The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  CASE IN POINT 3

  Me: My mom went out to the bank and said she was going to be back in fifteen minutes and when it got to seventeen minutes, I started to panic. And then when I called her, she didn’t pick up on her cell, and I was sure she was lying dead in a ditch somewhere.

  Dr. Moon: On a scale of one to ten, how did that make you feel?

  Me: A nine.

  (Note: It was really a ten, but that’s an even number, and saying it out loud would make my anxiety level blow off the chart.)

  Dr. Moon: Can you think of a solution that might have worked better than calling 911?

  Me (doing my best Cher from Moonstruck impression): Snap out of it!

  I rate my days, too, although I haven’t told this to Dr. Moon yet. High numbers are good days; low numbers are bad days. And today is a one, between my fight with Theo and then the absence of the Free Sample Lady at the grocery store. (In my defense, I have worked out an algorithm to predict what she’s going to serve, and maybe I wouldn’t have been upset if it was the first Saturday of the month, when she hands out vegetarian items. But today was a dessert day, for God’s sake.) I have been in my room since we got home. I bury myself under my covers, and put a weighted blanket on top of that. I cue “I Shot the Sheriff” on my iPod on repeat and listen to that one song until 4:30, when it is time to watch CrimeBusters and I have to go into the living room, where the TV is.

  The episode is number 82, one of my top five ever. It involves a case where one of the CSI investigators, Rhianna, doesn’t show up for work. It turns out she is taken hostage by a man racked with grief over his wife’s recent death. Rhianna leaves behind clues for the rest of the team to solve, to lead them to where she is being kept.

  Naturally, I figure out the conclusion long before the rest of the CSI team does.

  The reason I like the episode so much is that they actually got something wrong. Rhianna gets dragged to a diner by her kidnapper and leaves a coupon for her favorite clothing store underneath her finished plate. Her colleagues find it, and need to prove it’s actually hers. They process it for prints, using a small-particle reagent followed by ninhydrin, when in reality, you’re supposed to use ninhydrin first. It reacts to the amino acid and then is followed by the small-particle reagent, which reacts with fats. If you used the small-particle reagent first, like they did in the episode, it would ruin the porous surface for the ninhydrin procedure. When I spotted the error, I wrote to the producers of CrimeBusters. They sent me back a letter and an officially licensed T-shirt. The T-shirt doesn’t fit me anymore, but I still keep it in my drawer.

  After watching the episode, my day definitely improves from a one to a three.

  “Hey,” my mother says, poking her head into the living room. “How are you doing?”

  “Okay,” I reply.

  She sits down beside me on the couch. Our legs are touching. She is the only person I can stand having close to me. If it were anyone else, I would have moved away a few inches by now. “So, Jacob,” she says, “I just want to point out that you did in fact survive the day without the free food sample.”

  It’s times like this I am glad I don’t look people in the eye. If I did, surely they would die on the spot from the contempt shooting out of mine. Of course I survived. But at what cost?

  “Teachable moment,” my mother explains, and she pats my hand. “I’m just saying.”

  “Frankly my dear,” I murmur, “I don’t give a damn.”

  My mother sighs. “Dinner at six, Rhett,” she says, even though it’s always at six, and even though my name is Jacob.

  At different times, the media have posthumously diagnosed certain famous people with Asperger’s. Here is just a sampling:

  1. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

  2. Albert Einstein

  3. Andy Warhol

  4. Jane Austen

  5. Thomas Jefferson

  I am 99 percent sure not a single one of them had a meltdown in a grocery store and wound up breaking a whole shelf of relish and pickle jars.

  Dinner proves to be a painful affair. My mother seems driven to start a conversation, although neither Theo nor I is inclined to hold up the other end of it. She has just gotten another packet of letters from the Burlington Free Press, and sometimes she reads them out loud at dinner and we make up politically incorrect responses that my mother would never in a million years write in her advice column.

  CASE IN POINT 4

  Dear Auntie Em,

  My mother-in-law insists on cooking roast beef every time my husband and I come to visit, even though she knows that I am a lifelong vegetarian. What should I do next time it happens?

  Steamed in South Royalton

  Dear Steamed,

  Turnip your nose at her and walk away.

  Sometimes the questions she gets are really sad, like the woman whose husband had left her and who didn’t know how to tell her kids. Or the mom dying of breast cancer who wrote a letter for her baby daughter to read when she grew up, about how she wished she could have been there for her daughter’s high school graduation, her engagement, her first child. Mostly, though, the questions come from a bunch of idiots who made bad choices. How do I get my husband back, now that I realize I shouldn’t have cheated on him? Try being faithful, lady. What’s the best way to win back a friend you’ve hurt with a nasty remark? Don’t say it in the first place. I swear, sometimes I can’t believe my mother gets paid to state the obvious.

  Tonight she holds up a note from a teenage girl. I can tell, because the ink of the pen is purple and because the i in Auntie Em has a heart over it where the dot should be. “Dear Auntie Em,” she reads, and just like always, I picture a little old lady wearing a bun and sensible shoes, not my own mother. “I like a guy who already has a girlfriend. I know he likes me cuz—God, don’t they teach you how to spell these days?”

  “No,” I answer. “They teach us to use spell-check.”

  Theo looks up from his plate long enough to grunt in the direction of the grape juice.

  “I know he likes me because,” my mother edits, “he walks me home from school and we talk for hours on the phone and yesterday I couldn’t take it anymore and I kissed him and he kissed me back . . . Oh, please, someone get this girl a comma.” Then she frowns at the loose-leaf paper. “He says we can’t go out but we can be friends with benefits. Do you think I should say yes? Sincerely, Burlington Buddy.” My mother glances at me. “Don’t all friends have benefits?”

  I stare at her blankly.

  “Theo?” she asks.

  “It’s a saying,” he mutters.

  “A saying that means what, exactly?”

  Theo’s face turns bright red. “Just Google it.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “It’s when a guy and a girl who aren’t going out hook up, all right?”

  My mother considers this. “You mean like . . . have sex?”

  “Among other things . . .”

  “And then what happens?”

  “I don’t know!” Theo says. “They go back to ignoring each other, I guess.”

  My mother’s jaw drops. “That is the most demeaning thing I’ve ever heard. This poor girl shouldn’t just tell that guy to go jump in a lake, she ought to slash all four of his car tires, and—” Suddenly she pins her gaze on Theo. “You haven’t treated a girl like that, have you?”

  Theo rolls his eyes. “Can’t you be like other mothers and just ask me if I’m smoking weed?”

  “Are you smoking weed?” she says.

  “No!”

  “Do you have friends with benefits?”

  Theo pushes back from the table and stands up in one smooth move. “Yeah. I have thousands. They line up outside the front door, or haven’t you noticed them lately?” He dumps his plate in the sink and runs upstairs.

  My mother reaches for a pen she’s tucked into her ponytail (she always wears a ponytail, because she knows how I feel about loose hair swishing around her shoulders) and begins to scrawl a