Jodi Picoult - House Rules

In one glance I could tell that Mark Maguire was everything I was not:

1. Coordinated

2. Attractive (if you’re a girl, I mean)

3. Popular

4. Muscular

5. Confident

I could also tell that I was one thing Mark Maguire was not:

1. Smart

“Mark, this is my friend Jacob.”

He leaned down into my face and yelled, “Hey, dude, cool to meet you!”

I yelled back, “I’m not deaf!”

He grinned at Jess. He had perfect, white teeth. “You’re right. He is funny.”

Had Jess told him I was funny? Had she meant that I made her laugh because I told good jokes or because I was a joke?

In that instant I hated Mark Maguire viscerally, because he’d made me doubt Jess, and up until then I had known, unequivocally, that we were friends.

“So what do you say we give the bunny hill a try?” Mark asked, and he held out a pole so that he could drag me to the rope tow. “Like this,” he said, showing me how to grab on to the moving rope, and I thought I had it right but my left hand got screwed up with my right and I wound up spinning backward and collapsing on the little kid behind me. The guy running the rope tow had to shut it off while Mark hauled me to my feet again. “You okay, Jacob?” Jess asked, but Mark brushed her off.

“He’s doing great,” Mark said. “Relax, Jake. I teach retarded kids all the time.”

“Jacob is autistic, ” Jess corrected, and I turned around so fast that I forgot about the skis and fell down in a heap again. “I’m not retarded,” I shouted, but that statement is somewhat less resonant when one cannot even untangle one’s own legs.

I will say this for Mark Maguire: he taught me how to snowplow efficiently enough to make it down the bunny hill twice, solo. Then he asked Jess if she wanted to take a run up the big hill while I practiced. They left me in the company of seven-year-olds in pink snowsuits.

CASE STUDY 2: In laboratory studies, scientists have learned that, when it comes to love, a very tiny portion of the brain is actually involved. For example, friendship lights up receptors all over the cerebral cortex, but this isn’t true with love, which activates parts of the brain more commonly associated with emotional responses like fear and anger. The brain of a person in love will show activity in the amygdala, which is associated with gut feelings, and in the nucleus accumbens, an area associated with rewarding stimuli that tends to be active in drug abusers. Or, to recap: the brain of a person in love doesn’t look like the brain of someone overcome by deep emotion. It looks like the brain of a person who’s been snorting coke.

That day at Stowe, I did two runs with the help of a kid who was learning to snowboard, then inched myself toward the main ski lift. I leaned against a rack where people could store their skis while they were in the lodge getting hot chocolate and chicken nuggets, and I waited for Jess to come back to me.

Mark Maguire is wearing a suit. He has dark circles under his eyes and I almost feel bad for him, because he must be missing Jess, too, until I remember how he hurt her.

“Can you state your name for the record?” the prosecutor asks.

“Mark Maguire.”

“Where do you live, Mr. Maguire?”

“Forty-four Green Street in Burlington.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m twenty-five,” he says.

“And what do you do for a living?”

“I’m a grad student at UVM and a part-time ski instructor at Stowe.”

“How did you know Jess Ogilvy, Mr. Maguire?”

“She’d been my girlfriend for five months.”

“Where were you on Sunday, January tenth, 2010?” Helen Sharp asks.

“At Mama’s Pizza in Townsend. Jess had a tutoring session with Jacob Hunt, and I liked to come along every now and then.”

That is not true. He just didn’t like that she was spending time with me and wouldn’t give me up for him.

“So you know Jacob?”

“Yes.”

“Do you see him in the courtroom today?”

I stare down at the table so I can’t feel the serrated edges of Mark’s eyes. “He’s sitting over there.”

“Let the record reflect that the witness has identified the defendant,” the prosecutor says. “How many times, before January tenth, had you met Jacob?”

“I don’t know. Maybe five or six?”

The prosecutor walks toward the witness box. “Did you get along with him?”

Mark is looking at me again, I can tell. “I didn’t really pay attention to him,” he says.

We are in Jess’s dorm room watching a TV movie about the JonBenét Ramsey murder case, which of course was one in which Dr. Henry Lee was involved. I tell Jess what is true and what Hollywood has changed. She keeps checking her voice-mail messages, but there aren’t any. I am so excited about the movie that for a while I don’t realize she is crying. You’re crying, I say, the obvious, and I don’t get it because she didn’t know JonBenét and usually people who cry at someone’s death knew them very well. I’m just not very happy today, I guess, Jess says, and she stands up. When she does, she makes a sound like a dog that’s been kicked. She has to stand on a chair to reach a high shelf where she keeps her extra toilet paper and Ziploc bags and Kleenex. When she grabs the box of tissues, her sweater rides up on the side and I can see them, red and purple and yellow like a tattoo, but I’ve watched enough CrimeBusters to know bruises when I see them.

What happened to you? I ask, and she tells me she fell down.

I’ve watched enough CrimeBusters to know that’s what girls always say when they don’t want you to know that someone is beating them up.

“We ordered pizza,” Mark says, “the kind that Jacob can eat, without wheat in the crust. While we were waiting for it, Jacob asked Jess out. Like on a date. It was hilarious, but when I laughed at him, she got pissed off at me. I didn’t have to sit around and take that, so I left.”

Even worse than Mark’s stare, it turns out, is my mother’s.

“Did you talk to Jess at any point after that?” Helen asks.

“Yeah, on Monday. She called me and begged me to come over that night, and I did.”

“What was her state of mind?”

“She thought I was mad at her-”

“Objection,” Oliver says. “Speculation.”

The judge nods. “Sustained.”

Mark looks confused. “What was her emotional state?” Helen asks.

“She was upset.”

“Did you continue to argue?”

“No,” Mark says. “We kissed and made up, if you get my drift.”

“So you spent the night?”

“Yes.”

“What happened on Tuesday morning?”

“We were having breakfast and we started to fight again.”

“About what?” Helen Sharp asks.

“I don’t even remember. But I got really angry, and I… I sort of shoved her.”

“You mean your fight became physical?”

Mark looks down at his hands. “I didn’t mean to. But we were yelling and I grabbed her and pushed her against the wall. I stopped right away, said I was sorry. She told me to leave, so I did. I only had my hands on her for a minute.”

My head snaps up. I grab the pen in front of me and write so hard on the legal pad that it rips through the paper. HE IS LYING, I write, and I push the pad toward Oliver.

He glances at it, and writes:?

BRUISES ON HER NECK.

Oliver rips off the piece of paper and tucks it into his pocket. Meanwhile, Mark covers his eyes, and his voice cracks. “I called her all day long, to apologize again, and she wouldn’t answer her phone. I figured she was ignoring me, and I deserved it, but by Wednesday morning I was getting worried. I went over to her place, figuring I could catch her before she went to class, but she wasn’t there.”