Free House Rules by Jodi Picoult

will taste like the wine, but if there‘s alcohol in it, you could have fooled me.
    Trailing crumbs, I walk into the living room. I haven‘t taken my sneakers off, so I‘m leaving behind a trail of melting snow, too. I pretend I‘m superhuman. I can see through walls; I can hear a pin drop. Nobody could ever take me by surprise.
    The living room is exactly what you‘d be expecting. Couches with crackly leather and stacks of paper everywhere, so many dusty books that even though I don‘t have asthma I feel it coming on.
    A woman and a man live here. I can tell because there are books on gardening and little glass bottles lined up on the mantel. I wonder if they sit in this room and talk about their kids, way back when. I bet they finish each other‘s sentences.
    Remember when Louis found a piece of felt on the driveway after Christmas …
    … 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