House Rules: A Novel Read online

  Jacob repeats what I said, and then repeats it again: Brings it all back. Brings it all back. The first time I heard him do it, I thought he was mimicking me. Now I know it’s echolalia; Emma explained it to me as just the repetition of sounds. Sometimes Jacob does that by reciting movie quotes, and sometimes it’s an immediate parroting of something he’s heard.

  I just hope no one hears him doing it in court, or they’ll assume he’s a wiseass.

  “Bring it all back,” Jacob says again. “Bring what all back?”

  “Something that’s going to make the jury assume you’re guilty.”

  “But it’s a crime scene,” Jacob says again. “I just wrote down the evidence like usual.”

  “It’s not a fictional crime scene,” I point out.

  “Why not?” he asks. “I’m the one who created it.”

  “Oh my God,” Emma chokes. “They’re going to think he’s a monster.”

  I want to put my hand on her arm and tell her I will be able to keep that from happening, but I cannot make that kind of promise. Even having been with Jacob for the past month, like I have, there are still things he does that strike me as utterly chilling—like now, when his mother is hysterical and he turns away without registering any remorse and cranks up the volume on his TV show. Juries, which are supposed to be about reason, are actually always about the heart. A juror who watches Jacob stare blankly through the graphic testimony about Jess Ogilvy’s death will deliberate his fate with that image etched in her mind, and it cannot help but sway her decision.

  I cannot change Jacob, which means I have to change the system. This is why I’ve filed a motion, and why we’re going to court tomorrow, although I haven’t yet broken the news to Emma yet.

  “I need to tell you both something,” I say, as Emma’s watch begins to beep.

  “Hold on,” she says, “I’m timing Theo on a math quiz.” She faces the kitchen. “Theo? Put your pencil down. Jacob, lower that volume. Theo? Did you hear me?”

  When there’s no answer, Emma walks into the kitchen. She calls out again, and then I hear her footsteps overhead, in Theo’s room. A moment later, she is back in the living room, her voice wild. “He never did his math quiz. And his coat and sneakers and backpack are missing,” she says. “Theo’s gone.”

  Theo

  Let me just say that I think it’s pretty insane that a kid who’s fifteen, like me, can fly across the country without a parent. The hardest part was getting the ticket, which turned out to not be very hard at all. It was no secret that my mother keeps an emergency credit card buried in her file cabinet, and honestly, didn’t this count as an emergency? All I had to do was dig it out, get the number off the front and the PIN code on the back, and book my ticket on Orbitz.com.

  I had a passport, too (we’d driven up to Canada once on a vacation that lasted approximately six hours, after Jacob refused to sleep in the motel room because it had an orange carpet), which was stored one file folder away from the emergency credit card. And getting to the airport was a piece of cake; it took two hitched rides, and that was that.

  I wish I could tell you I had a plan, but I didn’t. All I knew was that, directly or indirectly, this was my fault. I hadn’t killed Jess Ogilvy, but I’d seen her the day she died, and I hadn’t told the police or my mother or anyone else—and now Jacob was going to be tried for murder. In my mind, it was like a chain reaction. If I hadn’t been breaking into houses at the time, if I hadn’t been in Jess’s, if I had never locked eyes with her—maybe that missing link would have broken the string of events that happened afterward. It was no great secret that my mother was totally freaking out about where the money would be coming from for Jacob’s trial; I figured that if I was ever going to remove my karmic debt, I might as well start by finding the solution to that problem.

  Hence: this visit to my father.

  On the plane, I am sitting between a businessman who’s trying to sleep and a woman who looks like a grandmother—she’s got short white hair and a light purple sweatshirt with a cat on it. The businessman is shifting in his seat because he’s got a kid behind him who keeps kicking it.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” he says.

  I’ve always wondered why people say that. Why the H? I mean, what if his middle name was Stanley?

  “I’m stuck on the last one,” the grandma says.

  I pull my iPod earphone free. “Sorry?”

  “No, that doesn’t fit.” She is hunched over a crossword puzzle in the back of the US Airways magazine. It had been filled out halfway. I hate that; doesn’t the jerk who is sitting in the seat on the previous flight think someone else might want to try it on his own? “The clue is Regretted. And it’s four letters.”

  Theo, I think.

  Suddenly the businessman comes out of his seat and twists around. “Madam,” he says to the kid’s mom, “is there any chance you could keep your brat from being so incredibly rude?”

  “That’s it,” the grandma says. “Rude!”

  I watch her write it in pencil. “I, uh, think it’s spelled differently,” I suggest. “R-U-E-D.”

  “Right,” she says, erasing it to make the correction. “I admit to being a horrendous speller.” She smiles at me. “Now, what’s bringing you out to sunny California?”

  “I’m visiting someone.”

  “Me, too. Someone I’ve never met—my first grandbaby.”

  “Wow,” I say. “You must be pretty stoked.”

  “If that’s a good thing, then yes, I guess I am. My name’s Edith.”

  “I’m Paul.”

  Okay, I don’t know where the lie came from. I shouldn’t have been surprised—after all, I’d hidden my involvement in this whole nightmare for over a month now, and I was getting really good at pretending I wasn’t the same person I was back then. But once I made up the name, the rest kept coming. I was on school break. I was an only child. My parents were divorced (Ha! Not a lie!), and I was going to see my dad. We were planning on taking a college tour of Stanford.

  At home, we don’t talk about my father. In world studies class we learned about indigenous cultures who no longer speak the names of the dead—well, we no longer say the name of the person who quit when the going got tough. I don’t really know the details of my parents’ split, except that I was still a baby when it happened, and so of course there’s a piece of me that thinks I must have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. But I do know that he tries to pay off his guilt by sending my mom a child support check every month. And I also know that he has replaced Jacob and me with two little girls who look like china dolls and who probably have never broken into a house or stimmed a day in their short lives. I know this because he sends us a Christmas card every year, which I throw out if I get to the mail before my mother does.

  “Do you have brothers or sisters?” Edith asks.

  I take a sip of the 7-Up I bought for three bucks. “Nope,” I say. “Only child.”

  “Stop it,” the businessman says, and for one awful moment I think he’s going to tell this woman who I really am. Then he turns around in his seat. “For the love of God,” he says to the little kid’s mom.

  “So, Paul,” Edith says, “what do you want to study at Stanford?”

  I am fifteen, I have no idea what I want to do with my life. Except fix the mess I’ve made of it.

  Instead of answering, I point down at her crossword puzzle. “Quito,” I say. “That’s the answer to forty-two across.”

  She gets all excited and reads aloud the next clue. I think about how happy she’ll be if we finish this crossword puzzle. She’ll get off the plane and tell her son-in-law, or whoever is picking her up, about the nice young man she met. About how helpful I was. How proud my parents must be of me.

  Jacob

  My brother is not as smart as I am.

  I am not saying this to be mean; I’m just stating a fact. For example, he has to study all his vocabulary words if he wants to do well on a test; I can look at the page and