Jodi Picoult - House Rules

It’s times like this I am glad I don’t look people in the eye. If I did, surely they would die on the spot from the contempt shooting out of mine. Of course I survived. But at what cost?

“Teachable moment,” my mother explains, and she pats my hand. “I’m just saying.”

“Frankly my dear,” I murmur, “I don’t give a damn.”

My mother sighs. “Dinner at six, Rhett,” she says, even though it’s always at six, and even though my name is Jacob.

At different times, the media have posthumously diagnosed certain famous people with Asperger’s. Here is just a sampling:

1. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

2. Albert Einstein

3. Andy Warhol

4. Jane Austen

5. Thomas Jefferson

I am 99 percent sure not a single one of them had a meltdown in a grocery store and wound up breaking a whole shelf of relish and pickle jars.

Dinner proves to be a painful affair. My mother seems driven to start a conversation, although neither Theo nor I is inclined to hold up the other end of it. She has just gotten another packet of letters from the Burlington Free Press, and sometimes she reads them out loud at dinner and we make up politically incorrect responses that my mother would never in a million years write in her advice column.

CASE IN POINT 4

Dear Auntie Em,

My mother-in-law insists on cooking roast beef every time my husband and I come to visit, even though she knows that I am a lifelong vegetarian. What should I do next time it happens?

Steamed in South Royalton

Dear Steamed,

Turnip your nose at her and walk away.

Sometimes the questions she gets are really sad, like the woman whose husband had left her and who didn’t know how to tell her kids. Or the mom dying of breast cancer who wrote a letter for her baby daughter to read when she grew up, about how she wished she could have been there for her daughter’s high school graduation, her engagement, her first child. Mostly, though, the questions come from a bunch of idiots who made bad choices. How do I get my husband back, now that I realize I shouldn’t have cheated on him? Try being faithful, lady. What’s the best way to win back a friend you’ve hurt with a nasty remark? Don’t say it in the first place. I swear, sometimes I can’t believe my mother gets paid to state the obvious.

Tonight she holds up a note from a teenage girl. I can tell, because the ink of the pen is purple and because the i in Auntie Em has a heart over it where the dot should be. “Dear Auntie Em,” she reads, and just like always, I picture a little old lady wearing a bun and sensible shoes, not my own mother. “I like a guy who already has a girlfriend. I know he likes me cuz -God, don’t they teach you how to spell these days?”

“No,” I answer. “They teach us to use spell-check.”

Theo looks up from his plate long enough to grunt in the direction of the grape juice.

“I know he likes me because,” my mother edits, “he walks me home from school and we talk for hours on the phone and yesterday I couldn’t take it anymore and I kissed him and he kissed me back … Oh, please, someone get this girl a comma.” Then she frowns at the loose-leaf paper. “He says we can’t go out but we can be friends with benefits. Do you think I should say yes? Sincerely, Burlington Buddy.” My mother glances at me. “Don’t all friends have benefits?”

I stare at her blankly.

“Theo?” she asks.

“It’s a saying,” he mutters.

“A saying that means what, exactly?”

Theo’s face turns bright red. “Just Google it.”

“Just tell me.”

“It’s when a guy and a girl who aren’t going out hook up, all right?”

My mother considers this. “You mean like… have sex?”

“Among other things…”

“And then what happens?”

“I don’t know!” Theo says. “They go back to ignoring each other, I guess.”

My mother’s jaw drops. “That is the most demeaning thing I’ve ever heard. This poor girl shouldn’t just tell that guy to go jump in a lake, she ought to slash all four of his car tires, and-” Suddenly she pins her gaze on Theo. “You haven’t treated a girl like that, have you?”

Theo rolls his eyes. “Can’t you be like other mothers and just ask me if I’m smoking weed?”

“Are you smoking weed?” she says.

“No!”

“Do you have friends with benefits?”

Theo pushes back from the table and stands up in one smooth move. “Yeah. I have thousands. They line up outside the front door, or haven’t you noticed them lately?” He dumps his plate in the sink and runs upstairs.

My mother reaches for a pen she’s tucked into her ponytail (she always wears a ponytail, because she knows how I feel about loose hair swishing around her shoulders) and begins to scrawl a response. “Jacob,” she says, “be a sweetheart and clear the table for me, will you?”

And off goes my mother, champion of the confused, doyenne of the dense. Saving the world one letter at a time. I wonder what all those devoted readers would think if they knew that the real Auntie Em had one son who was practically a sociopath and another one who was socially impractical.

I’d like a friend with benefits, although I’d never admit that to my mother.

I’d like a friend, period.

For my birthday last year my mother bought me the most incredible gift ever: a police scanner radio. It operates by receiving frequencies that regular radios cannot-ones assigned by the federal government in the VHF and UHF range above the FM stations, and which are used by police, fire, and rescue crews. I always know when the highway patrol is sending out the sanding trucks before they arrive; I get the special weather alerts when a nor’easter is coming. But mostly I listen to the police and emergency calls, because even in a place as small as Townsend you get a crime scene every now and then.

Since Thanksgiving alone, I have gone to two crime scenes. The first was a break-in at a jewelry store. I rode my bike to the address I heard on the scanner and found several officers swarming the storefront for evidence. It was the first time I got to see spray wax being used on snow to cast a footprint, a definite highlight. The second crime scene was not really a crime scene. It was the house of a kid who goes to my school, who is a real jerk to me. His mother had called 911, but by the time they got there she was standing at the front door, her nose still bleeding, saying that she didn’t want to press charges against her husband.

Tonight I have just gotten into my pajamas when I hear a code on the scanner that is different from any I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard plenty:

10-52 AMBULANCE NEEDED.

10-50 MOTOR VEHICLE ACCIDENT.

10-13 CIVILIANS PRESENT AND LISTENING.

10-40 FALSE ALARM, PREMISES SECURE.

10-54 LIVESTOCK ON HIGHWAY.

Right now, though, I hear this:

10-100

Which means, Dead body.

I don’t think I’ve ever gotten dressed so quickly in my life. I grab a composition notebook, even though it’s a used one, because I don’t want to waste any time; and I scrawl down the address that keeps getting mentioned on the scanner. Then I tiptoe downstairs. With any luck my mother is already asleep and won’t even know I’m gone.

It’s bitterly cold out, and there are about two inches of snow on the ground. I’m so excited about the crime scene that I am wearing sneakers instead of boots. The wheels of my mountain bike skid every time I go around a turn.

The address is a state highway, and I know I have reached the right spot because there are four police cars with their flashing blues on. There is a wooden stake with police tape (yellow, not orange) fluttering in the wind, and a visible trail of footprints. An abandoned car, a Pontiac, sits on the side of the road covered in ice and snow.