House Rules Read Online Free PDF Page B

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