Jodi Picoult: House Rules

I used to have a friend. Her name was Alexa, and she moved away in seventh grade. After that, I decided to treat school like an anthropological study. I tried to cultivate an interest in topics that normal kids talked about. But it was so boring:

CASE IN POINT 2

Girl: Hey, Jacob, isn’t this the coolest MP3 player?

Me: It was probably made by Chinese kids.

Girl: You want a sip of my Slushee?

Me: Sharing drinks can give you mono. So can kissing.

Girl: I’m going to go sit somewhere else…

Can you blame me for trying to jazz up conversations with my peers a little, by talking about topics like Dr. Henry Lee’s take on the Laci Peterson murder? Eventually I gave up engaging in mundane chats; following a discussion about who was going out with whom was as hard for me as cataloging the mating rituals of a nomadic tribe in Papua New Guinea. My mother says sometimes I don’t even try. I say I try all the time, and I keep getting rejected. I’m not even sad about it, really. Why would I want to be friends with kids who are nasty to people like me, anyway?

There are some things I really can’t stand.

1. The sound of paper being crumpled. I can’t tell you why, but it makes me feel like someone’s doing that to all my internal organs.

2. Too much noise or flashing lights.

3. Having plans change.

4. Missing CrimeBusters, which is on the USA Network at 4:30 every day, thanks to the wonders of syndication. Even though I know all 114 of the episodes by heart, watching them daily is as important to me as taking insulin would be to a diabetic. My whole day is planned around it, and if I can’t have my fix, I get shaky.

5. When my mother puts my clothes away. I keep them in rainbow order, ROYGBIV, and the colors can’t touch. She does her best, but the last time, she completely forgot about indigo.

6. If someone else takes a bite of my food, I have to cut off the part that his/her saliva has touched before I can eat any more of it.

7. Loose hair. It freaks me out, which is why mine is military short.

8. Being touched by someone I don’t know.

9. Foods with membranes, like custards; or foods that explode in your mouth, like peas.

10. Even numbers.

11. When people call me retarded, which I am not.

12. The color orange. It means danger, and there’s no rhyme for it in English, which makes it suspicious. (Theo wants to know why I can tolerate things that are silver, then, but I won’t even rise to the argument.)

I have spent much of my eighteen years learning how to exist in a world that is occasionally orange, chaotic, and too loud. In between classes, for example, I wear headphones. I used to wear this great pair that made me look like an air traffic controller, but Theo said everyone made fun of me when they saw me in the halls, so my mother convinced me to use earbuds instead. I hardly ever go to the cafeteria, because (a) there’s no one for me to sit with and (b) all those conversations crossing each other feel like knives on my skin. Instead, I hang out in the teachers’ room, where if I happen to mention that Pythagoras did not really discover the Pythagorean theorem (the Babylonians used it thousands of years before Pythagoras was even a seductive gleam in his Grecian parents’ eyes), they do not look at me as if I have grown a second head. If things get really bad, pressure helps-like lying under a pile of laundry or a weighted blanket (a blanket with little poly pellets inside that make it heavier)-because the deep touch sensory stimulation calms me down. One of my therapists, a Skinner aficionado, got me to relax to Bob Marley songs. When I get upset, I repeat words over and over and talk in a flat voice. I close my eyes and ask myself, What would Dr. Henry Lee do?

I don’t get into trouble because rules are what keep me sane. Rules mean that the day is going to go exactly the way I am predicting it to be. I do what I’m told; I just wish everyone else would do it, too.

We have rules in our house:

1. Clean up your own messes.

2. Tell the truth.

3. Brush your teeth twice a day.

4. Don’t be late for school.

5. Take care of your brother; he’s the only one you’ve got.

The majority of these rules come naturally to me-well, except for brushing my teeth, which I hate doing, and taking care of Theo. Let’s just say my interpretation of rule number 5 doesn’t always synchronize with Theo’s interpretation. Take today, for example. I included him in a starring role in my crime scene, and he got furious. He was cast as the perpetrator… how could he not see that as the highest form of flattery?

My psychiatrist, Dr. Moon Murano, often asks me to rate anxiety-producing situations on a scale of one to ten.

CASE IN POINT 3

Me: My mom went out to the bank and said she was going to be back in fifteen minutes and when it got to seventeen minutes, I started to panic. And then when I called her, she didn’t pick up on her cell, and I was sure she was lying dead in a ditch somewhere.

Dr. Moon: On a scale of one to ten, how did that make you feel?

Me: A nine.

(Note: It was really a ten, but that’s an even number, and saying it out loud would make my anxiety level blow off the chart.)

Dr. Moon: Can you think of a solution that might have worked better than calling 911?

Me (doing my best Cher from Moonstruck impression): Snap out of it!

I rate my days, too, although I haven’t told this to Dr. Moon yet. High numbers are good days; low numbers are bad days. And today is a one, between my fight with Theo and then the absence of the Free Sample Lady at the grocery store. (In my defense, I have worked out an algorithm to predict what she’s going to serve, and maybe I wouldn’t have been upset if it was the first Saturday of the month, when she hands out vegetarian items. But today was a dessert day, for God’s sake.) I have been in my room since we got home. I bury myself under my covers, and put a weighted blanket on top of that. I cue “I Shot the Sheriff” on my iPod on repeat and listen to that one song until 4:30, when it is time to watch CrimeBusters and I have to go into the living room, where the TV is.

The episode is number 82, one of my top five ever. It involves a case where one of the CSI investigators, Rhianna, doesn’t show up for work. It turns out she is taken hostage by a man racked with grief over his wife’s recent death. Rhianna leaves behind clues for the rest of the team to solve, to lead them to where she is being kept.

Naturally, I figure out the conclusion long before the rest of the CSI team does.

The reason I like the episode so much is that they actually got something wrong. Rhianna gets dragged to a diner by her kidnapper and leaves a coupon for her favorite clothing store underneath her finished plate. Her colleagues find it, and need to prove it’s actually hers. They process it for prints, using a small-particle reagent followed by ninhydrin, when in reality, you’re supposed to use ninhydrin first. It reacts to the amino acid and then is followed by the small-particle reagent, which reacts with fats. If you used the small-particle reagent first, like they did in the episode, it would ruin the porous surface for the ninhydrin procedure. When I spotted the error, I wrote to the producers of CrimeBusters. They sent me back a letter and an officially licensed T-shirt. The T-shirt doesn’t fit me anymore, but I still keep it in my drawer.

After watching the episode, my day definitely improves from a one to a three.

“Hey,” my mother says, poking her head into the living room. “How are you doing?”

“Okay,” I reply.

She sits down beside me on the couch. Our legs are touching. She is the only person I can stand having close to me. If it were anyone else, I would have moved away a few inches by now. “So, Jacob,” she says, “I just want to point out that you did in fact survive the day without the free food sample.”