Free Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult Page A

this.”
    The woman looked at her attorney. “Mrs. Calloway was coming home from the pet store with a silver arowana,” the lawyer said.
    “That’s a fifty-five-dollar tropical fish, Judge,” the defendant interjected.
    “The plastic bag rolled off the passenger seat and popped. Mrs. Calloway reached down for the fish and that’s when…the unfortunate incident occurred.”
    “By unfortunate incident,” Alex clarified, looking at her file, “you mean hitting a pedestrian.”
    “Yes, Your Honor.”
    Alex turned to the defendant. “How’s the fish?”
    Mrs. Calloway smiled. “Wonderful,” she said. “I named it Crash.”
    From the corner of her eye, Alex saw a bailiff enter the courtroom and whisper to the clerk, who looked at Alex and nodded. He scrawled something on a piece of paper, and the bailiff walked it up to the bench.
    Shots fired at Sterling High, she read.
    Alex went still as stone. Josie. “Court’s adjourned,” she whispered, and then she ran.
    John Eberhard gritted his teeth and concentrated on moving just one more inch forward. He could not see, with all the blood running down his face, and his left side was completely useless. He couldn’t hear, either-his ears still rang with the blast of the gun. Still, he had managed to crawl from the upstairs hallway where Peter Houghton had shot him into an art supply room.
    He thought about the practices where Coach made them skate from goal line to goal line, faster and then faster still, until the players were gasping for breath and spitting onto the ice. He thought about how, when you felt you had nothing left to give, you’d find just one iota more. He dragged himself another foot, digging his elbow against the floor.
    When John reached the metal shelving that held clay and paint and beads and wire, he tried to push himself upright, but a blinding pain speared his head. Minutes later-or was it hours?-he regained consciousness. He didn’t know if it was safe to check outside the closet yet. He was flat on his back, and something cold was drifting across his face. Wind. Coming through a crack in the seal of the window.
    A window.
    John thought of Courtney Ignatio: how she’d been sitting across from him at the cafeteria table when the glass wall behind her burst; how suddenly there had been a flower blooming in the middle of her chest, bright as a poppy. He thought of how a hundred screams, all at once, had braided into a rope of sound. He remembered teachers poking their heads out of their classrooms like gophers, and the looks on their faces when they heard the shots.
    John pulled himself up on the shelves, one-handed, fighting the black buzz that told him he was going to faint again. By the time he was upright, leaning against the metal frame, he was shuddering. His vision was so blurred that when he took a can of paint and hurled it, he had to choose between two windows.
    The glass shattered. Jackknifed on the ledge, he could see fire trucks and ambulances. Reporters and parents pushing at police tape. Clusters of sobbing students. Broken bodies, spaced like railroad ties on the snow. EMTs bringing out more of them.
    Help, John Eberhard tried to scream, but he couldn’t form the word. He couldn’t form any words-not Look, not Stop, not even his own name.
    “Hey,” someone called. “There’s a kid up there!”
    Sobbing by now, John tried to wave, but his arm wouldn’t work.
    People were starting to point. “Stay put,” a fireman yelled, and John tried to nod. But his body no longer belonged to him, and before he realized what had happened, that small movement pitched him out the window to land on the concrete two stories below.
    Diana Leven, who had left her job as an assistant attorney general in Boston two years ago to join a department that was a little kinder and gentler, walked into the Sterling High gym and stopped beside the body of a boy who had fallen directly on the three-point line after being shot in the neck. The shoes of