Jodi Picoult - House Rules

“Did you talk to Jacob Hunt that afternoon?” the prosecutor asks.

“Yes. By the time I brought the pizzas they had ordered, he was sitting alone at the table.”

“Do you know why Jacob Hunt was sitting alone?” Helen Sharp asks.

“Well, they were all fighting. The boyfriend was angry at Jacob, Jess was angry at the boyfriend for being angry at Jacob, and then the boyfriend left.” She shakes her head. “Then Jess got angry at Jacob, and she left.”

“Did you hear what they were fighting about?”

“I had eighteen take-out orders to fill; I wasn’t listening. The only thing I heard was what Jess said, before she left.”

“Which was what, Mama S.?”

The woman purses her lips. “She told him to get lost.”

The prosecutor sits back down, and then it is Oliver’s turn. I don’t watch cop shows. I don’t really watch anything, unless it’s CrimeBusters, since Jacob hogs the TV. But being in court is kind of like watching a basketball game-one side scores, and then the other takes the ball back and scores, and this goes on and on. And just like basketball, I bet it all comes down to the last five minutes.

“So you really don’t know what the argument was about,” Oliver says.

“No.” She leans forward. “Oliver, you look very handsome in your fancy suit.”

He smiles, but it looks a little painful. “Thanks, Mama. So, you were in fact paying attention to your customers.”

“I’ve got to make a living, don’t I?” she says, and then she shakes her head. “You’re losing weight, I think. You’ve been eating out too much. Constantine and I are both worried about you…”

“Mama, I kind of need to get through this?” he whispers.

“Oh. All right.” She turns to the jury. “I didn’t hear the argument.”

“You were behind the counter?”

“Yes.”

“Near the ovens.”

“Yes.”

“And there were other people working around you?”

“Three, that day.”

“And there was noise?”

“The phone, and the pinball, and the jukebox were all going.”

“So you’re not really sure what upset Jess in the first place?”

“No.”

Oliver nods. “When Jacob was sitting alone, did you talk to him?”

“I tried. He wasn’t big on conversation.”

“Did he ever make eye contact with you?”

“No.”

“Did he do anything threatening?”

Mama S. shakes her head. “No, he’s a good boy. I just left him alone,” she says. “It seemed to be what he wanted.”

My whole life, Jacob’s wanted to be part of the group. This is one of the reasons why I never brought friends home. My mother would have insisted we include Jacob, and frankly, that would have pretty much guaranteed the end of the friendship for me. (The other reason is I was embarrassed. I didn’t want anyone to know what my household was like; I didn’t want to have to explain Jacob’s antics, because even though my mother insisted they were just quirks of his, to the rest of the free world, they looked freaking ridiculous.)

Every now and then, though, Jacob managed to infiltrate my separate life, which was even worse. It was the social equivalent of when I once built a house of cards using all fifty-two of them and Jacob thought it would be funny to poke it with his fork.

In elementary school I was a total social outcast because of Jacob, but when we got to middle school, there were people from other towns who didn’t know about my brother with Asperger’s. Through some miracle I managed to become friends with two guys named Tyler and Wally, who lived in South Burlington and played Ultimate Frisbee. They invited me to play after school, and when I told them sure and didn’t have to even call my mom to check if it was okay, that only made me seem cooler. I didn’t explain that the reason I didn’t have to call was because I spent as much time away from my house as possible, that my mother was used to me not coming home until it got dark out and, half the time, probably didn’t even notice I was gone.

It was, and I am not just saying this, the best day of my life. We were flinging the Frisbee around the softball field, and a few girls who had stayed after for field hockey practice came to watch in their short skirts, with the sun all caught up in their hair. I jumped extra high, showing off, and when I worked up a sweat, one of the girls let me have a drink from her water bottle. I got to put my mouth where hers had been a minute before, which was practically like kissing her, if you want to get technical.

And then Jacob showed up.

I don’t know what he was doing there-apparently it had to do with some kind of testing that was being administered at my school instead of his, and he was waiting with his aide for my mother to come pick him up. But the minute he saw me and called out my name, I knew I was screwed. At first I pretended I didn’t hear him, but he ran right onto the field. “Friend of yours, Hunt?” Tyler asked, and I just laughed it off. I whipped the Frisbee in his direction, extra hard.

To my surprise, Jacob-who couldn’t catch a freaking cold if he tried-nabbed the Frisbee and started to run with it. I froze, but Tyler took off after him. “Hey, retard,” he yelled at Jacob. “I’m gonna kick your ass!”

He was faster than Jacob, big surprise, and he tackled my brother to the ground. He lifted his hand to deck Jacob, but by then I was on his back, yanking him off and straddling his body as the Frisbee went spinning into the street. “You don’t fucking touch him,” I yelled into Tyler’s face. “If anyone’s going to beat up my brother, it’s going to be me.”

I left him in the dirt, coughing, and then took Jacob’s hand and walked him to the front of the school, where I couldn’t hear the girls whispering about me and my dork of a brother, where there were enough teachers milling around to keep Tyler and Wally from jumping me in revenge.

“I wanted to play,” Jacob said.

“Well, they didn’t want you to play,” I told him.

He kicked at the dirt. “I wish I could be the big brother.”

Technically, he was, but he wasn’t talking about age. He just didn’t know how to say what he meant. “You could start by not stealing someone’s goddamn Frisbee,” I said.

And then my mother drove up and rolled down the window. She was smiling a huge smile. “I thought I was only picking up Jacob, but look at that,” she said. “You two found each other.”

I am sure that the jury isn’t absorbing anything that Marcy Allston, the CSI, is saying. She’s so drop-dead gorgeous that I can practically imagine the dead bodies she stumbles across sitting up and panting.

“The first time we came to the house, we dusted for fingerprints and found some on the computer and in the bathroom.”

“Can you explain the process?” Helen asks.

“The skin of your fingers, the palms of your hands, and the soles of your feet aren’t smooth-they are friction ridge skin, with lines that start, stop, and have certain contours or shapes. Along those lines of skin are a series of sweat pores, and if they become contaminated with sweat, blood, dirt, dust, and so on, they leave a reproduction of those lines on the object that’s been touched. My job is to make that reproduction visible. Sometimes you need a magnifying glass to do it, sometimes you need a light source. Once I make the print visible, it can be photographed, and once it can be photographed I can preserve it and make a comparison against a known sample.”

“Where do those known samples come from?”

“The victim, the suspects. And from AFIS, a fingerprint database for all criminals in the United States who have been processed.”