House Rules: A Novel

by Jodi Picoult

  Because I don’t know how to say this to her—and I’m sure she wouldn’t want to hear it, anyway—I reach for the remote control on her nightstand and turn on the TV that’s sitting on the dresser across the room. The news is on, the weatherman predicting a storm sometime next week. “Thanks, Norm,” the anchorwoman says. “Breaking news in the case of the murder of Jessica Ogilvy … Police have arrested eighteen-year-old Jacob Hunt of Townsend, Vermont, in connection with the crime.”

  Beside me, my mother freezes. Jacob’s school photo fills the screen. In it, he is wearing a striped blue shirt and, as usual, not staring at the camera. “Jacob is a senior at Townsend Regional High School and was tutored by the victim.”

  Holy shit.

  “We’ll have more on this story as it develops,” the anchor promises.

  My mother lifts the remote control. I figure she is going to turn off the television, but instead, she hurls it at the screen. The remote breaks apart, and the TV screen cracks. She rolls onto her side.

  “I’ll get the broom,” I say.

  In the middle of the night, I hear noises in the kitchen. I creep downstairs to find my mother, rummaging through a drawer to find the phone book. Her hair is loose, her feet are bare, and there’s a toothpaste stain on her shirt. “Why isn’t it listed under ‘Government,’” she mutters.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I have to call the jail,” she says. “He doesn’t like it when it’s dark. I could bring him a night-light. I want them to know that I can bring him a night-light, if that helps.”

  “Mom,” I say.

  She picks up the telephone.

  “Mom … you need to go to bed.”

  “No,” she corrects. “I need to call the jail—”

  “It’s three in the morning. They’re asleep.” I look at her. “Jacob’s asleep.”

  She turns her face to mine. “Do you really think so?”

  “Yeah,” I say, but the word has to squeeze itself out around the knot in my throat. “Yeah, I do.”

  Here are the things I am afraid of:

  That the subject Jacob loves the most has stopped being an interest and has started to become an obsession.

  That this is why he’s in jail in the first place.

  That when he was last with Jess, something made him feel scared, or cornered, which is what makes him snap.

  That you can love someone and hate him at the same time.

  That age has nothing to do with who is the older brother.

  If you think having a brother who’s got Asperger’s makes me a pariah, imagine having one who’s in jail. The next day I am in school—yes, more on that later—and everywhere I go, I hear the whispers.

  I heard he cut off her finger with a knife and kept it.

  I heard he hit her with a baseball bat.

  I always thought he was creepy.

  The reason I’m taking up space in my classes today—and believe me, that’s all I’m doing, since my brain is too busy blocking the gossip I overhear—is that my mother thought it was the best plan. “I have to go to the jail,” she said, which I had figured would happen. “You can’t stay home for two weeks. You have to go back sometime.”

  I knew she was right, but didn’t she also realize that people were going to ask about Jacob? Make assumptions? And not just the kids. Teachers would come up to me full of fake sympathy when what they really wanted was some dirt they could take back to the teachers’ lounge. The whole thing made me feel sick to my stomach.

  “What am I supposed to say if someone asks?”

  My mother hesitated. “Tell them your brother’s attorney said you can’t talk about it.”

  “Is that true?”

  “I have no idea.”

  I took a deep breath. I was going to come clean, to tell her about breaking into Jess’s house. “Mom, I have to talk to you about something …”

  “Can I take a rain check?” she said. “I want to be there when the doors open at nine. There’s plenty of cereal for breakfast, and you can take the bus.”

  Now, I’m sitting in biology next to Elise Howath, who is a pretty good lab partner even if she’s a girl, when she slips a note to me.

  I’m really sorry to hear about your brother.

  I want to thank her, for being nice. For being the first person to give a shit about Jacob instead of crucifying him like the media and the stupid court already have for what he’s done.

  What he’s done.

  I grab my backpack and run out of class, even though Mr. Jennison is still yammering away, and he doesn’t even comment (which tells me, more than anything, that this is not my life but a parallel universe). I keep walking down the hall without a hall pass, and no one stops me. Not when I cruise past the principal’s office and the guidance department. Not when I bust through the double doors near the gym into the blinding light of afternoon and start walking.

  Apparently in the public schools, if you have a relative arrested for murder, the administration and teachers pretend you are invisible.

  Which, to be honest, isn’t really all that different from the way I was treated before.

  I wish I had my skateboard with me. Then I could move faster, maybe outdistance the facts that keep circling in my head:

  I saw Jess Ogilvy alive and well. Shortly after that, Jacob went to her house.

  Now she’s dead.

  I’ve seen my brother put a chair through a wall and smash a window with his hand. I’ve been in his way, sometimes, when he has a meltdown. I’ve got the scars to prove it.

  You do the math.

  My brother is a murderer. I test the words under my breath and immediately feel a pain in my chest. You can’t say it the way you’d say My brother is six feet tall or My brother likes scrambled eggs, even if they are all accurate facts. But the Jacob I knew a week ago is no different than the Jacob I saw this morning. So does that mean I was too stupid to notice some major flaw in my brother? Or that anyone—even Jacob—might suddenly turn into a person you never imagined?

  I sure as hell qualify.

  All my life I’ve thought I have nothing in common with my brother—and it turns out we are both criminals.

  But you didn’t kill anyone.

  The voice echoes in my head, an excuse. For all I know, Jacob’s got his reasons, too.

  That makes me run faster. But I could be a goddamned bullet and still not manage to outstrip the sad fact that I’m no better than those assholes at school: I have already assumed my brother is guilty.

  Behind the school, if you go far enough, you hit a pond. It’s a community hot spot in the winter—on weekends someone lights a bonfire and brings marshmallows to roast; and a few enterprising hockey dads sweep the ice with wide shovels so that pickup games can break out all across its surface. I step onto the ice, even though I don’t have skates with me.

  It’s not crowded on a weekday. A few moms with toddlers, pushing milk crates as they learn to skate. An old man in those black figure skates that always make me think of Holland, or the Olympics. He’s doing figure eights. I dump my backpack on the edge of the snow and shuffle my feet little by little, until I am standing dead center.

  Every year there’s a competition in Townsend to see when the ice will fully melt. They stick a pole in the ice that’s attached to some kind of digital clock, and when the ice melts enough for the pole to tilt, it trips a switch and records that moment in time. People put money down on which day and hour the ice will melt, and the person with the closest guess gets the jackpot. Last year, I think it was about $4,500.

  What if the moment the ice melted was right now?

  What if I went under?

  Would those kids skating around hear the splash? Would the old man come to my rescue?

  My English teacher says a rhetorical question is one that’s asked even though an answer isn’t expected: Is the Pope Catholic? Or Does a bear crap in the woods?

  I think it’s a question that has an answer you don’t really
want to hear.

  Does this dress make me look fat?

  Are you really that stupid?

  If the ice melts and no one sees me go under, did I ever really exist?

  If I were the one in jail, would Jacob believe the worst of me?

  Just like that, I sit down in the middle of the pond, on the ice. It’s cold through my jeans. I picture myself freezing from the inside out. They will find me and I’ll be a sculpture, a statue.

  “Hey, kid, you okay?” The old man has skated over to me. “You need some help?”

  Like I said: an answer you don’t really want to hear.

  I didn’t sleep much last night, but when I did, I dreamed. I dreamed that I was breaking Jacob out of jail. I did it by reading through all his CrimeBusters notebooks and copying the behavior of cat burglars. As soon as I rounded the corner of the prison where Jacob was being kept in a cell, he was ready. Jacob, I said, you have to do exactly what I tell you to do, and he did, which is how I knew it was a dream. He was quiet, and he followed my lead, and he didn’t ask any questions. We tiptoed past the guard booth, and we both hopped into a giant trash bin, covering ourselves with paper and garbage. The custodian finally came and wheeled us right through the buzzers and the locked gate, and just as he was about to dump the giant trash bin into the Dumpster outside, I yelled, Now! and Jacob and I jumped out and started running. We ran for hours, until the only things following us were falling stars, and then we finally stopped in a field of tall grass and laid down on our backs on the ground.

  I didn’t do it, Jacob told me.

  I believe you, I said, and it was really true.

  On that day when Jacob was supposed to make a friend for homework, those two little girls he met in the sandbox had to leave. They ran off without saying good-bye, leaving my thirteen-year-old brother alone and digging in the sand.

  I was afraid to look at my mother again. So instead, I walked to the sandbox and sat down on the edge. My knees came up to my chin; I was too big for the space—it was crazy to see my brother squeezed into it. I picked up a rock and started to paw through the sand with it. “What are we looking for?” I asked.

  “Allosaurus,” Jacob replied.

  “How are we going to know when we find it?”

  Jacob’s face lit up. “Well, its vertebrae and skull won’t be as heavy as those of other dinosaurs. That’s what the name means, translated: different lizard.”

  I imagined any kid Jacob’s age watching him play paleontologist in a sandbox and wondered if he’d ever have a friend.

  “Theo,” he suddenly whispered, “you know we’re not really going to find allosaurus in here.”

  “Um, yeah.” I laughed. “But if we did, that would be some story, wouldn’t it?”

  “The news vans would come,” Jacob said.

  “Screw the news, we’d be on Oprah,” I told him. “Two kids who find a dinosaur skeleton in a sandbox. We might even wind up on the Wheaties box.”

  “The fabulous Hunt brothers.” Jacob grinned. “That’s what they’d

  call us.”

  “The fabulous Hunt brothers,” I repeated, and I watched Jacob dig to the bottom with his shovel. I wondered how long it would be before I outgrew him.

  Jacob

  I don’t really understand what’s happening.

  At first I thought maybe this was protocol, like the way that my mother was wheeled out of the hospital after she gave birth to Theo, even though she could easily have walked and carried him in her arms. Maybe it was a liability issue, which is why the bailiffs had to get me out of the courtroom (this time they were a little more hesitant to touch me). I assumed they would lead me to the front of the building, or maybe to a loading dock where defendants could be picked up and taken home.

  Instead, I was stuffed into the back of a police car and driven two hours and thirty-eight minutes to jail.

  I do not want to be in jail.

  The officers who drop me off are not the same ones who take me into the jail. This new one wears a different colored uniform and asks me the same questions that Detective Matson asked me at the police station. There are fluorescent lights on the ceiling, like they have at Walmart. I don’t enjoy going to Walmart for this very reason—the lights spit and hiss sometimes due to their transformers, and I worry that the ceiling will collapse on me. Even now, I cannot speak without glancing up at the ceiling every few moments. “I’d like to call my mother now,” I say to the officer.

  “Well, I’d like a winning lottery ticket, but something tells me neither of us is going to get what we want.”

  “I can’t stay here,” I tell him.

  He’s still typing on his computer. “I don’t remember asking for your opinion.”

  Is this man particularly thickheaded? Or is he trying to annoy me? “I’m a student,” I explain, the same way I might explain mass spectrometry to someone who doesn’t have a clue about trace evidence analysis. “I have to be at school by seven forty-seven in the morning, or else I won’t have time to get to my locker before class.”

  “Consider yourself on winter break,” the officer says.

  “Winter break isn’t until February fifteenth.”

  He punches a button on the keyboard. “All right. Stand up,” he says, so I do. “What’s in your pockets?”

  I glance down at my jacket. “My hands.”

  “So you’re a wiseass,” the officer says. “Empty them, come on.”

  Confused, I hold my palms up in front of me. There’s nothing in them.

  “Your pockets.”

  I pull out a stick of gum, a green pebble, a piece of sea glass, a strip of photographs of my mother and me, and my wallet. He takes them all. “Hey—”

  “The money will be logged in to your account,” he says. I watch him write notes on a piece of paper, and then he opens my wallet and takes out my money and my picture of Dr. Henry Lee. He starts to count the money, and by accident, he drops the pile. When he gathers it back up, it’s out of order.

  Sweat breaks out on my forehead. “The money,” I say.

  “I didn’t take any, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  I see a twenty rubbing up against a dollar bill, and the five-dollar bill is backward, with President Lincoln facedown.

  In my wallet, I make sure that everything is in order from the smallest denomination to the biggest, and everything faces up. I have never taken cash out of my mother’s wallet without her permission, but sometimes when she is unaware I sneak into her purse and organize her money for her. I just don’t like the thought of all that chaos; the coin pocket is already haphazard enough.

  “You okay?” the officer says, and I realize he is staring at me.

  “Could you …” I can barely speak, my throat has gotten so tight. “Could you just put the bills in order?”

  “What the hell?”

  With my hand curled to my chest, I point a single finger at the stack of bills. “Please,” I whisper. “The ones go on top.”

  If at least the money looks the way it is supposed to, that’s something that hasn’t changed.

  “I don’t believe this,” the officer mutters, but he does it, and once that twenty is resting safely at the bottom of the pile, I let out the breath I’ve been holding.

  “Thanks,” I say, even though I noticed at least two of the bills are still upside down.

  Jacob, I tell myself, you can do this. It doesn’t matter if you are in another bed tonight instead of your own. It doesn’t matter if they do not let you brush your teeth. In the grand scheme of things, the world will not stop spinning. (That is a sentence my mother likes to use when I get nervous about a change in routine.)

  Meanwhile the officer leads me to another room, one not much bigger than a closet. “Strip,” he says, and he folds his arms.

  “Strip what?” I answer.

  “All of it. Underwear, too.” When I realize he wants me to take off my clothes, I am so surprised that my jaw drops.

  “I�
�m not changing in front of you,” I say, incredulous. I won’t even change for gym class in the locker room. I have a doctor’s note from Dr. Moon saying that I do not have to, that I can participate in class while wearing my normal clothes.

  “Again,” the officer says, “I didn’t ask you.”

  On television I’ve seen inmates wearing jumpsuits, although I never really gave much thought to what happened to their clothes. But what I am remembering now is bad. Very Bad, with capital letters. On television, the jumpsuits are always orange. Sometimes it is enough to make me change the channel.

  I can feel my pulse accelerate at the thought of all that orange, touching my skin. Of the other inmates, wearing the same color. We would be like an ocean of hazard warnings, a sea of danger.

  “If you don’t take off your clothes,” the officer says, “I will do it for you.”

  I turn my back to him and peel off my coat. I pull my shirt over my head. My skin is white, like a fish belly, and I don’t have rippling stomach muscles like the Abercrombie & Fitch guys; this embarrasses me. I unzip my jeans and pull down my underwear and then remember my socks. Then I crouch into a ball and carefully organize my clothes so that the olive khaki pants are on the bottom, then the green shirt, finally the green boxers and socks.

  The officer takes the clothes and starts shaking them out. “Hands out at your sides,” he says, and I close my eyes and do what he says, even when he makes me turn around and bend down and I can feel his fingers moving me apart. A soft cloth sack hits my chest. “Get dressed again.”

  Inside it is clothing but not my own. Instead, there are three pairs of socks, three pairs of underwear, three T-shirts, thermal pants, a thermal top, three pairs of dark blue pants and matching shirts, rubber flip-flops, a jacket, a hat, gloves, a towel.

  This is a huge relief. I won’t be wearing orange after all.

  I have been to one sleepover in my life. It was at the home of a boy named Marshall, who has since moved to San Francisco. Marshall had a lazy eye and was, like me, often the butt of classmates’ jokes in second grade. Our mothers were the ones who organized the sleepover, after mine learned that Marshall could spell the names of most dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period as well.