Jodi Picoult - House Rules

Emma turns, her face lighting up. “Jacob? Did you say something?”

I get the sense that, if he has been saying anything, it’s not a lot. He nods, his mouth working for a moment before another syllable is forced out. “I want…”

“What do you want, baby? I’ll get it for you.”

“I want to watch.”

Emma faces me, her eyebrows raised in a question.

“Not possible,” I tell her flatly. “He can stay in the house, but he can’t be anywhere near the room.”

“Can I speak to you for a moment?” she asks evenly, and she walks into Jacob’s bedroom, leaving him in the hallway. “Do you have any idea what kind of hell it is to watch your child become completely unresponsive?”

“No, but-”

“Well, this is the second time for me. I haven’t even been able to get him out of his bed,” she says. “And as I recall, the last thing you said to me was that I should trust you. I did, and you stabbed me in the back and arrested my son, after I offered him up to you on a silver platter. From where I’m standing, my son wouldn’t be hanging on by a thread if it weren’t for you. So if watching you load up your goddamn boxes with his possessions is what brings him back to the world of the living, then I would hope for the sake of common decency you’d simply let him.”

By the time she finishes, her eyes are glittering and her cheeks are flushed. I open my mouth, about to talk about search and seizure cases and the Supreme Court, but then change my mind. “Jacob?” I stick my head out the door. “Come on in.”

He sits down on the bed, and Emma leans against the doorjamb with her arms crossed. “I’m, uh, just going to take a look around,” I say.

Jacob Hunt is a wicked neat freak. One weekend with Sasha and I’m forever finding tiny socks wedged into the couch or cereal underfoot in the kitchen or books left strewn across the living room floor. But something tells me this isn’t the case with Jacob. His bed is made with military precision. His closet is so organized it looks like an advertisement. I’d assume he has a full-blown case of OCD, except for the fact that there are exceptions to the rule: his math notebook, lying open, is a disaster-loose-leaf pages haphazardly stuffed, papers falling out, handwriting so messy it looks like modern art. The same goes for a bulletin board on one wall, which is overstuffed with papers and pictures and photographs overlapping each other. Dirty dishes and mugs litter his desk.

Directly across from the desk is a small table with an overturned fish tank that has been kitted out like a fuming chamber. Jacob sees me looking at it. “What do you get prints off?” I ask.

“Don’t answer that, Jacob,” Emma interjects.

“Toothbrushes,” he replies. “Mugs. I once got a great partial off a manila folder with magnetic powder.”

His mother and I both stare at him-Emma because he’s probably said more in the last second than in the past three days; and I because there are CSIs who don’t even know that technique for getting prints off a porous surface.

I pick up the trash bin beside the desk and begin to leaf through it. There are several drafts of an English essay. There’s a gum wrapper. What’s extraordinary about the contents is not what they are but how they are: instead of being balled up or crumpled, each piece of garbage has been folded into crisp eighths. Even the tiny gum wrapper. The trash is stacked, like laundry.

The first item I take is Jacob’s police scanner-now I know how he managed to get to the crime scene for the hypothermic guy. Jacob’s hand begins to flap a little harder. “That… that’s mine.”

Emma puts her hand on his shoulder. “Remember what I said?”

I quickly procure the items that are in the fuming chamber: a mug, a mirror, the tank itself. I look under Jacob’s bed, but there is only a pair of slippers and two plastic bins-one filled with back issues of the Journal of Forensic Sciences, the other filled with Legos. From his bookshelf I take the complete DVD series of CrimeBusters, and then I see the composition notebooks. He told me he has more than a hundred, and he wasn’t lying. I pull the first one down.

“You can’t have those,” Jacob cries.

“I’m sorry, Jacob.” Episode 74, I read. Silent Witness, 12/4/08.

Two teenagers out for a joyride run over a deaf man, who turns out to be already dead.

This is followed by a list of evidence. Solved, it reads, 0:36.

Emma has her head bent close to Jacob’s now. She’s murmuring, but I cannot hear the words. Turning my back to them, I flip through the entries. Some are repeats of episodes; Jacob seems to have written about each of them when they aired, even if he’d seen the show before. Some of them have the disclaimer that Jacob could not solve the crime before the TV detectives did.

There are kidnappings. Stabbings. Cult ritual murders. One episode catches my eye: Joffrey puts on her boyfriend’s boots and leaves prints in the mud behind the house to mislead investigators.

Stuck between the pages is a pink index card, and as I scan it I realize this is a note Jacob has written to himself:

I am miserable. I can’t stand it anymore.

The people who supposedly care don’t.

I get my hopes up and everyone eventually lets me down. I finally know what’s wrong with me: all of you. All of you who think I’m just an autistic kid, so who really cares? Well, I hate you. I hate all of you. I hate how I cry at night because of you. But you are just people. JUST PEOPLE.

So why do you make me feel so small?

Was this written a week ago, a month, a year? Was it in response to bullying in school? To a teacher’s criticism? To something Jess Ogilvy said?

It could point to motive. I quickly close the journal and stick the notebook into the box. You can’t see that index card anymore, but I know it’s there, and it feels too private, too raw to be considered simply evidence. All of a sudden I am flooded by the image of Jacob Hunt huddled in this room after a whole day of trying unsuccessfully to blend in with the hundreds of kids in his school. Who, out of all of us, hasn’t felt marginalized at some point? Who hasn’t felt like they don’t belong?

Who hasn’t tried… and failed?

I had been the fat kid, the one who was stuck in the soccer goal during gym class and cast as a rock in the school play. I’d been called Doughboy, Lardass, Earthquake Boy, you name it. In eighth grade, after a graduation ceremony, a kid had come up to me. I never knew your real name was Rich, he’d said.

When my dad got laid off and we had to move to Vermont for his new job, I spent the summer reinventing myself. I ran-a half mile the first day, and then a whole one, and gradually more. I ate only green things. I did five hundred sit-ups every morning before I even brushed my teeth. By the time I got to my new school, I was a totally different guy, and I never looked back.

Jacob Hunt can’t exercise himself into a new personality. He can’t move to another school district and start over. He’ll always be the kid with Asperger’s.

Unless, instead, he makes himself the kid who killed Jess Ogilvy.

“I’m all done here,” I say, stacking the boxes. “I just need you to sign the receipt for the property so you can eventually get it back.”

“And when might that be?”

“When the DA’s done with it.” I turn to say good-bye to Jacob, but he’s staring at the empty spot where his fuming chamber was located.

Emma walks me downstairs. “You’re wasting your time,” she says. “My son isn’t a murderer.”

I push the inventory receipt toward her, silent.