House Rules: A Novel Read online

  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. Each cell has two beds, a sink, a toilet, and a television inside it. Each cell also has two men inside. They look like the same people you would see on the street, except of course they have all done something bad.

  Well, maybe not. After all, I’m here, too.

  “You’ll stay here for a week while you’re evaluated,” the officer says. “Based on your behavior, you might be moved to the minimum-security population.” He nods at one cell, which, unlike the others, has a smaller window. “That’s the shower,” the officer says.

  How am I supposed to make sure I shower first when there are so many other people around?

  How am I going to brush my teeth when I don’t have my toothbrush with me?

  How will I take my shot in the morning, and my supplements?

  As I think about these details, I feel myself starting to lose control.

  It’s not like a tsunami, although I’m sure that’s what it looks like to someone on the outside. It’s more like a packet of mail that’s wrapped tight several times with a rubber band. When it snaps, the band stays in place—out of habit, or out of muscle memory, I don’t know—and then one tiny move of the packet and it begins to unravel. Before you know it, there is nothing holding that packet of letters together.

  My hand starts moving a little, my fingers playing a beat on my thigh.

  Jess is dead and I am in jail and I missed CrimeBusters today and my right eye has a tic now that I can’t stop.

  We stop walking when we reach the cell at the end of the hallway. “Home sweet home,” the officer says. He unlocks the door to the cell and waits for me to move inside.

  The minute he locks the door again, I grab the bars. I can hear the lights buzzing overhead.

  Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid didn’t go to jail; instead they jumped off a cliff. “Kid, the next time I say ‘Let’s go someplace like Bolivia,’” I mutter, “let’s go someplace like Bolivia.”

  My head hurts, and out of the corners of my eyes, I am seeing red. I shut them, but the sounds are still there and my hands feel too big for my body and my skin is getting tighter. I picture it stretching so hard that it splits.

  “Don’t worry,” a voice says. “You’ll get used to it.”

  I spin around and hold my hands clutched in front of my chest, the way I used to walk sometimes when I wasn’t concentrating on looking like everyone else. I’d assumed the officer had put me in a special cell for people who have to be in jail but shouldn’t really be. I had not realized that I, like everyone else, would have a roommate.

  He is wearing all his blue clothes plus his jacket and hat, pulled down to his eyebrows. “What’s your name?”

  I stare at his face without looking him in the eye. He has a mole on his left cheek, and I have never liked people with moles. “I am Spartacus.”

  “No shit? Then I hope you’re in here for killing your parents.” He gets up from the bunk and walks behind me. “How about I call you Bitch instead?” My hands grip the bars more tightly. “Let’s get some things straight, so that you and me, we get along. I get the bottom bunk. I get to go out to the exercise yard before you do. I pick the TV channel. You don’t fuck with me, and I won’t fuck with you.”

  There is a common behavior in dogs that are put together in close quarters. One will snap at the other until the beta dog knows that the alpha dog is to be obeyed.

  I am not a dog. Neither is this man. He is shorter than I am. The mole on his cheek is raised, and shaped like a beehive.

  If Dr. Moon were here she’d ask, What’s the number?

  Sixteen. On a scale of one to ten, ten being the highest, my anxiety level is a sixteen. Which is the worst number, because it’s (a) even, (b) has an even square root, and (c) its even square root has an even square root.

  If my mother were here, she’d start singing “I Shot the Sheriff.” I stick my fingers in my ears so I cannot hear him and I close my eyes so I cannot see him and I start to repeat the chorus without any breaks between the words, just a ribbon of sound that I can imagine circling me like a force field.

  Suddenly he grabs my shoulder. “Hey,” he says, and I start to scream.

  His hat has fallen off so that I can see he is a redhead, and everyone knows that people with red hair don’t really have red hair, they have orange hair. And worse, his hair is long. It falls all around his face and his shoulders, and if he leans any closer it might land on me.

  The sounds that I make are high and piercing, louder than the voices of everyone who is telling me to shut the fuck up, louder than the officer who tells me he’ll write me up if I do not stop. But I can’t, because by now, the sound is oozing out of all my pores and even when I press my lips together my body is screaming. I grab the bars of the cell door—contusions are caused by blood vessels that are broken as the result of the blow—and smack my head against them—cerebral contusion associated with subdural hematoma in the front lobe is associated with mortality—and again—each red blood cell is one-third hemoglobin—and then just as I predicted my skin cannot contain what’s happening inside me and it splits and the blood runs down my fac