The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  I slip the iPod into my pocket and pour the water from the whistling kettle, and that’s when I realize that I can hear a shower running above me.

  Forgetting my tea, I creep into the living room, past the monster entertainment system, and up the stairs.

  The water sound is coming from the master bathroom suite.

  The bed’s unmade. It’s a quilt with roses embroidered all over it, and there is a pile of clothes on a chair. I pick up a lacy bra and run my hand over the straps.

  That’s when I realize that the bathroom door’s ajar, and that I can sort of see the shower reflected in the mirror.

  My day has gotten considerably better in the past thirty seconds.

  There’s steam, so I can only make out the curves when she turns and the fact that her hair reaches her shoulders. She’s humming, and she’s wicked off-key. Turn, I silently beg. Full frontal.

  “Oh, crap,” the woman says, and suddenly she opens the door of the shower. I see her arm emerge as she blindly feels around for her towel, which is hanging on a rack beside the shower door, and wipes her eyes. I hold my breath, staring at her shoulder. Her boob.

  Still blinking, she lets go of the towel and turns.

  In that second, our eyes meet.

  Jacob

  People say things all the time they don’t mean, and neurotypical folks manage to figure out the message all the same. Take, for example, Mimi Scheck in school. She said she’d die if Paul McGrath didn’t ask her to the Winter Formal, but in reality, she would not have died—she would just have been really sad. Or the way Theo sometimes smacks another kid’s shoulder and says “Get out!” when that really means he wants his friend to keep talking. Or that time my mom muttered “Oh, that’s just great” when we got a flat tire on the highway although it clearly was not great; it was a colossal hassle.

  So maybe when Jess told me to get lost on Sunday, she really meant something else.

  * * *

  I think I might be dying of spinal meningitis. Headaches, dementia, stiffness of the neck, high fever. I have two out of the four. I don’t know if I should ask my mother to take me for a lumbar puncture or just ride it out until I die. I have already prepared a note explaining how I’d like to be dressed at my funeral, just in case.

  It is equally possible, I suppose, that the reason I have a severe headache and stiff neck is I have gotten no sleep since Sunday, when I last saw Jess.

  She didn’t send me pictures of her new house in advance, like she promised. I sent her forty-eight emails yesterday to remind her, and she didn’t respond to any of them. I can’t call to remind her to send the pictures because I still have her cell phone.

  Last night at about four in the morning, I asked myself what Dr. Henry Lee would do, if confronted with the evidence that:

  1. No photos ever arrived by email.

  2. None of my forty-eight messages were acknowledged.

  Hypothesis One would be that Jess’s email account is not functional, which seems unlikely because it is connected with the entirety of UVM. Hypothesis Two would be that she is actively choosing to not communicate with me, which would indicate anger or frustration (see above: Just get lost). But that doesn’t make sense, since she specifically told me at our last meeting that I should tell her what I’d learned . . . which implies another meeting.

  Incidentally, I have made a list of what I learned at our last meeting:

  1. Gluten-free pizza tastes disgusting.

  2. Jess is not available to go to a movie this Friday night.

  3. Her cell phone sounds like a bird chirping when you power it down.

  4. Mark is a dim-witted moron. (Although, in fairness, this is (a) redundant and (b) something I already knew.)

  The only reason I went to school today, feeling as awful as I do, is that if I stayed home I know my mother would insist I miss my lesson with Jess, and I can’t do that. I have to give her back her phone, after all. And if I see her face-to-face, I can ask her why she didn’t answer my emails.

  Usually it is Theo’s job to walk me to the UVM campus, which is only a half mile from school. He drops me off at Jess’s dorm room, which she has always left unlocked for me, so that I can wait for her until she gets out of her anthropology class. Sometimes I do my homework while I’m waiting, and sometimes I look through the papers on her desk. Once I sprayed her perfume on my clothes and went around smelling like her for the rest of the day. Then Jess shows up and we go to the library to work, or sometimes to the student union or a café on Church Street.

  I could probably get to Jess’s dorm while comatose, but today—when I really do need Theo’s help to find my way to a new location—he leaves school because he’s sick. He searches me out after sixth period and tells me he feels like crap and is going home to die.

  Don’t, I tell him. That would really upset Mom.

  My immediate first instinct is to ask him how I am supposed to get to Jess’s if he goes home sick, but then I remember Jess telling me that not everything is about me, and that putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is part of social interactions. (Not literally. I would not fit in Theo’s shoes. He wears a ten and a half, while I wear a twelve.) So I tell Theo to feel better and then I go to the guidance counselor, Mrs. Grenville. We examine the map Jess has given me and decide that I should take Bus H-5 and get off at the third stop. She even draws a route in highlighter pen from the bus stop to the house.

  As it turns out, the map is a very good one, even if it’s not drawn to scale. After I get off the bus, I turn right at the fire hydrant and then count six houses on the left. Jess’s new temporary home is an old brick house with ivy growing up the sides. I wonder if she knows that the tendrils of ivy can break apart mortar and brick. I wonder if I should tell her. If someone told me, I would lie in bed at night wondering if the whole house was going to crumble around me.

  I am still very nervous when I ring the front doorbell, because I have never seen the inside of this house before and that makes me feel like my bones have gone to jelly.

  No one answers, so I go around the back.

  I glance down at the snow and make a mental note of what I see, but it isn’t really important because The Door Is Unlocked, and that must mean Jess is expecting me. I feel myself relaxing already: it’s just like her dorm room; I will go in and wait, and when she returns, everything will be back to normal.

  * * *

  There are only two times that Jess has gotten angry with me, and both occurred while I was waiting for her to show up. The first was when I took all her clothes out of her closet and arranged them according to the electromagnetic color spectrum, like mine. The second time was when I sat down at her desk and noticed the calculus problem set she was working on. She’d done half the problems wrong, so I fixed them for her.

  * * *

  Theo is the person who made me understand that the rules of violence are based on threat. If there is an actual problem, there are only two options:

  1. Retaliation

  2. Confrontation

  It’s gotten me into trouble.

  I have been sent to the principal’s office for smacking a boy who threw a paper airplane at me during English class. When Theo ruined one of my forensic experiments-in-progress, I went into his bedroom with a pair of scissors and systematically hacked his comic book collection to bits. Once in eighth grade, I found out that a group of kids were making fun of me, and as if someone had flipped an electrical switch inside me, I went into a frantic rage. I huddled in a cubicle in the school library, crafting a hit list of the people I hated and how I would like their lives to end: knife wound in the locker room at gym, bomb in their locker, cyanide in their Diet Coke. As is the Aspergian nature, I’m fanatically organized about some things and disorganized about others, and as luck would have it I lost that piece of paper. I figured someone (maybe me) had thrown it out, but my history teacher found it and gave it to the principal, who called my mother.

  She yelled at me for seventy-nine