Jodi Picoult - House Rules

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.

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.