.”

“No, I mean, why is she alive? She was in the cafeteria and the locker room. She saw people die all around her. Why didn’t Peter shoot her?”

“I don’t know. Things happen that I don’t understand all the time. Some of them-well, they’re like the shooting. And some of them…” He covered Alex’s hand with his own where it gripped the chair rail. “Some of them aren’t.”

Alex looked up at him, and Patrick was reminded again of how finding her-being with her-was like that first crocus you saw in the snow. Just when you assumed winter would last forever, this unexpected beauty could take you by surprise-and if you did not take your eyes off it, if you kept your focus, the rest of the snow would somehow melt.

“If I ask you something, will you be honest with me?” Alex asked.

Patrick nodded.

“My lasagna wasn’t very good, was it?”

He smiled at her through the slats of the chair. “Don’t give up your day job,” he said.

In the middle of the night, when Josie could still not get to sleep, she slipped outside and lay down on the front lawn. She stared up at the sky, which clung so low by this time of the night that she could feel stars pricking her face. Out here, without her bedroom closing in around her, it was almost possible to believe that whatever problems she had were tiny, in the grand scheme of the universe.

Tomorrow, Peter Houghton was going to be tried for ten murders. Even the thought of it-of that last murder-made Josie sick to her stomach. She could not go watch the trial, as much as she wanted to, because she was on a stupid witness list. Instead, she was sequestered, which was a fancy word for being kept clueless.

Josie took a deep breath and thought about a social studies class she’d taken in middle school where they’d learned that someone-Eskimos, maybe?-believed stars were holes in the sky where people who’d died could peek through at you. It was supposed to be comforting, but Josie had always found it a little creepy, as if it meant she was being spied on.

It also made her think of a really dumb joke about a guy walking past a mental institution with a high fence, who hears the patients chanting Ten! Ten! Ten! and goes to peek through a hole in the fence to see what’s going on…only to get poked in the eye with a stick and hear the patients chant Eleven! Eleven! Eleven!

Matt had told her that joke.

Maybe she’d even laughed.

Here’s what the Eskimos don’t tell you: Those people on the other side, they have to go out of their way to watch you. But you can see them any old time. All you have to do is close your eyes.

On the morning of her son’s murder trial, Lacy picked a black skirt out of her closet, along with a black blouse and black stockings. She dressed like she was headed to a funeral, but maybe that wasn’t so far off the mark. She ripped three pairs of hose because her hands were shaking, and finally decided to go without. By the end of the day her shoes would rub blisters on her feet, and Lacy thought maybe this was a good thing; maybe she could concentrate instead on a pain that made perfect sense.

She did not know where Lewis was; if he was even going to the trial today. They hadn’t really spoken since the day she had tracked him to the graveyard, and he had taken to sleeping in Joey’s bedroom. Neither one of them went into Peter’s.

But this morning, she forced herself to turn left instead of right at the landing, and she opened the door of Peter’s bedroom. After the police had come, she had put it back in some semblance of order, telling herself that she didn’t want Peter to come home to a place that had been ransacked. There were still gaping holes-the desk looked naked without its computer, the bookshelves half empty. She walked up to one and pulled down a paperback. The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde. Peter had been reading it for English class when he was arrested. She wondered if he’d had the time to finish.

Dorian Gray had a portrait that grew old and evil while he remained young and innocent-looking. Maybe the quiet, reserved mother who would testify for her son had a portrait somewhere that was ravaged with guilt, twisted with pain. Maybe the woman in that picture was allowed to cry and scream, to break down, to grab her son’s shoulders and say What have you done?

She startled at the sound of someone opening the door. Lewis stood on the threshold, wearing the suit that he kept for conferences and college graduations. He was holding a blue silk tie in his hand and did not speak.

Lacy took the tie out of Lewis’s hand and walked behind him. She noosed it around his neck, gently pulled the knot into place, and flipped down the collar. As she did, Lewis reached for her hand and didn’t let go.

There weren’t words, really, for moments like this-when you realized that you’d lost one child and the other was slipping out of your reach. Still holding Lacy’s hand, Lewis led her out of Peter’s room. He closed the door behind them.

At 6:00 a.m., when Jordan crept downstairs to read through his notes in preparation for the trial, he found a single place setting at the table: a bowl, a spoon, and a box of Cocoa Krispies-the meal he always used to kick off a battle. Grinning-Selena must have gotten up in the middle of the night to do this, since they’d headed up to bed together last night-he sat down and poured himself a healthy serving, then went into the fridge for the milk.

A Post-it note had been stuck to the carton. GOOD LUCK.

Just as Jordan sat down to eat, the telephone rang. He grabbed it-Selena and the baby were still asleep. “Hello?”

“Dad?”

“Thomas,” he said. “What are you doing up at this hour?”

“Well, um, I sort of didn’t go to bed yet.”

Jordan smiled. “Ah, to be young and collegiate again.”

“Anyway, I just called to wish you luck. It starts today, right?”

He looked down at his cereal and suddenly remembered the footage taken by the cafeteria video camera at Sterling High: Peter sitting down, just like this, to have a bowl of cereal, dead students flanking him. Jordan pushed the bowl away. “Yes,” he said. “It does.”

The correctional officer opened up Peter’s cell and handed him a stack of folded clothes. “Time for the ball, Cinderella,” he said.

Peter waited until he left. He knew his mother had bought these for him; she’d even left the tags on so that he could see they hadn’t come from Joey’s closet. They were preppy, the kind of clothes he imagined were worn to polo matches-not that he’d ever actually been to one to see.

Peter stripped out of his jumpsuit and pulled on the boxer shorts, the socks. He sat down on his bunk to pull up his trousers, which were a little tight at the waist. He buttoned the shirt wrong the first time and had to do it over. He didn’t know how to do his tie right. He rolled it up and stuffed it into his pocket so that Jordan could help him.

There wasn’t a mirror in his cell, but Peter imagined he looked ordinary now. If you beamed him from this jail into a crowded New York street or into the stands of a football game, people probably wouldn’t glance twice at him; wouldn’t realize that underneath all that washed wool and Egyptian cotton was someone they’d never imagine. Or in other words, after all this, nothing had changed.

He was about to leave the cell when he realized he had not been given a bulletproof vest, as he had for the arraignment. It probably wasn’t because he was any less hated now; more likely, it had been an oversight. He started to ask the guard about it, but then snapped his mouth shut.

Maybe, for the first time in his life, Peter had gotten lucky.

Alex dressed like she was going to work, which she was, except not as a judge. She wondered what it would be like to sit in court in the role of civilian. She wondered if the grieving mother from the arraignment would be there.

She knew it was going to be hard to listen to this trial, and to understand all over again how close she had come to losing Josie. Alex was through pretending that she was listening only because it was her job; she was listening because she had to. One day Josie would remember and would need someone to hold her upright; and since Alex hadn’t been there the first time to protect Josie, she’d bear witness now.

She hurried downstairs and found Josie sitting at the kitchen table, dressed in a skirt and blouse. “I’m going,” she announced.

It was d#233;j#224; vu-this was exactly what had happened the day of Peter’s arraignment, except that seemed so long ago, and she and Josie had both been very different people back then. Today, she was on the defense’s witness list, but she hadn’t been served with a subpoena, which meant that she didn’t actually have to be in the courthouse at all during the trial.

“I know I can’t go in, but Patrick’s sequestered, too, isn’t he?”

The last time Josie had asked to go to court, Alex had flatly refused. This time, though, she sat down across from Josie. “Do you have any idea what it’s going to be like? There are going to be cameras, lots of them. And kids in wheelchairs. And angry parents. And Peter.”

Josie’s gaze fell into her lap like a stone. “You’re trying to keep me from going again.”

“No, I’m trying to keep you from getting hurt.”

“I didn’t get hurt,” Josie said. “That’s why I have to go.”

Five months ago, Alex had made this decision for her daughter. Now she knew that Josie deserved to speak for herself. “I’ll meet you in the car,” she said calmly. She held this mask until Josie closed the door behind herself, and then bolted upstairs to the bathroom and got sick.

She was afraid that reliving the shooting, even from a distance, would rattle Josie past the point of recovery. But mostly she worried that for the second time, she would be powerless to keep her daughter from being hurt.

Alex rested her forehead against the cool porcelain lip of the bathtub. Then, standing, she brushed her teeth and splashed her face with water. She hurried to the car, where her daughter was already waiting.

Because the sitter was late, Jordan and Selena found themselves fighting the crowd on the courtroom steps. Selena had been expecting it-and still wasn’t entirely prepared for the hordes of reporters, the television vans, the spectators holding up their camera phones to capture a snapshot of the melee.

Jordan was playing the villain today-the vast majority of the onlookers were from Sterling, and since Peter would be transported to the court via underground tunnel, Jordan was their fall guy. “How do you sleep at night?” a woman shouted as Jordan hurried up the steps past her. Another held up a sign: There’s still a death penalty in NH.

“Ooh boy,” Jordan said under his breath. “This is gonna be a fun one.”

“You’ll be fine,” Selena replied.

But he had stopped moving. There was a man standing on the steps holding up a piece of posterboard with two large mounted photos-one of a girl, one of a pretty woman. Kaitlyn Harvey, Selena realized, recognizing the face. And her mother. At the top of the display were two words: NINETEEN MINUTES.

Jordan met the man’s gaze. Selena knew what he was thinking-that this could be him, that he had just as much to lose. “I’m sorry,” Jordan murmured, and Selena looped her arm through his and pulled him up the stairs again.

There was a different crowd up here, though. They wore startling yellow shirts with BVA printed across the chest, and they were chanting: “Peter, you are not alone. Peter, you are not alone.”

Jordan leaned closer to her. “What the fuck is this?”

“The Bullied Victims of America.”

“You must be joking,” Jordan said. “They exist?”

“You better believe it,” Selena said.

Jordan started to smile for the first time since they’d started driving to court. “And you found them for us?”

Selena squeezed his arm. “You can thank me later,” she said.

His client looked like he was going to faint. Jordan nodded at the deputy who let him into the holding cell where Peter was being kept at the courthouse, and then sat down. “Breathe,” he commanded.

Peter nodded and filled up his lungs. He was shaking. Jordan had expected this, had seen it at the start of every trial he’d ever been a part of. Even the most hardened criminal suddenly panicked when he realized that this was the day his life was on the line. “I’ve got something for you,” Jordan said, and he took a pair of glasses out of his pocket.

They were thick and tortoiseshell, Coke-bottle glasses, very different from the thin wire ones Peter usually wore. “I don’t,” Peter said, and then his voice cracked. “I don’t need new ones.”

“Well, take them anyway.”

“Why?”

“Because everyone will notice these on your face,” Jordan said. “I want you to look like someone who could never in a million years see well enough to shoot ten people.”

Peter’s hands curled around the metal edge of the bench. “Jordan? What’s going to happen to me?”

There were some clients you had to lie to, just so that they’d get through the trial. But at this point, Jordan thought he owed Peter the truth. “I don’t know, Peter. You haven’t got a great case, because of all the evidence against you. The likelihood of you being acquitted is slim, but I’m still going to do whatever I can for you. Okay?” Peter nodded. “All I want you to do is try to be quiet out there. Look pathetic.”

Peter bowed his head, his face contorting. Yes, just like that, Jordan thought, and then he realized that Peter had started to cry.

Jordan walked toward the front of the cell. This, too, was a familiar moment for him as a defense attorney. Jordan usually allowed his client to have this final breakdown in private before they went into the courtroom. It was none of his business, and to be honest, Jordan was all about business. But he could hear Peter sobbing behind him; and in that sad song was one note that reached right down into Jordan. Before he could think better of it, he had turned around and was sitting on the bench again. He wrapped an arm around Peter, felt the boy relax against him. “It’s going to be okay,” he said, and he hoped he was not lying.

Diana Leven surveyed the packed gallery, then asked a bailiff to turn off the lights. She pushed the button on her laptop, beginning her PowerPoint presentation.

The screen beside Judge Wagner filled with an image of Sterling High School. There was a blue sky in the background and some cotton-candy clouds. A flag snapped in the wind. Three school buses were lined up like a caravan in the front circle. Diana let this picture stand alone, in silence, for fifteen seconds.

The courtroom grew so quiet you could hear the hum of the transcriptionist’s laptop.

Oh, God, Jordan thought. I have to sit through this for the next three weeks.

“This is what Sterling High School looked like on March 6, 2007. It was 7:50 a.m., and school had just started. Courtney Ignatio was in chemistry class, taking a quiz. Whit Obermeyer was in the main office getting a late pass, because he’d had car trouble that morning. Grace Murtaugh was leaving the nurse’s office, where she’d taken some Tylenol for a headache. Matt Royston was in history class with his best friend, Drew Girard. Ed McCabe was writing homework on the blackboard for the math classes he taught. There was nothing to suggest to any of these people or any other members of the Sterling High School community at 7:50 a.m. on March sixth that this was anything other than a typical school day.”

Diana clicked a button, and a new photo appeared: Ed McCabe, lying on the floor with his intestines spilling out of his stomach as a sobbing student pressed both hands against the gaping wound. “This is what Sterling High School looked like at 10:19 a.m. on March 6, 2007. Ed McCabe never got to give his homework assignment to his math class, because nineteen minutes earlier, Peter Houghton, a seventeen-year-old junior at Sterling High School, burst through the doors with a knapsack that contained four guns-two sawed-off shotguns, as well as two fully loaded, semiautomatic 9-millimeter pistols.”

Jordan felt a tug on his arm. “Jordan,” Peter whispered.

“Not now.”

“But I’m going to be sick…”

“Swallow it,” Jordan ordered.

Diana flicked back to the previous slide, the picture-perfect image of Sterling High. “I told you, ladies and gentlemen, that none of the people in Sterling High School had any inclination this would be something other than a typical school day. But one person did know that it was going to be different.” She walked toward the defense table and pointed directly at Peter, who stared steadfastly down at his lap. “On the morning of March 6, 2007, Peter Houghton started his day by loading a blue knapsack with four guns and the makings of a bomb, plus enough ammunition to potentially kill one hundred and ninety-eight people. The evidence will show that when he arrived at the school, he set up this bomb in Matt Royston’s car to divert attention away from himself. While it exploded, he walked up the front steps of the school and shot Zoe Patterson. Then, in the hallway, he shot Alyssa Carr. He made his way to the cafeteria and shot Angela Phlug and Maddie Shaw-his first casualty-and Courtney Ignatio. As students started running away, he shot Haley Weaver and Brady Pryce, Natalie Zlenko, Emma Alexis, Jada Knight, and Richard Hicks. Then, as the wounded were sobbing and dying all around him, do you know what Peter Houghton did? He sat down in the cafeteria and he had a bowl of Rice Krispies.”

Diana let this information sink in. “When he finished, he picked up his gun and left the cafeteria, shooting Jared Weiner, Whit Obermeyer, and Grace Murtaugh in the hall, and Lucia Ritolli-a French teacher trying to shepherd her students to safety. He stopped off in the boys’ bathroom and shot Steven Babourias, Min Horuka, and Topher McPhee; and then went into the girls’ bathroom and shot Kaitlyn Harvey. He continued upstairs and shot Ed McCabe, the math teacher, John Eberhard, and Trey MacKenzie before reaching the gym and firing at Austin Prokiov, Coach Dusty Spears, Noah James, Justin Friedman, and Drew Girard. Finally, in the locker room, the defendant shot Matthew Royston twice-once in the stomach, and again in the head. You might remember that name-it’s the owner of the car that Peter Houghton bombed at the very beginning of his rampage.”

Diana faced the jury. “This entire spree lasted nineteen minutes in the life of Peter Houghton, but the evidence will show that its effects will last forever. And there’s a lot of evidence, ladies and gentlemen. There are a lot of witnesses, and there’s a lot of testimony to come…but by the end of this trial, you will be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that Peter Houghton purposefully and knowingly, with premeditation, caused the deaths of ten people and attempted to cause the deaths of nineteen others at Sterling High School.”

She walked toward Peter. “In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn, color your hair, watch a third of a hockey game. You can bake scones or get a tooth filled by a dentist. You can fold laundry for a family of five. Or, as Peter Houghton knows…in nineteen minutes, you can bring the world to a screeching halt.”

Jordan walked toward the jury, his hands in his pockets. “Ms. Leven told you that on the morning of March 6, 2007, Peter Houghton walked into Sterling High School with a knapsack full of loaded weapons, and he shot a lot of people. Well, she’s right. The evidence is going to show that, and we don’t dispute it. We know that it’s a tragedy for both the people who died and those who will live with the aftermath. But here’s what Ms. Leven didn’t tell you: when Peter walked into Sterling High School that morning, he had no intention of becoming a mass murderer. He walked in intending to defend himself from the abuse he’d suffered for twelve straight years.

“On Peter’s first day of school,” Jordan continued, “his mother put him on the kindergarten bus with a brand-new Superman lunch box. By the end of the ride to the school, that lunch box had been thrown out the window. Now, all of us have childhood memories of other kids teasing us or being cruel, and most of us are able to shake that off, but Peter Houghton’s life wasn’t one where these things happened occasionally. From that very first day in kindergarten, Peter experienced a daily barrage of taunting, tormenting, threatening, and bullying. This child has been stuffed into lockers, had his head shoved into toilets, been tripped and punched and kicked. He has had a private email spammed out to an entire school. He’s had his pants pulled down in the middle of the cafeteria. Peter’s reality was a world where, no matter what he did-no matter how small and insignificant he made himself-he was still always the victim. And as a result, he started to turn to an alternate world: one created by himself in the safety of HTML code. Peter set up his own website, created video games, and filled them with the kind of people he wished were surrounding him.”

Jordan ran his hand along the railing of the jury box. “One of the witnesses you’re going to hear from is Dr. King Wah. He’s a forensic psychiatrist who’s examined Peter and has spoken with him. He’s going to explain to you that Peter was suffering from an illness called post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s a complicated medical diagnosis, but it’s a real one-and children who have it can’t distinguish between an immediate threat and a distant threat. Even though you and I might be able to walk down the hall and spy a bully who’s paying no attention to us, Peter would see that same person and his heart rate would speed up…his body would sidle a little closer to the wall…because Peter was sure he’d be noticed, threatened, beaten, and hurt. Dr. Wah will not only tell you about studies that have been done on children like Peter, he’ll tell you how Peter was directly affected by the years and years of torment at the hands of the Sterling High School community.”

Jordan faced the jurors again. “Do you remember earlier this week, when we were talking to you about whether you’d be an appropriate juror to sit on this case? One of the things I asked each and every one of you during that process was whether you understood that you needed to listen to the evidence in the courtroom and apply the law as the judge instructs you. As much as we learned from civics class in eighth grade or Law amp; Order on Wednesday-night TV…until you’re here listening to the evidence and hearing the instructions of the court, you don’t know what the rules really are.”

He held the gaze of each juror in turn. “For example, when most people hear the term self-defense, they assume it means that someone is holding up a gun, or a knife to the throat-that there’s an immediate physical threat. But in this case, self-defense may not mean what you think. And what the evidence will show, ladies and gentlemen, is that the person who walked into Sterling High and fired all those shots was not a premeditated, cold-blooded killer, as the prosecution wants you to believe.” Jordan walked behind the defense table and put his hands on Peter’s shoulders. “He was a very scared boy who had asked for protection…and had never received it.”

Zoe Patterson kept biting her nails, even though her mother had told her not to do that; even though a zillion pairs of eyes and (holy cow) television cameras were focused on her as she sat on the witness stand. “What did you have after French class?” the prosecutor asked. She’d already gone through her name, address, and the beginning of that horrible day.

“Math, with Mr. McCabe.”

“Did you go to class?”

“Yes.”

“And what time did that class start?”

“Nine-forty,” Zoe said.

“Did you see Peter Houghton at all before math class?”

She couldn’t help it, she let her glance slide toward Peter sitting at the defense table. Here was the weird thing-she had been a freshman last year and didn’t know him at all. And even now, even after he’d shot her, if she’d walked down a street and passed him, she didn’t think she would have recognized him.

“No,” Zoe said.

“Anything unusual happen at math class?”

“No.”

“Did you stay for the entire period?”

“No,” Zoe said. “I had an orthodontist appointment at ten-fifteen, so I left a little before ten to sign out in the office and wait for my mom.”

“Where was she going to meet you?”

“On the front steps. She was just going to drive up.”

“Did you sign out of school?”

“Yes.”

“Did you go to the front steps?”

“Yes.”

“Was anyone else out there?”

“No. Class was in session.”

She watched the prosecutor pull out a big overhead photograph of the school and the parking lot, the way it used to be. Zoe had driven by the construction, and now there was a big fence around the entire area. “Can you show me where you were standing?” Zoe pointed. “Let the record show that the witness pointed to the front steps of Sterling High,” Ms. Leven said. “Now, what happened while you were standing and waiting for your mother?”

“There was an explosion.”

“Did you know where it came from?”

“Somewhere behind the school,” Zoe said, and she glanced at that big poster again, as if it might even now just detonate.

“What happened next?”

Zoe rubbed her hand over her leg. “He…he came around the side of the school and started to come up the steps…”

“By ‘he,’ do you mean the defendant, Peter Houghton?”

Zoe nodded, swallowing. “He came up the steps and I looked at him and he…he pointed a gun and shot me.” She was blinking too fast now, trying not to cry.

“Where did he shoot you, Zoe?” the prosecutor asked gently.

“In the leg.”

“Did Peter say anything to you before he shot you?”

“No.”

“Did you know who he was at that point in time?”

Zoe shook her head. “No.”

“Did you recognize his face?”

“Yes, from around school and all…”

Ms. Leven turned her back to the jury and gave Zoe a little wink, which made her feel better. “What kind of gun was he using, Zoe? Was it a small gun he held in one hand, or a big gun that he carried with two hands?”

“A small gun.”

“How many times did he shoot?”

“One.”

“Did he say anything after he shot you?”

“I don’t remember,” Zoe said.

“What did you do?”

“I wanted to get away from him, but my leg felt like it was on fire. I tried to run but I couldn’t do it-I just sort of crumpled and fell down the stairs, and then I couldn’t move my arm either.”

“What did the defendant do?”

“He went into the school.”

“Did you see which way he went?”

“No.”

“How’s your leg now?” the prosecutor asked.

“I still need a cane,” Zoe said. “I got an infection because the bullet blew fabric from my jeans into my leg. The tendon’s attached to the scar tissue, and that’s still really sensitive. The doctors don’t know if they want to do another surgery, because it might do more damage.”

“Zoe, were you on a sports team last year?”

“Soccer,” she said, and she looked down at her leg. “Today they start practice for the season.”

Ms. Leven turned to the judge. “Nothing further,” she said. “Zoe, Mr. McAfee might have a few questions for you.”

The other lawyer stood up. Zoe was nervous about this part, because even though she’d gotten to rehearse with the prosecutor, she had no idea what Peter’s attorney would ask her. It was like any other exam; she wanted to have the right answers. “When Peter was holding the gun, he was about three feet away from you?” the lawyer asked.

“Yes.”

“He didn’t look like he was running right toward you, did he?”

“I guess not.”

“He looked like he was just trying to run up the stairs, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And you were just waiting on the stairs, correct?”

“Yes.”

“So it’s fair to say that you were in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

“Objection,” Ms. Leven said.

The judge-a big man with a mane of white hair who sort of scared Zoe-shook his head. “Overruled.”

“No further questions,” the lawyer said, and then Ms. Leven rose again. “After Peter went inside,” she asked, “what did you do?”

“I started screaming for help.” Zoe looked into the gallery, trying to find her mother. If she looked at her mother, then she could say what she had to say next, because it was already over and that was what you had to keep remembering, no matter how much it felt like it wasn’t. “At first nobody came,” Zoe murmured. “And then…then everybody did.”

Michael Beach had seen Zoe Patterson leaving the room where the witnesses were sequestered. It was a weird collection of kids-everyone from losers like himself to popular kids like Brady Pryce. Even stranger, no one seemed to be inclined to break into their usual pods-the geeks in one corner, the jocks in another, and so on. Instead, they’d all just sat down next to each other at the one long conference table. Emma Alexis-who was one of the cool, beautiful girls-was now paralyzed from the waist down, and she rolled her wheelchair up right beside Justin. She’d asked him if she could have half of his glazed donut.

“When Peter first came into the gym,” the prosecutor asked, “what did he do?”

“Wave a gun around,” Michael said.

“Could you see what kind of gun it was?”

“Well, like a smallish one.”

“A handgun?”

“Yes.”

“Did he say anything?”

Michael glanced at the defense table. “He said ‘All you jocks, front and center.’”

“What happened?”

“A kid started to run toward him, like he was going to take him down.”

“Who was that?”

“Noah James. He’s-he was-a senior. Peter shot him, and he just collapsed.”

“Then what happened?” the prosecutor asked.

Michael took a deep breath. “Peter said, ‘Who’s next?’ and my friend Justin grabbed me and started dragging me to the door.”

“How long had you and Justin been friends?”

“Since third grade,” Michael said.

“And then?”

“Peter must have seen something moving, so he turned around and he just started to shoot.”

“Did he hit you?”

Michael shook his head and pressed his lips together.

“Michael,” the prosecutor said gently, “who did he hit?”

“Justin got in front of me when the shooting started. And then he…he fell down. There was blood everywhere and I was trying to stop it, like they do on TV, by pushing on his stomach. I wasn’t paying any attention to anything anymore, except Justin, and then all of a sudden I felt a gun press up against my head.”

“What happened?”

“I closed my eyes,” Michael said. “I thought he was going to kill me.”

“And then?”

“I heard this noise, and when I opened my eyes, he was pulling out the thing that had all the bullets in it and jamming in another one.”

The prosecutor walked up to a table and held up a gun clip. Just seeing it in her hand made Michael shudder. “Is this what went into the gun?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“What happened after that?”

“He didn’t shoot me,” Michael said. “Three people ran across the gym, and he followed them into the locker room.”

“And Justin?”

“I watched it,” Michael whispered. “I watched his face while he died.”

It was the first thing he saw in the morning when he awakened, and the last thing he saw before he went to bed: that moment where the shine in Justin’s eyes just dulled. When the life left a person, it wasn’t by degrees. It was instant, like someone pulling down a shade on a window.

The prosecutor came closer. “Michael,” she said, “you all right?”

He nodded.

“Were you and Justin jocks?”

“Not even close,” he admitted.

“Were you part of the popular crowd?”

“No.”

“Had you and Justin ever been bullied by anyone in school?”

Michael glanced, for the first time, at Peter Houghton. “Who hasn’t?” he said.

As Lacy waited for her turn to speak on Peter’s behalf, she thought back to the first time she realized she could hate her own child.

Lewis had a bigwig economist from London coming to dinner, and in preparation, Lacy had taken the day off work to clean. Although she had no doubts about her prowess as a midwife, the nature of her work meant that toilets didn’t get cleaned on a regular basis; that dust bunnies bloomed beneath the furniture. Usually, she didn’t care-she thought a house that was lived in was preferential to one that was sterile-unless company was coming over; then pride kicked in. So that morning, she’d gotten up, made breakfast, and had already dusted the living room by the time Peter-a sophomore, then-threw himself angrily into a chair at the kitchen table. “I have no clean underwear,” he fumed, although the rule in the house was that when his laundry bin filled, he had to do his own wash-there was so little that Lacy ever asked him to do, she didn’t think this one task was unreasonable. Lacy had suggested that he borrow some from his father, but Peter was disgusted by that, and she decided to let him figure it out on his own. She had enough on her plate.

She usually let Peter’s room stand in utter pigsty disarray, but as she passed by that morning, she noticed his laundry bin. Well, she was already home working, and he was at school. She could do this one thing for him. By the time Peter got home that day, Lacy had not only vacuumed and scrubbed the floors, cooked a four-course meal, and cleaned the kitchen-she had also washed, dried, and folded three loads of Peter’s laundry. They were piled on the bed, clean clothing that covered the entire six-foot span of the mattress, segregated into pants, shirts, undershorts. All he had to do was set them into his closet, his drawers.

Peter arrived, sullen and moody, and immediately hurried upstairs to his room and his computer-the place he spent most of his time. Lacy-arm deep in the toilet, at that point, scouring-waited for him to notice what she’d done for him. But instead, she heard him groan. “God! I’m supposed to put all this away?” Then he slammed his bedroom door so loud that the house shook around her.

Suddenly, Lacy couldn’t see straight. She had-of her own volition-done something nice for her son-her ridiculously spoiled son-and this was how he acted in return? She rinsed off the scrubbing gloves and left them in the sink. Then she stomped upstairs to Peter’s room and threw open the door. “What is your problem?”

Peter glared at her. “What’s your problem? Look at this mess.”

Something inside Lacy had snapped like a filament, igniting her. “Mess?” she repeated. “I cleaned up the mess. You want to see a mess?” She reached past Peter, knocking over a pile of neatly folded T-shirts. She grabbed his boxer shorts and threw them on the floor. She shoved his pants off the bed, hurled them at his computer, so that his tower of CD-ROMs fell over and the silver disks scattered. “I hate you!” Peter yelled, and without missing a beat, Lacy yelled back, “I hate you, too!” Only then did she realize that she and Peter were now the same height; that she was arguing with a child who stood eye-level with her.

She backed out of Peter’s room, and he slammed the door behind her. Almost immediately, Lacy burst into tears. She hadn’t meant it-of course she hadn’t. She loved Peter. She just, at that moment, hated what he’d said; what he’d done. When she knocked, he wouldn’t answer. “Peter,” she said. “Peter, I’m sorry I said that.”

She held her ear to the door, but there was no sound coming from the inside. Lacy had gone back downstairs and finished cleaning the bathroom. She had moved like a zombie through dinner, making conversation with the economist without really knowing what she was saying. Peter had not joined them. She did not see him, in fact, until the next morning, when Lacy went to wake him up and found his room already empty-and spotless. The clothes had been refolded and placed in their drawers. The bed was made. The CDs organized again, in their tower.

Peter was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of cereal, when Lacy went downstairs. He did not meet her eyes, and she did not meet his-the ground between them was still too tender for that. But she poured him a glass of juice and set it on the table. He said thank you.

They never spoke of what they’d said to each other, and Lacy had vowed to herself that no matter how frustrating it got, being the parent of a teenage boy, no matter how selfish and self-centered Peter became, she would never again let herself reach a point where she truly, viscerally hated her own son.

But as the victims of Sterling High told their stories in a courtroom just down the hall from where Lacy sat, she hoped that she wasn’t too late.

At first, Peter didn’t recognize her. The girl who was being led up the ramp by a nurse-the girl whose hair had been cropped to fit underneath bandages and whose face was twisted with scar tissue and bone that had been broken and carved away-settled herself inside the witness box in a way that reminded him of fish being introduced to a new tank. They’d swim around the perimeter gingerly, as if they knew they had to assess the dangers of this new place before they could even begin to function.

“Can you state your name for the record?” the prosecutor asked.

“Haley,” the girl said softly. “Haley Weaver.”

“Last year, you were a senior at Sterling High?”

Her mouth rounded, flattened. The pink scar that curved like the seam on a baseball over her temple grew darker, an angry red. “Yes,” she said. She closed her eyes, and a tear slid down her hollow cheek. “I was the homecoming queen.” She bent forward, rocking slightly as she cried.

Peter’s chest hurt, as if it were going to explode. He thought maybe he would just die on the spot and save everyone the trouble of going through this. He was afraid to look up, because if he did he would have to see Haley Weaver again.

Once, when he was little, he’d been playing with a Nerf football in his parents’ bedroom and he knocked over an antique perfume bottle that had belonged to his great-grandmother. It was made out of glass and it broke into pieces. His mother told him she knew it was an accident, and she’d glued it back together. She kept it on her dresser, and every time he passed by he saw the lines. For years, he’d thought that might have been worse than being punished in the first place.

“Let’s take a short recess,” Judge Wagner said, and Peter let his head sink down to the defense table, a weight too heavy to bear.

The witnesses were sequestered by side, prosecution in one room and defense in another. The policemen had their own room, too. Witnesses were not supposed to see each other, but nobody really noticed if you left to go to the cafeteria to get a cup of coffee or a donut, and Josie had taken to leaving for hours at a time. It was there that she’d run into Haley, who’d been drinking orange juice through a straw. Brady was with her, holding the cup so she could reach it.

They’d been happy to see Josie, but she was glad when they left. It hurt, physically, to have to smile at Haley and pretend that you weren’t staring at the pits and gullies of her face. She’d told Josie that she had already had three operations with a plastic surgeon in New York City who had donated his services.

Brady never let go of her hand; sometimes he ran his fingers through her hair. It made Josie want to cry, because she knew that when he looked at Haley, he was still able to see her in a way that no one else would again.

There were others there, too, that Josie hadn’t seen since the shooting. Teachers, like Ms. Ritolli and Coach Spears, who came over to say hello. The DJ who ran the radio station at the school, the honors student with the really bad acne. They all cycled through the cafeteria while she sat and nursed a cup of coffee.

She glanced up when Drew flung himself into a chair across from her. “How come you’re not in the room with the rest of us?”

“I’m on the defense’s list.” Or, as she was sure everyone in the other room thought of it, the traitors’ side.

“Oh,” Drew said, as if he understood, although Josie was sure he didn’t. “You ready for this?”

“I don’t have to be ready. They’re not actually going to call me.”

“Then why are you here?”

Before she could answer, Drew waved, and then she realized John Eberhard had arrived. “Dude,” Drew said, and John headed toward them. He walked with a limp, she noticed, but he was walking. He leaned down to high-five Drew and when he did, Josie could see the pucker in his scalp where the bullet had entered his head.

“Where have you been?” Drew asked, making room for John to sit down beside him. “I thought I’d see you around this summer, for sure.”

He nodded at them. “I’m…John.”

Drew’s smile faded like paint.

“This…is…”

“This is fucking unbelievable,” Drew murmured.

“He can hear you,” Josie snapped, and she crouched down in front of John. “Hi, John. I’m Josie.”

“Jooooz.”

“Right. Josie.”

“I’m…John,” he said.

John Eberhard had played goalie on the all-star state hockey team since his freshman year. Whenever the team won, the coach had always credited John’s reflexes.

“Shoooo,” he said, and he shuffled his foot.

Josie looked down at the undone Velcro strap of John’s sneaker. “There you go,” she said, fixing it for him.

Suddenly she could not stand being here, seeing this. “I’ve got to get back,” Josie said, standing up. As she walked away, blindly turning the corner, she crashed into someone. “Sorry,” she murmured, and then heard Patrick’s voice.

“Josie? You all right?”

She shrugged, and then she shook her head.

“That makes two of us.”

Patrick was holding a cup of coffee and a donut. “I know,” he said. “I’m a walking clich#233;. You want it?” He held the pastry out to her, and she took it, even though she wasn’t hungry. “You coming or going?”

“Coming,” she lied, before she even realized she was doing it.

“Then keep me company for a few minutes.” He led her to a table across the room from Drew and John; she could feel them looking at her, wondering why she might be hanging out with a cop. “I hate the waiting part,” Patrick said.

“At least you’re not nervous about testifying.”

“Sure I am.”

“Don’t you do this all the time?”

Patrick nodded. “But that doesn’t make it any easier to get up in front of a room full of people. I don’t know how your mom does it.”

“So what do you do to get over the stage fright? Imagine the judge in his underwear?”

“Well, not this judge,” Patrick said, and then, realizing what he’d just implied, he blushed deep red.

“That’s probably a good thing,” Josie said.

Patrick reached for the donut and took a bite, then handed it back to her. “I just try to tell myself, when I get out there, that I can’t get into trouble telling the truth. Then I let Diana do all the work.” He took a sip of his coffee. “You need anything? A drink? More food?”

“I’m okay.”

“Then I’ll walk you back. Come on.”

The room for the defense’s witnesses was tiny, because there were so few of them. An Asian man Josie had never seen before was sitting with his back to her, typing away at a laptop. There was a woman inside who hadn’t been there when Josie left, but Josie couldn’t see her face.

Patrick paused in front of the door. “How do you think it’s going in court?” she asked.

He hesitated. “It’s going.”

She slipped past the bailiff who was babysitting them, heading toward the window seat where she’d been curled before, reading. But at the last minute she sat down at the table in the middle of the room. The woman already seated there had her hands folded in front of her and was staring at absolutely nothing.

“Mrs. Houghton,” Josie murmured.

Peter’s mother turned. “Josie?” She squinted, as if that might bring Josie into better focus.

“I’m so sorry,” Josie whispered.

Mrs. Houghton nodded. “Well,” she said, and then she just stopped, as if the sentence were no more than a cliff to jump from.

“How are you doing?” Josie immediately wished she could take back her question-how did she think Peter’s mother was doing, for God’s sake? She was probably using all of her self-control right now to keep from dissolving into foam, blowing off into the atmosphere. Which, Josie realized, meant they had something in common.

“I wouldn’t have expected to see you here,” Mrs. Houghton said softly.

By here she didn’t mean the courthouse; she meant this room. With the other meager witnesses who had been tapped to stick up for Peter.

Josie cleared her throat, to make way for the words she hadn’t said for years, the words she still would have been afraid to use in front of nearly anyone else, for fear of the echo. “He’s my friend,” she said.

“We started running,” Drew said. “It was like this mass exodus. I just wanted to get as far away from the cafeteria as I could, so I headed for the gym. Two of my friends had heard the shots, but they didn’t know where they were coming from, so I grabbed them and told them to follow me.”

“Who were they?” Leven asked.

“Matt Royston,” Drew said. “And Josie Cormier.”

At the sound of her daughter’s name being spoken aloud, Alex shivered. It made it so…real. So immediate. Drew had located Alex in the gallery, and was staring right at her when he said Josie’s name.

“Where did you go?”

“We figured if we could get to the locker room, we could climb out the window onto the maple tree and we’d be safe.”

“Did you get to the locker room?”

“Josie and Matt did,” Drew said. “But I got shot.”

Alex listened as the prosecutor walked Drew through the extent of his injuries and how they had effectively ended his hockey career. Then she faced him squarely. “Did you know Peter before the day of the shooting?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“We were in the same grade. Everyone knows everyone.”

“Were you friends?” Leven asked.

Alex glanced across the aisle at Lewis Houghton. He was sitting directly behind his son, his eyes fixed straight on the bench. Alex had a flash of him, years ago, opening the front door when she’d gone to pick Josie up from a playdate. Here come da judge, he’d said, and he laughed at his own joke.

Were you friends?

“No,” Drew said.

“Did you have any problems with him?”

Drew hesitated. “No.”

“Did you ever get in an argument with him?” Leven asked.

“We probably had a few words,” Drew said.

“Did you ever make fun of him?”

“Sometimes. We were just kidding around.”

“Did you ever physically attack him?”

“When we were younger, I might have pushed him around a little bit.”

Alex looked at Lewis Houghton. His eyes were squeezed shut.

“Have you done that since you’ve been in high school?”

“Yes,” Drew admitted.

“Did you ever threaten Peter with a weapon?”

“No.”

“Did you ever threaten to kill him?”

“No…we were, you know. Just being kids.”

“Thank you.” She sat down, and Alex watched Jordan McAfee rise.

He was a good lawyer-better than she would have given him credit for. He put on a fine show-whispering with Peter, putting his hand on the boy’s arm when he got upset, taking copious notes on the direct examination and sharing them with his client. He was humanizing Peter, in spite of the fact that the prosecution was making him out to be a monster, in spite of the fact that the defense hadn’t even yet begun to have their turn.

“You had no problems with Peter,” McAfee repeated.

“No.”

“But he had problems with you, didn’t he?”

Drew didn’t respond.

“Mr. Girard, you’re going to have to speak up,” Judge Wagner said.

“Sometimes,” Drew conceded.

“Have you ever stuck your elbow in Peter’s chest?”

Drew’s gaze slid sideways. “Maybe. By accident.”

“Ah, yes. It’s always easy to find yourself sticking out an elbow when you least expect to…”

“Objection-”

McAfee smiled. “In fact, it wasn’t an accident, was it, Mr. Girard?”

At the prosecutor’s table, Diana Leven raised her pen and dropped it on the floor. The noise made Drew glance over, and a muscle flexed in his jaw. “We were just joking around,” he said.

“Ever shove Peter into a locker?”

“Maybe.”

“Just joking around?” McAfee said.

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” he continued. “Did you ever trip him?”

“I guess.”

“Wait…let me guess…joke, right?”

Drew glowered. “Yes.”

“Actually, you’ve been doing this sort of stuff as a joke to Peter since you were little kids, right?”

“We just never were friends,” Drew said. “He wasn’t like us.”

“Who’s us?” McAfee asked.

Drew shrugged. “Matt Royston, Josie Cormier, John Eberhard, Courtney Ignatio. Kids like that. We had all hung out together for years.”

“Did Peter know everyone in that group?”

“It’s a small school, sure.”

“Does Peter know Josie Cormier?”

In the gallery, Alex drew in her breath.

“Yes.”

“Did you ever see Peter talking to Josie?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, a month or so before the shooting, when you all were together in the cafeteria, Peter came over to speak to Josie. Can you tell us about that?”

Alex leaned forward on her chair. She could feel eyes on her, hot as the sun in a desert. She realized, from the direction, that now Lewis Houghton was staring at her.

“I don’t know what they were talking about.”

“But you were there, right?”

“Yes.”

“And Josie’s a friend of yours? Not one of the people who hung out with Peter?”

“Yeah,” Drew said. “She’s one of us.”

“Do you remember how that conversation in the cafeteria ended?” McAfee asked.

Drew looked down at the ground.

“Let me help you, Mr. Girard. It ended with Matt Royston walking behind Peter and pulling his pants down while he was trying to speak to Josie Cormier. Does that sound about right?”

“Yes.”

“The cafeteria was packed with kids that day, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“And Matt didn’t just pull down Peter’s pants…he pulled down his underwear too, correct?”

Drew’s mouth twitched. “Yeah.”

“And you saw all of this.”

“Yes.”

McAfee turned to the jury. “Let me guess,” he said. “Joke, right?”

The courtroom had gone utterly silent. Drew was glaring at Diana Leven, subliminally begging to be dragged off the witness stand, Alex assumed. This was the first person, other than Peter, who had been offered up for sacrifice.

Jordan McAfee walked back to the table where Peter sat and picked up a piece of paper. “Do you remember what day Peter was pantsed, Mr. Girard?”

“No.”

“Let me show you, then, Defense Exhibit One. Do you recognize this?”

He handed the piece of paper to Drew, who took it and shrugged.

“This is a piece of email that you received on February third, two days before Peter was pantsed in the Sterling High School cafeteria. Can you tell us who sent it to you?”

“Courtney Ignatio.”

“Was it a letter that had been written to her?”

“No,” Drew said. “It had been written to Josie.”

“By whom?” McAfee pressed.

“Peter.”

“What did he say?”

“It was about Josie. And how he was into her.”

“You mean romantically.”

“I guess,” Drew said.

“What did you do with that email?”

Drew looked up. “I spammed it out to the student body.”

“Let me get this straight,” McAfee said. “You took a very private note that didn’t belong to you, a piece of paper with Peter’s deepest, most secret feelings, and you forwarded this to every kid at your school?”

Drew was silent.

Jordan McAfee slapped the email down on the railing in front of him. “Well, Drew?” he said. “Was it a good joke?”

Drew Girard was sweating so much that he couldn’t believe all those people weren’t pointing at him. He could feel the perspiration running between his shoulder blades and making looped circles beneath his arms. And why not? That bitch of a prosecutor had left him in the hot seat. She’d let him get skewered by this dickwad attorney, so that now, for the rest of his life, everyone would think he was an asshole when he-like every other kid in Sterling High-had just been having a little fun.

He stood up, ready to bolt out of the courtroom and possibly run all the way to the town boundary of Sterling-but Diana Leven was walking toward him. “Mr. Girard,” she said, “I’m not quite finished.”

He sank back into his seat, deflated.

“Have you ever called anyone other than Peter Houghton names?”

“Yes,” he said warily.

“It’s what guys do, right?”

“Sometimes.”

“Did anyone you ever called names ever shoot you?”

“No.”

“Ever seen anyone other than Peter Houghton be pantsed?”

“Sure,” Drew said.

“Did any of those other kids who were pantsed ever shoot you?”

“No.”

“Ever spammed anyone else’s email out as a joke?”

“Once or twice.”

Diana folded her arms. “Any of those folks ever shoot you?”

“No, ma’am,” he said.

She headed back to her seat. “Nothing further.”

Dusty Spears understood kids like Drew Girard, because he had once been one. The way he saw it, bullies either were good enough to get football scholarships to Big Ten schools, where they could make the business connections to play on golf courses for the rest of their lives, or they busted their knees and wound up teaching gym at the middle school.

He was wearing a collared shirt and tie, and that pissed him off, because his neck still looked like it had when he was a tight end at Sterling in ’88, even if his abs didn’t. “Peter wasn’t a real athlete,” he said to the prosecutor. “I never really saw him outside of class.”

“Did you ever see Peter getting picked on by other kids?”

Dusty shrugged. “The usual locker room stuff, I guess.”

“Did you intervene?”

“I probably told the kids to knock it off. But it’s part of growing up, right?”

“Did you ever hear of Peter threatening anyone else?”

“Objection,” said Jordan McAfee. “That’s a hypothetical question.”

“Sustained,” the judge replied.

“If you had heard that, would you have intervened?”

“Objection!”

“Sustained. Again.”

The prosecutor didn’t miss a beat. “But Peter didn’t ask for help, did he?”

“No.”

She sat back down, and Houghton’s lawyer stood up. He was one of those smarmy guys that rubbed Dusty the wrong way-probably had been a kid who could barely field a ball, but smirked when you tried to teach him how, as if he already knew he’d be making twice as much money as Dusty one day, anyway. “Is there a bullying policy in place at Sterling High?”

“We don’t allow it.”

“Ah,” McAfee said dryly. “Well, that’s refreshing to hear. So let’s say you witness bullying on an almost daily basis in a locker room right under your nose…according to the policy, what are you supposed to do?”

Dusty stared at him. “It’s in the policy. Obviously I don’t have it right in front of me.”

“Luckily, I do,” McAfee said. “Let me show you what’s been marked as Defense Exhibit Two. Is this the bullying policy for Sterling High School?”

Reaching out, Dusty took a look at the printed page. “Yes.”

“You get this in your teacher handbook every year in August, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And this is the most recent version, for the academic year of 2006-2007?”

“I assume so,” Dusty said.

“Mr. Spears, I want you to go through that policy very carefully-all two pages-and show me where it tells you what to do if you, as a teacher, witness bullying.”

Dusty sighed and began to scan the papers. Usually, when he got the handbook, he shoved it in a drawer with his take-out menus. He knew the important things: don’t miss an in-service day; submit curriculum changes to the department heads; refrain from being alone in a room with a female student. “It says right here,” he said, reading, “that the Sterling School Board is committed to providing a learning and working environment that ensures the personal safety of its members. Physical or verbal threats, harassment, hazing, bullying, verbal abuse, and intimidation will not be tolerated.” Glancing up, Dusty said, “Does that answer your question?”

“No, actually, it doesn’t. What are you, as a teacher, supposed to do if a student bullies another student?”

Dusty read further. There was a definition of hazing, of bullying, of verbal abuse. There was mention of a teacher or school administrator being reported to, if the behavior had been witnessed by another student. But there was no set of rules, no chain of events to be set in motion by the teacher or administrator himself.

“I can’t find it in here,” he said.

“Thank you, Mr. Spears,” McAfee replied. “That’ll be all.”

It would have been simple for Jordan McAfee to notice up his intent to call Derek Markowitz to testify, as he was one of the only character witnesses Peter Houghton had, in terms of friends. But Diana knew he had value for the prosecution because of what he had seen and heard-not because of his loyalties. She’d seen plenty of friends rat each other out over the years she’d been in this business.

“So, Derek,” Diana said, trying to make him comfortable, “you were Peter’s friend.”

She watched him lock eyes with Peter and try to smile. “Yes.”

“Did you two hang out after school sometimes?”

“Yes.”

“What sort of things did you like to do?”

“We were both really into computers. Sometimes we’d play video games, and then we started to learn programming so we could create a few of our own.”

“Did Peter ever write any video games without you?” Diana asked.

“Sure.”

“What happened when he finished?”

“We’d play them. But there are also websites where you can upload your game and have other people rate them for you.”

Derek looked up just then and noticed the television cameras in the back of the room. His jaw dropped, and he froze.

“Derek,” Diana said. “Derek?” She waited for him to focus on her. “Let me hand you a CD-ROM. It’s marked State’s Exhibit 302…. Can you tell me what it is?”

“That’s Peter’s most recent game.”

“What’s it called?”

“Hide-n-Shriek.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s one of those games where you go around shooting the bad guys.”

“Who are the bad guys in this game?” Diana asked.

Derek darted a glance at Peter again. “They’re jocks.”

“Where does the game take place?”

“In a school,” Derek said.

From the corner of her eye, Diana could see Jordan shifting in his chair. “Derek, were you in school the morning of March 6, 2007?”

“Yeah.”

“What was your first-period class that morning?”

“Honors Trig.”

“How about second period?” Diana asked.

“English.”

“Then where did you go?”

“I had gym third period, but my asthma was pretty bad, so I had a doctor’s note to excuse me from class. Since I finished my work early in English, I asked Mrs. Eccles if I could go to my car to get it.”

Diana nodded. “Where was your car parked?”

“In the student parking lot, behind the school.”

“Can you show me on this diagram which door you used to leave the school at the end of second period?” Derek reached toward the easel and pointed to one of the rear doors of the school. “What did you see when you went outside?”

“Uh, a lot of cars.”

“Any people?”

“Yes,” Derek said. “Peter. It looked like he was getting something out of the backseat of his car.”

“What did you do?”

“I went over to say hi. I asked him why he was late to school, and he stood up and looked at me in a weird way.”

“Weird? What do you mean?”

Derek shook his head. “I don’t know. Like he didn’t know who I was for a second.”

“Did he say anything to you?”

“He said, ‘Go home. Something’s about to happen.’”

“Did you think that was unusual?”

“Well, it was a little bit Twilight Zone…”

“Had Peter ever said anything like that to you before?”

“Yes,” Derek said quietly.

“When?”

Jordan objected, as Diana had expected, and Judge Wagner overruled it, as she’d hoped. “A few weeks before,” Derek said, “the first time we were playing Hide-n-Shriek.”

“What did he say?” Derek looked down and mumbled a response. “Derek,” Diana said, coming closer, “I have to ask you to speak up.”

“He said, ‘When this really happens, it’s going to be awesome.’”

A hum rose in the gallery, like a swarm of bees. “Did you know what he meant by that?”

“I thought…I thought he was kidding,” Derek said.

“The day of the shooting when you found Peter in the parking lot, did you see what he was doing in the car?”

“No…” Derek broke off, clearing his throat. “I just sort of laughed off what he said and told him I had to go to class.”

“What happened next?”

“I went back into the school through the same door and walked to the office to get my gym note signed by Mrs. Whyte, the secretary. She was talking to another girl, who was signing out of school for an orthodontist appointment.”

“And then?” Diana asked.

“Once she left, Mrs. Whyte and I heard an explosion.”

“Did you see where it was coming from?”

“No.”

“What happened after that?”

“I looked at the computer screen on Mrs. Whyte’s desk,” Derek said. “It was scrolling, like, a message.”

“What did it say?”

“Ready or not…here I come.” Derek swallowed. “We heard these little pops, like lots of champagne bottles, and Mrs. Whyte grabbed me and dragged me into the principal’s office.”

“Was there a computer in that office?”

“Yes.”

“What was on the screen?”

“Ready or not…here I come.”

“How long were you in the office?”

“I don’t know. Ten, twenty minutes. Mrs. Whyte tried to call the police, but she couldn’t. There was something wrong with the phone.”

Diana faced the bench. “Judge, at this time, the prosecution would like to move State’s Exhibit 303 in full, and we ask that it be published to the jury.” She watched the deputy wheel out a television monitor with a computer attached, so that the CD-ROM could be inserted.

HIDE-N-SHRIEK, the screen proclaimed. CHOOSE YOUR FIRST WEAPON!

A 3-D animated boy wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a golf shirt crossed the screen and looked down over an array of crossbows, Uzis, AK-47s, and biological weapons. He reached for one, and then with his other hand, he loaded up on ammunition. There was a close-up of his face: freckles; braces; fever in his eyes.

Then the screen went blue and started scrolling.

Ready or not, it read. Here I come.

Derek liked Mr. McAfee. He wasn’t much to look at, but he had the hottest babe of a wife. Plus, he was probably the only other person in Sterling High who wasn’t related to Peter and still felt sorry for him.

“Derek,” the lawyer said, “you’ve been friends with Peter since sixth grade, right?”

“Yes.”

“You spent a lot of time with him both in and outside school.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you ever see Peter getting picked on by other kids?”

“All the time,” Derek said. “They’d call us fags and homos. They’d give us wedgies. When we walked down the hall, they’d trip us or slam us into lockers. Things like that.”

“Did you ever talk to a teacher about this?”

“I used to, but that just made it worse. I got creamed for being a tattletale.”

“Did you and Peter ever talk about getting picked on?”

Derek shook his head. “No. It was kind of nice to have someone around who just got it, you know?”

“How often was this happening…once a week?”

He snorted. “More like once a day.”

“Just you and Peter?”

“No, there are others.”

“Who did most of the bullying?”

“The jocks,” Derek said. “Matt Royston, Drew Girard, John Eberhard…”

“Any girls participate in the bullying?”

“Yeah, the ones who looked at us like we were bugs on a windshield,” Derek said. “Courtney Ignatio, Emma Alexis, Josie Cormier, Maddie Shaw.”

“So what do you do when someone’s slamming you into a locker?” Mr. McAfee asked.

“You can’t fight back, because you’re not as strong as they are, and you can’t stop it…so you just kind of wait it out.”

“Would it be fair to say that this group you named-Matt and Drew and Courtney and Emma and the rest-went after one person more than any others?”

“Yes,” Derek said. “Peter.”

Derek watched Peter’s attorney sit back down next to him, and then the lady lawyer rose and started speaking again. “Derek, you said you were bullied, too.”

“Yeah.”

“You never helped Peter put together a pipe bomb to blow up someone’s car, did you?”

“No.”

“You never helped Peter hack into the phone lines and computers at Sterling High, so that once the shooting started, no one could call for help, did you?”

“No,” Derek said.

“You never stole guns and hoarded them in your bedroom, did you?”

“No.”

The prosecutor took a step closer. “You never put together a plan, like Peter, to go through the school, systematically killing the people who had hurt you the most, did you, Derek?”

Derek turned to Peter, so that he could look him square in the eye when he answered. “No,” he said. “But sometimes I wish I had.”

From time to time, over the course of her career as a midwife, Lacy had run into a former patient at the grocery store or the bank or on a bike trail. They’d present their babies-now three, seven, fifteen years old. Look at what a great job you did, they’d sometimes say, as if bringing the child into the world had anything to do with who he became.

She did not know quite what to feel when confronted with Josie Cormier. They’d spent the day playing hangman-the irony of which, given her son’s fate, wasn’t lost on her. Lacy had known Josie as a newborn, but also as a little girl and as a playmate for Peter. Because of this, there had been a point where she had viscerally hated Josie in a way that even Peter never seemed to, for being cruel enough to leave her son behind. Josie may not have initiated the teasing that Peter suffered over his middle and high school years, but she didn’t intervene either, and in Lacy’s book, that had made her equally responsible.

As it turned out, though, Josie Cormier had grown into a stunning young woman, one who was quiet and thoughtful and not at all like the vacuous, material girls who trolled the Mall of New Hampshire or encompassed the social elite of Sterling High-girls Lacy had always likened to black widow spiders, looking for someone they could destroy. Lacy had been surprised when Josie had peppered her with polite questions about Peter: Was he nervous about the trial? Was it hard, being in jail? Did he get picked on there? You should send him a letter, Lacy had suggested to her. I’m sure he’d like to hear from you.

But Josie had let her glance slide away, and that was when Lacy realized that Josie had not really been interested in Peter; she had only been trying to be kind to Lacy.

When court recessed for the day, the witnesses were told they could go home, provided they did not watch the news or read the papers or speak about the case. Lacy excused herself to go to the bathroom while she waited for Lewis, who’d be fighting the crush of reporters that would surely be packing the lobby outside the courtroom. She had just come out of the stall and was washing her hands when Alex Cormier stepped inside.

The racket in the hallway rode in on her heels, then cut off abruptly as the door shut. Their eyes met in the long mirror over the bank of sinks. “Lacy,” Alex murmured.

Lacy straightened and reached for a paper towel to dry her hands. She didn’t know what to say to Alex Cormier. She could barely even imagine that at one point, she’d had anything to say to her.

There was a spider plant in Lacy’s midwifery office that had been dying by degrees, until the secretary moved a stack of books that had been blocking a window. She had forgotten to move the plant, though, and half the shoots started straining toward the light, growing in an unlikely sideways direction that seemed to defy gravity. Lacy and Alex were like that plant: Alex had moved off on a different course, and Lacy-well, she hadn’t. She’d withered up, wilted, gotten tangled in her own best intentions.

“I’m sorry,” Alex said. “I’m sorry you have to go through this.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Lacy replied.

Alex looked like she was going to speak again, but she didn’t, and Lacy had run out of conversation. She started out of the bathroom to find Lewis, but Alex called her back. “Lacy,” she said. “I remember.”

Lacy turned around to face her.

“He used to like the peanut butter on the top half of the bread and the marshmallow fluff on the bottom.” Alex smiled a little. “And he had the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen on a little boy. He could find anything I’d dropped-an earring, a contact lens, a straight pin-before it got lost permanently.”

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. Englishfrench-mathhistorychem. 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 cord of his power strip and instead smacked his head on the side of the desk. It brought tears to his eyes, or that’s what he told himself.

He pulled the plug, so that the monitor went black.

Then he sat back down and realized it hadn’t made a difference. He could still see those words, as clear as day, written across the screen. He could feel the give of the keys under his fingers:

Love, Peter.

He could hear them all laughing.

Peter glanced at his computer again. His mother always said that if something bad happened, you could look at it as a failure, or you could look at it as a chance to head in another direction.

Maybe this had been a sign.

Peter’s breathing was shallow as he emptied his school backpack of textbooks and three-ring binders, his calculator and pencils and crumpled tests he’d gotten back. Reaching beneath his mattress, he felt for the two pistols he’d been saving, just in case.

When I was little I used to pour salt on slugs. I liked watching them dissolve before my eyes. Cruelty is always sort of fun until you realize that something’s getting hurt.

It would be one thing to be a loser if it meant no one paid attention to you, but in school, it means you’re actively sought out. You’re the slug, and they’re holding all the salt. And they haven’t developed a conscience.

There’s a word we learned in social studies: schadenfreude. It’s when you enjoy watching someone else suffer. The real question, though, is why? I think part of it is just self-preservation. And part of it is because a group always feels more like a group when it’s banded together against an enemy. It doesn’t matter if that enemy has never done anything to hurt you-you just have to pretend you hate someone even more than you hate yourself.

You know why salt works on slugs? Because it dissolves in the water that’s part of a slug’s skin, so the water inside its body starts to flow out. The slug dehydrates. This works with snails, too. And with leeches. And with people like me.

With any creature, really, too thin-skinned to stand up for itself.

Five Months After

For four hours on the witness stand, Patrick relived the worst day of his life. The signal that had come through on the radio as he was driving; the stream of students running out of the school, as if it were hemorrhaging; the slip of his shoes in an oily pool of blood as he ran through the corridors. The ceiling, falling down around him. The screams for help. The memories that imprinted on his mind but didn’t register until later: a boy dying in the arms of his friend beneath the basketball hoop in the gym; the sixteen kids who were found crammed into a custodial closet three hours after the arrest, because they hadn’t known that the threat was over; the licorice smell of the Sharpie markers used to write numbers on the foreheads of the wounded, so that they could be identified later.

That first night, when the only people left in the school were the crime techs, Patrick had walked through the classrooms and the hallways. He felt, sometimes, like the keeper of memories-the one who had to facilitate that invisible transition between the way it used to be and the way it would be from now on. He’d stepped over bloodstains to enter rooms where students had huddled with teachers, waiting to be rescued, their jackets still draped over chairs as if they were about to return at any moment. There were bullet holes chewed into the lockers; yet in the library, some student had both the time and inclination to arrange the media specialist’s Gumby and Pokey figures into a compromising position. The fire sprinklers made a sea out of one corridor, but the walls were still plastered with bright posters advertising a spring dance.

Diana Leven held up a videocassette, the state’s exhibit number 522. “Can you identify this, Detective?”

“Yes, I took it from the main office of Sterling High. It showed footage from a camera posted in the cafeteria on March 6, 2007.”

“Is there an accurate representation on that tape?”

“Yes.”

“When was the last time you watched it?”

“The day before this trial started.”

“Has it been altered in any way?”

“No.”

Diana walked toward the judge. “I ask that this tape be published to the jury,” she said, and the same television unit that had been wheeled out earlier in the trial was brought back by a deputy.

The recording was grainy, but still intelligible. In the upper right-hand corner were the lunch ladies, slopping food onto plastic trays as students came through the line one by one, like drops through an intravenous tube. There were tables full of students-Patrick’s eye gravitated toward a central one, where Josie was sitting with her boyfriend.

He was eating her French fries.

From the left-hand door, a boy entered. He was wearing a blue knapsack, and although you could not see his face, he had the same slight build and stoop to his shoulders that someone who knew Peter Houghton would recognize. He dipped beneath the range of the camera. A shot rang out as a girl slumped backward off one of the cafeteria chairs, a bloodstain flowering on her white shirt.

Someone screamed, and then everyone was yelling, and there were more shots. Peter reappeared on camera, holding a gun. Students started stampeding, hiding underneath the tables. The soda machine, freckled with bullets, fizzed and sprayed all over the floor. Some students crumpled where they were shot, others who were wounded tried to crawl away. One girl who’d fallen was trampled by the rest of the students and finally lay still. When the only people left in the cafeteria were either dead or wounded, Peter turned in a circle. He moved down an aisle, pausing here and there. He walked up to the table beside Josie’s and put his gun down. He opened an untouched box of cereal still on a cafeteria tray, poured the cereal into a plastic bowl, and added milk from a carton. He swallowed five spoonfuls before he stopped eating, took a new clip out of his backpack, loaded it into his gun, and left the cafeteria.

Diana reached beneath the defense table and pulled out a small plastic bag and handed it to Patrick. “Do you recognize this, Detective Ducharme?”

The Rice Krispies box. “Yes.”

“Where did you find it?”

“In the cafeteria,” he said. “Sitting on the same table you just saw in the video.”

Patrick let himself look at Alex, sitting in the gallery. Until now, he couldn’t-he didn’t think he’d be able to do his job well, if he was worrying about how this information and level of detail were affecting her. Now, glancing at her, he could see how pale she’d gotten, how stiff she was in her chair. It took all of his self-control not to walk away from Diana, hop the bar, and kneel down beside her. It’s all right, he wanted to say. It’s almost over.

“Detective,” Diana said, “when you cornered the defendant in the locker room, what was he holding?”

“A handgun.”

“Did you see any other weapons around him?”

“Yes, a second handgun, around ten feet away.”

Diana lifted up a picture that had been enlarged. “Do you recognize this?”

“It’s the locker room where Peter Houghton was apprehended.” He pointed to a gun on the floor near the lockers, and then another a short distance away. “This is the weapon he dropped, Gun A,” Patrick said, “and this one, Gun B, is the other one that was on the floor.”

About ten feet past that, on the same linear path, was the body of Matt Royston. A wide pool of blood spread beneath his hip, and the top half of his head was missing.

There were gasps from the jury, but Patrick wasn’t paying attention. He was staring right at Alex, who was not looking at Matt’s body but at the spot beside it-a streak of blood from Josie’s forehead, where she had been found.

Life was a series of ifs-a very different outcome if you’d only played the lottery last night; if you had picked a different college; if you had invested in stocks instead of bonds; if you had not been taking your kindergartner to his first day of school the morning of 9/11. If just one teacher had stopped a kid, once, from tormenting Peter in the hall. If Peter had put the gun in his mouth, instead of pointing it at someone else. If Josie had been standing in front of Matt, she might have been the one buried in the cemetery. If Patrick had been a second later, she still might have been shot. If he hadn’t been the detective on this case, he would not have met Alex.

“Detective, did you collect these weapons?”

“Yes.”

“Were they tested for fingerprints?”

“Yes, by the state crime lab.”

“Did the lab find any fingerprints of value on Gun A?”

“Yes, one, on the grip.”

“Where did they obtain the fingerprints of Peter Houghton?”

“From the station, when we booked him.”

He walked the jury through the mechanics of fingerprint testing-the comparison of ten loci, the similarity in ridges and whorls, the computer program that verified the prints as a match.

“Did the lab compare the fingerprint on Gun A to any other person’s fingerprints?” Diana asked.

“Yes, Matt Royston’s. They were obtained from his body.”

“When the lab collected the print off the gun’s grip and compared it to Matt Royston’s fingerprints, were they able to determine whether or not there was a match?”

“There was no match.”

“And when the lab compared it to Peter Houghton’s fingerprints, were they able to determine whether or not there was a match?”

“Yes,” Patrick said. “There was.”

Diana nodded. “What about on Gun B? Any prints?”

“Just a partial one, on the trigger. Nothing of value.”

“What does that mean, exactly?”

Patrick turned to the jury. “A print of value in fingerprint typing is one that can be compared to another known print and either excluded or included as a match to that print. People leave fingerprints on items they touch all the time, but not necessarily ones we can use. They might be smudged or too incomplete to be considered forensically valuable.”

“So, Detective, you don’t know for a fact who left the fingerprint on Gun B.”

“No.”

“But it could have been Peter Houghton?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any evidence that anyone else at Sterling High School was carrying a weapon that day?”

“No.”

“How many weapons were eventually found in the locker room?”

“Four,” Patrick said. “One handgun with the defendant, one on the floor, and two sawed-off shotguns in a knapsack.”

“In addition to processing the weapons found in the locker room for fingerprints, did the lab do any other forensic testing on them?”

“Yes, a ballistics test.”

“Can you explain that?”

“Well,” Patrick said, “you shoot the gun into water, basically. Every bullet that comes out of a gun has markings on it that are put in place when a bullet twists its way through the barrel of the gun. That means you can type each bullet to a gun that has been fired by test-firing a gun to see what a bullet would look like once fired from it, and then matching up bullets that have been retrieved. You can also tell whether a gun has ever been fired at all by examining residue within the barrel.”

“Did you test all four weapons?”

“Yes.”

“And what were the results of your tests?”

“Only two of the four guns were actually fired,” Patrick said. “The handguns, A and B. Of the bullets that we found, all were determined to have come from Gun A. Gun B, when we retrieved it, had been jammed with a double feed. That means two bullets had entered the chamber at the same time, which keeps the gun from properly functioning. When the trigger was pulled, it locked up.”

“But you said Gun B was fired.”

“At least once.” Patrick looked up at Diana. “The bullet has not been recovered to date.”

Diana Leven led Patrick meticulously through the discovery of ten dead students and nineteen wounded ones. He started with the moment that he walked out of Sterling High with Josie Cormier in his arms and placed her in an ambulance, and ended with the last body being moved to the medical examiner’s morgue; then the judge adjourned court for the day.

After he got off the stand, Patrick talked with Diana for a moment about what would happen tomorrow. The double doors of the courtroom were open, and through them, Patrick could see reporters sucking the stories out of any angry parent who was willing to give an interview. He recognized the mother of a girl-Jada Knight-who’d been shot in the back while she was running from the cafeteria. “My daughter won’t go to school this year until eleven o’clock, because she can’t handle being there when third period starts,” the woman said. “Everything scares her. This has ruined her whole life; why should Peter Houghton’s punishment be any less?”

He had no desire to run the media gauntlet, and as the only witness for the day, he was bound to be mobbed. So instead, Patrick sat down on the wooden railing that separated the court professionals from the gallery.

“Hey.”

He turned at the sound of Alex’s voice. “What are you still doing here?” He would have assumed she was upstairs, springing Josie out of the sequestered witness room, as she had done yesterday.

“I could ask you the same thing.”

Patrick nodded toward the doorway. “I wasn’t in the mood to do battle.”

Alex came closer, until she was standing between his legs, and wrapped her arms around him. She buried her face against his neck, and when she took a deep, rattling breath, Patrick felt it in his own chest. “You could have fooled me,” she said.

Jordan McAfee was not having a good day. The baby had spit up on him on his way out the door. He had been ten minutes late for court because the goddamn media were multiplying like jackrabbits and there were no parking spots, and Judge Wagner had reprimanded him for his tardiness. Add to this the fact that for whatever reason, Peter had stopped communicating with Jordan except for the odd grunt, and that his first order of the morning would be to cross-examine the knight in shining armor who’d rushed into the school to confront the evil shooter-well, being a defense attorney didn’t get much more fabulous than this.

“Detective,” he said, approaching Patrick Ducharme on the witness stand, “after you finished with the medical examiner, you went back to the police department?”

“Yes.”

“You were holding Peter there, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“In a jail cell…with bars and a lock on it?”

“It’s a holding cell,” Ducharme corrected.

“Had Peter been charged with any crime yet?”

“No.”

“He wasn’t actually charged with anything until the following morning, is that right?”

“That’s correct.”

“Where did he stay that night?”

“At the Grafton County Jail.”

“Detective, did you speak to my client at all?” Jordan asked.

“Yes, I did.”

“What did you ask him?”

The detective folded his arms. “If he wanted some coffee.”

“Did he take you up on the offer?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ask him at all about the incident at the school?”

“I asked him what had happened,” Ducharme said.

“How did Peter respond?”

The detective frowned. “He said he wanted his mother.”

“Did he start crying?”

“Yes.”

“In fact, he didn’t stop crying, not the whole time you tried to question him, isn’t that true?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Did you ask him any other questions, Detective?”

“No.”

Jordan stepped forward. “You didn’t bother to, because my client was in no shape to be going through an interview.”

“I didn’t ask him any more questions,” Ducharme said evenly. “I have no idea what kind of shape he was in.”

“So you took a kid-a seventeen-year-old kid, who was crying for his mother-back to your holding cell?”

“Yes. But I told him I wanted to help him.”

Jordan glanced at the jury and let that statement sink in for a moment. “What was Peter’s response?”

“He looked at me,” the detective answered, “and he said, ‘They started it.’”

Curtis Uppergate had been a forensic psychiatrist for twenty-five years. He held degrees from three Ivy League medical schools and had a CV thick enough to serve as a doorstop. He was lily-white, but wore his shoulder-length gray hair cornrowed, and had come to court in a dashiki. Diana nearly expected him to call her Sista when she questioned him.

“What’s your field of expertise, Doctor?”

“I work with violent teenagers. I assess them on behalf of the court to determine the nature of their mental illnesses, if any, and figure out an appropriate treatment plan. I also advise the court as to what their state of mind may have been at the time a crime has been committed. I worked with the FBI to create their profiles of school shooters, and to examine parallels between cases at Thurston High, Paducah, Rocori, and Columbine.”

“When did you first become involved in this case?”

“Last April.”

“Did you review Peter Houghton’s records?”

“Yes,” Uppergate said. “I reviewed all the records I received from you, Ms. Leven-extensive school and medical records, police reports, interviews done by Detective Ducharme.”

“What, in particular, were you looking for?”

“Evidence of mental illness,” he said. “Physical explanations for the behavior. A psychosocial construct that might resemble those of other perpetrators of school violence.”

Diana glanced at the jury; their eyes were glazing over. “As a result of your work, did you reach any conclusion with a reasonable degree of medical certainty as to Peter Houghton’s mental state on March 6, 2007?”

“Yes,” Uppergate said, and he faced the jury, speaking slowly and clearly. “Peter Houghton was not suffering from any mental illness at the time he started shooting at Sterling High School.”

“Can you tell us how you reached that conclusion?”

“The definition of sanity implies being in touch with the reality of what you are doing at the time you do it. There’s evidence that Peter had been planning this attack for a while-from stockpiling ammunition and guns, to making lists of targeted victims, to rehearsing his Armageddon through a self-designed video game. The shooting was not a departure for Peter-it was something he had been considering all along, with great premeditation.”

“Are there other examples of Peter’s premeditation?”

“When he first reached the school and saw a friend in the parking lot, he tried to warn him off, for safety. He lit a pipe bomb in a car before going into the school, to serve as a diversion so that he could enter unimpeded with his guns. He concealed weapons that were preloaded. He targeted areas in the school where he himself had been victimized. These are not the acts of someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing-they’re the hallmarks of a rational, angry-perhaps suffering, but certainly not delusional-young man.”

Diana paced in front of the witness stand. “Doctor, were you able to compare information from past school shootings to this one, in order to support your conclusion that the defendant was sane and responsible for his actions?”

Uppergate flipped his braids over his shoulder. “None of the shooters from Columbine, Paducah, Thurston, or Rocori had status. It’s not that they’re loners, but in their minds, they perceive that they are not members of the group to the same degree as anyone else in that group. Peter was on the soccer team, for example, but was one of two students never put in to play. He was bright, but his grades didn’t reflect that. He had a romantic interest, but that interest went unreturned. The only venue where he did feel comfortable was in a world of his own creation-computer games where Peter was not only comfortable…he was God.”

“Does that mean he was living in a fantasy world on March sixth?”

“Absolutely not. If he had been, he wouldn’t have been planning his attack as rationally and methodically.”

Diana turned. “There’s been some evidence, Doctor, that Peter was the subject of bullying in school. Have you reviewed that information?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Has your research told you anything about the effect of bullying on kids like Peter?”

“In every single school shooting case,” Uppergate said, “the bullying card gets played. It’s the bullying, allegedly, that makes the school shooter snap one day and fight back with violence. However, in every other case-and this one, in my opinion-the bullying seems exaggerated by the shooter. The teasing isn’t significantly worse for the shooter than it is for anyone else at the school.”

“Then why shoot?”

“It becomes a public way to take control of a situation in which they usually feel powerless,” Curtis Uppergate said. “Which, again, means it’s something they’ve been planning for a while.”

“Your witness,” Diana said.

Jordan stood up and approached Dr. Uppergate. “When did you first meet Peter?”

“Well. We haven’t officially been introduced.”

“But you’re a psychiatrist?”

“Last time I checked,” Uppergate said.

“I thought the field of psychiatry was based on gaining a rapport with your client and getting to know what he thinks about the world and how he processes it.”

“That’s part of it.”

“That’s an incredibly important part of it, isn’t it?” Jordan asked.

“Yes.”

“Would you write a prescription for Peter today?”

“No.”

“Because you’d have to physically meet with him before you decided whether he was an appropriate candidate for that medicine, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Doctor, did you get a chance to talk to the school shooters from Thurston High?”

“Yes, I did,” Uppergate said.

“What about the boy from Paducah?”

“Yes.”

“Rocori?”

“Yes.”

“Not Columbine…”

“I’m a psychiatrist, Mr. McAfee,” Uppergate said. “Not a medium. However, I did speak at length to the families of the two boys. I read their diaries and examined their videos.”

“Doctor,” Jordan asked, “did you ever once speak directly to Peter Houghton?”

Curtis Uppergate hesitated. “No,” he said. “I did not.”

Jordan sat down, and Diana faced the judge. “Your Honor,” she said. “The prosecution rests.”

“Here,” Jordan said, tossing Peter half a sandwich as he entered the holding cell. “Or are you on a hunger strike, too?”

Peter glared at him, but unwrapped the sandwich and took a bite. “I don’t like turkey.”

“I don’t really care.” He leaned against the cement wall of the holding cell. “You want to tell me who peed in your Cheerios today?”

“Do you have any idea what it’s like to sit in that room and listen to all these people talk about me like I’m not there? Like I can’t even hear what they’re saying about me?”

“That’s the way the game’s played,” Jordan said. “Now, it’s our turn.”

Peter stood up and walked to the front of the cell. “Is that what this is to you? Some game?”

Jordan closed his eyes, counting to ten for patience. “Of course not.”

“How much money do you get paid?” Peter asked.

“That’s not your-”

“How much?”

“Ask your parents,” Jordan said flatly.

“You get paid whether I win or lose, right?”

Jordan hesitated, and then nodded.

“So you don’t really give a shit what the outcome is, do you?”

It struck Jordan, with some wonder, that Peter had the chops to be an excellent defense attorney. That sort of circular reasoning-the kind that left the person being grilled hung out to dry-was exactly what you aimed for in a courtroom.

“What?” Peter accused. “Now you’re laughing at me, too?”

“No. I was just thinking you’d be a good lawyer.”

Peter sank down again. “Great. Maybe the state prison offers that degree along with a GED.”

Jordan reached for the sandwich in Peter’s hand and took a bite. “Let’s just wait and see how it goes,” he said.

A jury was always impressed by King Wah’s record, and Jordan knew it. He’d interviewed over five hundred subjects. He’d been an expert witness at 248 trials, not including this one. He had written more papers than any other forensic psychiatrist with a specialty in post-traumatic stress disorder. And-here was the beautiful part-he’d taught three seminars that had been attended by the prosecution’s witness, Dr. Curtis Uppergate.

“Dr. Wah,” Jordan began, “when did you first begin to work on this case?”

“I was contacted by you, Mr. McAfee, in June. I agreed to meet with Peter at that time.”

“Did you?”

“Yes, for over ten hours of interviews. I also sat down and read the police reports, the medical and school records of both Peter and his older brother. I met with his parents. I then sent him to be examined by my colleague, Dr. Lawrence Ghertz, who is a pediatric neuropsychiatrist.”

“What does a pediatric neuropsychiatrist do?”

“Studies organic causes for mental symptomology and disorder in children.”

“What did Dr. Ghertz do?”

“He took several MRI scans of Peter’s brain,” King said. “Dr. Ghertz uses brain scans to show that there are structural changes in the adolescent brain that not only explain the timing of some major mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but also give biological reasons for some of the wild conduct that parents usually attribute to raging hormones. That’s not to say that there aren’t raging hormones in adolescents, but there’s also a paucity of the cognitive controls that are necessary for mature behavior.”

Jordan turned to the jury. “Did you get that? Because I’m lost…”

King grinned. “Layman’s terms? You can tell a lot about a kid by looking at his brain. There might actually be a physiological reason why, when you tell your seventeen-year-old to put the milk back in the fridge, he nods and then completely ignores you.”

“Did you send Peter to Dr. Ghertz because you thought he was bipolar or schizophrenic?”

“No. But part of my responsibility involves ruling those causes out before I begin to look at other reasons for his behavior.”

“Did Dr. Ghertz send you a report detailing his findings?”

“Yes.”

“Can you show us?” Jordan lifted up a diagram of a brain that he’d already entered as evidence, and handed it to King.

“Dr. Ghertz said that Peter’s brain looked very similar to a typical adolescent brain in that the prefrontal cortex was not as developed as you’d find in a mature adult brain.”

“Whoa,” Jordan said. “You’re losing me again.”

“The prefrontal cortex is right here, behind the forehead. It’s sort of like the president of the brain, in charge of calculated, rational thought. It’s also the last part of the brain to mature, which is why teenagers often get into so much trouble.” Then he pointed to a tiny spot on the diagram, centrally located. “This is called the amygdala. Since a teenager’s decision-making center isn’t completely turned on yet, they rely on this little piece of the brain instead. This is the impulsive epicenter of the brain-the one that houses feelings like fear and anger and gut instinct. Or in other words-the part of the brain that corresponds to ‘Because my friends thought it was a good idea, too.’”

Most of the jury chuckled, and Jordan caught Peter’s eye. He wasn’t slumped in the chair anymore; he was sitting up, listening carefully. “It’s fascinating, really,” King said, “because a twenty-year-old might be physiologically capable of making an informed decision…but a seventeen-year-old won’t be.”

“Did Dr. Ghertz perform any other psychological tests?”

“Yes. He did a second MRI, one that was performed while Peter was working on a simple task. Peter was given photographs of faces and asked to identify the emotions reflected on them. Unlike a test group of adults who got most of those assessments correct, Peter tended to make errors. In particular, he identified fearful expressions as angry, confused, or sad. The MRI scan showed that while he was focused on this task, it was the amygdala that was doing the work…not the prefrontal cortex.”

“What can you infer from that, Dr. Wah?”

“Well, Peter’s capacity for rational, planned, premeditated thought is still in its developmental stages. Physiologically, he just can’t do it yet.”

Jordan watched the jurors’ response to this statement. “Dr. Wah, you said you met with Peter as well?”

“Yes, at the correctional facility, for ten one-hour sessions.”

“Where did you meet with him?”

“In a conference room. I explained who I was, and that I was working with his attorney,” King said.

“Was Peter reluctant to speak to you?”

“No.” The psychiatrist paused. “He seemed to enjoy the company.”

“Did anything strike you about him, at first?”

“He seemed unemotional. Not crying, or smiling, or laughing, or showing hostility. In the business, we call it flat affect.”

“What did you two talk about?”

King looked at Peter and smiled. “The Red Sox,” he said. “And his family.”

“What did he tell you?”

“That Boston deserved another pennant. Which-as a Yankees fan myself-was enough to call into question his capacity for rational thought.”

Jordan grinned. “What did he say about his family?”

“He explained that he lived with his mother and father, and that his older brother Joey had been killed by a drunk driver about a year earlier. Joey had been a year older than Peter. We also talked about things he liked to do-mostly centered on programming and computers-and about his childhood.”

“What did he tell you about that?” Jordan asked.

“Most of Peter’s childhood memories involved situations where he was victimized either by other children or by adults whom he’d perceived as being able to help him, yet didn’t. He described everything from physical threats-Get out of my way or I’m going to punch your lights out; to physical actions-doing nothing more than walking down a hallway and being slammed up against the wall because he happened to get too close to someone walking past him; to emotional taunts-like being called homo or queer.”

“Did he tell you when this bullying started?”

“The first day of kindergarten. He got on the bus, was tripped as he walked down the aisle, and had his Superman lunch box thrown onto the highway. It continued up to shortly before the shooting, when he suffered public humiliation after his romantic interest in a classmate was revealed.”

“Doctor,” Jordan said, “didn’t Peter ask for help?”

“Yes, but even when it was given, the result backfired. Once, for example, after being shoved by a boy at school, Peter charged him. This was seen by a teacher, who brought both boys to the principal’s office for detention. In Peter’s mind, he’d defended himself, and yet he was being punished as well.” King relaxed on the stand. “More recent memories were colored by Peter’s brother’s death and his inability to live up to the same standards his brother had set as a student and a son.”

“Did Peter talk about his parents?”

“Yes. Peter loved his parents, but didn’t feel he could rely on them for protection.”

“Protection from what?”

“Troubles in school, feelings he was having, suicide ideation.”

Jordan turned toward the jury. “Based on your discussions with Peter, and Dr. Ghertz’s findings, were you able to diagnose Peter’s state of mind on March 6, 2007, with a reasonable degree of medical certainty?”

“Yes. Peter was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“Can you explain what that is?”

King nodded. “It’s a psychiatric disorder that can occur following an experience in which a person is oppressed or victimized. For example, we’ve all heard of soldiers who come home from war and can’t adjust to the world because of PTSD. People who suffer from PTSD often relive the experience through nightmares, have difficulty sleeping, feel detached. In extreme cases, after exposure to serious trauma, they might exhibit hallucinations or dissociation.”

“Are you saying that Peter was hallucinating on the morning of March sixth?”

“No. I believe that he was in a dissociative state.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s when you’re physically present, but mentally removed,” King explained. “When you can separate your feelings about an event from the knowledge of it.”

Jordan knit his brows together. “Hang on, Doctor. Do you mean that a person in a dissociative state could drive a car?”

“Absolutely.”

“And set up a pipe bomb?”

“Yes.”

“And load weapons?”

“Yes.”

“And fire those weapons?”

“Sure.”

“And all that time, that person wouldn’t know what he was doing?”

“Yes, Mr. McAfee,” King said. “That’s exactly right.”

“In your opinion, when did Peter slip into this dissociative state?”

“During our interviews, Peter explained that the morning of March sixth, he got up early and went to check a website for feedback on his video game. By accident, he pulled up an old file on his computer-the email he had sent to Josie Cormier, detailing his feelings for her. It was the same email that, weeks before, had been sent to the entire school, and that had preceded an even greater humiliation, when his pants were pulled down in the cafeteria. After he saw that email, he said, he can’t really remember the rest of what happened.”

“I pull up old files by accident on my computer all the time,” Jordan said, “but I don’t go into a dissociative state.”

“The computer had always been a safe haven for Peter. It was the vehicle he used to create a world that was comfortable for him, peopled by characters who appreciated him and whom he had control over, as he didn’t in real life. Having this one secure zone suddenly become yet another place where humiliation occurred is what triggered the break.”

Jordan crossed his arms, playing devil’s advocate. “I don’t know…we’re talking about an email here. Is it really fair to compare bullying to the trauma seen by war veterans in Iraq, or survivors from 9/11?”

“The thing that’s important to remember about PTSD is that a traumatic event affects different people differently. For example, for some, a violent rape might trigger PTSD. For others, a brief groping might trigger it. It doesn’t matter if the traumatic event is war, or a terrorist attack, or sexual assault, or bullying-what counts is where the subject is starting from, emotionally.”

King turned to the jury. “You might have heard, for example, of battered woman syndrome. It doesn’t make sense, on the outside, when a woman-even one who’s been victimized for years-kills her husband when he’s fast asleep.”

“Objection,” Diana said. “Does anyone see a battered woman on trial?”

“I’ll allow it,” Judge Wagner replied.

“Even when a battered woman is not immediately under physical threat, she psychologically believes she is, thanks to a chronic, escalating pattern of violence that’s caused her to suffer from PTSD. It’s living in this constant state of fear that something’s going to happen, that it’s going to keep happening, which leads her to pick up the gun at that moment, even though her husband is snoring. To her, he is still an immediate threat,” King said. “A child who is suffering from PTSD, like Peter, is terrified that the bully is going to kill him eventually. Even if the bully is not at that moment shoving him into a locker or punching him, it could happen at any second. And so, like the battered wife, he takes action even when-to you and me-nothing seems to warrant the attack.”

“Wouldn’t someone notice this sort of irrational fear?” Jordan asked.

“Probably not. A child who suffers from PTSD has made unsuccessful attempts to get help, and as the victimization continues, he stops asking for it. He withdraws socially, because he’s never quite sure when interaction is going to lead to another incident of bullying. He probably thinks of killing himself. He escapes into a fantasy world, where he can call the shots. However, he starts retreating there so often that it gets harder and harder to separate that from reality. During the actual incidents of bullying, a child with PTSD might retreat into an altered state of consciousness-a dissociation from reality to keep him from feeling pain or humiliation while the incident occurs. That’s exactly what I think happened to Peter on March sixth.”

“Even though none of the kids who’d bullied him were present in his bedroom when that email appeared?”

“Correct. Peter had spent his entire life being beaten and taunted and threatened, to the point where he believed he would be killed by those same kids if he didn’t do something. The email triggered a dissociative state, and when he went to Sterling High and fired shots, he was completely unaware of what he was doing.”

“How long can a dissociative state last?”

“It depends. Peter could have been dissociating for several hours.”

“Hours?” Jordan repeated.

“Absolutely. There’s no point during the shootings that illustrates to me conscious awareness of his actions.”

Jordan glanced at the prosecutor. “We all saw a video where Peter sat down after firing shots in the cafeteria and ate a bowl of cereal. Is that meaningful to your diagnosis?”

“Yes. In fact, I can’t think of clearer proof that Peter was still dissociating at that moment. You’ve got a boy who is completely unaware of the fact that he’s surrounded by classmates he’d either killed, wounded, or sent fleeing. He sits down and takes the time to calmly pour a bowl of Rice Krispies, unaffected by the carnage around him.”

“What about the fact that many of the children Peter fired at were not part of what could commonly be called the ‘popular crowd’? That there were special-needs children and scholars and even a teacher who became his victims?”

“Again,” the psychiatrist said, “we’re not talking about rational behavior. Peter wasn’t calculating his actions; at the moment he was shooting, he had separated himself from the reality of the situation. Anyone Peter encountered during those nineteen minutes was a potential threat.”

“In your opinion, when did Peter’s dissociative state end?” Jordan asked.

“When Peter was in custody, speaking to Detective Ducharme. That’s when he started reacting normally, given the horror of the situation. He began to cry and ask for his mother-which indicates both a recognition of his surroundings and an appropriate, childlike response.”

Jordan leaned against the rail of the jury box. “There’s been some evidence in this case, Doctor, that Peter wasn’t the only child in the school who was bullied. So why did he react this way to it?”

“Well, as I said, different people have different responses to stress. In Peter’s case, I saw an extreme emotional vulnerability, which, in fact, was the reason he was teased. Peter didn’t play by the codes of boys. He wasn’t a big athlete. He wasn’t tough. He was sensitive. And difference is not always respected-particularly when you’re a teenager. Adolescence is about fitting in, not standing out.”

“How does a child who is emotionally vulnerable wind up one day carrying four guns into a school and shooting twenty-nine people?”

“Part of it is the PTSD-Peter’s response to chronic victimization. But a big part of it, too, is the society that created both Peter and those bullies. Peter’s response is one enforced by the world he lives in. He sees violent video games selling off the shelves at stores; he listens to music that glorifies murder and rape. He watches his tormentors shove him, strike him, push him, demean him. He lives in a state, Mr. McAfee, whose license plate reads ‘Live Free or Die.’” King shook his head. “All Peter did, one morning, was turn into the person he’d been expected to be all along.”

Nobody knew this, but once, Josie had broken up with Matt Royston.

They had been going out for nearly a year when Matt picked her up one Saturday night. An upperclassman on the football team-someone Brady knew-was having a party at his house. You up for it? Matt had asked, even though he’d already been driving there when he asked her.

The house had been pulsing like a carnival by the time they arrived, cars parked on the curb and the sidewalk and the lawn. Through the upstairs windows, Josie could see people dancing; as they walked up the driveway, a girl was throwing up in the bushes.

Matt didn’t let go of her hand. They twined through wall-to-wall bodies, embroidering their path to the kitchen, where the keg was set up, and then back to the dining room, where the table had been tipped on its side to create a bigger dance floor. The kids they passed were not only from Sterling High, but other towns, too. Some had the red-rimmed, loose-jawed stare that came from smoking pot. Guys and girls sniffed at each other, circling for sex.

She didn’t know anyone, but that wasn’t important, because she was with Matt. They pressed closer, in the heat of a hundred other bodies. Matt slid his leg between hers while the music beat like blood, and she lifted up her arms to fit herself against him.

Everything had gone wrong when she went to use the bathroom. First, Matt had wanted to follow her-he said it wasn’t safe for her to be alone. She finally convinced him it would take all of thirty seconds, but as she started off, a tall boy wearing a Green Day shirt and a hoop earring turned too quickly and spilled his beer on her. Oh, shit, he’d said.

It’s okay. Josie had a tissue in her pocket; she took it out and started to blot her blouse dry.

Let me, the boy said, and he took the napkin from her. At the same time they both realized how ridiculous it was trying to soak up that much liquid with a tiny square of Kleenex. He started laughing, and then she did, and his hand was still lightly resting on her shoulder when Matt came up and punched him in the face.

What are you doing! Josie had screamed. The boy was out cold on the floor, and other people were trying to get out of the way but stay close enough to see the fight. Matt grabbed her wrist so hard that she thought it was going to snap. He dragged her out of the house and into the car, where she sat in stony silence.

He was just trying to help, Josie said.

Matt put the car into reverse and lurched backward. You want to stay? You want to be a slut?

He’d started to drive like a lunatic-running red lights, taking corners on two wheels, doubling the speed limit. She told him to slow down three times, and then she just closed her eyes and hoped it would be over soon.

When Matt had screeched to a stop in front of her house, she turned to him, unusually calm. I don’t want to go out with you anymore, she had said, and she got out of the car. His voice trailed her to the front door: Good. Why would I want to go out with a fucking whore, anyway?

She had managed to slip by her mother, feigning a headache. In the bathroom, she’d stared at herself in the mirror, trying to figure out who this girl was who had suddenly grown such a backbone, and why she still felt like crying. She’d lain in her bed for an hour, tears leaking from the corners of her eyes, wondering why-if she’d been the one to end it-she felt so miserable.

When the phone rang after three in the morning, Josie grabbed it and hung it up again, so that when her mother picked up, she would assume it had been a wrong number. She held her breath for a few seconds, and then lifted the receiver and punched in *69. She knew, even before she saw the familiar string of numbers, that it was Matt.

Josie, he had said, when she called back. Were you lying?

About what?

Loving me?

She had pressed her face into the pillow. No, she whispered.

I can’t live without you, Matt had said, and then she heard something that sounded like a bottle of pills being shaken.

Josie had frozen. What are you doing?

What do you care?

Her mind had started racing. She had her driver’s permit, but couldn’t take the car out herself, and not after dark. She lived too far away from Matt to run there. Don’t move, she said. Just…don’t do anything.

Downstairs in the garage, she’d found a bicycle she hadn’t ridden since she was in middle school, and she pedaled the four miles to Matt’s house. By the time she got there, it had been raining; her hair and her clothes were glued to her skin. The light was still on in Matt’s bedroom, which was on the first floor. Josie knocked on the window, and he opened it so that she could crawl inside.

On his desk was a bottle of Tylenol and another one, open, of Jim Beam. Josie faced him. Did you-

But Matt wrapped his arms around her. He smelled of liquor. You told me not to. I’d do anything for you. Then he had pulled back from her. Would you do anything for me?

Anything, she vowed.

Matt had gathered her into his arms. Tell me you didn’t mean it.

She felt a cage coming down around her; too late she realized that Matt had her trapped by the heart. And like any unwitting animal that was well and truly caught, Josie could escape only by leaving a piece of herself behind.

I’m so sorry, Josie had said at least a thousand times that night, because it was all her fault.

“Dr. Wah,” Diana said, “how much were you paid for your work on this case?”

“My fee is two thousand dollars per day.”

“Would it be fair to say that one of the most important components of diagnosing the defendant was the time you spent interviewing him?”

“Absolutely.”

“During the course of those ten hours, you were relying on him to be truthful with you in his recollection of events, right?”

“Yes.”

“You’d have no way of knowing if he wasn’t being truthful, would you?”

“I’ve been doing this for some time, Ms. Leven,” the psychiatrist said. “I’ve interviewed enough people to know when someone’s trying to put one over on me.”

“Part of what you use in determining whether or not a teen is putting one over on you is taking a look at the circumstances they’re in, correct?”

“Sure.”

“And the circumstances in which you found Peter included being locked up in jail for multiple first-degree murders?”

“That’s right.”

“So, basically,” Diana said, “Peter had a huge incentive to find a way out.”

“Or, Ms. Leven,” Dr. Wah countered, “you could also say he had nothing left to lose by telling the truth.”

Diana pressed her lips together; a yes or no answer would have done just fine. “You said that part of your diagnosis of PTSD came from the fact that the defendant was attempting to get help, and couldn’t. Was this based on information he gave you during your interviews?”

“Yes, corroborated by his parents, and some of the teachers who testified for you, Ms. Leven.”

“You also said that part of your diagnosis of PTSD was illustrated by Peter’s retreat into a fantasy world, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And you based that on the computer games that Peter told you about during your interviews?”

“Correct.”

“Isn’t it true that when you sent Peter to Dr. Ghertz, you told him he was going to have some brain scans done?”

“Yes.”

“Couldn’t Peter have told Dr. Ghertz that a smiling face looked angry, if he thought it would help you out with a diagnosis?”

“I suppose it would be possible…”

“You also said, Doctor, that reading an email the morning of March sixth is what put Peter into a dissociative state, one strong enough to last through Peter’s entire killing spree at Sterling High-”

“Objection-”

“Sustained,” the judge said.

“Did you base that conclusion on anything other than what Peter Houghton told you-Peter, who was sitting in a jail cell, charged with ten murders and nineteen attempted murders?”

King Wah shook his head. “No, but any other psychiatrist would have done the same.”

Diana just raised a brow. “Any psychiatrist who stood to make two thousand bucks a day,” she said, and even before Jordan objected she withdrew her remark. “You said that Peter was suffering from suicide ideation.”

“Yes.”

“So he wanted to kill himself?”

“Yes. That’s very common for patients with PTSD.”

“Detective Ducharme has testified that there were one hundred sixteen bullet casings found in the high school that morning. Another thirty unspent rounds were found on Peter’s person, and another fifty-two unspent rounds were found in the backpack he was carrying, along with two guns he didn’t use. So, do the math for me, Doctor. How many bullets are we talking about?”

“One hundred and ninety-eight.”

Diana faced him. “In a span of nineteen minutes, Peter had two hundred chances to kill himself, instead of every other student he encountered at Sterling High. Is that right, Doctor?”

“Yes. But there is an extremely fine line between a suicide and a homicide. Many depressed people who have made the decision to shoot themselves choose, at the last moment, to shoot someone else instead.”

Diana frowned. “I thought Peter was in a dissociated state,” she said. “I thought he was incapable of making choices.”

“He was. He was pulling the trigger without any thought of consequence or knowledge of what he was doing.”

“Either that, or it was a tissue-paper line he felt like crossing, right?”

Jordan stood up. “Objection. She’s bullying my witness.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Jordan,” Diana snapped, “you can’t use your defense on me.”

“Counselors,” the judge warned.

“You also testified, Doctor, that this dissociative state of Peter’s ended when Detective Ducharme began to ask him questions at the police station, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Would it be fair to say that you based this assumption on the fact that at that moment, Peter started to respond in an appropriate manner, given the situation he was in?”

“Yes.”

“Then how do you explain how, hours earlier, when three officers pointed a gun at Peter and told him to drop his weapon, he was able to do what they asked?”

Dr. Wah hesitated. “Well.”

“Isn’t that an appropriate response, when three policemen have their weapons drawn and pointed at you?”

“He put the gun down,” the psychiatrist said, “because even on a subliminal level, he understood that otherwise, he was going to be shot.”

“But Doctor,” Diana said. “I thought you told us that Peter wanted to die.”

She sat back down, satisfied that Jordan could do nothing on redirect that would damage the headway she’d made. “Dr. Wah,” he said, “you spent a lot of time with Peter, didn’t you?”

“Unlike some doctors in my field,” he said pointedly, “I actually believe in meeting the client you’re going to be talking about in court.”

“Why is this important?”

“To build a rapport,” the psychiatrist said. “To foster a relationship between doctor and patient.”

“Would you take everything a patient told you at face value?”

“Certainly not, especially under these circumstances.”

“In fact, there are many ways to corroborate a client’s story, aren’t there?”

“Of course. In Peter’s case, I spoke with his parents. There were instances in the school records where bullying was mentioned-although there was no response from the administration. The police package I received supported Peter’s statement about his email being sent out to several hundred members of the school community.”

“Did you find any corroborative points that helped you diagnose the dissociative state Peter went into on March sixth?” Jordan asked.

“Yes. Although the police investigation stated that Peter had created a list of target victims, there were far more people shot who were not on the list…who were, in fact, students he didn’t even know by name.”

“Why is that important?”

“Because it tells me that at the time he was shooting, he wasn’t targeting individual students. He was merely going through the motions.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Jordan said, and he nodded to Diana.

She looked at the psychiatrist. “Peter told you he had been humiliated in the cafeteria,” she said. “Did he mention any other specific places?”

“The playground. The school bus. The boys’ bathroom and the locker room.”

“When Peter started shooting at Sterling High, did he go into the principal’s office?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“How about the library?”

“No.”

“The staff lounge?”

Dr. Wah shook his head. “No.”

“The art studio?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“In fact, Peter went from the cafeteria, to the bathrooms, to the gym, to the locker room. He went methodically from one venue where he’d been bullied to the next, right?”

“It seems so.”

“You said he was going through the motions, Doctor,” Diana said. “But wouldn’t you call that a plan?”

When Peter got back to the jail that night, the detention officer who took him to his cell handed him a letter. “You missed mail call,” he said, and Peter couldn’t speak, so unaccustomed was he to that concentrated a dose of kindness.

He sat down with his back to the wall on the lower bunk and surveyed the envelope. He was a little nervous, now, about mail-he had been since Jordan reamed him for talking to that reporter. But this envelope wasn’t typed, like that one had been. This letter was handwritten, with little puffy circles floating over the i’s like clouds.

He ripped it open and unfolded the letter inside. It smelled like oranges.

Dear Peter,

You don’t know me by name, but I was number 9. That’s how I left the school, with a big magic marker label on my forehead. You tried to kill me.

I am not at your trial, so don’t try to find me in the crowd. I couldn’t stand being in that town anymore, so my parents moved a month ago. I start school in a week here in Minnesota, and already people have heard about me. They only know me as a victim from Sterling High. I don’t have interests, I don’t have a personality, I don’t even have a history, except the one you gave me.

I had a 4.0 average but I don’t care very much about grades anymore. What’s the point. I used to have all these dreams, but now I don’t know if I’ll go to college, since I still can’t sleep through the night. I can’t deal with people who sneak up behind me either, or doors that slam really loud, or fireworks. I’ve been in therapy long enough to tell you one thing: I’m never going to set foot in Sterling again.

You shot me in the back. The doctors said I was lucky-that if I’d sneezed or turned to look at you I would be in a wheelchair now. Instead, I just have to deal with the people who stare when I forget and put on a tank top-anyone can see the scars from the bullet and the chest tubes and the stitches. I don’t care-they used to stare at the zits on my face; now they just have another place to focus their attention.

I’ve thought about you a lot. I think you should go to jail. It’s fair, and this wasn’t, and there’s a kind of balance in that.

I was in your French class, did you know that? I sat in the row by the window, second from the back. You always seemed sort of mysterious, and I liked your smile.

I would have liked to be your friend.

Sincerely,

Angela Phlug

Peter folded the letter and slipped it inside his pillowcase. Ten minutes later, he took it out again. He read it all night long, over and over, until the sun rose; until he did not need to see the words to recite it by heart.

Lacy had dressed for her son. Although it was nearly eighty-five degrees outside, she was wearing a sweater she had dug out of a box in the attic, a pink angora one that Peter had liked to stroke like a kitten when he was tiny. Around her wrist was a bracelet Peter had made her in fourth grade by rolling up tiny bits of magazines into splashy colored beads. She had on a gray patterned skirt that Peter had laughed at once, saying it looked like a computer’s motherboard, and wasn’t that sort of fitting. And her hair was braided neatly, because she remembered how the tail had brushed Peter’s face the last time she’d kissed him good night.

She’d made a promise to herself. No matter how hard this got, no matter how much she had to sob her way through the questions, she would not take her eyes off Peter. He would be, she decided, like the pictures of white beaches that birthing mothers sometimes brought in as a focal point. His face would force her to concentrate, even though her pulse was skittish and her heart was off a beat; she would show Peter that there was still someone steadfastly watching over him.

As Jordan McAfee called her to the stand, the strangest thing happened. She walked in with the bailiff, but instead of marching toward the tiny wooden balcony where the witness was to sit, her body moved of its own accord in the other direction. Diana Leven knew where she was heading before Lacy did herself-she stood up to object, but then decided against it. Lacy’s step was quick, her arms flat at her sides, until she was positioned in front of the defense table. She knelt down beside Peter, so that his face was the only thing she could see in her range of vision. Then she reached out with her left hand and she touched his face.

His skin was still as smooth as a child’s, warm to the touch. When she cupped his cheek, his lashes fanned over her thumb. She had visited her son weekly in the jail, but there had always been a line between them. This-the feeling of him underneath her own hands, vital and real-was the kind of gift you had to take out of its box every now and then, hold aloft, marvel at, so you didn’t forget that it was still in your possession. Lacy remembered the moment Peter had first been placed in her arms, still slick with vernix and blood, his raw, red mouth round with a newborn’s cry, his arms and legs splayed in this suddenly infinite space. Leaning forward, she did now the same thing she’d done the first time she’d met her son: closed her eyes, winged a prayer, and kissed his forehead.

A bailiff touched her shoulder. “Ma’am,” he began.

Lacy shrugged him off and got to her feet. She walked to the witness box and unhooked the latch of the gate, let herself inside.

Jordan McAfee approached her, holding a box of Kleenex. He turned his back so that the jury could not see him speaking. “You okay?” he whispered. Lacy nodded, faced Peter, and offered up a smile like a sacrifice.

“Can you state your name for the record?” Jordan asked.

“Lacy Houghton.”

“Where do you live?”

“1616 Goldenrod Lane, Sterling, New Hampshire.”

“Who lives with you?”

“My husband, Lewis,” Lacy said. “And my son, Peter.”

“Do you have any other children, Ms. Houghton?”

“I had a son, Joseph, but he was killed by a drunk driver last year.”

“Can you tell us,” Jordan McAfee said, “when you first became aware that something had happened at Sterling High School on March sixth?”

“I was on call overnight at the hospital. I’m a midwife. After I had finished delivering a baby that morning. I went out to the nurses’ station, and they were all gathered around the radio. There had been an explosion at the high school.”

“What did you do when you heard?”

“I told someone to cover for me, and I drove to the school. I needed to make sure that Peter was all right.”

“How did Peter usually get to school?”

“He drove,” Lacy said. “He has a car.”

“Ms. Houghton, tell me about your relationship with Peter.”

Lacy smiled. “He’s my baby. I had two sons, but Peter was the one who was always quieter, more sensitive. He always needed a little more encouragement.”

“Were you two close when he was growing up?”

“Absolutely.”

“How was Peter’s relationship with his brother?”

“It was fine…”

“And his father?”

Lacy hesitated. She could feel Lewis in the room as surely as if he were beside her, and she thought about him walking in the rain through the cemetery. “I think that Lewis had a tighter bond with Joey, while Peter and I have more in common.”

“Did Peter ever tell you about the problems he had with other kids?”

“Yes.”

“Objection,” the prosecutor said. “Hearsay.”

“I’m going to overrule it for now,” the judge answered. “But be careful where you’re going, Mr. McAfee.”

Jordan turned to her again. “Why do you think Peter had problems with those kids?”

“He’d get picked on because he wasn’t like them. He wasn’t very athletic. He didn’t like to play cops and robbers. He was artistic and creative and thoughtful, and kids made fun of him for that.”

“What did you do?”

“I tried,” Lacy admitted, “to toughen him up.” As she spoke she directed her words at Peter, and hoped he could read it as an apology. “What does any mother do when she sees her child being teased by someone else? I told Peter I loved him; that kids like that didn’t know anything. I told him that he was amazing and compassionate and kind and smart, all the things we want adults to be. I knew that all the attributes he was teased for, at age five, were going to work in his favor by the time he was thirty-five…but I couldn’t get him there overnight. You can’t fast-forward your child’s life, no matter how much you want to.”

“When did Peter start high school, Ms. Houghton?”

“In the fall of 2004.”

“Was Peter still being picked on there?”

“Worse than ever,” Lacy said. “I even asked his brother to keep an eye out for him.”

Jordan walked toward her. “Tell me about Joey.”

“Everybody liked Joey. He was smart, an excellent athlete. He could relate just as easily to adults as he could to kids his own age. He…well, he cut a swath through that school.”

“You must have been very proud of him.”

“I was. But I think that because of Joey, teachers and students had a certain sort of idea in mind for a Houghton boy, before Peter even arrived. And when he did get there, and people realized he wasn’t like Joey, it only made things worse for him.” She watched Peter’s face transform as she spoke, like the change of a season. Why hadn’t she taken the time before, when she had it, to tell Peter that she understood? That she knew Joey had cast such a wide shadow, it was hard to find the sunlight?

“How old was Peter when Joey died?”

“It was at the end of his sophomore year.”

“That must have been devastating for the family,” Jordan said.

“It was.”

“What did you do to help Peter deal with his grief?”

Lacy glanced down at her lap. “I wasn’t in any shape to help Peter. I had a very hard time helping myself.”

“What about your husband? Was he a resource for Peter then?”

“I think we were both just trying to make it through one day at a time…. If anything, Peter was the one who was holding the family together.”

“Mrs. Houghton, did Peter ever say that he wanted to hurt people at school?”

Lacy’s throat tightened. “No.”

“Was there ever anything in Peter’s personality that led you to believe he was capable of an act like this?”

“When you look into your baby’s eyes,” Lacy said softly, “you see everything you hope they can be…not everything you wish they won’t become.”

“Did you ever find any plans or notes to indicate that Peter was plotting this event?”

A tear coursed down her cheek. “No.”

Jordan softened his voice. “Did you look, Mrs. Houghton?”

She thought back to the moment she’d cleared out Joey’s desk; how she’d stood over the toilet and flushed the drugs she’d found hidden in his drawer. “No,” Lacy confessed. “I didn’t. I thought I was helping him. After Joey died, all I wanted to do was keep Peter close. I didn’t want to invade his privacy; I didn’t want to fight with him; I didn’t want anyone else to ever hurt him. I just wanted him to be a child forever.” She glanced up, crying harder now. “But you can’t do that, if you’re a parent. Because part of your job is letting them grow up.”

There was a clatter in the gallery as a man in the back stood up, nearly upending a television camera. Lacy had never seen him before. He had thinning black hair and a mustache; his eyes were on fire. “Guess what,” he spat out. “My daughter Maddie is never going to grow up.” He pointed at a woman beside him, and then further forward on a bench. “Neither is her daughter. Or his son. You goddamned bitch. If you’d done your job better, I could still be doing my job.”

The judge began to smack his gavel. “Sir,” he said. “Sir, I have to ask you to-”

“Your son’s a monster. He’s a fucking monster,” the man yelled, as two bailiffs reached his seat and grabbed him by the upper arms, dragging him out of the courtroom.

Once, Lacy had been present at the birth of an infant that was missing half its heart. The family had known that their child would not live; they chose to carry through with the pregnancy, in the hope that they could have a few brief moments on this earth with her before she was gone for good. Lacy had stood in a corner of the room as the parents held their daughter. She didn’t study their faces; she just couldn’t. Instead, she focused on the medical needs of that newborn. She watched it, still and frost-blue, move one tiny fist in slow motion, like an astronaut navigating space. Then, one by one, her fingers unfurled and she let go.

Lacy thought of those miniature fingers, of slipping away. She turned to Peter. I’m so sorry, she mouthed silently. Then she covered her face with her hands and sobbed.

Once the judge had called for a recess and the jury had filed out, Jordan moved toward the bench. “Judge, the defense asks to be heard,” he said. “We’d like to move for a mistrial.”

Even with his back to her, he could feel Diana rolling her eyes. “How convenient.”

“Well, Mr. McAfee,” the judge said, “on what grounds?”

The grounds that I’ve got absolutely nothing better to salvage my case, Jordan thought. “Your Honor, there’s been an incredibly emotional outburst from the father of a victim in front of the jury. There’s no way that kind of speech can be ignored, and there’s no instruction you can give them that will unring that bell.”

“Is that all, Counselor?”

“No,” Jordan said. “Prior to this, the jury may not have known that family members of the victims were sitting in the gallery. Now they do-and they also know that every move they make is being watched by those same people. That’s a tremendous amount of pressure to put on a jury in a case that’s already extremely emotional and highly publicized. How are they supposed to put aside the expectations of these family members and do their jobs fairly and impartially?”

“Are you kidding?” Diana said. “Who did the jury think was in the gallery? Vagrants? Of course it’s full of people who were affected by the shootings. That’s why they’re here.”

Judge Wagner glanced up. “Mr. McAfee, I’m not declaring a mistrial. I understand your concern, but I think I can address it with an instruction to the jurors to disregard any sort of emotional outburst from the gallery. Everyone involved in this case understands that emotions are running high, and that people may not always be able to control themselves. However, I’ll also issue a cautionary instruction to the gallery to restrain themselves, or I will close the courtroom to observers.”

Jordan sucked in his breath. “Please do note my exception, Your Honor.”

“Of course, Mr. McAfee,” he said. “See you in fifteen minutes.”

As the judge exited for chambers, Jordan headed back to the defense table, trying to divine some sort of magic that would save Peter. The truth was, no matter what King Wah had said, no matter how clear the explanation of PTSD, no matter if the jury completely empathized with Peter-Jordan had forgotten one salient point: they would always feel sorrier for the victims.

Diana smiled at him on her way out of the courtroom. “Nice try,” she said.

Selena’s favorite room in the courthouse was tucked near the janitor’s closet and filled with old maps. She had no idea what they were doing in a courthouse instead of a library, but she liked to hide up there sometimes when she got tired of watching Jordan strut around in front of the bench. She’d come here a few times during the trial to nurse Sam on the days they didn’t have a sitter to watch him.

Now she led Lacy into her haven and sat her down in front of a world map that had the southern hemisphere as its center. Australia was purple, New Zealand green. It was Selena’s favorite. She liked the red dragons painted into the seas, and the fierce storm clouds in the corners. She liked the calligraphed compass, drawn for direction. She liked thinking that the world might look completely different from another angle.

Lacy Houghton had not stopped crying, and Selena knew she had to-or the cross-examination was going to be a disaster. She sat down beside Lacy. “Can I get you something? Soup? Coffee?”

Lacy shook her head and wiped her nose with a tissue. “I can’t do anything to save him.”

“That’s Jordan’s job,” Selena said, although to be frank, she couldn’t imagine a scenario for Peter that did not involve serious jail time. She racked her brain, trying to think of what else she could say or do to calm Lacy down, just as Sam reached up and yanked on one of her braids.

Bingo.

“Lacy,” Selena said. “Do you mind holding him while I look for something in my bag?”

Lacy lifted her gaze. “You…you don’t mind?”

Selena shook her head and transferred the baby to her lap. Sam stared up at Lacy, diligently trying to fit his fist in his mouth. “Gah,” he said.

A smile ghosted across Lacy’s face. “Little man,” she whispered, and she shifted the baby so that she could hold him more firmly.

“Excuse me?”

Selena turned to see the door crack open and Alex Cormier’s face peek inside. She immediately stood up. “Your Honor, you can’t come in-”

“Let her,” Lacy said.

Selena stepped back as the judge walked into the room and sat down beside Lacy. She put a Styrofoam cup on the table and reached out, smiling a little as Sam grabbed onto her pinky finger and tugged on it. “The coffee here is awful, but I brought you some anyway.”

“Thanks.”

Selena moved gingerly behind the stacks of maps until she was standing behind the two women, watching them with the same stunned curiosity she’d have shown if a lioness cozied up to an impala instead of eating it.

“You did well in there,” the judge said.

Lacy shook her head. “I didn’t do well enough.”

“She won’t ask you much on cross, if anything.”

Lacy lifted the baby to her chest and stroked his back. “I don’t think I can go back in there,” she said, her voice hitching.

“You can, and you will,” the judge said. “Because Peter needs you to.”

“They hate him. They hate me.”

Judge Cormier put her hand on Lacy’s shoulder. “Not everyone,” she said. “When we go back, I’m going to be sitting in the front row. You don’t have to look at the prosecutor. You just look at me.”

Selena’s jaw dropped. Often, with fragile witnesses or young children, they’d plant a person as a focal point to make testifying less scary. To make them feel that out of that whole crowd of people, they had at least one friend.

Sam found his thumb and started to suck on it, falling asleep against Lacy’s chest. Selena watched Alex reach out, stroke the dark marabou tufts of her son’s hair. “Everyone thinks you make mistakes when you’re young,” the judge said to Lacy. “But I don’t think we make any fewer when we’re grown up.”

As Jordan walked into the holding cell where Peter was being kept, he was already doing damage control. “It’s not going to hurt us,” he announced. “The judge is going to give the jury instructions to disregard that whole outburst.”

Peter sat on the metal bench, his head in his hands.

“Peter,” Jordan said. “Did you hear me? I know it looked bad, and I know it was upsetting, but legally, it isn’t going to affect your-”

“I need to tell her why I did it,” Peter interrupted.

“Your mother?” Jordan said. “You can’t. She’s still sequestered.” He hesitated. “Look, as soon as I can get you to talk to her, I-”

“No. I mean, I have to tell everyone.”

Jordan looked at his client. Peter was dry-eyed; his fists rested on the bench. When he lifted his gaze, it wasn’t the terrified face of the child he’d sat beside in court on the first day of the trial. It was someone who had grown up, overnight.

“We’re getting out your side of the story,” Jordan said. “You just have to be patient. I know this is hard to believe, but it’s going to come together. We’re doing the best we can.”

“We’re not,” Peter said. “You are.” He stood up, walking closer to Jordan. “You promised. You said it was our turn. But when you said that, you meant your turn, didn’t you? You never intended for me to get up there and tell everyone what really happened.”

“Did you see what they did to your mother?” Jordan argued. “Do you have any idea what’s going to happen to you if you get up there and sit in that witness box?”

In that instant, something in Peter broke: not his anger, and not his hidden fear, but that last spider-thread of hope. Jordan thought of the testimony Michael Beach had given, about how it looked when the life left a person’s face. You did not have to witness someone dying to see that.

“Jordan,” Peter said. “If I’m going to spend the rest of my life in jail, I want them to hear my side of the story.”

Jordan opened his mouth, intending to tell his client absolutely fucking not, he would not be taking the stand and ruining the tower of cards Jordan had created in the hope of an acquittal. But who was he kidding? Certainly not Peter.

He took a deep breath. “All right,” he said. “Tell me what you’re going to say.”

Diana Leven didn’t have any questions for Lacy Houghton, which-Jordan knew-was most likely a blessing. In addition to the fact that there wasn’t anything the prosecutor could ask her that hadn’t been covered better by Maddie Shaw’s father, he hadn’t known how much more stress Lacy could take without being rendered incomprehensible on the stand. As she was escorted from the courtroom, the judge looked up from his file. “Your next witness, Mr. McAfee?”

Jordan inhaled deeply. “The defense calls Peter Houghton.”

Behind him, there was a flurry of activity. Rustling, as reporters dug fresh pens out of their pockets and turned to a fresh page on their pads. Murmurs, as the families of the victims traced Peter’s steps to the witness stand. He could see Selena off to one side, her eyes wide at this unplanned development.

Peter sat down and stared only at Jordan, just as he’d told him to. Good boy, he thought. “Are you Peter Houghton?”

“Yes,” Peter said, but he wasn’t close enough to the microphone for it to carry. He leaned forward and repeated the word. “Yes,” he said, and this time, an unholy screech from the PA system rang through the courtroom speakers.

“What grade are you in, Peter?”

“I was a junior when I got arrested.”

“How old are you now?”

“Eighteen.”

Jordan walked toward the jury box. “Peter, are you the person who went to Sterling High School the morning of March 6, 2007, and shot and killed ten people?”

“Yes.”

“And wounded nineteen others?”

“Yes.”

“And caused damage to countless other people, and to a great deal of property?”

“I know,” Peter said.

“You’re not denying that today, are you?”

“No.”

“Can you tell the jury,” Jordan asked, “why you did it?”

Peter looked into his eyes. “They started it.”

“Who?”

“The bullies. The jocks. The ones who called me a freak my whole life.”

“Do you remember their names?”

“There are so many of them,” Peter said.

“Can you tell us why you felt you had to resort to violence?”

Jordan had told Peter that whatever he did, he could not get angry. That he had to stay calm and collected while he spoke, or his testimony would backfire on him-even more than Jordan already expected. “I tried to do what my mom wanted me to do,” Peter explained. “I tried to be like them, but that didn’t work out.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I tried out for soccer, but never got any time on the field. Once, I helped some kids play a practical joke on a teacher by moving his car from the parking lot into the gym…. I got detention, but the other kids didn’t, because they were on the basketball team and had a game on Saturday.”

“But, Peter,” Jordan said, “why this?”

Peter wet his lips. “It wasn’t supposed to end this way.”

“Did you plan to kill all those people?”

They had rehearsed this in the holding cell. All Peter had to say was what he’d said before, when Jordan had coached him. No. No I didn’t.

Peter looked down at his hands. “When I did it in the game,” he said quietly, “I won.”

Jordan froze. Peter had broken from the script, and now Jordan couldn’t find his line. He only knew that the curtain was going to close before he finished. Scrambling, he replayed Peter’s response in his mind: it wasn’t all bad. It made him sound depressed, like a loner.

You can salvage this, Jordan thought to himself.

He walked up to Peter, trying desperately to communicate that he needed focus here; he needed Peter to play along with him. He needed to show the jury that this boy had chosen to stand before them in order to show remorse. “Do you understand now that there weren’t any winners that day, Peter?”

Jordan saw something shine in Peter’s eyes. A tiny flame, one that had been rekindled-optimism. Jordan had done his job too well: after five months of telling Peter that he could get him acquitted, that he had a strategy, that he knew what he was doing…Peter, goddammit, had picked this moment to finally believe him.

“The game’s not over yet, right?” Peter said, and he smiled hopefully at Jordan.

As two of the jurors turned away, Jordan fought for composure. He walked back to the defense table, cursing under his breath. This had always been Peter’s downfall, hadn’t it? He had no idea what he looked like or sounded like to the ordinary observer, the person who didn’t know that Peter wasn’t actively trying to sound like a homicidal killer, but instead trying to share a private joke with one of his only friends.

“Mr. McAfee,” the judge said. “Do you have any further questions?”

He had a thousand: How could you do this to me? How could you do this to yourself? How can I make this jury understand that you didn’t mean that the way it sounded? He shook his head, puzzling through his course of action, and the judge took that for an answer.

“Ms. Leven?” he said.

Jordan’s head snapped up. Wait, he wanted to say. Wait, I was still thinking. He held his breath. If Diana asked Peter anything-even what his middle name was-then he’d have a chance to redirect. And surely, then, he could leave the jury with a different impression of Peter.

Diana riffled through the notes she’d been taking, and then she turned them facedown on the table. “The state has no questions, Your Honor,” she said.

Judge Wagner summoned a bailiff. “Take Mr. Houghton back to his seat. We’ll adjourn court for the weekend.”

As soon as the jury was dismissed, the courtroom erupted in a roar of questions. Reporters swam up the stream of onlookers toward the bar, hoping to corral Jordan for a quote. He grabbed his briefcase and hurried out the back door, the one through which the bailiffs were taking Peter.

“Hold it,” he called out. He jogged closer to the men, who stood with Peter between them, his hands cuffed. “I have to talk to my client about Monday.”

The bailiffs looked at each other, and then at Jordan. “Two minutes,” they said, but they didn’t step away. If Jordan wanted to talk to Peter, this was the only circumstance in which he was going to do it.

Peter’s face was flushed, beaming. “Did I do a good job?”

Jordan hesitated, fishing for a string of words. “Did you say what you wanted to say?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you did a really good job,” Jordan said.

He stood in the hallway and watched the bailiffs lead Peter away. Just before he turned the corner, Peter lifted his conjoined hands, a wave. Jordan nodded, his hands in his pockets.

He slipped out of the jail through a rear door and walked past three media vans with satellite dishes perched on the top like enormous white birds. Through the back window of each van, Jordan could see the producers editing video for the evening news. His face was on every television monitor.

He passed the last van and heard, through the open window, Peter’s voice. The game’s not over yet.

Jordan hiked his briefcase over his shoulder and walked a little faster. “Oh, yes it is,” he said.

Selena had made her husband what he referred to as the Executioner’s Meal, the same thing she served him each night before a closing argument: roast goose, as in, Your goose is cooked. With Sam already in bed, she slipped a plate in front of Jordan and then sat down across from him. “I don’t even really know what to say,” she admitted.

Jordan pushed the food away. “I’m not ready for this yet.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I can’t end the case with that.”

“Baby,” Selena pointed out, “after today, you couldn’t save this case with an entire squad of firefighters.”

“I can’t just give up. I told Peter he had a chance.” He turned his anguished face up to Selena’s. “I was the one who let him get up on the stand, even though I knew better. There’s got to be something I can do…something I can say so that Peter’s testimony isn’t the last one the jury’s left with.”

Selena sighed and reached for the dinner plate. She took Jordan’s knife and fork and cut herself a piece, dipped it in cherry sauce. “This is some damn fine goose, Jordan,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

“The witness list,” Jordan said, standing up and rummaging through a stack of papers on the other end of the dining room table. “There’s got to be someone we haven’t called who can help us.” He scanned the names. “Who’s Louise Herrman?”

“Peter’s third-grade teacher,” Selena said, her mouth full.

“Why the hell is she on the witness list?”

“She called us,” Selena said. “She told us that if we needed her, she’d be willing to testify that he was a good boy in third grade.”

“Well, that’s not going to work. I need someone recent.” He sighed. “There’s nobody else here…” Flipping to the second page, he saw a single, final name typed. “Except Josie Cormier,” Jordan said slowly.

Selena put down her fork. “You’re calling Alex’s daughter?”

“Since when do you call Judge Cormier Alex?”

“The girl doesn’t remember anything.”

“Well, I’m completely screwed. Maybe she remembers something now. Let’s bring her in and see if she’ll talk.”

Selena sifted through the piles of papers that covered the serving table, the fireplace mantel, the top of Sam’s walker. “Here’s her statement,” she said, handing it to Jordan.

The first page was the affidavit that Judge Cormier had brought him-the one that said Jordan wouldn’t put Josie on the stand because she didn’t know anything. The second was the most recent interview the girl had given to Patrick Ducharme. “They’ve been friends since kindergarten.”

“Were friends.”

“I don’t care. Diana’s already laid the groundwork here-Peter had a crush on Josie; he killed her boyfriend. If we can get her to say something nice about him-maybe even to show that she forgives him-it will carry weight with the jury.” He stood up. “I’m going back to the courthouse,” he said. “I need a subpoena.”

When the doorbell rang on Saturday morning, Josie was still in her pajamas. She’d slept like the dead, which wasn’t surprising, because she hadn’t managed to sleep well all week. Her dreams were full of highways that carried only wheelchairs; of combination locks with no numbers; of beauty queens without faces.

She was the only person left sitting in the sequestered witness room, which meant that this was nearly over; that soon, she’d be able to breathe again.

Josie opened the door to find the tall, stunning African-American woman who was married to Jordan McAfee smiling at her, holding out a piece of paper. “I need to give you this, Josie,” she said. “Is your mom home?”

Josie took the folded blue note. Maybe it was like a cast party for the end of the trial. That would be kind of cool. She called for her mother over her shoulder. Alex appeared with Patrick trailing behind.

“Oh,” Selena said, blinking.

Unflappable, her mother folded her arms. “What’s going on?”

“Judge, I’m sorry to bother you on a Saturday, but my husband was wondering if Josie might be free to speak to him today.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s subpoenaed Josie to testify on Monday.”

The room started to spin. “Testify?” Josie repeated.

Her mother stepped forward, and from the look on her face, she probably would have done serious damage if Patrick hadn’t wrapped an arm around her waist to hold her back. He plucked the blue paper out of Josie’s hand and scanned it.

“I can’t go to court,” Josie murmured.

Her mother shook her head. “You have a signed affidavit from Josie stating that she doesn’t remember anything-”

“I know you’re upset. But the reality is, Jordan’s calling Josie on Monday, and we’d rather talk to her about her testimony beforehand than have her come in cold. It’s better for us, and it’s better for Josie.” She hesitated. “You can do it the hard way, Judge, or you can do it this way.”

Josie’s mother clenched her jaw. “Two o’clock,” she gritted out, and she slammed the door in Selena’s face.

“You promised,” Josie cried. “You promised me I didn’t have to get up there and testify. You said I wouldn’t have to do this!”

Her mother grabbed her by the shoulders. “Honey, I know this is scary. I know you don’t want to be there. But nothing you say is going to help him. It’s going to be very short and painless.” She glanced at Patrick. “Why the hell is he doing this?”

“Because his case is in the toilet,” Patrick said. “He wants Josie to save it.”

That was all it took: Josie burst into tears.

Jordan opened the door of his office, carrying Sam like a football in his arms. It was two o’clock on the dot, and Josie Cormier and her mother had arrived. Judge Cormier looked about as inviting as a sheer cliff wall; by contrast, her daughter was shaking like a leaf. “Thanks for coming,” he said, pasting an enormous, friendly smile on his face. Above all else, he wanted Josie to feel at ease.

Neither of the women said a word.

“I’m sorry about this,” Jordan said, gesturing toward Sam. “My wife was supposed to be here by now to get the baby so that we could talk, but a logging truck overturned on Route 10.” He stretched his smile wider. “It should only be a minute.”

He gestured toward the couch and chairs in his office, offering a seat. There were cookies on the table, and a pitcher of water. “Please have something to eat, or drink.”

“No,” the judge said.

Jordan sat down, bouncing the baby on his knee. “Right.”

He stared at the clock, amazed at how very long sixty seconds could be when you wanted them to pass quickly, and then suddenly the door flew open and Selena ran inside. “Sorry, sorry,” she said, flustered, reaching for the baby. As she did, the diaper bag fell off her shoulder, skittering across the floor to land in front of Josie.

Josie stood up, staring at Selena’s fallen backpack. She backed away, stumbling over her mother’s legs and the side of the couch. “No,” she whimpered, and she curled into a ball in the corner, covering her head with her hands as she started to cry. The noise set Sam off shrieking, and Selena pressed him up against her shoulder as Jordan watched, speechless.

Judge Cormier crouched beside her daughter. “Josie, what’s the matter. Josie? What’s going on?”

The girl rocked back and forth, sobbing. She glanced up at her mother. “I remember,” she whispered. “More than I said I did.”

The judge’s mouth dropped open, and Jordan used her shock to seize the moment. “What do you remember?” he asked, kneeling beside Josie.

Judge Cormier pushed him out of the way and helped Josie to her feet. She sat her down on the couch and poured her a glass of water from the pitcher on the table. “It’s okay,” the judge murmured.

Josie took a shuddering breath. “The backpack,” she said, jerking her chin toward the one on the floor. “It fell off Peter’s shoulder, like that one did. The zipper was open, and…and a gun fell out. Matt grabbed it.” Her face contorted. “He fired at Peter, but he missed. And Peter…and he…” She closed her eyes. “That’s when Peter shot him.”

Jordan caught Selena’s eye. Peter’s defense hinged on PTSD-how one event might trigger another; how a person who was traumatized might be unable to recall anything about the event at all. How someone like Josie might watch a diaper bag fall and instead see what had happened in the locker room months earlier: Peter, with a gun pointing at him-a real and present threat, a bully about to kill him.

Or, in other words, what Jordan had been saying all along.

“It’s a mess,” Jordan said to Selena after the Cormiers had gone home. “And that works for me.”

Selena hadn’t left with the baby; Sam was now asleep in an empty filing cabinet drawer. She and Jordan sat at the table where, less than an hour ago, Josie had confessed that she’d recently started to remember bits and pieces of the shooting but hadn’t told anyone, out of fear of having to go to court and talk about it. That when the diaper bag had fallen, it had all come flooding back, full-force.

“If I’d found this out before the trial started, I would have taken it to Diana and used it tactically,” Jordan said. “But since the jury’s already sitting, maybe I can do something even better.”

“Nothing like an eleventh-hour Hail Mary pass,” Selena said.

“Let’s assume we put Josie on the stand to say all this in court. All of a sudden, those ten deaths aren’t what they seemed to be. No one knew the real story behind this one, and that calls into question everything else the prosecution’s told the jury about the shootings. In other words, if the state didn’t know this, what else don’t they know?”

“And,” Selena pointed out, “it highlights what King Wah said. Here was one of the kids who’d tormented Peter, holding a gun on him, just like he’d figured all along would happen.” She hesitated. “Granted, Peter was the one who brought in the gun…”

“That’s irrelevant,” Jordan said. “I don’t have to have all the answers.” He kissed Selena square on the mouth. “I just need to make sure that the state doesn’t either.”

Alex sat on the bench, watching a ragged crew of college students playing Ultimate Frisbee as if they had no idea that the world had split at its seams. Beside her, Josie hugged her knees to her chest. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Alex asked.

Josie lifted her face. “I couldn’t. You were the judge on the case.”

Alex felt a stab beneath her breastbone. “But even after I recused myself, Josie…when we went to see Jordan, and you said you didn’t remember anything…That’s why I had you swear the affidavit.”

“I thought that’s what you wanted me to do,” Josie said. “You told me if I signed it, I wouldn’t have to be a witness…and I didn’t want to go to court. I didn’t want to see Peter again.”

One of the college players leaped and missed the Frisbee. It sailed toward Alex, landing in a scuffle of dust at her feet. “Sorry,” the boy called, waving.

Alex picked it up and sent it soaring. The wind lifted the Frisbee and carried it higher, a stain against a perfectly blue sky.

“Mommy,” Josie said, although she had not called Alex that for years. “What’s going to happen to me?”

She didn’t know. Not as a judge, not as a lawyer, not as a mother. The only thing she could do was offer good counsel and hope it withstood what was yet to come. “From here on out,” Alex told Josie, “all you have to do is tell the truth.”

Patrick had been called into a domestic-violence hostage negotiation down in Cornish and did not reach Sterling until it was nearly midnight. Instead of heading to his own house, he went to Alex’s-it felt more like home, anyway. He’d tried to call her several times today to see what had happened with Jordan McAfee, but he couldn’t get cell phone service where he was.

He found her sitting in the dark on the living room sofa, and sank down beside her. For a moment, he stared at the wall, just like Alex. “What are we doing?” he whispered.

She faced him, and that’s when he realized she had been crying. He blamed himself-You should have tried harder to call, you should have come home earlier. “What’s wrong?”

“I screwed up, Patrick,” Alex said. “I thought I was helping her. I thought I knew what I was doing. As it turned out, I didn’t know anything at all.”

“Josie?” he asked, trying to fit together the pieces. “Where is she?”

“Asleep. I gave her a sleeping pill.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“We saw Jordan McAfee today, and Josie told him…she told him that she remembered something about the shooting. In fact, she remembered everything.”

Patrick whistled softly. “So she was lying?”

“I don’t know. I think she was scared.” Alex glanced up at Patrick. “That’s not all. According to Josie, Matt shot at Peter first.”

“What?”

“The knapsack Peter was carrying fell down in front of Matt, and he got hold of one of the guns. He shot, but he missed.”

Patrick rubbed a hand down his face. Diana Leven was not going to be happy.

“What’s going to happen to Josie?” Alex said. “The best-case scenario is that she gets on the stand and the entire town hates her for testifying on Peter’s behalf. The worst-case scenario is that she commits perjury on the stand and gets charged with it.”

Patrick’s mind was racing. “You can’t worry about this. It’s out of your hands. Besides, Josie will be fine. She’s a survivor.”

He leaned down and kissed her, softly, his mouth rounding over words he couldn’t yet tell her, and promises he was afraid to make. He kissed her until he felt the tightness go out of her spine. “You ought to go take one of those sleeping pills,” he whispered.

Alex tilted her head. “You’re not staying?”

“Can’t. I’ve still got work to do.”

“You came all the way over here to tell me you’re leaving?”

Patrick looked at her, wishing he could explain what he had to do. “I’ll see you later, Alex,” he said.

Alex had confided in him, but as a judge, she would know that Patrick could not keep her secret. On Monday morning, when Patrick saw the prosecutor, he’d have to tell Diana what he now knew about Matt Royston firing the first shot in the locker room. Legally, he was obligated to disclose this new wrinkle. However, technically, he had all day Sunday to do with that information whatever he liked.

If Patrick could find evidence to back up Josie’s allegations, then it would soften the blow for her on the stand-and make him a hero in Alex’s eyes. But there was another part of him that wanted to search the locker room again for another reason. Patrick knew he had personally combed that small space for evidence, that no other bullet had been found. And if Matt had shot first at Peter, there should have been one.

He hadn’t wanted to say this to Alex, but Josie had lied to them once. There was no reason she couldn’t be doing it again.

At six in the morning, Sterling High School was a sleeping giant. Patrick unlocked the front door and moved through the corridors in the dark. They had been professionally cleaned, but that didn’t stop him from seeing, in the beam of his flashlight, the spots where bullets had broken windows and blood had stained the floor. He moved quickly, the heels of his boots echoing, as he pushed aside blue construction tarps and avoided stacks of lumber.

Patrick opened the double doors of the gym and squeaked his way across the Morse-coded markings on the polyurethaned boards. He flicked a bank of switches and the gym flooded with light. The last time he’d been in here, there had been emergency blankets lying on the floor, corresponding to the numbers that had been inked on the foreheads of Noah James and Michael Beach and Justin Friedman and Dusty Spears and Austin Prokiov. There had been crime-scene techs crawling on their hands and knees, taking photographs of chips in the cement block, digging bullets out of the backboard of the basketball hoop.

He had spent hours at the police station, his first stop after leaving Alex’s house, scrutinizing the enlarged fingerprint that had been on Gun B. An inconclusive one; one that he’d assumed, lazily, to be Peter’s. But what if it was Matt’s? Was there any way to prove that Royston had held the gun, as Josie claimed? Patrick had studied the prints taken from Matt’s dead body and held them up every which way against the partial print, until the lines and ridges blurred even more than they should have.

If he was going to find proof, it was going to have to be in the school itself.

The locker room looked exactly like the photo he’d used during his testimony earlier this week, except that the bodies, of course, had been removed. Unlike the corridors and classrooms of the school, the locker room hadn’t been cleaned or patched. The small area held too much damage-not physical, but psychological-and the administration had unanimously agreed to tear it down, along with the rest of the gym and the cafeteria, later this month.

The locker room was a rectangle. The door that led into it, from the gym, was in the middle of one long wall. A wooden bench sat directly opposite, and a line of metal lockers. In the far left corner of the locker room was a small doorway that opened into a communal shower stall. In this corner, Matt’s body had been found, with Josie lying beside him; thirty feet away in the far right corner of the locker room, Peter had been crouching. The blue backpack had fallen just to the left of the doorway.

If Patrick believed Josie, then Peter had come running into the locker room, where Josie and Matt had gone to hide. Presumably, he was holding Gun A. He dropped his backpack, and Matt-who would have been standing in the middle of the room, close enough to reach it-grabbed Gun B. Matt shot at Peter-the bullet that had never been found, the one that proved Gun B was fired at all-and missed. When he tried to shoot again, the gun jammed. At that moment, Peter shot him, twice.

The problem was, Matt’s body had been found at least fifteen feet away from the backpack where he’d grabbed the gun.

Why would Matt have backed up, and then shot at Peter? It didn’t make sense. It was possible that Peter’s shots had sent Matt’s body recoiling, but basic physics told Patrick that a shot fired from where Peter was standing would still not have landed Matt where he’d been found. In addition, there had been no blood-spatter pattern to suggest that Matt had been standing anywhere near the backpack when he was hit by Peter. He’d pretty much dropped where he’d been shot.

Patrick walked toward the wall where he’d apprehended Peter. He started at the upper corner and methodically ran his fingers over every divot and niche, over the edges of the lockers and inside them, around the bend of the perpendicular walls. He crawled beneath the wooden bench and scrutinized the underside. He held his flashlight up to the ceiling. In such close quarters, any bullet fired by Matt should have made enough serious damage to be noticeable, and yet, there was absolutely no evidence that any gun had been fired-successfully-in Peter’s direction.

Patrick walked to the opposite corner of the locker room. There was still a dark bloodstain on the floor, and a dried boot print. He stepped over the stain and into the shower stall, repeating the same meticulous investigation of the tiled wall that would have been behind Matt.

If he found that missing bullet here, where Matt’s body had been found, then Matt clearly hadn’t been the one to fire Gun B-it would have been Peter wielding that weapon, as well as Gun A. Or in other words: Josie would have been lying to Jordan McAfee.

It was easy work, because the tile was white, pristine. There were no cracks or flakes, no chips, nothing that would suggest a bullet had gone through Matt’s stomach and struck the shower wall.

Patrick turned around, looking in places that didn’t make sense: the top of the shower, the ceiling, the drain. He took off his shoes and socks and shuffled along the shower floor.

It was when he’d just scraped his little toe along the line of the drain that he felt it.

Patrick got down on his hands and knees and felt along the edge of the metal. There was a long, raw scuff on the tile that bordered the drainage grate. It would have easily gone unnoticed because of its location-techs who saw it had probably assumed it was grout. He rubbed it with his finger and then peered with a flashlight into the drain. If the bullet had slipped through, it was long gone-and yet, the drainage holes were tiny enough that this shouldn’t have been possible.

Opening a locker, Patrick ripped a tiny square of mirror off with his hands and set it face-up on the floor of the shower, just where the scuff mark was. Then he turned off the lights and took out a laser pointer. He stood where Peter had been apprehended and pointed the beam at the mirror, watched it bounce onto the far wall of the showers, where no bullet had left a mark.

Circling around, he continued to point the beam until it ricocheted up-right through the center of a small window that served as ventilation. He knelt, marking the spot where he stood with a pencil from his pocket. Then he dug out his cell phone. “Diana,” he said when the prosecutor answered. “Don’t let that trial start tomorrow.”

“I know it’s unusual,” Diana said in court the next morning, “and that we have a jury sitting here, but I have to ask for a recess until my detective gets here. He’s investigating something new on the case…possibly something exculpatory.”

“Have you called him?” Judge Wagner asked.

“Several times.” Patrick was not answering his phone. If he was, then she could have told him directly how much she wanted to kill him.

“I have to object, Your Honor,” Jordan said. “We’re ready to go forward. I’m sure that Ms. Leven will give me that exculpatory information, if and when it ever arrives, but I’m willing at this point to take my chances. And since we’re all here at the bench, I’d like to add that I have a witness who’s prepared to testify right now.”

“What witness?” Diana said. “You don’t have anyone else to call.”

He smiled at her. “Judge Cormier’s daughter.”

Alex sat outside the courtroom, holding tight to Josie’s hand. “This is going to be over before you know it.”

The great irony here, Alex knew, was that months ago when she’d fought so hard to be the judge on this case, it was because she felt more at ease offering legal comfort to her daughter than emotional comfort. Well, here she was, and Josie was about to testify in the arena Alex knew better than anyone else, and she still didn’t have any grand judicial advice that could help her.

It would be scary. It would be painful. And all Alex could do was watch her suffer.

A bailiff came out to them. “Judge,” he said. “If your daughter’s ready?”

Alex squeezed Josie’s hand. “Just tell them what you know,” she said, and she stood up to take a seat in the courtroom.

“Mom?” Josie called after her, and Alex turned. “What if what you know isn’t what people want to hear?”

Alex tried to smile. “Tell the truth,” she said. “You can’t lose.”

To comply with discovery rules, Jordan handed Diana a synopsis of Josie’s testimony as she was walking up to the stand. “When did you get this?” the prosecutor whispered.

“This weekend. Sorry,” he said, although he really wasn’t. He walked toward Josie, who looked small and pale. Her hair had been gathered into a neat ponytail, and her hands were folded in her lap. She was studiously avoiding anyone’s gaze by focusing on the grain of the wood on the rail of the witness stand.

“Can you state your name?”

“Josie Cormier.”

“Where do you live, Josie?”

“45 East Prescott Street, in Sterling.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m seventeen,” she said.

Jordan took a step closer, so that only she would be able to hear him. “See?” he murmured. “Piece of cake.” He winked at her, and he thought she might even have smiled back the tiniest bit.

“Where were you on the morning of March 6, 2007?”

“I was at school.”

“What class did you have first period?”

“English,” Josie said softly.

“What about second period?”

“Math.”

“Third period?”

“I had a study.”

“Where did you spend it?”

“With my boyfriend,” she said. “Matt Royston.” She looked sideways, blinking too fast.

“Where were you and Matt during third period?”

“We left the cafeteria. We were going to his locker, before the next class.”

“What happened then?”

Josie looked into her lap. “There was a lot of noise. And people started running. People were screaming about guns, about someone with a gun. A friend of ours, Drew Girard, told us it was Peter.”

She glanced up then, and her eyes locked on Peter’s. For a long moment, she just stared at him, and then she closed her eyes and turned away.

“Did you know what was going on?”

“No.”

“Did you see anyone shooting?”

“No.”

“Where did you go?”

“To the gym. We ran across it, toward the locker room. I knew he was coming closer, because I kept hearing gunshots.”

“Who was with you when you went into the locker room?”

“I thought Drew and Matt, but when I turned around, I realized that Drew wasn’t there. He’d been shot.”

“Did you see Drew getting shot?”

Josie shook her head. “No.”

“Did you see Peter before you got into the locker room?”

“No.” Her face crumpled, and she wiped at her eyes.

“Josie,” Jordan said, “what happened next?”

10:16 A.M., The Day Of

Get down,” Matt hissed, and he shoved Josie so that she fell behind the wooden bench.

It wasn’t a good place to hide, but then, nowhere in the locker room was a good place to hide. Matt’s plan had been to climb out the window in the shower, and he’d even opened it up, but then they’d heard the shots in the gym and realized they didn’t have time to drag the bench over and climb through. They’d boxed themselves in, literally.

She curled herself into a ball and Matt crouched down in front of her. Her heart thundered against his back, and she kept forgetting to breathe.

He reached behind him until he found her hand. “If anything happens, Jo,” he whispered, “I loved you.”

Josie started to cry. She was going to die; they were all going to die. She thought of a hundred things she hadn’t done yet that she so badly wanted to do: go to Australia, swim with dolphins. Learn all the words to “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Graduate.

Get married.

She wiped her face against the back of Matt’s shirt, and then the locker room burst open. Peter stumbled inside, his eyes wild, holding a handgun. His left sneaker was untied, Josie noticed, and then she couldn’t believe she noticed. He lifted his gun at Matt, and she couldn’t help it; she screamed.

Maybe it was the noise; maybe it was her voice. It startled Peter, and he dropped his backpack. It slid off his shoulder, and as it did, another gun fell out of an open pocket.

It skittered across the floor, landing just behind Josie’s left foot.

Do you know how there are moments when the world moves so slowly you can feel your bones shifting, your mind tumbling? When you think that no matter what happens to you for the rest of your life, you will remember every last detail of that one minute forever? Josie watched her hand stretch back, watched her fingers curl around the cold black butt of the gun. Fumbling it, she staggered upright, pointing the gun at Peter.

Matt backed away toward the showers, under Josie’s cover. Peter held his gun steady, still pointing it at Matt, even though Josie was closer. “Josie,” he said. “Let me finish this.”

“Shoot him, Josie,” Matt said. “Fucking shoot him.”

Peter pulled back the slide of the gun so that a bullet from the clip would cycle into place. Watching him carefully, Josie mimicked his actions.

She remembered being in nursery school with Peter-how other boys would pick up sticks or rocks and run around yelling Hands up. What had she and Peter used the sticks for? She couldn’t recall.

“Josie, for Christ’s sake!” Matt was sweating, his eyes wide. “Are you fucking stupid?”

“Don’t talk to her like that,” Peter cried.

“Shut up, asshole,” Matt said. “You think she’s going to save you?” He turned to Josie. “What are you waiting for? Shoot.”

So she did.

As the gun fired, it ripped two stripes of her skin from the base of her thumb. Her hands jerked upward, numb, humming. The blood was black on Matt’s gray T-shirt. He stood for a moment, shocked, his hand over the wound in his stomach. She saw his mouth close around her name, but she couldn’t hear it, her ears were ringing so loudly. Josie? and then he fell to the floor.

Josie’s hand started shaking violently; she wasn’t surprised when the gun just fell out of it, as singularly repelled by her grasp as it had been glued to it moments before. “Matt,” she cried, running toward him. She pressed her hands against the blood, because that’s what you were supposed to do, wasn’t it, but he writhed and screamed in agony. Blood began to bubble out of his mouth, trailing down his neck. “Do something,” she sobbed, turning to Peter. “Help me.”

Peter walked closer, lifted the gun he was holding, and shot Matt in the head.

Horrified, she scrambled backward, away from them both. That wasn’t what she’d meant; that couldn’t have been what she meant.

She stared at Peter, and she realized that in that one moment, when she hadn’t been thinking, she knew exactly what he’d felt as he moved through the school with his backpack and his guns. Every kid in this school played a role: jock, brain, beauty, freak. All Peter had done was what they all secretly dreamed of: be someone, even for just nineteen minutes, who nobody else was allowed to judge.

“Don’t tell,” Peter whispered, and Josie realized he was offering her a way out-a deal sealed in blood, a partnership of silence: I won’t share your secrets, if you don’t share mine.

Josie nodded slowly, and then her world went black.

I think a person’s life is supposed to be like a DVD. You can see the version everyone else sees, or you can choose the director’s cut-the way he wanted you to see it, before everything else got in the way.

There are menus, probably, so that you can start at the good spots and not have to relive the bad ones. You can measure your life by the number of scenes you’ve survived, or the minutes you’ve been stuck there.

Probably, though, life is more like one of those dumb video surveillance tapes. Grainy, no matter how hard you stare at it. And looped: the same thing, over and over.

Five Months After

Alex pushed past the people in the gallery who had erupted in confusion in the wake of Josie’s confession. Somewhere in this crowd of people were the Roystons, who had just heard that their son had been shot by her daughter, but she could not think of that right now. She could only see Josie, trapped on that witness stand, while Alex struggled to get past the bar. She was a judge, dammit; she should have been allowed to go there, but two bailiffs were firmly holding her back.

Wagner was smacking his gavel, although nobody gave a damn. “We’ll take a fifteen-minute recess,” he ordered, and as another bailiff hauled Peter through a rear door, the judge turned to Josie. “Young lady,” he said, “you are still under oath.”

Alex watched Josie being taken through another door, and she called out after her. A moment later, Eleanor was at her side. The clerk took Alex’s arm. “Judge, come with me. You’re not safe out here right now.”

For the first time she could actively remember, Alex allowed herself to be led.

Patrick arrived in the courtroom just as it exploded. He saw Josie on the stand, crying desperately; he saw Judge Wagner fighting for control-but most of all, he saw Alex single-mindedly trying to get to her daughter.

He would have drawn his gun right then and there to help her do it.

By the time he fought his way down the central aisle of the courtroom, Alex was gone. He caught a glimpse of her as she slipped into a room behind the bench, and he hurdled the bar to follow her but felt someone grab his sleeve. Annoyed, he glanced down to see Diana Leven.

“What the hell is going on?” he asked.

“You first.”

He sighed. “I spent the night at Sterling High, trying to check Josie’s statement. It didn’t make sense-if Matt had fired at Peter, there should have been physical evidence of destruction in the wall behind him. I assumed that she was lying again-that Peter had been the one to shoot Matt unprovoked. Once I figured out where that first bullet hit, I used a laser to see where it could have ricocheted-and then I understood why we didn’t find it the first time around.” Digging in his coat, he extracted an evidence bag with a slug inside. “The fire department helped me dig it out of a maple tree outside the window in the shower stall. I drove it straight to the lab for testing-and stood over them all night with a whip until they agreed to do the work on the spot. Not only was the bullet fired from Gun B, it’s got blood and tissue on it that types to Matt Royston. The thing is, when you reverse the angle of that bullet-when you stand in the tree and ricochet the laser off the tile where it struck, to see where the shot originated from-you don’t get anywhere close to where Peter was standing. It was-”

The prosecutor sighed wearily. “Josie just confessed to shooting Matt Royston.”

“Well,” Patrick said, handing the evidence bag to Diana, “she’s finally telling the truth.”

Jordan leaned against the bars of the holding cell. “Did you forget to tell me about this?”

“No,” Peter said.

He turned. “You know, if you’d mentioned this at the beginning, your case could have had a very different outcome.”

Peter was lying on the bench in the cell, his hands behind his head. To Jordan’s shock, he was smiling. “She was my friend again,” Peter explained. “You don’t break a promise to a friend.”

Alex sat in the dark of the conference room where defendants were usually brought during breaks, and realized that her daughter now would qualify. There would be another trial, and this time Josie would be at the center of it.

“Why?” she asked.

She could make out the silver edge of Josie’s profile. “Because you told me to tell the truth.”

“What is the truth?”

“I loved Matt. And I hated him. I hated myself for loving him, but if I wasn’t with him, I wasn’t anyone anymore.”

“I don’t understand…”

“How could you? You’re perfect.” Josie shook her head. “The rest of us, we’re all like Peter. Some of us just do a better job of hiding it. What’s the difference between spending your life trying to be invisible, or pretending to be the person you think everyone wants you to be? Either way, you’re faking.”

Alex thought of all the parties she’d ever gone to where the first question she was asked was What do you do? as if that were enough to define you. Nobody ever asked you who you really were, because that changed. You might be a judge or a mother or a dreamer. You might be a loner or a visionary or a pessimist. You might be the victim, and you might be the bully. You could be the parent, and also the child. You might wound one day and heal the next.

I’m not perfect, Alex thought, and maybe that was the first step toward becoming that way.

“What’s going to happen to me?” Josie asked, the same question she’d asked a day ago, when Alex thought herself qualified to give answers.

“What’s going to happen to us,” Alex corrected.

A smile chased over Josie’s face, gone almost as quickly as it had come. “I asked you first.”

The door to the conference room opened, spilling light from the corridor, silhouetting whatever came next. Alex reached for her daughter’s hand and took a deep breath. “Let’s go see,” she said.

Peter was convicted of eight first-degree murders and two second-degree murders. The jury decided that in the case of Matt Royston and Courtney Ignatio, he had not been acting with premeditation and deliberation. He’d been provoked.

After the verdict was handed down, Jordan met with Peter in the holding cell. He’d be brought back to the jail only until the sentencing hearing; then he would be transferred to the state prison in Concord. Serving out eight consecutive murder sentences, he would not leave it alive.

“You okay?” Jordan asked, putting his hand on Peter’s shoulder.

“Yeah.” He shrugged. “I sort of knew it was going to happen.”

“But they heard you. That’s why they came back with manslaughter for two of the counts.”

“I guess I should say thanks for trying.” He smiled crookedly at Jordan. “Have a good life.”

“I’ll come see you, if I get down to Concord,” Jordan said.

He looked at Peter. In the six months since this case had fallen into his lap, his client had grown up. Peter was as tall as Jordan now. He probably weighed a little more. He had a deeper voice, a shadow of beard on his jaw. Jordan marveled that he hadn’t noticed these things until now.

“Well,” Jordan said. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out the way I’d hoped.”

“Me, too.”

Peter held out his hand, and Jordan embraced him instead. “Take care.”

He started out of the cell, and then Peter called him back. He was holding out the eyeglasses Jordan had brought him for the trial. “These are yours,” Peter said.

“Hang on to them. You have more use for them.”

Peter tucked the glasses into the front pocket of Jordan’s jacket. “I kind of like knowing you’re taking care of them,” he said. “And there isn’t all that much I really want to see.”

Jordan nodded. He walked out of the holding cell and said good-bye to the deputies. Then he headed toward the lobby, where Selena was waiting.

As he approached her, he put on Peter’s glasses. “What’s up with those?” she asked.

“I kind of like them.”

“You have perfect vision,” Selena pointed out.

Jordan considered the way the lenses made the world curve in at the ends, so that he had to move more gingerly through it. “Not always,” he said.

In the weeks after the trial, Lewis began fooling around with numbers. He’d done some preliminary research and entered it into STATA to see what kinds of patterns emerged. And-here was the interesting thing-it had absolutely nothing to do with happiness. Instead, he’d started looking at the communities where school shootings had occurred in the past and spinning them out to the present, to see how a single act of violence might affect economic stability. Or in other words-once the world was pulled out from beneath your feet, did you ever get to stand on firm ground again?

He was teaching again at Sterling College-basic microeconomics. Classes had only just begun in late September, and Lewis found himself slipping easily into the lecture circuit. When he was talking about Keynesian models and widgets and competition, it was routine-so effortless that he could almost make himself believe this was any other freshman survey course he’d taught in the past, before Peter had been convicted.

Lewis taught by walking up and down the aisles-a necessary evil, now that the campus had gone WiFi and students would play online poker or IM each other while he lectured-which was how he happened to come across the kids in the back. Two football players were taking turns squeezing a sports-top water bottle so that the stream arced upward and sprayed onto the back of another kid’s neck. The boy, two rows forward, kept turning around to see who was squirting water at him, but by then, the jocks were looking up at the graphs on the screen in the front of the hall, their faces as smooth as choirboys’.

“Now,” Lewis said, not missing a beat, “who can tell me what happens if you set the price above point A on the graph?” He plucked the water bottle out of the hands of one of the jocks. “Thank you, Mr. Graves. I was getting thirsty.”

The boy two rows ahead raised his hand like an arrow, and Lewis nodded at him. “No one would want to buy the widget for that much money,” he said. “So demand would fall, and that means the price would have to drop, or they’d wind up with a whole boatload of extras in the warehouse.”

“Excellent,” Lewis said, and he glanced up at the clock. “All right, guys, on Monday we’ll be covering the next chapter in Mankiw. And don’t be surprised if there’s a surprise quiz.”

“If you told us, it’s not a surprise,” a girl pointed out.

Lewis smiled. “Oops.”

He stood by the chair of the boy who’d given the right answer. He was stuffing his notebook into his backpack, which was already so crammed with papers that the zipper wouldn’t close. His hair was too long, and his T-shirt had a picture of Einstein’s face on it. “Nice work today.”

“Thanks.” The boy shifted from one foot to the other; Lewis could tell that he wasn’t quite sure what to say next. He thrust out his hand. “Um, nice to meet you. I mean, you’ve already met us all, but not, like, personally.”

“Right. What’s your name again?”

“Peter. Peter Granford.”

Lewis opened up his mouth to speak, but then just shook his head.

“What?” The boy ducked his head. “You just, uh, looked like you were going to say something important.”

Lewis looked at this namesake, at the way he stood with his shoulders rounded, as if he did not deserve so much space in this world. He felt that familiar pain that fell like a hammer on his breastbone whenever he thought of Peter, of a life that would be lost to prison. He wished he’d taken more time to look at Peter when Peter was right in front of his eyes, because now he would be forced to compensate with imperfect memories or-even worse-to find his son in the faces of strangers.

Lewis reached deep inside and unraveled the smile that he saved for moments like this, when there was absolutely nothing to be happy about. “It was important,” he said. “You remind me of someone I used to know.”

It took Lacy three weeks to gather the courage to enter Peter’s bedroom. Now that the verdict had been handed down-now that they knew Peter would never be coming home again-there was no reason to keep it as she had for the past five months: a shrine, a haven for optimism.

She sat down on Peter’s bed and brought his pillow to her face. It still smelled like him, and she wondered how long it would take for that to dissipate. She glanced around at the scattered books on his shelves-the ones that the police had not taken. She opened his nightstand drawer and fingered the silky tassel of a bookmark, the metal teeth of a lockjawed stapler. The empty belly of a television remote control, missing its batteries. A magnifying glass. An old pack of Pok#233;mon cards, a magic trick, a portable hard drive on a key-chain.

Lacy took the box she’d brought up from the basement and placed each item inside. Here was the crime scene: look at what was left behind and try to re-create the boy.

She folded his quilt, and then his sheets, and then pulled the pillowcase free. She suddenly recalled a dinner conversation where Lewis had told her that for $10,000, you could flatten a house with a wrecking ball. Imagine how much less it took to destroy something than it did to build it in the first place: in less than an hour, this room would look as if Peter had never lived here at all.

When it was all a neat pile, Lacy sat back down on the bed and looked around at the stark walls, the paint a little brighter in the spots where posters had been. She touched the piped seam of Peter’s mattress and wondered how long she would continue to think of it as Peter’s.

Love was supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it fell apart at the details. It couldn’t save a single child-not the ones who’d gone to Sterling High that day, expecting the normal; not Josie Cormier; certainly not Peter. So what was the recipe? Was it love, mixed with something else for good measure? Luck? Hope? Forgiveness?

She remembered, suddenly, what Alex Cormier had said to her during the trial: Something still exists as long as there’s someone around to remember it.

Everyone would remember Peter for nineteen minutes of his life, but what about the other nine million? Lacy would have to be the keeper of those, because it was the only way for that part of Peter to stay alive. For every recollection of him that involved a bullet or a scream, she would have a hundred others: of a little boy splashing in a pond, or riding a bicycle for the first time, or waving from the top of a jungle gym. Of a kiss good night, or a crayoned Mother’s Day card, or a voice off-key in the shower. She would string them together-the moments when her child had been just like other people’s. She would wear them, precious pearls, every day of her life; because if she lost them, then the boy she had loved and raised and known would really be gone.

Lacy began to stretch the sheets over the bed again. She settled the quilt, tucked the corners, fluffed the pillow. She set the books back on the shelves and the toys and tools and knickknacks back in the nightstand. Last, she unrolled the long tongues of the posters and put them back up on the walls. She was careful to place the thumbtacks in the same original holes. That way, she wouldn’t be doing any more damage.

Exactly one month after he was convicted, when the lights were dimmed and the detention officers made a final sweep of the catwalk, Peter reached down and tugged off his right sock. He turned on his side in the lower bunk, so that he was facing the wall. He fed the sock into his mouth, stuffing it as far back as it would go.

When it got hard to breathe, he fell into a dream. He was still eighteen, but it was the first day of kindergarten. He was carrying his backpack and his Superman lunch box. The orange school bus pulled up and, with a sigh, split open its gaping jaws. Peter climbed the steps and faced the back of the bus, but this time, he was the only student on it. He walked down the aisle to the very end, near the emergency exit. He put his lunch box down beside him and glanced out the rear window. It was so bright he thought the sun itself must be chasing them down the highway.

“Almost there,” a voice said, and Peter turned around to look at the driver. But just as there had been no passengers, there was no one at the wheel.

Here was the amazing thing: in his dream, Peter wasn’t scared. He knew, somehow, that he was headed exactly where he’d wanted to go.

March 6, 2008

You might not have recognized Sterling High. There was a new green metal roof, fresh grass growing out front, and a glass atrium that rose two stories at the rear of the school. A plaque on the bricks by the front door read: A SAFE HARBOR.

Later today, there would be a ceremony to honor the memories of those who’d died here a year ago, but because Patrick had been involved in the new security protocols for the school, he’d been able to sneak Alex in for an advance viewing.

Inside, there were no lockers-just open cubbies, so that nothing was hidden from view. Students were in class; only a few teachers moved through the lobby. They wore IDs around their necks, as did the kids. Alex had not really understood this-the threat was always from the inside, not the outside-but Patrick said that it made people feel secure, and that was half the battle.

Her cell phone rang. Patrick sighed. “I thought you told them-”

“I did,” Alex said. She flipped it open, and the secretary for the Grafton County public defender’s office began reeling off a litany of crises. “Stop,” she said, interrupting. “Remember? I’m missing in action for the day.”

She had resigned her judicial appointment. Josie had been charged as an accessory to second-degree murder and accepted a plea of manslaughter, with five years served. After that, every time Alex had a child in her courtroom charged with a felony, she couldn’t be impartial. As a judge, weighing the evidence had taken precedence; but as a mother, it was not the facts that mattered-only the feelings. Going back to her roots as a public defender seemed not only natural but comfortable. She understood, firsthand, what her clients were feeling. She visited them when she went to visit her daughter at the women’s penitentiary. Defendants liked her because she wasn’t condescending and because she told them the truth about their chances: what you saw of Alex Cormier was what you got.

Patrick led her to the spot that had once housed the back staircase at Sterling High. Instead, now, there was an enormous glass atrium that covered the spot where the gymnasium and locker room had been. Outside, you could see the playing fields, where a gym class was now in the thick of a soccer game, taking advantage of the early spring and the melted snow. Inside, there were wooden tables set up, with stools where students could meet or have a snack or read. A few kids were there now, studying for a geometry test. Their whispers rose like smoke to the ceiling: complementary…supplementary…intersection…endpoint.

To one side of the atrium, in front of the glass wall, were ten chairs. Unlike the rest of the seats in the atrium, these had backs and were painted white. You had to look closely to see that they had been bolted to the floor, instead of having been dragged over by students and left behind. They were not lined up in a row; they were not evenly spaced. They did not have names or placards on them, but everyone knew why they were there.

She felt Alex come up behind her and slide his arm around her waist. “It’s almost time,” he said, and she nodded.

As she reached for one of the empty stools and started to drag it closer to the glass wall, Patrick took it from her. “For God’s sake, Patrick,” she muttered. “I’m pregnant, not terminal.”

That had been a surprise, too. The baby was due at the end of May. Alex tried not to think about it as a replacement for the daughter who would still be in jail for the next four years; she imagined instead that maybe this would be the one who rescued them all.

Patrick sank down beside her on a stool as Alex looked at her watch: 10:02 a.m.

She took a deep breath. “It doesn’t look the same anymore.”

“I know,” Patrick said.

“Do you think that’s a good thing?”

He thought for a moment. “I think it’s a necessary thing,” he said.

She noticed that the maple tree, the one that had grown outside the window of the second-story locker room, had not been cut down during the construction of the atrium. From where she was sitting, you couldn’t see the hole that had been carved out of it to retrieve a bullet. The tree was enormous, with a thick gnarled trunk and twisted limbs. It had probably been here long before the high school ever was, maybe even before Sterling was settled.

10:09.

She felt Patrick’s hand slip into her lap as she watched the soccer game. The teams seemed grossly mismatched, the kids who had already hit puberty playing against those who were still slight and small. Alex watched a striker charge a defenseman for the other team, leaving the smaller boy trampled as the ball hurtled high into the net.

All that, Alex thought, and nothing’s changed. She glanced at her watch again: 10:13.

The last few minutes, of course, were the hardest. Alex found herself standing, her hands pressed flat against the glass. She felt the baby kick inside her, answering back to the darker hook of her heart. 10:16. 10:17.

The striker returned to the spot where the defenseman had fallen and reached out his hand to help the slighter boy stand. They walked back to center field, talking about something Alex couldn’t hear.

It was 10:19.

She happened to glance at the maple tree again. The sap was still running. A few weeks from now, there would be a reddish hue on the branches. Then buds. A burst of first leaves.

Alex took Patrick’s hand. They walked out of the atrium in silence, down the corridors, past the rows of cubbies. They crossed the lobby and threshold of the front door, retracing the steps they’d taken.