You don’t stop being a judge just because you step out of the courthouse, her mother used to say. It was why Alex Cormier never drank more than one glass of wine in public; it was why she never yelled or cried. A trial was a stupid word, considering that an attempt was never good enough: you were supposed to toe the line, period. Many of the accomplishments that Josie’s mother was most proud of—Josie’s grades, her looks, her acceptance into the “right” crowd—had not been achieved because Josie wanted them so badly herself, but mostly because she was afraid of falling short of perfect.
Everyone broke up in laughter, as Lacy watched. Alex, she realized, could fit anywhere. Here, or with Lacy’s family at dinner, or in a courtroom, or probably at tea with the queen. She was a chameleon.
It struck Lacy that she didn’t really know what color a chameleon was before it started changing.
How could you change a boy’s bedding every week and feed him breakfast and drive him to the orthodontist and not know him at all?
Did everyone in jail think they were innocent? All this time Peter had spent lying on the bench, convincing himself that he was nothing like anyone else in the Grafton County Jail—and as it turned out, that was a lie.
The town of Sterling would analyze to death what she had done to her son—but what about what she would do for him? It was easy to be proud of the kid who got straight A’s and who made the winning basket—a kid the world already adored. But true character showed when you could find something to love in a child everyone else hated.
Everyone wants their kid to grow up and go to Harvard or be a quarterback for the Patriots. No one ever looks at their baby and thinks, Oh, I hope my kid grows up and becomes a freak. I hope he gets to school every day and prays he won’t catch anyone’s attention. But you know what? Kids grow up like that every single day.
She buried her face in her pillow. She didn’t know what the hell was wrong with her. It was as if, after, there were two Josies—the little girl who kept hoping it might be a nightmare, might never have happened, and the realist who still hurt so badly she lashed out at anyone who got too close.
Monsters didn’t grow out of nowhere; a housewife didn’t turn into a murderer unless someone turned her into one. The Dr. Frankenstein, in her case, was a controlling husband. And in Peter’s case, it was the whole of Sterling High School. Bullies kicked and teased and punched and pinched, all behaviors meant to force someone back where he belonged. It was at the hands of his tormentors that Peter learned how to fight back.
Logan Rourke wasn’t her father, not any more than the guy who’d taken their coins at the toll booth or any other stranger. You could share DNA with someone and still have nothing in common with them.
What if you took the prey… and made them the hunters?
Peter got out of bed and sat down at his desk, pulling his eighth-grade yearbook from the drawer where he’d banished it months ago. He’d create a computer game that was Revenge of the Nerds, but updated for the twenty-first century. A fantasy world where the balance of power was turned on its head, where the underdog finally got a chance to beat the bullies.
Like Peter, Derek Markowitz was a computer whiz. Like Peter, he hadn’t been blessed with muscles or height or, for that matter, any gifts of puberty. He had hair that stuck up in small tufts, as if it had been planted. He wore his shirt tucked into his pants at all times, and he had never been popular.
Unlike Peter, he hadn’t gone to school one day and killed ten people.
Children didn’t make their own mistakes. They plunged into the pits they’d been led to by their parents. She and Lewis had truly believed they were headed the right way, but maybe they should have stopped to ask for directions.
When you begin a journey of revenge, start by digging two graves: one for your enemy, and one for yourself.
Maybe it was our own damn fault that men turned out the way they did, Selena thought. Maybe empathy, like any unused muscle, simply atrophied.
Dorian Gray had a portrait that grew old and evil while he remained young and innocent-looking. Maybe the quiet, reserved mother who would testify for her son had a portrait somewhere that was ravaged with guilt, twisted with pain. Maybe the woman in that picture was allowed to cry and scream, to break down, to grab her son’s shoulders and say What have you done?
“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.”
“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?”
“Was there ever anything in Peter’s personality that led you to believe he was capable of an act like this?”
“When you look into your baby’s eyes,” Lacy said softly, “you see everything you hope they can be… not everything you wish they won’t become.”
