Life is one big popularity contest. It starts in about kindergarten, when you first start school, and it never ends. However, it isn’t much of a problem until middle school, and it continues to be a problem through high school, then gets better. At the top of the popularity pyramid we of course have the jocks and the preps. At the bottom are the nerds and misfits. Those at the top of the pyramid win, and those at the bottom lose. But, sometimes winners laugh at the losers and pick on them, just for losing. They do it in sports, and in popularity. In sports it’s called bad sportsmanship, but in popularity it’s called bullying. Nineteen Minutes is about a boy who after being bullied for 13 years, snaps, and goes on a killing spree in his small town high school. The book takes us through the lives of Peter, the shooter; Josie, popular girl who used to be friends with Peter, who’s boyfriend Peter killed; Alex, Josie’s mom, and a judge; and Lacy, Peter’s mom, both before and after the shootings. The following quotes capture the characters and conflict perfectly.

“You could lose track of someone when you blinked,” (Picoult, 146).

One main theme in this book is thinking you know someone when you really don’t. Or you do know them one minute, but then you blink and they’re an entirely different person. Lacy thought she knew her son Peter, and her son Joey. But then after Joey dies, she finds heroin in his room, and a year after that Peter goes to school with four guns and kills ten people. And then there’s her husband Lewis, who after several months of thinking he was visiting Peter in jail every other week, Lacy finds out he only went once, and was instead bringing flowers to the graves of the people Peter killed. It just goes to show that you really don’t know the people you think you know. You may think you know your spouse, but you really don’t. After all, there’s all those years before you met him/her, and they’re old enough to keep secrets. And your children, how can a parent not know their own child? Well, you do know them at least for about eleven years. Those first eleven years of a child’s life their parents know almost everything about them. Because the child tells their parents basically everything that happens in their lives, since they’re close to their parents, and they’re not doing things that they wouldn’t tell their parents. Then the child gets to middle school, and they start becoming a teenager, and withdrawing from their parents, whether or not their parents know it. Every teenager keeps secrets from their parents, even the straight-A nerd with only a few friends, who spends all his time studying and reading ahead for his classes has some secret from their parents. It may just be one or two small secrets, or everything their parents think about them might be a lie. Also, most teenagers almost never share their inner thoughts with their parents, like a child might. So there’s even more secrets a child has from their parents, and more that their parents don’t know about them. You really don’t know everyone you think you do, even if they’re your spouse or your own child.     

“You can feel people staring; it’s like heat that rises from the pavement during summer…. You don’t have to hear a whisper, either, to know that it’s about you.
I used to stand in front of the mirror in the bathroom to see what they were staring at. I wanted to know what made their heads turn, what it was about me that was so incredibly different. At first I couldn’t tell. I mean, I was just me.
Then, one day, when I looked in the mirror, I understood. I looked into my own eyes and I hated myself, maybe as much as all of them did. That was the day I started to believe they might be right” (Picoult, 162).

Thousands of kids are bullied everyday, just because they’re different, and not popular. Other kids, the ones that aren’t bullied (or are bullied less) and don’t bully, stare at them in the hallway, just because they’re different enough to be picked on. They don’t look funny, or necessarily dress different, but their personality just doesn’t fit in, and the popular people hate that. I don’t know why they hate people who are different. Neither do the victims of bullying. Every time a victim looks at their selves they wonder why everyone stares at them, and what’s so different about them that people shove them in lockers, and trip them every day. And some people, like Peter Houghton, are bullied so much that they start to believe the bullies are right, and begin to hate themselves. And then some, like Peter, and Kip Kinkel from Thurston High, John McLaughlin from Rocori, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold from Columbine high school, and others as well, end up full so of hatred, for the bullies, and for themselves, that they kill other students, and sometimes themselves. To others, they seem crazy. I thought Peter was crazy when I read the line “he slipped the gun between his mattress and his box spring and lay down. It would be like that fairy tale, the one with the princess who could feel a pea or whatever. Except Peter wasn’t a prince, and the lump wouldn’t keep him up at night. In fact, it might make him sleep better” (Picoult, 328). But then I thought about it and I realized that he wasn’t crazy. He just wanted protection. As do other school shooters. And the only way for them to get it was with a gun.  
Of course not everyone does that. Derek Markowitz never did. Neither Michael Beach and Justin Friedman. Same goes for the thousands of other kids that are bullied. But some people are bullied worse than others. Besides, everyone has different reactions to everything. Some people may just accept the bullying and deal with it, while others want to get revenge. But while getting vengeance they do something else. They fulfill every teens dream of being someone that no one can judge, as Josie realized. “She stared at Peter, and she realized…she knew exactly what he’d felt as he moved through the school with his backpack and his guns. Every kid in this school played a role: jock, brain, beauty, freak. All Peter had done was what they all secretly dreamed of: be someone, even for just nineteen minutes, who nobody else was allowed to judge,” (Picoult, 441). What teen doesn’t dream of not being judged, even for just a few minutes? The only way to not be judged is through physical harm to another. The popular people bully others, and no one judges them for it. Then when the bullied come to school with guns and start shooting, no one judges them.  

“Ask a random kid today if she wants to be popular, and she’ll tell you no…. See, you can’t admit to wanting it, because that makes you less cool. To be truly popular, it has to look like it’s something you are, when in reality, it’s what you make yourself.
I wonder if anyone works any harder at anything than kids do at being popular. I mean, even air-traffic controllers and the President of the United States take vacations, but look at your average high school student, and you’ll see someone who’s putting in time twenty-four hours a day, for the entire length of the school year.
So how do you crack that inner sanctum? Well, here’s the catch: it’s not up to you. What’s important is what everyone else thinks of how you dress, what you eat for lunch, what shows you TiVo, what music is on your iPod.
I’ve always wondered, though: If everyone else’s opinion is what matters, then do you ever really have one of your own?” (Picoult, 241)   

A lot of people want to be popular, and everyone wanted to be popular at one point in their lives. Popular people don’t get bullied. Popular people have lots of friends. Popular people are envied by lots of people. Popular people can get almost any guy or girl they want. Who wouldn’t want a life like that? But the popular people have to try hard to be popular. They can’t just get up in the morning, run a brush through their hair, and throw on the first outfit they find. They have to take the time to make sure their hair looks perfect, make sure the outfit they pick goes together, and is stylish, or else they risk being laughed at by their “friends” and others. It’s the way the system works. As Josie said, “Popular kids didn’t have friends; they had alliances. You were safe only as long as you hid your trust- at any moment someone might make you the laughingstock, because then they knew no one was laughing at them” (Picoult, 318). Popular kids hang out with other popular kids, just because their all popular. But it’s like a contest, where everyone judges everyone else. If some of the judges agree that one of the contestants should be demoted from popular, they can make it happen. No one wants that to happen. Therefore before school, the popular kids make sure they look perfect, just like everyone expects them to look. That way they won’t be kicked out of the popular clique.
Sometimes the popular people wish they weren’t popular, so they didn’t have to go through all that every day. Josie does. “Sometimes Josie thought of her life as a room with no doors and no windows. It was a sumptuous room, sure- a room half the kids in Sterling High would have given their right arm to enter- but it was also a room from which there really wasn’t an escape. Either Josie was someone she didn’t want to be, or she was someone no one wanted,” (Picoult, 8). She wishes she could just leave popularity, even just for a short while. But as she says “if you take one step…you’re going to fall,” (Picoult, 205). The pyramid of popularity is a fragile one. One day not following the rules could send you plummeting to the bottom.