Jodi Picoult - House Rules

“I know you’re upset, but we have a lot of time to figure it out. Today’s arraignment is just a rubber stamp.”

She stares at me. When I was in college, the girls that I always found myself drooling over were the ones who had dabs of toothpaste on their chins, or who stuck pencils through their messy hair to keep it away from their faces. The ones who slayed me were so far removed from caring how they looked that they circled back to a natural, artless beauty. Emma Hunt might be a decade older than me, but she’s still a knockout. “How old are you?” she asks after a moment.

“I don’t really think that chronological age is a decent measure of-”

“Twenty-four,” she guesses.

“Twenty-eight.”

She closes her eyes and shakes her head. “I was twenty-eight a thousand years ago.”

“Then you look great for your age,” I say.

Blinking, she focuses fiercely on me. “Promise,” she demands. “Promise me that you’re going to get my son out of here.”

I nod at her, and for a moment I want to be a white knight; I want to be able to tell her I know law as well as I know how to shoe a skittish mare, and I don’t want it to be a lie. Just then the bailiff peers around the corner. “We’re ready,” he says.

I only wish I could say the same.

The courtroom is different when it’s empty. Dust motes hang in the air, and my footsteps sound like gunshots on the parquet flooring. Emma and I walk to the front of the gallery, where I leave her sitting just behind the bar as I cross through to sit at the defense table.

It’s déjà vu.

Jacob is led out by the bailiffs. He’s handcuffed, and I hear Emma suck in her breath behind me when she notices. But then again, he left the courtroom violent; there’s no reason to assume he wouldn’t pull the same trick twice. When he sits down beside me, the handcuffs jingle in his lap. He presses his lips together in a flat line, as if he’s trying to show me he remembers my instructions.

“All rise,” the bailiff says, and when I stand up, I grab Jacob’s sleeve so he will, too.

Judge Cuttings enters and sits down heavily in his chair, his robes billowing around him like a storm. “I trust you’ve talked to your client about his behavior in the courtroom, Counselor?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” I answer. “I’m sorry about the outburst. Jacob’s autistic.”

The judge frowns. “Are you concerned about competency?”

“Yes,” I reply.

“All right. Mr. Bond, your client is here to be arraigned on a charge of first-degree murder pursuant to 13 VSA, section 2301. Do you waive the reading of the rights on his behalf at this time?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

He nods. “I’m going to enter a not guilty plea on his behalf, because of the competency issue.”

For a moment, I hesitate. If the judge enters the plea, does that mean I don’t have to?

“Are there any other issues with the charge as it stands today, Counselor?”

“I don’t think so, Your Honor…”

“Excellent. This is bound over for a competency hearing fourteen days from today at nine A.M. I’ll see you then, Mr. Bond.”

The larger bailiff approaches the defense table and hauls Jacob to his feet. He lets loose a squeak, and then, remembering the rules of the courtroom, squelches it. “Hang on a minute,” I interrupt. “Judge, didn’t you just say we could go?”

“I said you could go, Counselor. Your client, on the other hand, is charged with murder and being held pending his competency hearing at your own request.”

As he leaves the bench to return to chambers, as Jacob is pulled out of the courtroom again-silent, this time-headed to a two-week stay in jail, I gather the courage to turn around and confess to Emma Hunt that I’ve just done everything I told her I wouldn’t.

My mother doesn’t cry very often. The first time, like I said, was at the library when I had a tantrum instead of Jacob. The second time was when I was ten years old and Jacob was thirteen and he had homework for his life skills class-an extracurricular he hated because he was one of only two autistic kids, and the other boy didn’t have AS but was lower on the spectrum and spent most of the class lining up crayons end to end. The other three kids in the class had Down syndrome or developmental disabilities. Because of this, a lot of time was spent on things like hygiene-stuff Jacob already knew how to do-with a little bit of social skills tossed in. And one day, his teacher assigned the class to make a friend before the next time they all met.

“You don’t make a friend,” Jacob said with a scowl. “It’s not like they come with directions like you’d find on a box of macaroni and cheese.”

“All you have to do is remember the steps that Mrs. LaFoye gave you,” my mother said. “Look someone in the eye, tell them your name, ask them if they’d like to play.”

Even at ten, I knew that this protocol would surely lead to getting your ass kicked, but I wasn’t going to tell Jacob that.

So the three of us trekked to the local playground, and I sat down next to my mother on a bench while Jacob set out to make a friend. The problem was, there was no one his age there. The oldest kid I could see was about my age, and he was hanging upside down from the monkey bars. Jacob walked up to him and twisted sideways so that he could look the kid in the eye. “My name is Jacob,” he said in his voice, which I’m used to but which is weird to everyone else-flat as a sheet of aluminum, even in places where there should be exclamation points. “Do you want to play?”

The kid did a neat flip onto the ground. “Are you, like, some kind of retard?”

Jacob considered this. “No.”

“News flash,” the boy said. “You are.”

The kid ran off, leaving Jacob standing alone under the monkey bars. I almost got up to rescue him, but then he started to turn in a slow circle. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing, and then I realized he liked the sound his sneaker made when it crunched a dry leaf underneath the sole.

He walked on his tiptoes, very precisely crushing the leaves, until he reached the sandbox. A pair of tiny kids-one blond and one with red pigtails-were busy making pizzas out of sand. “Here’s another one,” the first girl said, and she slapped a glob of sand onto the wooden railing so that the other girl could decorate it with pepperoni rocks and mozzarella grass.

“Hi, I’m Jacob,” my brother said.

“I’m Annika, and I’m going to be a unicorn when I grow up,” the blonde said.

Pigtails didn’t look up from the pizza assembly line. “My little brother threw up in the bathroom and slipped in it and landed on his butt.”

“Do you want to play?” Jacob asked. “We could dig for dinosaurs.”

“There aren’t any dinosaurs in the sandbox, just pizza,” Annika said. “Maggie’s the one who gets to put on the cheese and stuff, but you can be the waiter.”

Jacob looked like a giant in the sandbox beside those two girls. A woman was staring daggers at him, and I would have bet fifty bucks it was either Annika’s or Maggie’s mom, wondering if the thirteen-year-old playing with her precious little daughter was a perv. Jacob picked up a stick and began to outline a skeleton in the sand. “The allosaurus had a wishbone, like other meat-eating dinosaurs,” he said. “Just like you’d find on a chicken.”

“Here’s another one,” Annika said, and she dumped a pile of sand in front of Maggie. You could practically draw a line between the little girls and Jacob. They weren’t playing together as much as they were playing next to each other.

Jacob looked up at that moment and grinned at me. He tipped his head toward the girls as if to say, Hey, check it out, I made two friends.