House Rules Read online

  --Consider yourself on winter break,|| the officer says.

  --Winter break isn't until February fifteenth.||

  He punches a button on the keyboard. --All right. Stand up,|| he says, so I do.

  --What's in your pockets?||

  I glance down at my jacket. --My hands.||

  --So you're a wiseass,|| the officer says. --Empty them, come on.||

  Confused, I hold my palms up in front of me. There's nothing in them.

  --Your pockets.||

  I pull out a stick of gum, a green pebble, a piece of sea glass, a strip of photographs of my mother and me, and my wallet. He takes them all. --Hey--||

  --The money will be logged in to your account,|| he says. I watch him write notes on a piece of paper, and then he opens my wallet and takes out my money and my picture of Dr. Henry Lee. He starts to count the money, and by accident, he drops the pile. When he gathers it back up, it's out of order.

  Sweat breaks out on my forehead. --The money,|| I say.

  --I didn't take any, if that's what you're worried about.||

  I see a twenty rubbing up against a dollar bill, and the five-dollar bill is backward, with President Lincoln facedown.

  In my wallet, I make sure that everything is in order from the smallest denomination to the biggest, and everything faces up. I have never taken cash out of my mother's wallet without her permission, but sometimes when she is unaware I sneak into her purse and organize her money for her. I just don't like the thought of all that chaos; the coin pocket is already haphazard enough.

  --You okay?|| the officer says, and I realize he is staring at me.

  --Could you ...|| I can barely speak, my throat has gotten so tight. --Could you just put the bills in order?||

  --What the hell?||

  With my hand curled to my chest, I point a single finger at the stack of bills.

  --Please,|| I whisper. --The ones go on top.||

  If at least the money looks the way it is supposed to, that's something that hasn't changed.

  --I don't believe this,|| the officer mutters, but he does it, and once that twenty is resting safely at the bottom of the pile, I let out the breath I've been holding.

  --Thanks,|| I say, even though I noticed at least two of the bills are still upside down.

  Jacob, I tell myself, you can do this. It doesn't matter if you are in another bed tonight instead of your own. It doesn't matter if they do not let you brush your teeth. In the grand scheme of things, the world will not stop spinning. (That is a sentence my mother likes to use when I get nervous about a change in routine.) Meanwhile the officer leads me to another room, one not much bigger than a closet.

  --Strip,|| he says, and he folds his arms.

  --Strip what?|| I answer.

  --All of it. Underwear, too.|| When I realize he wants me to take off my clothes, I am so surprised that my jaw drops.

  --I'm not changing in front of you,|| I say, incredulous. I won't even change for gym class in the locker room. I have a doctor's note from Dr. Moon saying that I do not have to, that I can participate in class while wearing my normal clothes.

  --Again,|| the officer says, --I didn't ask you.||

  On television I've seen inmates wearing jumpsuits, although I never really gave much thought to what happened to their clothes. But what I am remembering now is bad.

  Very Bad, with capital letters. On television, the jumpsuits are always orange. Sometimes it is enough to make me change the channel.

  I can feel my pulse accelerate at the thought of all that orange, touching my skin. Of the other inmates, wearing the same color. We would be like an ocean of hazard warnings, a sea of danger.

  --If you don't take off your clothes,|| the officer says, --I will do it for you.||

  I turn my back to him and peel off my coat. I pull my shirt over my head. My skin is white, like a fish belly, and I don't have rippling stomach muscles like the Abercrombie & Fitch guys; this embarrasses me. I unzip my jeans and pull down my underwear and then remember my socks. Then I crouch into a ball and carefully organize my clothes so that the olive khaki pants are on the bottom, then the green shirt, finally the green boxers and socks.

  The officer takes the clothes and starts shaking them out. --Hands out at your sides,||

  he says, and I close my eyes and do what he says, even when he makes me turn around and bend down and I can feel his fingers moving me apart. A soft cloth sack hits my chest. --Get dressed again.||

  Inside it is clothing but not my own. Instead, there are three pairs of socks, three pairs of underwear, three T-shirts, thermal pants, a thermal top, three pairs of dark blue pants and matching shirts, rubber flip-flops, a jacket, a hat, gloves, a towel.

  This is a huge relief. I won't be wearing orange after all.

  I have been to one sleepover in my life. It was at the home of a boy named Marshall, who has since moved to San Francisco. Marshall had a lazy eye and was, like me, often the butt of classmates' jokes in second grade. Our mothers were the ones who organized the sleepover, after mine learned that Marshall could spell the names of most dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period as well.

  My mother and I talked for two whole weeks about what would happen if I woke up in the middle of the night and wanted to come home (I'd call). What would happen if Marshall's mother served something for breakfast that I didn't like (I would say No thank you). We talked about how Marshall might not have his clothes organized in his closet the way I do and how he had a dog and dogs sometimes drop hair on the floor without intending to.

  The night of the sleepover my mother dropped me off after dinner. Marshall asked if I wanted to watch Jurassic Park, and I said yes. But when I started telling him during the video what was anachronistic and what was downright fictionalized, he got angry and told me to shut up and I went to play with his dog instead.

  The dog was a Yorkshire terrier with a pink bow in its hair even though it happened to be male. It had a very small pink tongue, and it licked my hand, which I thought I would like but which I wanted to wash off immediately.

  That night when we went to sleep Marshall's mother put a rolled blanket between us to divide up his full-size bed. She kissed him on the forehead and then she kissed me, which was strange because she was not my mother. Marshall told me that in the morning if we got up early we could watch TV before his mother got up and caught us. Then he fell asleep, but I didn't. I was awake when the dog came into the room and burrowed underneath the covers, scratching me with its tiny black toenails. And I was still awake when Marshall wet the bed in his sleep, too.

  I got up and called my mother. It was 4:24 A.M.

  When she arrived, she knocked on the door, and Marshall's mother answered it in her bathrobe. My mother thanked her on my behalf. --I guess Jacob's an early riser,|| she said. --Very early.|| She tried to laugh a little, but it sounded like a brick falling.

  When we got into the car, she said, --I'm sorry.||

  Even though I didn't meet her gaze, I could feel her looking at me. --Don't ever do that to me again,|| I answered.

  I have to fill out a form for visitors. I can't imagine who might want to come, so I write down my mother's name and my brother's name and our address, and their birth dates. I add Jess's name, too, although I know she can't visit, obviously, but I bet she would have wanted to.

  Then a nurse examines me, taking my temperature and checking my pulse, just like at the doctor's office. When she asks me if I'm on any medication, I tell her yes, but she gets angry when I don't know the names of the supplements, when I can only tell her the colors, or the fact that it comes in a syringe.

  Finally, I am taken to the place where I will be staying. The officer walks me down a hallway until we reach a booth. Inside, another officer pushes a button, and the metal door in front of us slides open. I am given another laundry bag, this one with two sheets and two blankets and a pillowcase.

  The cells are on the left side of a hallway that has a metal grate instead of a floor.