House Rules

by Jodi Picoult

  --Holy shit,|| Oliver murmurs.

  I reach for Jacob's hands and pin them over his head again. --You ain't seen nothing yet,|| I say.

  The last time I had to dress my brother in a coat and tie we were headed to my grandfather's funeral. My mother was not herself that day, which is maybe why Jacob didn't put up as big a fight about the clothes as he did today. Neither of us owned a coat and tie, so my mother had borrowed them from a neighbor's husband. We were younger then, and a man's jacket fit neither of us. We sat on the side of the viewing room where the coffin was with our clothes swimming on us, as if we'd been bigger before our grief hit.

  In reality, I didn't know my grandfather very well. He'd been in a nursing home since my grandmother died, and my mom dragged us to visit him twice a year. It smelled like pee, and I used to get totally creeped out by the old people in their wheelchairs, whose skin seemed stretched too shiny and tight over bony knuckles and knees. The one good memory I had of my grandfather involved sitting on his lap when I was really little and having him pull a quarter out of my ear. His breath smelled like whiskey, and his white hair, when I touched it, was stiff as a Brillo pad.

  But still, he was dead, and I thought I should feel something ...

  because if I didn't, that meant I was no better than Jacob.

  My mother had, for the most part, left us to our own devices while she accepted the condolences of people whose names she didn't even know. I sat next to Jacob, who was staring straight ahead at the casket. It was black and propped up on fancy sawhorses that were covered with red velvet drapes. --Jacob,|| I whispered. --What do you think happens after?||

  --After what?||

  --After, you know. You die. Do you think you still get to go to heaven even if you never went to church?|| I thought about this for a moment. --Do you think that you recognize people in heaven, or is it like moving to a new school and starting over?||

  Jacob looked at me. --After you die, you decompose. Calliphoridae arrive on a body within minutes of death. The blowflies lay eggs in open wounds or natural orifices even before death, and their larvae hatch out in twenty-four hours. So even though maggots can't live underground, the pupal cases might be buried alive with the corpse and do their work from inside the coffin.||

  My jaw dropped.

  --What?|| Jacob challenged. --Did you really think embalming lasted forever?||

  After that, I didn't ask him any more questions.

  Once Jacob has been forced into his new formal wear, I leave Oliver to deal with the fallout and go to my mother's bedroom. She doesn't answer when I knock, so I push the door open a little bit and peek inside. --In here,|| she calls from her closet.

  --Mom,|| I say, and I sit down on her bed.

  --Is Jacob dressed?|| She pokes her head around the doorframe.

  --Pretty much.|| I pick at a thread on her quilt.

  In all the years we have lived here, my mother has slept on the left side of the bed.

  You'd think by now she would have branched out and taken over the whole damn thing, but no. It's like she's still waiting for someone to crawl into the other side.

  --Mom,|| I repeat. --I have to talk to you.||

  --Sure, baby. Shoot,|| she says. And then, --Where the hell are my black heels?||

  --It's kind of important. It's about Jacob.||

  She steps out of the closet and sits down beside me on the bed. --Oh, Theo,|| she sighs. --I'm scared, too.||

  --It's not that--||

  --We're going to do this the way we've done everything when it comes to Jacob,||

  she promises. --Together.||

  She gives me a tight squeeze, which only makes me feel more miserable, because I know I'm not going to say what I want to say to her, what I need to say.

  --How do I look?|| she asks, drawing away from me.

  For the first time, I notice what she's wearing. Not the conservative skirt and blue sweater and pearls that Oliver picked out for her but instead, a totally out-of-season bright yellow sundress. She grins at me. --It's Yellow Wednesday,|| she says.

  Jacob

  The first job from which I was fired was a pet store. I will not give the name of the chain, because I'm not sure if that's printable, and I have enough legal trouble to last me a lifetime right now. However, I will say--objectively--

  that I was the best employee they had and that, in spite of this, they still dismissed me.

  Even though when someone bought a corgi puppy, I offered facts along with Puppy Chow.

  (It's related to the dachshund! Its name is Welsh and means dwarf dog!) Even though I didn't steal from the cash register, like one of my coworkers.

  Even though I didn't tell on that coworker.

  Even though I wasn't rude to customers and never bitched when it was my turn to clean the public restrooms.

  What my boss (Alan, who was nineteen and an extremely viable candidate for Proactiv) told me was that customers had complained because of my appearance.

  No, I did not have snot running down my face. I wasn't drooling. I didn't wear my pants halfway to my knees, like the coworker I referenced above. All I did, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, was refuse to wear the store uniform. It was a blue button-down shirt. I wore it on Fridays, but honestly, it was bad enough I had to deal with buttons--was I supposed to put up with wearing colors on their off days, too?

  No one had complained, by the way. And it was easy to spot me as an employee because, even when I wasn't wearing the uniform, I still wore a tag as big as a newborn's head that read, HELLO MY NAME IS JACOB, CAN I HELP YOU?

  The real reason I was fired was that, after several weeks of making excuses to Alan about why my uniform did not appear on my body unless I happened to be scheduled to work on a Friday, I finally told him that I was autistic and that I had a thing about clothing colors, not to mention buttons. So in spite of the fact that the puppies genuinely loved me, and that I sold more of them than any other person working here; in spite of the fact that even at the moment I was fired one of the employees was texting her boyfriend instead of ringing up a customer and another one was flirting with Steve in Amphibians--in spite of all these things, I was made a scapegoat because of my disability.

  Yeah, I'm playing the Asperger's card.

  All I know is that before I told Alan I had AS he was willing to make excuses along with me, and afterward, he just wanted me gone.

  This is the story of my life.

  We ride to the courthouse in Oliver's car. My mother is in the front seat, and Theo and I are in the back. I spend most of the trip looking at the things I took for granted, sights I hadn't seen while I was cooped up under house arrest: the Colony diner, with its busted neon sign, advertising EAT AT THE COLON. The picture window of the pet store where I used to work, with a Gordian knot of puppies on view. The movie theater where I lost my first tooth and the cross on the side of the road where a teenager once died en route to school during an ice storm. The Restwood Bible Church billboard that reads, FREE COFFEE!

  ETERNAL LIFE! MEMBERSHIP HAS ITS PRIVILEGES!

  --Okay,|| Oliver says, after he pulls into a parking spot and turns off the ignition. --Here we go.||

  I open my door and step out of the car, and suddenly there are a thousand sounds hitting me like arrows and so much light that everything goes white. I can't hold my hands up to my eyes and my ears at the same time, and somewhere in between the screaming I can hear my name and my mother's voice and Oliver's. They multiply before my eyes, microphones like cancer cells, and they are coming closer.

  Oliver: Shit--I should have thought of this ...

  Mom: Jacob, close your eyes, baby. Can you hear me? Theo? Have you got ahold of him?

  And then there is a hand on my arm, but who can say if it belongs to my brother or to one of the strangers, the ones who want to cut my veins lengthwise and bleed me dry, the ones with headlight eyes and cavern mouths who want a piece of me to stick into their pockets and take away, until there's nothing left.


  I do what any ordinary person would do when faced with a horde of wild animals gnashing their teeth and wielding microphones: I run.

  It feels fantastic.

  Keep in mind I have been in a cage that's twenty by forty feet, two stories high. I may not be as fast as I'd like to be, because I am wearing dress shoes and also I am a natural klutz, but I manage to get far enough away to not hear their voices anymore. I can't hear anything, really, but the wind whistling in my ears and my breathing.

  And then suddenly I'm knocked off my feet.

  --Fuck it,|| Oliver wheezes. --I'm getting too old for this.||

  I can barely speak because he's lying flat on my back. --You're ... twenty-eight ...,||

  I grunt.

  He rolls off me, and for a moment we are both sprawled on the pavement underneath a sign at a gas station. UNLEADED $2.69.

  --I'm sorry,|| Oliver says after a moment. --I should have seen that coming.||

  I push up on my elbows to look at him.

  --There are a lot of people who want to see what happens with your case,|| he says,

  --and I should have prepared you.||

  --I don't want to go back there,|| I say.

  --Jake, the judge is going to put you back in jail if you don't.||

  I run through the list of rules in my head, the ones Oliver gave me for court behavior. I wonder why he didn't give the reporters the same rules, because clearly shoving a microphone up my nostrils doesn't qualify as good etiquette. --I want a sensory break,|| I announce, one of the appropriate responses to Oliver when we are at the trial.

  He sits up and draws his knees into his chest. A car pulls up to the gas pump a few feet away, and the guy who gets out looks at us strangely before swiping his credit card.

  --Then we'll ask the judge for one as soon as we get inside.|| He tilts his head. --What do you say, Jake? You ready to fight with me?||

  I roll my toes in the bells of the dress shoes. I do it three times, because that's lucky. --I love the smell of napalm in the morning,|| I answer.

  Oliver looks away from me. --I'm nervous,|| he admits.

  This doesn't seem like a great thing to hear from one's attorney before going into a trial, but I like the fact that he's not lying to me. --You tell the truth,|| I say.

  It's a compliment, but Oliver interprets it as a directive. He hesitates. --I'll tell them why you're not guilty.|| Then he gets up, dusting off his pants. --So what do you say?||

  This phrase has always seemed to be a trick question. Most of the time it's uttered by a person when you haven't even said a damn thing, but of course, the minute you point out that you haven't said anything, you have.

  --Do I have to go through all those people again?|| I ask.

  --Yeah,|| Oliver says, --but I've got an idea.||

  He leads me to the edge of the parking lot, where Theo and my mom are anxiously waiting. I want to tell Oliver something, but it fades in the face of this more immediate problem. --Close your eyes,|| he instructs, so I do. Then I feel him grab my right arm, and my mother grabs my left. My eyes are still closed, but I start to hear the humming of the voices, and without even realizing it, I make the same sound in the back of my throat.

  --Now ... sing!||

  --I shot the sheriff ... but I didn't shoot no deputy--|| I break off. --I can still hear them.||

  So Theo starts singing. And Oliver, and my mother. All of us, a barbershop quartet but without the harmony, up the stairs of the courthouse.

  It works. Probably because they are so surprised by the musical number, the Red Sea of reporters parts and we walk right up the middle.

  I'm so amazed that it takes me a while to remember what was stuck like a fish bone in my throat before we walked up the steps of the courthouse.

  1. I said to Oliver the verbal equation we'll call p: --You tell the truth.||

  2. He replied with q: --I'll tell them why you're not guilty.||

  3. In the logic equation of this conversation, I had made the assumption that p and q were equivalent.

  4. Now I realize that's not necessarily true.

  Before Jess and I started to work together, I had to go to social skills class at my school.

  This was largely populated by kids who, unlike me, were not particularly interested in joining the social scene. Robbie was profoundly autistic and spent most of the sessions lining crayons from end to end across the room. Jordan and Nia were developmentally disabled and spent all their time in special ed instead of being mainstreamed. Serafima was probably the most similar to me, although she had Down syndrome. She wanted to be part of the action so badly she'd crawl into the lap of a stranger and hold his face between her hands, which was cute when she was six but not so much when she was sixteen.

  Lois, the teacher, had all sorts of interactive games that we had to participate in. We'd role-play and have to greet each other as if we hadn't been sitting in the same room together for the past half hour. We'd have contests to see how long we could keep eye contact. Once, she used an egg timer to show us when we should stop talking about a topic so that someone else could have a turn in the conversation, but that stopped quickly when Robbie went ballistic the first time the buzzer went off.

  Every day we had to end with a circle time, where we each gave a compliment to the person next to us. Robbie always said the same thing, no matter whom he was placed beside: I like terrapins.

  (He did, too. He knew more about them than anyone I've ever met since and probably ever will, and if not for him I'd still be confusing them with box turtles.) Jordan and Nia always gave compliments based on appearance: I like that you brush your hair. I like that your skirt is red.

  One day Serafima told me that she liked hearing me talk about mitochondrial DNA.

  I turned to her and said that I didn't like the fact that she was a liar, since she had just that very day used the hand signal we agreed on as a class--a peace sign raised in the air--to tell Lois that she was tired of the topic, even though I hadn't gotten to the part about how all of us in this world are related.

  That was when Lois called my mother, and my mother found Jess.

  I worked on compliments with Jess, too, but it was different. For one thing, I really wanted to give them to her. I did like the way her hair looked like the stringy silk you pull out of a corn husk before it goes into the boiling water, and how she drew smiley faces on the white rubber rims of her sneakers. And when I went on and on about forensic science, she didn't wave a peace sign in the air; instead, she'd ask more questions.

  It was almost like that was her way of getting to know me--through how my mind worked. It was like a maze; you had to follow all the twists and turns in order to figure out where I started from, and I was amazed that Jess was willing to put in the time. I guess I didn't really think about the fact that my mother must have been paying her to do that, at least not until that idiot Mark Maguire said so at the pizza place. But still, it wasn't like she was sitting there counting down the minutes she had to suffer with me. You would have realized that, if you'd seen her.

  My favorite session with Jess was the one where we practiced asking a girl to the dance. We were sitting at a Wendy's because it was raining--we had gotten caught in a sudden downpour. While it passed Jess decided to get a snack, although there wasn't much fast food that was gluten-and casein-free. I had ordered two baked potatoes and a side salad without dressing, while Jess had a cheeseburger. --You can't even have French fries?||

  --Nope,|| I said. --It's all about the coating, and the oil they're fried in. The only fast-food fries that are gluten-free are at Hooters.||

  Jess laughed. --Yeah, I won't be taking you there.|| She peered at my bare potato, my undressed salad. --You can't even have a little butter?||

  --Not unless it's soy.|| I shrug. --You get used to it.||

  --So this,|| she said, turning the cheeseburger over in her hand, --is the kiss of death for you?||

  I felt my face go bright red. I didn't know what she was talking abou
t, but hearing her say the word kiss was enough to make me feel like I'd just eaten a butterfly instead of a cucumber. --It's not like an allergy.||

  --What would happen if you ate it?||

  --I don't know. I'd get upset more easily, I guess. The diet just works, for some reason.||

  She looked at the bun and picked a seed off it. --Maybe I should go cold turkey, too.||

  --Nothing upsets you,|| I told her.

  --Little do you know,|| Jess said, and then she shook her head and went back to the topic of the day. --Go ahead. Ask.||

  --Um,|| I said, looking into my potato, --so do you want to go to the dance with me?||

  --No,|| Jess said flatly. --You've got to sell it, Jacob.||

  --I'm, uh, going to the dance and I thought since you might be there, too--||

  --Blah blah blah,|| she interrupted.

  I forced myself to look Jess in the eye. --I think you're the only person who gets me.|| I swallowed hard. --When I'm with you, the world doesn't feel like a problem I can't figure out. Please come to the dance,|| I said, --because you're my music.||

  Jess's mouth dropped open. --Oh, Jacob, yes!|| she shouted, and then all of a sudden she was out of her seat and pulling me up and hugging me, and I could smell the rain in her ponytail and I didn't mind at all that she was in my space and too close. I liked it. I liked it so much that you know what happened and I had to push her away before she noticed or (worse) felt it hard against her.

  An old couple that was sitting across from us was smiling. I have no idea what they thought we were up to, but chances are Autistic Kid with Social Skills Tutor was not high on the list. The elderly woman winked at Jess. --Looks like that's one cheeseburger you won't forget.||

  There's a lot about Jess I won't forget. Like the way her fingernails were painted with sparkly purple polish that day. And how she hated barbecue sauce. How when she laughed, it wasn't a tiny, delicate thing but a sound that came from her belly.

  So much time is spent with people superficially. You remember all the fun you had but nothing specific.