Nineteen Minutes (32 page)

Liz glanced up at the tree as a gust of wind sent a new score of leaves onto the raked grass. “Alex,” she said. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“When was the last time you got laid?”

Alex turned, her mouth dropping open. “What does that have to-”

“Most people who go to work spend their time wondering how long till they get back home to do whatever it is they really want to do. For you, it’s the other way around.”

“That’s not true. Josie and I-”

“What did you two do for fun this weekend?”

Alex plucked a leaf and shredded it. In the past three years, Josie’s social calendar had become crammed with phone calls and sleepovers and packs of kids going to a movie or hanging out in someone’s basement lair. This weekend, Josie had gone shopping with Haley Weaver, a junior who’d just gotten her driver’s license. Alex had written two decisions and cleaned out the fruit and vegetable drawers in her refrigerator.

“I’m setting you up on a blind date,” Liz said.

There were a number of business establishments in Sterling that hired teenagers for after-school employment. After his first summer at QuikCopy, Peter had deduced that this was because the jobs mostly sucked, and they couldn’t find anyone else to do them.

He was responsible for photocopying most of the course material for Sterling College, which professors brought in. He knew how to shrink a document down to one-thirty-second of its original size, and how to add toner. When customers paid, he liked to guess what size bill they were going to pull out of their wallets just by the way they dressed or wore their hair. College kids always used twenties. Moms with strollers whipped out a credit card. Professors used crumpled singles.

The reason he was working was because he needed a new computer with a better graphics card, so that he could do some of the gaming design he and Derek had been into lately. It never failed to amaze Peter how you could take a seemingly senseless string of commands and-magic!-it would become a knight or a sword or a castle on the screen. He liked the very concept: that something the ordinary person might dismiss as gibberish was actually vibrant and eye-catching, if you knew how to look at it.

Last week, when his boss said he’d hired another high school student, Peter had become so nervous that he actually had to lock himself in the bathroom for twenty minutes until he could act like it was no big deal. As stupid and boring as this job was, it was a haven. Peter was alone here most of the afternoon; he didn’t have to worry about crossing paths with the cool kids.

But if Mr. Cargrew was hiring someone else from Sterling High, then that person knew who Peter was. And even if the kid wasn’t part of the popular crowd, the copy center would no longer be a comfortable place. Peter would have to think twice about what he said or did, because otherwise, it would become fodder for rumors around school.

To Peter’s great surprise, however, his co-worker turned out to be Josie Cormier.

She had walked in behind Mr. Cargrew. “This is Josie,” he said, by way of introduction. “You two know each other?”

“Sort of,” Josie had replied, as Peter answered, “Yeah.”

“Peter will show you the ropes,” Mr. Cargrew said, and then he left to go play golf.

Occasionally when Peter walked down the hall in school and he saw Josie with her new group of friends, he didn’t recognize her. She dressed differently now-in jeans that showed off her flat belly and a rainbow of T-shirts layered one over the other. She wore makeup that made her eyes look enormous. And a little sad, he sometimes thought, but he doubted she knew that.

The last major conversation he’d had with Josie had been five years ago, when they were in sixth grade. He had been certain that the real Josie would come out of this fog of popularity and realize that the people she was hanging around with were about as scintillating as cardboard cutouts. He was sure that as soon as they started ripping on other people, she’d come back to Peter. Oh my God, she would say, and they’d laugh about her journey to the underworld. What was I thinking?

But Josie never came crawling back to him, and then he started to hang out with Derek from the soccer team, and by the time he was in seventh grade he found it really hard to believe that once, he and Josie had spent two weeks coming up with a secret handshake that no one else would ever be able to duplicate.

“So,” Josie had said that first day, as if she’d never met him before, “what do we do?”

They had been working together for a week now. Well, not together-it was more like they were doing a dance punctuated with the sighs and throaty grumbles of the copiers and the shrill ring of the telephone. Mostly, if they spoke, it was informational: Do we have any more toner for the color copier? How much do I charge someone to receive a fax here?

This afternoon, Peter was photocopying articles for a psychology course at the college. Every now and then, as the pages whipped through the automatic collating machine, he’d see brain scans of schizophrenics-bright pink circles at the frontal lobes that reproduced in shades of gray. “What’s that word you use when you call something by its brand name instead of what it really is?”

Josie was stapling together another job. She shrugged.

“Like Xerox,” Peter said. “Or Kleenex.”

“Jell-O,” Josie answered after a moment.

“Google.”

Josie glanced up. “Band-Aid,” she said.

“Q-tip.”

She thought for a second, a grin spreading over her face. “FedEx. Wiffle ball.”

Peter smiled. “Rollerblade. Frisbee.”

“Crock-Pot.”

“That’s not-”

“Go look it up,” Josie said. “Jacuzzi. Post-it.”

“Magic Marker.”

“Ping-Pong!”

By now they’d both stopped working. They were standing next to each other, laughing, when the bell over the door chimed.

Matt Royston walked into the store. He was wearing a Sterling hockey cap-even though the season wouldn’t start for another month, everyone knew he would be tapped for varsity, even as a freshman. Peter-who’d been reveling in the miracle that here was Josie, again, like she used to be-watched her turn to Matt. Her cheeks pinkened; her eyes leaped like the brightest part of a flame. “What are you doing here?”

He leaned against the counter. “Is that how you treat all your customers?”

“Do you need something copied?”

Matt’s mouth cocked up in a grin. “No way. I’m an original.” He glanced around the store. “So this is where you work.”

“No, I just come here for the free caviar and champagne,” Josie joked.

Peter watched this exchange from behind the counter. He waited for Josie to tell Matt that she was in the middle of doing something, which might not necessarily be true, but they had been having a conversation. Sort of.

“When do you get off?” Matt asked.

“Five.”

“Some of us are going over to Drew’s tonight to hang out.”

“Is that an invitation?” she said, and Peter noticed that when she smiled, really hard, she had a dimple he’d never noticed before. Or maybe she just hadn’t smiled that way around him.

“Do you want it to be?” Matt answered.

Peter walked toward the counter. “We have to get back to work,” he blurted out.

Matt’s eyes flicked over Peter. “Stop looking at me, homo.”

Josie moved so that her body was blocking Peter’s view of Matt. “What time?”

“Seven.”

“I’ll see you over there,” she said.

Matt rapped his hands against the counter. “Cool,” he replied, and he walked out of the store.

“Saran Wrap,” Peter said. “Vaseline.”

Josie turned to him, confused. “What? Oh. Right.” She picked up the materials she’d been stapling, stacked a few more packets on top of each other, aligned their edges.

Peter added paper to the machine that was working on his job. “Do you like him?” he asked.

“Matt? I guess.”

“Not like that,” Peter said. He pressed the Copy button, watched the machine begin to birth a hundred identical babies.

When Josie didn’t answer, he went to stand next to her at the sorting table. He gathered a packet of papers in his hands and stapled it, then handed it to her. “What does it feel like?” he asked.

“What does what feel like?”

Peter thought for a moment. “Being at the top.”

Josie reached across him for another packet of material and fed it into the stapler. She did three of these, and Peter was certain that she was going to ignore him, but then she spoke. “Like if you take one wrong step,” she said, “you’re going to fall.”

When she said that, Peter could hear a note in her voice that was like a lullaby. He could vividly remember sitting on Josie’s driveway in the heat of July, trying to make a fire with sawdust, sunlight, and his glasses. He could hear her yelling over her shoulder as they ran home from school, daring Peter to catch up. He saw a faint flush paint her face and realized that the Josie who used to be his friend was still there, trapped inside several cocoons, like one of those Russian nesting dolls that hides another and another, until you reach the one that fits snug in the palm of your hand.

If he could just somehow make her remember those things, too. Maybe being popular wasn’t what had made Josie start hanging out with Matt and Company. Maybe it was just because she’d forgotten that she liked hanging out with Peter.

From the corner of his eye, he looked at Josie. She was biting her lower lip, concentrating hard on getting the staple straight. Peter wished he knew how to be as easy and natural as Matt, but all his life, he’d always seemed to laugh just a little too loud or too late; to be oblivious to the fact that he was the one being laughed at. He didn’t know how to be anyone except who he’d always been, so he took a deep breath and told himself that not too long ago, that had been good enough for Josie anyway.

“Hey,” he said. “Check this out.” He walked into the adjoining office, the one where Mr. Cargrew kept a picture of his wife and kids and his computer, which was firmly off-limits and password-encoded.

Josie followed him and stood behind the chair as Peter sat down. He keyed a few strokes, and suddenly the screen opened up for access.

“How did you do that?” Josie asked.

Peter shrugged. “I’ve been playing around with computers a lot. I hacked into Cargrew’s last week.”

“I don’t think we should-”

“Wait.” Peter picked his way through the computer until he reached a well-hidden file of downloads and opened up the first porn site.

“Is that…a dwarf?” Josie murmured. “And a donkey?”

Peter tilted his head. “I thought it was a really big cat.”

“Either way, it’s totally gross.” She shuddered. “Ugh. How am I going to take a paycheck from that guy’s hand now?” Then she looked down at Peter. “What else can you do with that computer?”

“Anything,” he bragged.

“Like…hack into other places? Schools and stuff?”

“Sure,” Peter said, although he didn’t really know about that. He was just starting to learn about encryption and how to make wormholes through it.

“What about finding an address?”

“Piece of cake,” Peter answered. “Whose?”

“Someone totally random,” she said, and she leaned over him to type. He could smell her hair-apples-and felt the press of her shoulder against his. Peter closed his eyes, waiting for lightning to strike. Josie was pretty, and she was a girl, and yet…he felt nothing.

Was that because she was too familiar-like a sister?

Or because she wasn’t a he?

Stop looking at me, homo.

He did not tell Josie this, but when he’d first found Mr. Cargrew’s porn site, he’d found himself staring at the guys, not the girls. Did that mean he was attracted to them? Then again, he’d looked at the animals, too. Couldn’t it just have been curiosity? Comparison, even, between the men and him?

What if it turned out that Matt-and everyone else-was right?

Josie clicked on the mouse a few times until the screen was filled with an article from The Boston Globe. “There,” she said, pointing. “That guy.”

Peter squinted at the caption. “Who’s Logan Rourke?”

“Who cares,” Josie said. “Someone who looks like he has an unlisted address, anyway.”

He did, but then, Peter figured that anyone running for public office probably was smart enough to take their personal information out of the phone book. It took him ten minutes to figure out that Logan Rourke had worked for Harvard Law School, and another fifteen to hack into the human resources files there.

“Ta-da,” Peter said. “He lives in Lincoln. Conant Road.”

He looked over his shoulder and saw his smile spread, contagious, over Josie’s face. She stared at the screen for a long moment. “You are good,” she said.

Economists, it was often said, knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Lewis considered this as he opened up the enormous file on his office computer, the World Values Survey. Gathered by Norwegian social scientists, here was data collected from hundreds of thousands of people around the world-an endless array of details. Simple ones-like age, gender, birth order, weight, religion, marital status, number of children-and more complex accounts, like political views and religious affiliations. The survey had even considered time allocation: how long a person spent at work, how often he went to church, how many times a week he had sex and with how many partners.

What would have seemed tedious to most people was, to Lewis, like a roller-coaster ride. When you started to sort out the patterns in data this massive, you didn’t know where you’d twist or turn, how steep the fall or how soaring the heights. He’d examined these numbers often enough to know that he’d be able to quickly crank out a paper for next week’s conference. It didn’t have to be perfect-the gathering was small, and his higher-ranking peers wouldn’t be present. He could always take whatever he eked out now and polish it later for publication in an academic journal.

The focus of his paper involved putting a price on the variables of happiness. Everyone always said that money bought happiness, but how much? Did income have a direct or causal effect on happiness? Were happier people more successful in their jobs, or were they given a higher wage because they were happier people?