Jodi Picoult - House Rules

“You do realize that keeping me locked up in this house for weeks or months could be considered criminal behavior. That good parents do not treat their children like caged animals.”

“And you do realize that even if we had Oliver go before the judge to ask for an exception, Dr. Lee’s speech would be over before the judge scheduled the hearing?” I point out. “I’m sure it will be recorded. We can listen to the podcast.”

“That’s not the same!” Jacob yells.

The cords of his neck stand out in relief; he is dangerously close to losing control again. I moderate my voice so that it spreads like a balm. “Take a deep breath. Your Asperger’s is showing.”

“I hate you,” Jacob says. “This has nothing to do with my Asperger’s. It’s about being made a slave in my own household.” He shoves me aside, heading for the hallway.

I use every ounce of strength I can to hold him back. I know better, but sometimes, when Jacob is being particularly supercilious, I can’t help but argue back. “You walk out that door, and you’ll be in jail before morning. And this time, I swear, I won’t try to get you out,” I tell him. “I may be six inches shorter than you and fifty pounds lighter, but I am still your mother, and no means no.”

He struggles against the restraint of my arms for a few seconds, and then all the fight goes out of him. Almost too easily, he sinks onto his bed and puts a pillow over his head.

Without another word, I back out of Jacob’s bedroom and close the door behind me. I lean against the wall for a moment, sagging under the weight of the relief his admission has brought me. I had been telling myself that the reason I hadn’t directly asked Jacob earlier if he had murdered Jess was that I was afraid he’d be disappointed in me for even believing it was a possibility. But the real reason I’d waited so long was that I was afraid to hear his answer. How many times, after all, had I asked Jacob a question only to hope for a white lie?

Do I have too many wrinkles?

I just baked these-it’s a new recipe. What do you think?

I know you’re angry, but you don’t really wish your brother had never been born, do you?

Even today on the witness stand, the expert Oliver had found said Aspie kids don’t lie.

Then again.

Jacob told me Jess didn’t talk to him that Tuesday he was supposed to meet with her, but he didn’t tell me she was dead.

Jacob told me that he’d been to Jess’s house, but he neglected to mention that he’d found it in a state of disarray.

And he never mentioned taking his rainbow quilt anywhere.

Technically, he had told me the truth. And at the same time, he had lied by omission.

“Mom?” Theo yells. “I think I set the toaster on fire…”

I hurry downstairs. By the time I am extricating the charred bagel with two knives, I’ve convinced myself that everything Jacob hasn’t told me has been an oversight, a typical Aspie side effect of having so much information that some of it gets lost or forgotten.

I have convinced myself that this could not have been deliberate.

The term stir-crazy comes from the early 1900s. Stir was slang for prison, based on the Gypsy word stariben. Stir-crazy was actually a play on an older expression, stir-bugs, which described a prisoner who became mentally unstable due to being locked up too long.

You can attribute my next actions to the fact that I was stir-crazy, or to the correct stimulus: the fact that Dr. Henry Lee, my idol, was going to be 188.61 miles away from me, and I was not going to be able to meet him. In spite of my mother’s assertions that if I went to college I would have to go somewhere local, where I could live at home and benefit from her help and organization, I had long assumed that, one day, I’d apply to the University of New Haven (never mind that as a high school senior I was already over a month past deadline). I would get into the criminalist program he’d founded there, where I would be plucked from undergraduate obscurity by Dr. Lee himself, who would notice my attention to detail and my inability to be distracted by girls or frat parties or loud music emanating from dorm windows and would invite me to help him solve a real current case and consider me his protégé.

Now, of course, I had an even more pressing reason to meet him.

Imagine, Dr. Lee, I would begin. You have set up a crime scene to point to someone else’s involvement and wind up a suspect yourself. And then together we would analyze what might have been conceived differently, to prevent it from happening the next time.

My mother and I argue about the same things over and over, such as why she refuses to treat me normally. This would be a classic example, where she is taking my desire to see Dr. Lee and twisting it into a pretzel so that it seems like an unreasonable Aspie request, instead of one grounded in reality. There are many instances where I want to do things other kids my age do:

1. Get a license and drive a car.

2. Live on my own at college.

3. Go out with my friends without her having to call their parents first and explain my quirks.

a. It should be noted, of course, that this would apply to a time when I currently had friends.

4. Get a job so that I have money for the above.

a. It should be noted that she did let me get a job, and unfortunately to date the only people who’ve chosen to hire me were completely unreasonable asses who couldn’t see the big picture, like whether being five minutes late on a shift is truly going to cause a global catastrophe.

Instead, I watch Theo sail out the door while she waves good-bye to him. Unlike me, he will be allowed to get his driver’s license sooner or later. Imagine how incredibly humiliating it will be for me to be driven around by my younger brother, the same child who used his own poop to paint a mural on the garage door once.

My mother argued that I could not have it both ways. I could not ask to be treated like an ordinary eighteen-year-old and also demand clothing with the tags cut out and refuse to drink orange juice because of its name. Maybe I did feel that I could have it both ways-be disabled sometimes and normal at other times-but then again, why couldn’t I? Let’s say that Theo sucked at growing vegetables but was really good at bowling. My mother might treat him like a slightly remedial student if she was teaching him to grow rutabagas, but when she hit the lanes with him, she’d ditch the slow voice. Not all humans have one standard, so why should I?

At any rate, whether I have simply been cooped up too long or whether I am suffering acute mental distress from my soon-to-be missed opportunity with Dr. Lee, I do the only thing that seems justifiable at the time.

I call 911 and tell them I am being abused by my mother.

It’s like one of those pictures in celebrity magazines I read at the dentist’s office: “What’s Different?” The first shot shows Jess Ogilvy with a big smile on her face and Mark Maguire’s arm draped over her shoulder. It’s a photograph we took from her nightstand.

The second picture was taken by my CSI team and shows Jess with her eyes closed and ringed with bruises, her skin frozen a solid, pale blue. She is draped with a postage-stamp quilt that looks like a painter’s color wheel.

Ironically, she is wearing the same sweatshirt in both photos.

There are obvious differences-the physical trauma being the biggest one. But there’s something else about her I cannot put my finger on. Did she lose weight? Not really. Was it the makeup? Nah, she wasn’t wearing any in either shot.