It's a typical day in school. Everything is peaceful, and the next moment, loud gunshots echo off the walls of the narrow hallways. In this moment, everything is in chaos. Eventually, it ends, and things begin to calm down. However, the question remains. How did this event affect you? Do you go about your day, watching others fall apart from the devastation? Or are you the one falling apart? In the story Nineteen Minutes by Jody Picoult, a local high school is ravaged by a shooting, leaving 10 dead and many others scarred for life, both physically and emotionally. The one responsible for these deaths, a student by the name of Peter Houghton, is forced through the law system while everyone else is left to face the harsh reality of what has happened. The different characters in the story all go through the same event, but they react in ways completely different from others. Some are devastated, while others are left relatively unfazed. However, the way different people interpret this situation has a lot to do with the relationships between other characters.
One emotion that characters have been left with is guilt. Two of the main characters, Josie and Lacy, end up feeling more and more guilty as the story progresses. Lacy, Peter's mother, feels guilty after the shooting because she feels as if she was the driving force behind what led Peter to commit such a crime. "Lacy nodded, afraid that even the sound of her voice would ruin her anonymity. It was almost too easy to agree: had there ever been a more awful child? A worse mother?" (pg. 166) In other words, Lacy is almost completely convinced that she was the reason why Peter is such an "awful" child. However, she, unlike many people, still believes in Peter, so she may not be saying anything to counter what people say about her because she's trying to put more of the blame on herself rather than Peter. Towards the end of the story, it is discovered that Josie played a part in one of the victims' death. Josie is completely haunted by the guilt, and as a result, she cannot bring herself to talk about what she witnessed at the shooting. Unlike Lacy, this guilt completely controlled Josie, making her break into tears the moment someone asked her about the shooting. It struck fear in her when the guilt in Lacy was more controlled. This shows how Josie and Lacy reacted to this experience with guilt, and how the guilt affected them.
Unlike most people, Peter was left mostly unchanged by the shooting. This is because as the shooter, Peter had control of the entire situation, and as a result, no one that Peter cared for was affected in the shooting. In fact, the victims of the shooting were the people that he hated the most. When he was in kindergarten, other kids would always throw his lunchbox out of the window, and after multiple instances of this happening, Peter's parents stopped giving him the support he needed, saying that he had to stand up for himself. This was clearly not an option for him, as anything he said or did was instantly punished by the bullies doing something to hurt him. Josie would always be the one to stand by Peter when no one else would even dare, which led to Peter never learning how to stand up for himself. Also, sometime before the shooting, Peter wrote a very private email to Josie about how much he liked her, and unfortunately, his letter was sent out to the entire school. Peter's love for Josie was a small beacon of hope within all of the horrendous things that he was forced to endure, and suddenly, everyone was stomping on that hope, leaving Peter with nothing. Peter had nothing left for him in the world that he cared about, and as a result, he didn't lose anything in the shooting, which is why he was not affected at all by the effects of it.
To sum up, a big part of determining how someone is affected by a certain event has a lot to do with how if affects the people that they care about. It was surprising to see how Peter's lack of anything that he cared about eventually led to almost a complete apathy for everything in the world. It shows that since Peter had nothing to care for, he had nothing to lose. I learned from this that it's important for people to have something to care about because that is what keeps life colorful. Without anything to care for, we fall into a life like Peter's where there is nothing to make any kind of difference, and without it, nothing would happen in the world.
