id 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

F or 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.