“All rise,” the bailiff says, and when I stand up, I grab Jacob’s sleeve so he will, too.

Judge Cuttings enters and sits down heavily in his chair, his robes billowing around him like a storm. “I trust you’ve talked to your client about his behavior in the courtroom, Counselor?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” I answer. “I’m sorry about the outburst. Jacob’s autistic.”

The judge frowns. “Are you concerned about competency?”

“Yes,” I reply.

“All right. Mr. Bond, your client is here to be arraigned on a charge of first-degree murder pursuant to 13 VSA, section 2301. Do you waive the reading of the rights on his behalf at this time?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

He nods. “I’m going to enter a not guilty plea on his behalf, because of the competency issue.”

For a moment, I hesitate. If the judge enters the plea, does that mean I don’t have to?

“Are there any other issues with the charge as it stands today, Counselor?”

“I don’t think so, Your Honor…”

“Excellent. This is bound over for a competency hearing fourteen days from today at nine A.M. I’ll see you then, Mr. Bond.”

The larger bailiff approaches the defense table and hauls Jacob to his feet. He lets loose a squeak, and then, remembering the rules of the courtroom, squelches it. “Hang on a minute,” I interrupt. “Judge, didn’t you just say we could go?”

“I said you could go, Counselor. Your client, on the other hand, is charged with murder and being held pending his competency hearing at your own request.”

As he leaves the bench to return to chambers, as Jacob is pulled out of the courtroom again-silent, this time-headed to a two-week stay in jail, I gather the courage to turn around and confess to Emma Hunt that I’ve just done everything I told her I wouldn’t.

My mother doesn’t cry very often. The first time, like I said, was at the library when I had a tantrum instead of Jacob. The second time was when I was ten years old and Jacob was thirteen and he had homework for his life skills class-an extracurricular he hated because he was one of only two autistic kids, and the other boy didn’t have AS but was lower on the spectrum and spent most of the class lining up crayons end to end. The other three kids in the class had Down syndrome or developmental disabilities. Because of this, a lot of time was spent on things like hygiene-stuff Jacob already knew how to do-with a little bit of social skills tossed in. And one day, his teacher assigned the class to make a friend before the next time they all met.

“You don’t make a friend,” Jacob said with a scowl. “It’s not like they come with directions like you’d find on a box of macaroni and cheese.”

“All you have to do is remember the steps that Mrs. LaFoye gave you,” my mother said. “Look someone in the eye, tell them your name, ask them if they’d like to play.”

Even at ten, I knew that this protocol would surely lead to getting your ass kicked, but I wasn’t going to tell Jacob that.

So the three of us trekked to the local playground, and I sat down next to my mother on a bench while Jacob set out to make a friend. The problem was, there was no one his age there. The oldest kid I could see was about my age, and he was hanging upside down from the monkey bars. Jacob walked up to him and twisted sideways so that he could look the kid in the eye. “My name is Jacob,” he said in his voice, which I’m used to but which is weird to everyone else-flat as a sheet of aluminum, even in places where there should be exclamation points. “Do you want to play?”

The kid did a neat flip onto the ground. “Are you, like, some kind of retard?”

Jacob considered this. “No.”

“News flash,” the boy said. “You are.”

The kid ran off, leaving Jacob standing alone under the monkey bars. I almost got up to rescue him, but then he started to turn in a slow circle. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing, and then I realized he liked the sound his sneaker made when it crunched a dry leaf underneath the sole.

He walked on his tiptoes, very precisely crushing the leaves, until he reached the sandbox. A pair of tiny kids-one blond and one with red pigtails-were busy making pizzas out of sand. “Here’s another one,” the first girl said, and she slapped a glob of sand onto the wooden railing so that the other girl could decorate it with pepperoni rocks and mozzarella grass.

“Hi, I’m Jacob,” my brother said.

“I’m Annika, and I’m going to be a unicorn when I grow up,” the blonde said.

Pigtails didn’t look up from the pizza assembly line. “My little brother threw up in the bathroom and slipped in it and landed on his butt.”

“Do you want to play?” Jacob asked. “We could dig for dinosaurs.”

“There aren’t any dinosaurs in the sandbox, just pizza,” Annika said. “Maggie’s the one who gets to put on the cheese and stuff, but you can be the waiter.”

Jacob looked like a giant in the sandbox beside those two girls. A woman was staring daggers at him, and I would have bet fifty bucks it was either Annika’s or Maggie’s mom, wondering if the thirteen-year-old playing with her precious little daughter was a perv. Jacob picked up a stick and began to outline a skeleton in the sand. “The allosaurus had a wishbone, like other meat-eating dinosaurs,” he said. “Just like you’d find on a chicken.”

“Here’s another one,” Annika said, and she dumped a pile of sand in front of Maggie. You could practically draw a line between the little girls and Jacob. They weren’t playing together as much as they were playing next to each other.

Jacob looked up at that moment and grinned at me. He tipped his head toward the girls as if to say, Hey, check it out, I made two friends.

I glanced at my mother, and that’s when I saw her crying. Tears were rolling down her cheeks and she wasn’t doing anything to try to wipe them away. It was almost as if she didn’t know it was happening.

There were plenty of other times in my life that it would have made more sense for my mother to cry: when she had to go to the school to talk to the principal about something Jacob had done to get himself into trouble, for example. Or when he had one of his tantrums in the middle of a crowded space-like last year, in front of the Santa Claus pavilion at the mall while a bazillion kids and parents watched the nuclear meltdown ensue. But then, my mother had been dry-eyed, her face wiped clean of expression. In fact, during those moments, my mother looked a little like Jacob did.

I don’t know why seeing my brother with two little girls in a sandbox was a straw that broke the so-called camel’s back, for her. I just know that, at that moment, I remember feeling like the world had turned itself inside out. It’s the child who’s supposed to cry, and the mom who makes it all better, not the other way around, which is why mothers will move heaven and earth to hold it together in front of their own kids.

Even then I knew that if Jacob was the one who made her cry, I was the one who had to stop it.

Of course I know where they are; my mother has called me from the courthouse. But that doesn’t keep me from being unable to concentrate on Civitas or Geo until they come home.

I wonder if my teachers will accept that as an excuse: Sorry I didn’t get my homework done: my brother was being arraigned.

Sure, my geometry teacher will say. Like I haven’t heard that one a thousand times.

The minute I hear the door open, I run into the mudroom to find out what happened. My mother walks in, alone, and sits down on the bench where we usually dump our school backpacks.

“Where’s Jacob?” I ask, and very slowly she looks up at me.

“In jail,” she whispers. “Oh, my God, he’s in jail.” She bends at the waist until she is doubled over.