Josie did it!!

At what I believe is the last trial, Peter knows now that he is going to be charged as guilty. He tells Jordan this and asks him if he can just tell his side of the story so they know what happened. Jordan agrees and as Peter speaks, some people realize what he was going through and are shocked to hear some of his answers.

Meanwhile, Patrick decides he must find what happened to that other bullet that was fired in the locker room. As he is driving to the school, he gets eerie memories of what happened the day of the shooting. As he walks around the school, his conscience seems to be telling him to look in the locker room. When Patrick goes in there, he starts positioning himself where he found Peter, Matt, and Josie and where they may have been standing before he came. As Josie "claims", Matt picked up Gun B and tried to shoot Peter but he missed and so Peter shot Matt. To Patrick though, he thinks Josie is lying and I kind of do too. It's not possible for Matt to have shot a gun and then be lying on the other side of the locker room dead. Suddenly, it all clicks when Patrick finds a bullet by the shower stalls, coming from Josie's direction.

Back at the courthouse, Josie is called up as a witness. She decides it's time to tell the truth and so she tell the judge that when her, Peter, and Matt were in the locker room. Josie shot Matt first and then Peter did in the head. I can't believe it!! I never would of thought Josie would of killed Matt. I thought he could of shot himself or Peter did using two guns, but not Josie! All of a sudden, the courtroom is a buzz as the truth comes out.

The end of the book closes with the author writing that Peter committed suicide in the prison cell using a sock. Then, Patrick and Alex are described as walking through Sterling High School five months later and Alex is pregnant.

Wow. This book had a very twisted ending with lots of surprises I never would of guessed.

Who shot Gun B?

As the Sterling High School shooting trial moves along, more students are interviewed. Drew Girard was chosen to be asked questions and Jordan McAfee makes Drew look like a bully. The types of questions he asks like "Did you ever call him names?" "Shove Peter into a locker?" "What about the time you pantsed him?" put Drew on the spot but he answered all of them honestly. From what I've learned and already guessed, Josie's "crowd" (the one that Matt, Courtney, Maddie, Drew, and others hung out in) were very mean to Peter. They bullied him pretty much everyday.

Next, Derek (one of Peter's only friends) came up to the witnesses stand. He was asked the normal questions and everyone heard that along with Peter, he was picked on quite often as well. Jordan started asking him if Peter had ever talked about the shooting and he said no but the two played his game, "Hide-N-Shriek!" Then, Derek said something at the end of his talk. A female lawyer asked, "You never put together a plan...killing people who had hurt you the most, did you, Derek?" And Derek said, "No, but sometimes I wish I had."

Is that saying everyone who was picked on or bullied wishes they would of done what Peter did? Was Peter sticking up for those kids?

At a jury meeting about a week later, the judge asks Patrick about the guns Peter used. He said Peter on used two guns, Gun A and Gun B. Patrick and the crime lab have proof that Peter used Gun A, but he still hasn't discovered who used Gun B. That seems to be the missing piece of this puzzle.

At this same meeting, a physiologist has done some research on what may have gone wrong and if Peter had a brain disorder. He concludes to the judge that Peter was just going through the motions and actions of everything he did that day like shooting people but that he never was capable of thinking about what he was doing.

The bullying never ends.

One night at Josie's house, Courtney had to sleepover because her parents were out of town. She went through Josie's e-mail while Josie was taking a shower and saw one from Peter Houghton. Peter was telling Josie that he liked her a lot in the e-mail. Courtney thought this was hilarious so she told Drew Girard to spam the e-mail to the whole student body and he did and everyone found out about Peter's secret. Josie never knew about the e-mail until she got to school and her friends were teasing her about it.

A few days later, Courtney told Peter that Josie likes him too. Peter believes her and at lunch that day, he gets up the courage to visit her lunch table ask her to sit with him at lunch. Josie is embarrassed when her comes over and next thing you know, Matt is behind Peter and pulls his pants down...along with his boxers. Everyone in the cafeteria is laughing at Peter as he quickly pulls up his pants and runs to the bathroom. He got really mad and yelled to himself "I hate you all".

Matt and Josie are still going out and one day, Josie realizes she hasn't gotten her period in a while. She takes plenty of pregnancy tests and they all come back positive. Josie starts to freak out realizing she is pregnant and so she fakes sick to skip school one day. She reads online about herbs and remedies or ways to self-abort your baby. She tries a few different ways and a little bit later, she has a miscarriage and it is like the happiest day of Josie's life.

Patrick and Alex start to become closer when he spots her at a Chinese restaurant one night. They end up eating together and then day’s later one thing leads to another and the two are now dating. I think Josie felt a little awkward because Patrick is a detective on her case, but she seems happy if her mom is happy with him.

"Hide-N-Shriek!"

Patrick went to speak with Joan McCabe, Ed McCabe's sister. He was the only teacher who was killed during the shooting and Patrick wanted to find out more about Ed. Peter had had Mr. McCabe for math in tenth grade and nobody remembers Peter having a bad relationship with the teacher. When Joan and Patrick were talking, Joan mentions that maybe Philip remembers something. It turns out that Philip was Ed's partner and that no one knew at school that Ed was gay. Then Patrick thinks back to one of the first people shot, Natalie Zlenko, and remembered her being lesbian and in the GLAAD club at school thinking that Peter could possibly be a homophobic.

The principle and staff members of Sterling High School knew that the kids would have to finish out their high school year somewhere so now the kids who have chosen to come back are at an old elementary school that wasn't being used before.

Later at Jordan's house (Peter's defense attorney), he is trying to figure out a way to make Peter seem not guilty. When his wife and him are talking, she brings up something about Battered woman syndrome, which flicks a light bulb on in Jordan's head. He considers an argument that Peter could of had post-traumatic stress disorder, which could be named, bullied victim syndrome. Jordan reasons that Peter just wanted all the bullying to stop and that Peter is pretty much a kid so he didn't know what he was doing. He may not of fully processed the consequences of his actions.

At Patrick's house one night, he sits at home and begins playing a computer game called "Hide-N-Shriek" that Peter created. Patrick is playing as a nerdy boy and the point of the game is to try and kill the jocks, bullies, and popular kids and when you hit them you receive a certain amount of points. As Patrick weaves his way through the hallways of the school he recognizes the floor plan, it was Sterling High School. It seems that Peter created his idea for the school shooting from this.

Peter has a new friend

“Every day in Sterling, there was a different funeral”. That’s very sad to think about.
Matt Royston had his memorial service and almost all of Sterling seemed to be there. Josie and her mother were sitting in the back when all of a sudden, something took over Josie and she walked up to Matt's coffin and started crying saying "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."

Over the next few days, Patrick makes a visit to the Cormier house to interview Josie and see what she remembers from the shooting. Josie was in the locker room when Peter shot Matt and that's where Patrick found the three. He thought she might have more insight on what happened in the locker room that day but the problem is that she says she doesn't remember anything, not even waking up that morning and that it's like "a blank spot her head skips over". I have a feeling she actually does remember what happened and that she is either afraid to tell the truth or thinking about it is like reliving the awful memories.

In the book, Picoult goes back to Peter's sixth grade days and writes about the middle school years. She wrote that Peter was forced to play soccer by his mom and in the soccer locker room Matt Royston and Drew Girard teased Peter about his physique. Then, Peter met another boy on the soccer team named Derek who was also being benched every game. The two became the benchwarmers and were from then on friends. I was happy to read this because I think that Derek and Josie were Peter's only friends.

*I forgot to mention that the Houghton’s had another son named Joey, but he was hit by a drunk driver and died in a car accident. Lacy and Lewis were devastated, but from what I've read Peter was a little sad, but not that upset. The reason why Peter didn't seem to care is because Joey was a "golden boy" as Peter called him. He was a straight-A student and an all-star athlete. I got the feeling that Lacy and Lewis wanted Peter to be just like Joey and so they forced Peter into doing sports like soccer that he didn't enjoy. Peter's parents thought that he liked Joey a lot, but that's not true. Also, Joey would pick on Peter as well and say some real mean things. Peter's parents loved Joey and Peter thought they wished he would of died in that accident instead of Joey. It turns out that Lewis had actually said that to Lacy after the shooting. He said that none of this would have happened if Peter had died in the car accident.

Released from the hospital

Josie is still recovering in the hospital after the shooting although I didn’t understand exactly why they kept her there if she hadn’t been shot. But as Josie said in the book, they wanted to make sure her head was okay after she’d fainted and hit it, and that she didn’t commit suicide or have any sudden panic attacks. The nurses thought that Josie couldn’t hear what they were saying but she can. Unfortunately, she knows that her boyfriend Matt is dead and her math teacher Ed McCabe, along with eight others. Anytime Josie would think of Matt, she realized she’d never see him again.

The next morning, Josie was released from the hospital. As she was walking out, she saw the name Haley Weaver, a senior she knew at her school. She told Josie that her boyfriend Brady stepped in front of a bullet for her and that Peter killed their friends Courtney Ignatio and Maddie Shaw too.

While this is happening, detective Patrick Ducharme visits the crime scene lab on the shooting and a woman tells him that Peter Houghton had four guns (A, B, C, D). He never used guns C and D, but gun A had his fingerprints (which is the gun that Patrick found Peter holding in the locker room). Gun B had a partial print, but you couldn’t tell whose print it was. I wonder who was using gun B? It couldn’t have been Peter because as Patrick points out, it doesn’t make sense to use one gun the whole time and then suddenly switch. Two bullets were shot at Matt Royston. One was by gun A and they found the bullet in his body, but gun B must of went through clean. Could someone else have been in the locker room? Would Matt shoot himself? Did Peter shoot twice, but with another gun the second time so he could cover it up?

The Day After

I’m in the “The Day After” chapter of Nineteen Minutes. In this chapter, this is what happened the day after the shooting at Sterling High School and it talks about the police searching through the Houghton’s house and about Peter in jail and getting his lawyer named Jordan McAffe.

When the police searched through the house, they brought out various items from Peter’s room like his computer. Then, a policeman asks Mr. Houghton (Lewis) to come inside with them for a moment. He takes Lewis to the basement and asks if any of his guns are missing, although it killed Lewis to admit this, it turned out that two of his five guns were missing from his locked gun case…
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I think because Alex has always been so involved with her job and wanting to be a top judge (even before Josie was born) that Alex doesn’t have as strong of a relationship with Josie. At first, Alex didn’t seem to care much about her baby and she wanted to give it up for adoption right after she had it. Then, I think she changed her ways of thinking and realized that being a mother was more important at the moment and later on, than having a successful job.

Something else I forgot to mention in one of my first blogs about this book is that Josie seems to be a part of the “popular” crowd and I don’t think Peter is. Josie mentions though that the girls she is friends with may not really be loyal friends and that they’re all “carbon copies” of each other. She also explains waking up many mornings and not wanting to put on a “cover” or put on a mask acting like someone she’s not. She didn’t want to have to pretend she was a popular girl or be known as “Matt Royston’s girlfriend”.

I am also positive that Lacy and Alex are no longer friends because that one time when Alex found Josie with a gun in her hand in Peter’s basement back when the two were in kindergarten. I think after that, Alex decided it was best to keep Josie away from Peter.