Rules

by Cynthia Lord

  My deepest appreciation to:

  Everyone at Scholastic Press, especially Marijka Kostiw, Kristina Albertson, Tracy Mack, and Leslie Budnick.

  Tracey Adams, my wonderful agent.

  The members of my critique groups, each of whom possess that rare combination of Charlotte the spider: a true friend and a good writer.

  My retreat-mates who put me on the right track: Franny Billingsley, Toni Buzzeo, Sarah Lamstein, Dana Walrath, Mary Atkinson, Carol Peacock, and Jackie Davies.

  With special thanks to Amy Butler Greenfield, Nancy Werlin, Amanda Jenkins, Denise Johns, Melissa Wyatt, Lisa Firke, Lisa Harkrader, Laura Weiss, Mary Pearson, Amy McAuley, and Kristina Cliff-Evans.

  And to my parents, Earl and Elaine Lord, who gave me wings but always left the porch light on to show the way home.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  Rules for David

  Follow the rules.

  Don’t run down the clinic hallway.

  If it’s too loud, cover your ears or ask the other person to be quiet.

  Sometimes you’ve gotta work with what you’ve got.

  If you don’t have the words you need, borrow someone else’s.

  Sometimes things work out, but don’t count on it.

  Saying you’ll do something means you have to do it — unless you have a very good excuse.

  If you can only choose one, pick carefully.

  At someone else’s house, you have to follow their rules.

  If it fits in your mouth, it’s food.

  Sometimes people laugh when they like you. But sometimes they laugh to hurt you.

  Open closet doors carefully. Sometimes things fall out.

  Sometimes people don’t answer because they didn’t hear you. Other times it’s because they don’t want to hear you.

  No toys in the fish tank.

  Solving one problem can create another.

  No dancing unless I’m alone in my room or it’s pitch-black dark.

  Not everything worth keeping has to be useful.

  Pantless brothers are not my problem.

  Some people think they know who you are, when really they don’t.

  Late doesn’t mean not coming.

  A real conversation takes two people.

  If you need to borrow words, Arnold Lobel wrote some good ones.

  After Words™

  About the Author

  Q&A with Cynthia Lord

  A New Set of Rules

  Inside Catherine’s Sketchbook: How to Draw a Guinea Pig

  Dots and Dashes: Messages in Morse Code

  Further Reading

  Don’t miss Cynthia Lord’s second novel, Touch Blue!

  Copyright

  “Come on, David.” I let go of his sleeve, afraid I’ll rip it. When he was little, I could pull my brother behind me if he didn’t want to do something, but now David’s eight and too strong to be pulled.

  Opening the front door, I sigh. My first day of summer vacation is nothing like I dreamed. I had imagined today warm, with seagulls winging across a blue sky, not overcast and damp. Still, I refuse to grab my jacket from the peg inside the front door.

  “Umbrella?” David asks, a far-off stare in his brown eyes.

  “It’s not raining. Come on. Mom said go to the car.”

  David doesn’t move.

  I get his favorite red umbrella.

  “Okay, let’s go.” I step onto the front porch and slide the umbrella into my backpack with my sketch-book and colored pencils.

  “Let’s go to the video store,” David says, not moving one inch.

  “You’re going to the clinic. But if you do a good job, Dad’ll take you to the video store when he comes home.”

  The video store is David’s favorite place, better than the circus, the fair, or even the beach. Dad always invites me to come, too, but I say, “No, thanks.” David has to watch all the previews on the store TVs and walk down each row of videos, flipping boxes over to read the parental advisory and the rating — even on videos Dad would never let him rent. David’ll say, loud enough for the whole store to hear, “Rated PG-thirteen for language and some violence! Crude humor!” He’ll keep reaching for boxes and flipping them over, not even seeing the looks people give us. But the hardest part is when David kneels in the aisle to see the back of a video box a complete stranger is holding in his hand.

  Dad says, “No one cares, Catherine. Don’t be so sensitive,” but he’s wrong. People do care.

  Beside me, David checks his watch. “I’ll pick you up at five o’clock.”

  “Well, maybe five o’clock,” I say. “Sometimes Dad’s late.”

  David shrieks, “Five o’clock!”

  “Shh!” I scan the yards around us to see if anyone heard, and my stomach flips. A moving van is parked in front of the house next door, back wide open, half full of chairs and boxes. From inside the truck, two men appear, carrying a couch between them.

  My hands tremble, trying to zip my backpack. “Come on, David. Mom said go to the car.”

  David stands with his sneaker toes on the top step, like it’s a diving board and he’s choosing whether to jump. “Five o’clock,” he says.

  The right answer would be “maybe,” but David only wants surefire answers: “yes” and “no” and “Wednesday at two o’clock,” but never “maybe” or “it depends” or worst of all, “I don’t know.”

  Next door the movers set the couch on the driveway. If I hurry, I can ask them before they head into the house.

  “Okay,” I say. “Dad will pick you up at five o’clock. That’s the rule.”

  David leaps down the steps just as the moving men climb into the van. He might not understand some things, but David loves rules.

  I know I’m setting up a problem for later because Dad’s always late, but I have rules, too, and one of mine is:

  Sometimes you’ve gotta work with what you’ve got.

  I take David’s elbow to hurry him. “Let’s go past the fence and talk to those men.”

  A little spring mud remains under the pine trees near the fence. Only a month ago, puddles were everywhere when Mrs. Bowman called me over to say her house had been sold to a woman with a twelve-year-old daughter. “I knew you’d be pleased,” she said. “I told the realtor I have a girl just that age living next door and maybe they can be friends.”

  A few weeks later, I had stood on my porch, waving, as Mrs. Bowman’s son drove her away to her new apartment attached to his house.

  It feels wrong that Mrs. Bowman’s not living in the gray-shingled house next door anymore, and her porch looks empty without her rocking chairs. But I’m tingly with hopes, too. I’ve always wanted a friend in my neighborhood, and a next-door friend would be best of all.

  Usually in summer I do lots of things by myself because my best friend, Melissa, spends the whole vacation in California with her dad. This year’ll be different, though. The girl next door and I can do all my favorite summer things together: swimming at the pond, watching TV, and riding bikes. We could even send midnight messages from our windows, using flashlights and Morse code, like next-door friends do in books.

  And the best part, David won’t have to come since Mom won’t have to drive me and pick me up.

  I bite my teeth together, fighting the memory of my last sleepover at Melissa’s. When Mom came to pick me up, David raced around Melissa’s kitchen, opening doors, looking for their cellar, even when Mom kept telling him this was a trailer and trailers don’t have cellars.

  “Real friends understand,” Mom had said on the ride home. But here’s what I understand: Sometimes everyone gets invited except us, and it’s because of David.

  Walking toward the
van, I study the moving men. One has a blotchy face and looks all business. The younger one wears a half smile and a dirty T-shirt and jeans.

  T-shirt Man seems friendlier.

  “Remember the rule,” I whisper, my hand pushing David’s back to hurry him. “If someone says ‘hi,’ you say ‘hi’ back.”

  Down the walkway, I run through conversation possibilities in my head, but that one rule should be enough. There’s only one question I need to ask, then I can take David right to the car.

  “Hi!” I call, reaching the corner of the fence. David flickers his fingers up and down, like he’s playing a piano in the air.

  T-shirt Man turns around.

  “Do you know when the family’s coming?” I ask. “Is it today?”

  He looks to the other man in the van. “When are the Petersons coming?”

  “If someone says ‘hi,’ you say ‘hi’ back!” David yells. “That’s the rule!”

  Both men stare past me with that familiar look. The wrinkled-forehead look that means, “What’s wrong with this kid?”

  I grab David’s hands to stop his fingers.

  “They’re coming about five o’clock,” the red-faced man says. “That’s what she said.”

  “Five o’clock!” David twists under my arm.

  My wrist kills from being curled backward. I grip my toes in my sneakers to hide the pain. “Thanks!” I pretend I can see my watch. “Wow, look at the time! Sorry, gotta go!”

  Chasing David to the car, I hear heavy footsteps on the van’s metal ramp behind me, thunk-thunk.

  David covers his ears with his hands. “It’s five o’clock. Let’s go to the video store!”

  My own hands squeeze to fists. Sometimes I wish someone would invent a pill so David’d wake up one morning without autism, like someone waking from a long coma, and he’d say, “Jeez, Catherine, where have I been?” And he’d be a regular brother like Melissa has — a brother who’d give back as much as he took, who I could joke with, even fight with. Someone I could yell at and he’d yell back, and we’d keep going and going until we’d both yelled ourselves out.

  But there’s no pill, and our quarrels fray instead of knot, always ending in him crying and me sorry for hurting him over something he can’t help.

  “Here’s another rule.” I open the car door. “If you want to get away from someone, you can check your watch and say, ‘Sorry, gotta go.’ It doesn’t always work, but sometimes it does.”

  “Sorry, gotta go?” David asks, climbing into the car.

  “That’s right. I’ll add it to your rules.”

  The men carry a mattress, still in plastic, up the walkway next door. Someday soon I’m going to take a plate of cookies up those steps and ring the doorbell. And if the girl next door doesn’t have a flashlight, I’ll buy her one that turns on and off easily.

  Mom says I have to deal with what is and not to get my hopes up, but how else can hopes go but up?

  “Wear your seat belt in the car,” David states. “That’s the rule.”

  “You’re right.” I click the seat belt across me and open my sketchbook to the back pages. That’s where I keep all the rules I’m teaching David so if my someday-he’ll-wake-up-a-regular-brother wish doesn’t ever come true, at least he’ll know how the world works, and I won’t have to keep explaining things.

  Some of the rules in my collection are easy and always:

  Say “excuse me” after you burp.

  Don’t stand in front of the TV when other people are watching it.

  Flush!

  But more are complicated, sometimes rules:

  You can yell on a playground, but not during dinner.

  A boy can take off his shirt to swim, but not his shorts.

  It’s fine to hug Mom, but not the clerk at the video store.

  And a few are more hints than rules — but matter just as much:

  Sometimes people don’t answer because they didn’t hear you. Other times it’s because they don’t want to hear you.

  Most kids don’t even consider these rules. Sometime when they were little, their mom and dad must’ve explained it all, but I don’t remember mine doing it. It seems I’ve always known these things.

  Not David, though. He needs to be taught everything. Everything from the fact that a peach is not a funny-looking apple to how having long hair doesn’t make someone a girl.

  I add to my list:

  If you want to get away from someone, check your watch and say, “Sorry, gotta go!”

  “It’s Mom!” David yells. “Let’s go to the video store!”

  She’s on the porch, locking our front door. I’ll get in trouble if Mom finds out I let him think the wrong thing. “I’m depending on you, Catherine,” she’ll say. “How will he learn to be independent if everyone lets him behave and speak the wrong way?”

  “You’re going to occupational therapy,” I tell David, “at the clinic.”

  He frowns. “Let’s go to the video store.”

  David may not have the sorry-gotta-go rule down, but he’s got this one perfect:

  If you say something over and over and over, maybe they’ll give in to shut you up.

  “You’re going to OT,” I say. “Maybe —”

  “Maybe” is all it takes. David twists toward me as far as his seat belt allows, his eyes flashing.

  I cover David’s mouth with my hand so the movers don’t hear him scream.

  When David was three and started coming to the clinic for occupational therapy, I tagged along because I was too little to stay home alone. Now I’m twelve and can stay home if I want, but I still like to come. I like talking to Mom on the ride over and back and shopping in the stores across the street, and I love the road between our house and the clinic. It follows the ocean’s shoreline, and I look for snowy egrets standing stick-still in the salt marshes and osprey circling, hunting fish. At high tide, waves sparkle under the wooden bridges, and I can guess the tide before I even see the water, just by closing my eyes and breathing the air through the open car windows. Low tide smells mud-black and tangy, but high tide smells clean and salty.

  The clinic is a few streets from the ocean, and in the summer sometimes Mom and I walk to the waterfront park while David has his appointment. It’s the only time in the week that I get Mom completely to myself and someone else is in charge of David. Mom likes to stay in the clinic waiting room so she can hear if David has a hard time, but I like when we leave because then she doesn’t look away from me every time she hears him shriek.

  At the clinic there’s a waiting room and a long corridor of doors to little offices for hearing tests, speech therapy, and occupational therapy. David comes on Tuesdays and Thursdays to see Stephanie, a woman with kind eyes and an office full of games, swings, a trampoline, and more balls than I’ve ever seen outside a school playground. I think it’d be fun to go with Stephanie and do what she calls “playing,” but David thinks it’s work.

  I wait while Mom says hello to the other waiting-room people, but as soon as Stephanie takes David’s hand, I ask, “Can we go to the park? We haven’t been since last fall.”

  “It’s going to rain.” Mom sits down on the waiting room couch. “And it’ll be cold by the water. You didn’t even bring your jacket.”

  “Can we go shopping, then?” I glance out the window to the line of stores across the street. My favorite is Elliot’s Antiques. From the sidewalk it seems only a door, tucked between two downtown shops, but behind the door and up a musty-smelling staircase is a sign: ELLIOT’S ANTIQUES. The whole store is like an attic, full of stuff someone’s grandparents once owned but had no more use for. Things not quite good enough to keep, but not quite bad enough to throw away.

  “David had a hard time last week,” Mom says. “I need to make sure Stephanie can handle it. Why don’t we read?”

  Mom crosses her legs, like she’s settled to stay. I slump on the couch beside her and check if anyone looks like they’ll mind Mom reading out loud. I haven’t
been to the clinic since my last school vacation, but I recognize the waiting-room people because their appointments are nearly the same time as David’s every week. Mrs. Frost, a tiny old lady, reads a magazine in the big chair between the front windows (she brings her even-older brother for speech therapy because he had a stroke). The receptionist with her blond, beauty-parlor hair types fast on her computer. Carol, a young mother wearing a big skirt and hoop earrings, sits in the rocking chair near the bookshelf. She leans down, handing her baby with Down syndrome chunky plastic blocks from the toy basket. In the chair next to the exit, Mrs. Morehouse, Jason’s mother, checks her watch.

  And there’s Jason. I’m not sure how old Jason is, maybe fourteen or fifteen, but even though he’s almost grown, his mother stays with him in the waiting room. Jason can’t go anywhere unless someone pushes his wheelchair.

  I open my backpack, and Mom cleans her glasses on the bottom edge of her shirt. When I was seven, Mom began reading the Harry Potter series to me, and even though I can read easily to myself now, we still read each new book together. I never think of the characters without hearing her voices.

  I pass her the book. “Read quiet.”

  She turns to our chapter, and I arrange my colored pencils on the couch next to me.

  Hunting out the window for something to draw, I consider the line of stores and restaurants across the street, but they look tired and “between.” In a week or two, the gift shop window will have splashy beach towels and plastic sand buckets, the hotel will show off the “No” lit up with the “vacancy,” and the parking lot will be full of seagulls strutting between the cars and perched on the streetlights, screeching for someone to drop a bite of sandwich or a French fry.

  I wish time would hurry and there’d be sailboats tying up at the landing and tour buses passing through, and I’d already have the first hellos traded with Somebody Peterson, the girl next door.

  I figure by five fifteen that first hi-trading could be over. Especially if I just happen to be outside at five o’clock when she arrives.