House Rules: A Novel Read online

  “I was just asking, for God’s sake.”

  “Well, you can’t come in at the third act and expect me to tell you what you’ve missed,” she snaps, and silence fills the car like sarin gas. I start to whisper the Fibonacci sequence under my breath, to make myself feel better, and Theo must feel the same way, because he says, “So … are we there yet?” and then laughs hysterically, as if he’s told a really funny joke.

  As we drive in, Oliver is leaning against his truck. It is an old pickup that, he says, is more suited to a farrier than an attorney, but it still gets him from point A to point B. We are parked in the back of the courthouse, away from the cameras and the television news vans. He glances up as we drive by, but this isn’t my mother’s car, so he doesn’t realize it’s us. It isn’t until we park and step out of the rental car that Oliver sees my mother and comes forward with a big smile on his face.

  And then he notices my dad.

  “Oliver,” my mother says, “this is my ex-husband, Henry.”

  “Are you kidding?” Oliver looks at my mother.

  My father sticks out his hand to shake Oliver’s. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Um. Right. Pleasure.” Then he turns to me. “Oh, for the love of God … Emma, I can’t let him go into the courtroom like this.”

  I look down. I’m wearing brown corduroy pants and a brown shirt, with a brown tweed blazer and the stretchy brown tie that Theo tied for me.

  “It’s Thursday, and he’s dressed in a jacket and tie,” my mother says tightly. “You might imagine that this morning I had a lot on my plate.”

  Oliver turns to my father. “What does he look like to you?”

  “A UPS driver?” my father says.

  “I was thinking Nazi.” Oliver shakes his head. “We don’t have time for you to go home and change, and you’re too big to fit into my—” Suddenly he breaks off and sizes up my father with one glance. “Go trade shirts with him in the bathroom.”

  “But it’s white,” I say.

  “Exactly. The look we’re going for is not modern-day serial killer, Jake.”

  My father glances at my mother. “See,” he says. “Aren’t you glad I came?”

  The first day I met Jess for social skills training I happened to be fearing for my very life. I had been in Mrs. Wicklow’s English class that year. It wasn’t a particularly interesting class, and Mrs. Wicklow had the bad fortune to have a face that looked a little like a sweet potato—long and narrow, with a few sprouting hairs at the chin and an orange spray-on tan. But she always let me read aloud when we were doing plays, even if I sometimes had trouble remembering my place, and the time I forgot my notebook on the day of the open-book exam she let me take it the next day. One day, when she was out with the flu, a boy in the class named Sawyer Trigg (who had been suspended once for bringing NyQuil to school to sell in the cafeteria) ignored the substitute teacher and plucked bits of the spider plant off, then stuck it to his chin with gum. He jammed wadded-up paper under his shirt and started prancing through the aisles between our desks. “I’m Mrs. Witchlow,” he said, and everyone laughed.

  I laughed, too, but only to fit in. Because you’re supposed to respect teachers, even if they’re not there. So when Mrs. Wicklow came back, I told her what Sawyer had been doing, and she sent him to the principal. Later that day, he slammed me up against my locker and said, “I could fucking kill you, Hunt.”

  Well, I spent the rest of the day in an utter panic, because he could kill me, I had no doubt of that. And when Jess arrived at the school to meet me for the first time, I had a butter knife in my pocket stolen from the cafeteria—the best I could do on short notice—just in case Sawyer Trigg was lurking in the shadows of the hallways.

  She told me that what I said to her was private, and that she wouldn’t tell my mother about anything I wanted to keep a secret between us. I liked that—it sounded like having a best friend, at least the way it is always portrayed on television—but I was too distracted to comment. “Um, Jacob?” Jess said, when she caught me looking over my shoulder for the eighth time. “Is everything okay?”

  That was when I told her everything about Mrs. Wicklow and Sawyer Trigg.

  She shook her head. “He’s not going to kill you.”

  “But he said—”

  “That’s his way of letting you know he’s mad at you for tattling on him.”

  “You’re not supposed to make fun of teachers—”

  “You’re not supposed to tell on your peers, either,” Jess said. “Especially if you want them to like you. I mean, Mrs. Wicklow has to be nice to you; it’s part of her contract. But you have to earn the trust of your classmates. And you just lost that.” She leaned forward. “There are all kinds of rules, Jacob. Some of them are explicit, like not making fun of teachers. But others are like secrets. They’re the ones you’re supposed to know, even if they never get said.”

  That was exactly what I never seemed to understand: those unwritten rules that other people seemed to pick up as if they had a social radar device that was missing in my own brain.

  “Did you laugh when Sawyer made fun of Mrs. Wicklow?”

  “Yes.”

  “He thought you were on his side, that you were enjoying the performance. So imagine how he felt when you tattled on him.”

  I stared at Jess. I wasn’t Sawyer, and I had been adhering to a rule; whereas he was deliberately breaking one. “I can’t,” I said.

  A few minutes later, my mother came to pick me up. “Hello,” she said, smiling at Jess. “How did it go?”

  Jess looked at me, making sure she caught my eye. Then she turned to my mother. “Jacob got another boy in trouble today. Oh, and he stole a knife from the school cafeteria.”

  I felt my heart go to stone in my chest, and my mouth was dry as cotton. I thought this girl was going to be my friend, was going to keep my secrets. And the first thing she did was turn around and tell my mother everything that had happened today?

  I was furious; I never wanted to see her again. And I felt soft and spongy in my stomach, too, as if I had just gotten off an amusement park ride, because I knew my mother was going to want to follow up on this conversation on the drive home.

  Jess touched my arm to get my attention. “That,” she said, “is how Sawyer felt. And I will never do that to you again. Will you?”

  The next day I went to school, and I waited near Sawyer’s locker. “What are you doing here, prick?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him, and I really, truly meant it.

  Maybe it was my face, or the tone of my voice, or just the fact that I sought him out—but he stood there for a second with his locker open and then he shrugged. “Whatever,” Sawyer said.

  I decided that was his way of saying thanks. “Are you still thinking of killing me?”

  He shook his head and laughed. “I don’t think so.”

  I’m telling you, Jess Ogilvy was the best teacher I’ve ever had. And she would have understood, better than anyone, why I had to do what I did.

  Oliver

  What happened last night was the single most remarkable experience of my sexual history, unless you count the time I was a sophomore in college and got a letter published in Penthouse—the difference being, of course, that that was fictional, whereas last night really happened.

  I’ve been thinking about it. (Okay, I’ve been thinking of nothing but it.) Once Emma and I had both admitted our biggest fears to each other, we were on equal footing. Vulnerability trumps age. When you’re emotionally bare, the leap to being physically bare isn’t all that far.

  I woke up this morning with her hair loose over my arm and her body warm against mine and I decided that I didn’t care if she had slept with me out of desperation or frustration or even distraction—I wasn’t going to let her go. I had charted every inch of her last night; I wanted to return to that territory until I knew it better than anyone ever had or ever would.

  Which meant I had to get her son acquitted, beca