The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  . . . and he took it to show-and-tell as proof of Santa Claus?

  I sit down on the couch. The television remote is on the coffee table, so I pick it up. I put my sandwich down beside me on the couch and turn on the entertainment system, which is much nicer than you’d think for ol’ Grandpa and Grandma. They have shelves of CDs, with every kind of music you can imagine. And a state-of-the-art, flat-screen HDTV.

  They have TiVo, too. I punch buttons until I reach the screen to show what they’ve recorded.

  Antiques Roadshow.

  The Three Tenors on Vermont Public TV.

  And, like, everything on the History Channel.

  They’ve also taped a hockey game on NESN and a movie that aired last weekend—Mission Impossible III.

  I double-click that one—because it’s hard to believe Mr. and Mrs. Professor watching Tom Cruise kick ass, but sure enough, there it is.

  So I decide to let them have that one. The rest, I delete.

  Then I start adding programs to tape.

  The Girls Next Door

  My Super Sweet 16

  South Park

  And for good measure, I go to HBO and add a dollop of Borat.

  When that movie came out, it was playing at the same theater as Pirates of the Caribbean 3. I wanted to see Borat, but my mother said I had to wait a decade or so. She bought us tickets to Pirates and said she would meet us in the parking lot after the film, because she had to go grocery shopping. I knew that Jacob would never have suggested it, so I told him that I wanted to let him in on a secret—but he had to promise not to tell Mom. He was so psyched about the secret he didn’t even care that we were breaking the rules, and when I sneaked into the other theater after the opening credits, he came along. And in a way, I guess he did keep his promise—he never actually told my mother that we’d gone to see Borat.

  She figured it out when he started quoting lines from the film, like he always does. Very nice, very nice, how much? I like to make sexy time!

  I think I was grounded for three months.

  I have a fleeting vision of Mrs. Professor turning on her TiVoed programs and seeing the Playboy bunnies and having a heart attack. Of her husband having a stroke when he finds her.

  Immediately, I feel like shit.

  I erase all the programming and put back in the original shows. This is it. This is the last time I’m breaking in somewhere, I tell myself, even though there’s another part of me that knows this won’t be true. I’m an addict, but instead of the rush some people get from shooting up or snorting, I need a fix that feels like home.

  I pick up the telephone, intending to call my mother and ask her to come pick me up, but then on second thought I put down the receiver. I don’t want there to be any trace of me. I want it to feel like I was never here.

  So I leave the house cleaner than it was when I first entered. And then I start walking home. It’s eight miles, but I can try to hitch once I reach the state highway.

  After all, Leon’s got the kind of parents who wouldn’t mind dropping me off.

  Oliver

  I’m feeling pretty good, because this Friday, I won my case against the pig.

  Okay, so technically, the pig was not the one who filed the lawsuit. That honor belongs to Buff (short for Buffalo, and I swear I am not making this up) Wings, a three-hundred-pound motorcyclist who was riding his vintage Harley down a road in Shelburne when a gigantic rogue pig wandered off the side of the road and directly into his path. As a result of the accident, Mr. Wings lost an eye—something he showed the jury at one point, by lifting up his black satin patch, which of course I objected to.

  Anyway, when Wings got out of the hospital, he sued the owner of the land from which the pig wandered. But it turned out to be more complicated than that. Elmer Hodgekiss, the owner of the pig, was only renting the property from a landlord who lived down in Brattleboro—an eighty-year-old lady named Selma Frack. In Elmer’s lease was a direct clause that said no pets, no animals. But Elmer defended his forbidden pig keeping (and his equally subversive chicken keeping for that matter) on the grounds that Selma was in a nursing home and never visited the property and what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

  I was representing Selma Frack. Her caretaker at the Green Willow Assisted Living Facility told me that Selma picked me out of the phone book because of my Yellow Pages ad:

  Oliver O. Bond, Esquire, it read, with a graphic that looked like 007’s gun—except it was OOB, my initials. When you need an attorney who won’t be shaken OR stirred.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I came up with that myself.”

  The caretaker just stared at me blankly. “She liked the fact that she could read the font. Most of them lawyers, their print is too tiny.”

  In spite of the fact that Buff Wings wanted Selma’s insurance to cover his medical bills, I had two strikes in my favor.

  1. Buff Wings’s convoluted argument was that Selma should be held responsible even though she (a) didn’t know about the pig, (b) had expressly banned the pig, and (c) had evicted Elmer Hodgekiss as soon as she learned that he had loosed his killer pig on the general populace.

  2. Buff Wings had chosen to represent himself.

  I had trotted out experts to refute Wings’s claims about damages—both emotional and physical. For example, did you know that there is a guy from Ohio who actually is an expert on driving with one eye? And that in almost all states you can continue to drive—even a motorcycle—as long as your other eye has 20/20 vision? And that in certain circumstances, the term blind spot can be politically incorrect?

  After the judge had ruled in our favor, I followed Selma and her caretaker to the elevator at the courthouse. “Well,” the caretaker said, “all’s well that ends well.”

  I glanced down at Selma, who’d been asleep for most of the proceedings. “It’s all fun and games till somebody loses an eye,” I replied. “Please extend my congratulations to Mrs. Frack on her victory in court.”

  Then I ran down the stairs to the parking lot, punching my fist in the air.

  I have a hundred percent success rate in my litigation.

  So what if I’ve only had one case?

  * * *

  Contrary to popular belief, the ink is not still drying on my bar certificate.

  That’s pizza sauce.

  But it was an honest accident. I mean, since my office is above the town pizza joint, and Mama Spatakopoulous routinely blocks my ascension on the staircase to thrust a plate of spaghetti or a mushroom-and-onion pie into my hands, it would be downright rude to turn her down. Coupled with that is the fact that I can’t really afford to eat, and turning away free food would be stupid. Granted, it was dumb of me to grab a makeshift napkin from a stack of papers on my desk, but the odds of it being my bar certificate (as opposed to my recent Chinese takeout order) had been pretty slim.

  If any new clients ask to see my bar certificate, I’m just going to tell them it’s being framed.

  Sure enough, as I am headed back inside, Mama S. meets me with a calzone. “You gotta wear a hat, Oliver.”

  My hair is still dripping wet from my shower at the high school locker room. Ice has started to form. “You’ll take care of me when I have pneumonia, won’t you?” I tease.

  She laughs and pushes the box at me. As I jog up the stairs, Thor starts barking his head off. I open the door just a crack, so that he doesn’t come flying out. “Relax,” I say. “I was only gone for fifteen minutes.”

  He launches all twelve pounds of himself at me.

  Thor’s a miniature poodle. He doesn’t like to be called a poodle within hearing distance—he’ll growl, and can you blame him? What guy dog wants to be a poodle? They should only come in female denominations, if you ask me.

  I do the best I can for him. I gave him the name of a mighty warrior. I let his hair grow out, but instead of making him look less effeminate, it only makes him look more like a mop head.

  I pick him up and tuck him into my arm like a