After Before and After

Phase 4: Chapter 101

September 15, 1993. 2:02 PM.

The first full week of testimony regarding Piggy's death felt slow, though still excruciating. First of all, it started on a Tuesday. And second of all, Ralph was still battling an internal conflict about the guilt and blame to be assigned for what happened to Piggy that horrible mid-January day.

Barnes finished up with the physical evidence side of things, wrapping it in a neat bow of formal Exhibits, before moving onto establishing the scene of Piggy's death. It was midweek when Andrew Murray took her place at the front of the courtroom to handle the Flag State's evidence; the tapes of the interviews conducted in the week after the rescue. These particular tapes had been cut to play only parts where the boys talked of Piggy's death and how it happened. It only took a day and a half for Murray to present the tapes and question the investigators who interviewed the boys for additional clarification. There were far more tapes to get through with Simon's death because there were far more people who told the truth about Simon's death.

Very few boys were forthcoming about what they all witnessed the day Piggy was killed.

By the end of the week on Friday, September 10th, Barnes had done her job of presenting all the physical evidence and establishing the scene of Piggy's death using common details among all the boys' stories told in their Flag State interviews.

By the beginning of the second week, Barnes moved onto establishing motive. The hardest part of her job in this trial was to prove that the boys had a reason to hurt the people they did. With Simon and Captain Benson, it was incredibly difficult to prove malicious intent because there wasn't any. Self-defense was the only motive that would stand up in court, and Barnes' only chance at a conviction was to get the jury to see that the crime itself was still worthy of punishment, even if the only thing the boys were really guilty of was poor judgment and a lack of impulse control.

It was now Wednesday, and officially halfway through the month of September. Sitting still and quiet in the courtroom, all Ralph could think about was his school and classmates back in East Point. The kids he shared the hallway with since being rescued were all two-hundred and forty-five miles away swimming through the trenches of sophomore year without him. Classes would go on, teens would makeout up against lockers, bullies would throw food at others across the cafeteria, tryouts for sports teams would take over many hours after school, and the hot, cramped bus would leave the school parking lot every afternoon, all in Ralph's absence, just like they did when he was stuck on the island.

What Ralph was really learning from the island and the trial was that he wasn't an integral part of society, that the world wouldn't stop spinning just because he wasn't there to spin with it. Even his own parents got up every morning and went to work everyday when he was missing, possibly presumed dead at the bottom of the North Atlantic. Ralph wondered now if anyone would even remember him when he returned to Eastern Woodland Academy next fall. Ralph would be starting the tenth grade while all his friends and classmates would be starting the eleventh. It was just another humiliating sacrifice he'd have to make in light of a three-year-old tragedy that wasn't his fault.

Ralph's mind continued to wander as Dana Barnes questioned a member of Bainbridge Military Academy's lunchroom staff. The older woman with a strict and uptight demeanor was asked to speak to the incidents she witnessed in the cafeteria between 1986 and 1990, specifically those involving Pieter Kingston, Roger Conroy, and Jack Merridew. The witness who was no longer a staff member at the academy shared a handful of stories about the three boys in question, most of which involved spitballs or meatball launchers made from plastic spoons. The most common way she responded to Jack and/or Roger was with a belted "knock it off!" or a finger waved in their young faces with a threat to spend the remainder of the lunch period eating with Principal Stone in his office.