(A piece of short fiction)
“Oh. My. GAWD!”
For the first time in several hours, Juror Number 2 put down her cell phone. By this point, I had served on this jury with her for 8 days, six hours, and 15 minutes. I and 11 others had spent the past three days around the conference table in the jury deliberation room discussing the case. My seat was directly across from hers. Watching her chest heave against the flimsy straps of her tank top had kept me entertained for…maybe 20 minutes of those three days? Once the thrill faded, I had found myself with plenty of time to notice Juror Number 2’s less redeeming traits. As my fellow jurors traded ideas about the case, her desire to fit in would cool her desire to tap on her phone. She would then put the phone in her lap, in her bra strap (never have I so envied a cell phone!), or maybe in her purse, but her fingers always lingered over the phone, as though they were promising the phone a swift return.
Neela! Her name was Neela!
This time, Neela slammed her phone onto the table, sending a rhinestone flying from the phone’s outer case to skid across the dusty blue nylon carpet. Her arms folded and her hands hid beneath her arms in solidarity with what I knew was her wounded pride.
“I can’t BUH-LEEVE you people!” Thankfully for those of us enjoying our complementary courthouse water, waxed Iron Man Dixie cups do not shatter on high notes. “I have spent a whole goddamn week here, listening to this stupid case, and one of you have the NERVE to talk shit?”
Her eyes darted from face to face, sniffing for the scent of treason. Don’t laugh. Oh God, don’t laugh. Oh no! The corners of my mouth betrayed me. Neela’s eyes narrowed into burning slits before I could remake my Very Serious Juror Face.
“You! You creeper! Where do you get off?!”
Moi? I turned toward our fearless leader, Juror #12, Dr. Important Dentist D.D.S. I opened my eyes wider and tilted a single eyebrow – What is she on about? At least that’s what I imagined my face was saying to the man who had nominated and elected himself jury foreperson before his 11 disinterested subjects.
Dr. Dentist laid 12 index cards on the table. He closed his eyes, whisked himself away to his happy place for just a moment, and leveled his glare at Neela. “Neela,” he tiptoed, “what exactly is bothering you?”
Neela opened her lips, but not her teeth. She could have fried an egg against my forehead with her eyes. “Creeper over there just…just…just cyber-bullied me!”
“What is that? Cyber-bullied?” I had known Juror #3 for 8 days, along with everyone else. During jury selection, the judge had made everyone answer a handful of basic life questions. Juror #3 was named Harvinder, and she was a retired nurse who lived in one of the indistinguishable suburbs that blanketed most of the county. Aside from that, she had a warm smile for anyone and everyone…especially when she wasn’t sure what was going on.
“All right, look,” Dr. Dentist said as he picked up the 12 index cards again and laid them one by one on the table, “We have been here for three days bickering about this case.” Dr. Dentist plucked the two of the index cards that read “not guilty” and held them at eye level. “Two of you are still not convinced that the defendant is guilty, and no one gets to go home until we all agree, one way or the other.”
“Whoa whoa whoa whoa, you need to check yourself right now,” Juror #1 said, folding his arms and spinning his ball cap backwards to make eye contact with Dr. Dentist. “I’m not changing my vote just so you can get back to tightening braces.” I had forgotten Juror #1’s name, and as far as I knew, he owned no clothing other than the Metal Mulisha t-shirt that he had worn to court every day of the trial.
“Well if you had a job yourself, and employees who depend on you, maybe you’d be less keen on coming back Monday. My employees don’t get paid until I get back to ‘tightening braces’ as you put it.” Dr. Dentist put his index finger against the conference table, as though his unpaid employees were under there at that very moment hoping for table scraps to fall.
“If you were that worried, you could just pay them anyway,” Juror #1 said, meeting Dr. Dentist’s eyes while swiveling his chair in semi-circles. Dr. Dentist snorted in disbelief at Juror #1’s suggestion and then turned to me. “Wei-Wei, is it? What exactly are you doing to Neela?”
“Walter. You can call me Walter. I said that before and you can still call me Walter.” The judge had called me Wei-Wei because that’s what my driver’s license and my mom call me. But after 8 days I was still Wei-Wei, the unmarried computer engineering major at Sequoia State University. “And we aren’t even supposed to be Tweeting about the trial until it’s over. I was paying attention when the judge talked.”
“Ah ha,” Neela said, “How did you know it happened on Twitter unless you were the one harassing me?”
“Twitter?” Harvinder the retired nurse smiled at Neela, expectantly.
“Twitter is a website where you can post short little messages. And someone posted this!” She picked up her phone from the table and passed it to Dr. Dentist. Dr. Dentist held the phone like a dead plague rat that might infect his dignity and read:
“I wish the judge would tell the hot kindergarten teacher to stop tweeting about the trial. Her sparkly phone is blocking my view. #nicerack #jurydookie”
Dr. Dentist spoke the word “hashtag” like some nasty swear word he had just learned in a foreign language.
“See? I came up with the hashtag ‘jurydookie’ first! And then I clicked on it to see if anyone else had thought of it and JUST NOW I saw this message with the same hashtag.”
“So…” I began, “not only have you been Tweeting about the trial, even though the judge told us specifically not to do that, you also came up with this hashtag that you thought was sooooooo clever that you clicked on it to see if anyone else started using it?” Of course that was what she had done. I had known she would do that. That was the point of using her own hashtag.
“All right, enough! None of you are even supposed to be posting on the internet until we get this thing done, and that is never going to happen at this rate.” Dr. Dentist handed the phone back to Neela. “Besides, the person who posted this calls himself LOL underscore DONGS, and his profile picture is one of those mustache masks that the Occupy Wall Street people wear. You don’t know it was Mr. Khek.”
Ah. I had been promoted to “Mister Khek.”
“Well who else was it? Her?!” Neela pointed her thumb toward Harvinder. Juror #3’s eyes widened, and turned to the rest of us. “But it was not me!” She pleaded to Neela with her eyes while putting a hand on her shoulder.” It was. Not. Me!”
“But Neela has a point.” Juror #10 was named Yuri, and his last name had lots of consonants put together: a married engineer with two kids. His accent had become much less noticible since the first day of jury selection, when the judge ignored Yuri’s claim that he was not fluent enough in English to sit as a juror. “How did you know that Neela was upset about something that had happened on Twitter before she even said it happened on Twitter?” Juror #10 folded his arms. His belly strained against the buttons of his plaid shirt. His hairless noggin shone in the flurescent light. For 3 days, Juror #10 had not interacted with us for longer than it took to write the word “guilty” on his index card every time Dr. Dentist called for a vote. And now he decides to chime in?
Neela, Harvinder, and 2 other jurors nodded at Yuri and then turned to me. Time to think fast.
“I assumed it was Twitter because clearly no one is taking Instagram photos and only my parents and their friends use Facebook.” Was that too scoffing? Or just enough scoffing to deflect attention away from me?
Either way, I was not convincing enough for Patty Sanchez, Juror #11, who turned one lip up in disgust at me. “That is so incredibly rude. And oppressive to women. This is supposed to be a place where everyone is safe to share their thoughts and you just violated all of the trust in this room.” Neela, Harvinder, Yuri, and the other two nodded. That was 6 of them. Six jurors up in my shit.
“Well if Neela has been Tweeting about this trial, she has already violated the trust in this room.” Maybe Dr. Dentist didn’t care about sexual harassment. Maybe Dr. Dentist was sick of Patty’s constant “not guilty” votes. Either way, he was done. “None of you need to be talking or Tweeting or blogging or anything to anyone else not in this room.”
” ‘None of you need to be talking?’ You sound like a frickin’ middle school yard duty.” Yes! Metal Mulisha was starting a mutiny. Ten jurors smirked and held back laughter. I didn’t bother holding back.
Patty turned to Neela. “One time my friend posted pictures from her trip to Curacao on her Instagram. She was going to go to Aruba but thought it was too touristy. And then that girl disappeared and got killed by that rich boy from Holland. So she went to Curacao instead. Anyway, she posted pictures and some guy made a comment on her bikini and she was all like ‘I bet I know who this is – there’s this guy in my O-chem class who keeps staring at me in discussion section.’ And we both had a class with this guy in the afternoon, so when we all sat down in the lecture hall, she tried to sign into Instagram as him. But she didn’t know the password. So she clicked the button that sends a new password to your phone. And right when she did that, the guy got a text and looked at his phone, and so we knew it was him.”
Fire shone in Neela’s eyes as she picked up her phone. Her nails clacked madly against her phone. Crap. My hand snuck under the table to my phone to disable the text notification settings on my phone before its vibration could give me away.
Bzzzzzzzzt.
Too late. Neela’s eyes grew to the size of dinner plates.
“Just a dang minute here,” Dr. Dentist pounced on Patty. “Besides this guy being a jerk,” the doctor’s thumb primed toward Metal Mulisha, “the whole reason we are still here is because you don’t think that the defendant was the one who threatened the victim on Facebook before he got shot dead in his driveway.”
“Because that’s totally different!” Ten jurors scowled at Patty. Neela’s death gaze never left me. I pretended not to notice. “The defendant said that he kept his Facebook open on his computer, and he lived with his brother, and his brother had threatened the victim too. One time my little brother broke into my Facebook and talked all kinds of shit on my friends’ Facebook walls. And I had to call them all and say it wasn’t me, it was my brother, and…”
Dr. Dentist spoke without taking his eyes from the ceiling. “Did your little brother have an ankle monitor that pinged within 10 yards of your computer at the same time as he posted the comments? Because you know that the defendant had one of those. It pinged 10 yards from the scene of murder 15 minutes before the murder.”
The light went on in Patty’s mind. “Oh yeah…..” Silence. Meanwhile, Neela’s eyes had not moved. I remembered a story that my U.S. history teacher had told me about how the CIA killed an Iranian diplomat by seating him behind a tube that shot radiation right into the back of his head.
“Maybe….I guess he did it.”
“OF COURSE he did it,” Neela said to Patty.
“No…the defendant. I guess he did do it after all.”
“Well, this game is no fun if I’m the only one playing it.” Metal Mulisha grabbed a new index card from the stack in the center of the conference table. He scrawled the word “GUILTY” in big spikey letters. The jurors began to shift in their seats as though they had all been defrosted at the same time. The clouds parted from Dr. Dentist’s eyes.
“So…,” Dr. Dentist begin, weighing each of us for signs of dissent, “does that mean we all agree?”
A wave of grateful nods circled the table. Dr. Dentist sprang from his chair and knocked on the door of the deliberation room. The bailiff answered, and Dr. Dentist told him that “his” jury had reached a verdict. No one could care less about me anymore.
We filed into the courtroom and took our seats in the jury box a half-hour later. Although we were about to deep-six his client, I still had to admire the defense lawyer for leaving everyone on the jury while the prosecutor had tried to kick as many of us off as possible. Using chaos to hide a man’s crime was black-belt level trolling. I had much to learn.
