Jodi Picoult - House Rules

Even though I didn’t steal from the cash register, like one of my coworkers.

Even though I didn’t tell on that coworker.

Even though I wasn’t rude to customers and never bitched when it was my turn to clean the public restrooms.

What my boss (Alan, who was nineteen and an extremely viable candidate for Proactiv) told me was that customers had complained because of my appearance.

No, I did not have snot running down my face. I wasn’t drooling. I didn’t wear my pants halfway to my knees, like the coworker I referenced above. All I did, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, was refuse to wear the store uniform. It was a blue button-down shirt. I wore it on Fridays, but honestly, it was bad enough I had to deal with buttons-was I supposed to put up with wearing colors on their off days, too?

No one had complained, by the way. And it was easy to spot me as an employee because, even when I wasn’t wearing the uniform, I still wore a tag as big as a newborn’s head that read, HELLO MY NAME IS JACOB, CAN I HELP YOU?

The real reason I was fired was that, after several weeks of making excuses to Alan about why my uniform did not appear on my body unless I happened to be scheduled to work on a Friday, I finally told him that I was autistic and that I had a thing about clothing colors, not to mention buttons. So in spite of the fact that the puppies genuinely loved me, and that I sold more of them than any other person working here; in spite of the fact that even at the moment I was fired one of the employees was texting her boyfriend instead of ringing up a customer and another one was flirting with Steve in Amphibians-in spite of all these things, I was made a scapegoat because of my disability.

Yeah, I’m playing the Asperger’s card.

All I know is that before I told Alan I had AS he was willing to make excuses along with me, and afterward, he just wanted me gone.

This is the story of my life.

We ride to the courthouse in Oliver’s car. My mother is in the front seat, and Theo and I are in the back. I spend most of the trip looking at the things I took for granted, sights I hadn’t seen while I was cooped up under house arrest: the Colony diner, with its busted neon sign, advertising EAT AT THE COLON. The picture window of the pet store where I used to work, with a Gordian knot of puppies on view. The movie theater where I lost my first tooth and the cross on the side of the road where a teenager once died en route to school during an ice storm. The Restwood Bible Church billboard that reads, FREE COFFEE! ETERNAL LIFE! MEMBERSHIP HAS ITS PRIVILEGES!

“Okay,” Oliver says, after he pulls into a parking spot and turns off the ignition. “Here we go.”

I open my door and step out of the car, and suddenly there are a thousand sounds hitting me like arrows and so much light that everything goes white. I can’t hold my hands up to my eyes and my ears at the same time, and somewhere in between the screaming I can hear my name and my mother’s voice and Oliver’s. They multiply before my eyes, microphones like cancer cells, and they are coming closer.

Oliver: Shit-I should have thought of this…

Mom: Jacob, close your eyes, baby. Can you hear me? Theo? Have you got ahold of him?

And then there is a hand on my arm, but who can say if it belongs to my brother or to one of the strangers, the ones who want to cut my veins lengthwise and bleed me dry, the ones with headlight eyes and cavern mouths who want a piece of me to stick into their pockets and take away, until there’s nothing left.

I do what any ordinary person would do when faced with a horde of wild animals gnashing their teeth and wielding microphones: I run.

It feels fantastic.

Keep in mind I have been in a cage that’s twenty by forty feet, two stories high. I may not be as fast as I’d like to be, because I am wearing dress shoes and also I am a natural klutz, but I manage to get far enough away to not hear their voices anymore. I can’t hear anything, really, but the wind whistling in my ears and my breathing.

And then suddenly I’m knocked off my feet.

“Fuck it,” Oliver wheezes. “I’m getting too old for this.”

I can barely speak because he’s lying flat on my back. “You’re… twenty-eight…,” I grunt.

He rolls off me, and for a moment we are both sprawled on the pavement underneath a sign at a gas station. UNLEADED $2.69.

“I’m sorry,” Oliver says after a moment. “I should have seen that coming.”

I push up on my elbows to look at him.

“There are a lot of people who want to see what happens with your case,” he says, “and I should have prepared you.”

“I don’t want to go back there,” I say.

“Jake, the judge is going to put you back in jail if you don’t.”

I run through the list of rules in my head, the ones Oliver gave me for court behavior. I wonder why he didn’t give the reporters the same rules, because clearly shoving a microphone up my nostrils doesn’t qualify as good etiquette. “I want a sensory break,” I announce, one of the appropriate responses to Oliver when we are at the trial.

He sits up and draws his knees into his chest. A car pulls up to the gas pump a few feet away, and the guy who gets out looks at us strangely before swiping his credit card. “Then we’ll ask the judge for one as soon as we get inside.” He tilts his head. “What do you say, Jake? You ready to fight with me?”

I roll my toes in the bells of the dress shoes. I do it three times, because that’s lucky. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” I answer.

Oliver looks away from me. “I’m nervous,” he admits.

This doesn’t seem like a great thing to hear from one’s attorney before going into a trial, but I like the fact that he’s not lying to me. “You tell the truth,” I say.

It’s a compliment, but Oliver interprets it as a directive. He hesitates. “I’ll tell them why you’re not guilty.” Then he gets up, dusting off his pants. “So what do you say?”

This phrase has always seemed to be a trick question. Most of the time it’s uttered by a person when you haven’t even said a damn thing, but of course, the minute you point out that you haven’t said anything, you have.

“Do I have to go through all those people again?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Oliver says, “but I’ve got an idea.”

He leads me to the edge of the parking lot, where Theo and my mom are anxiously waiting. I want to tell Oliver something, but it fades in the face of this more immediate problem. “Close your eyes,” he instructs, so I do. Then I feel him grab my right arm, and my mother grabs my left. My eyes are still closed, but I start to hear the humming of the voices, and without even realizing it, I make the same sound in the back of my throat.

“Now… sing!”

“I shot the sheriff… but I didn’t shoot no deputy-” I break off. “I can still hear them.”

So Theo starts singing. And Oliver, and my mother. All of us, a barbershop quartet but without the harmony, up the stairs of the courthouse.

It works. Probably because they are so surprised by the musical number, the Red Sea of reporters parts and we walk right up the middle.

I’m so amazed that it takes me a while to remember what was stuck like a fish bone in my throat before we walked up the steps of the courthouse.

1. I said to Oliver the verbal equation we’ll call p : “You tell the truth.”

2. He replied with q : “I’ll tell them why you’re not guilty.”

3. In the logic equation of this conversation, I had made the assumption that p and q were equivalent.

4. Now I realize that’s not necessarily true.