Judge Cuttings takes off his reading glasses. “Mr. Bond, I am going to release your client on certain conditions. First, his mother will have to post the family home as surety on bail. Second, I’m going to require that the defendant be on home electronic monitoring, that he not attend school, that he stay in the house at all times, and that either his mother or another adult over the age of twenty-five be with him at all times. He is not allowed to leave the state. He’ll have to sign a waiver of extradition, and he is required to see Dr. Murano and follow all her directives, including taking medication. Finally, he will comply with the competency evaluation when it is scheduled, and you will get in touch with the prosecutor to determine when and where that might take place. The prosecution does not need to file a motion; I am going to set this case down for review on the day the competency evaluation comes back.”

Helen packs herself up. “Enjoy your reprieve,” she tells me. “This one’s a slam dunk for my side.”

“Only because you’re a giant,” I mutter.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said you haven’t met my client.”

She narrows her eyes and stalks out of the courtroom.

Behind me, Emma is locked in an embrace with Moon Murano. She looks up at me. “Thank you so much,” she says, her voice breaking like waves over the syllables.

I shrug, as if I do this all the time. In reality, I’ve sweated through my dress shirt. “Anytime,” I reply.

I lead Emma to the clerk’s office to fill out paperwork and pick up the sheets that Jacob has to sign. “I’ll meet you in the lobby,” I say.

Although Jacob was not in court, he had to be here while we deliberated on his behalf. And now, he needs to sign the conditions of his release and the waiver of extradition.

I haven’t seen him yet. In all honesty, I’m a little scared to do so. The testimony from his mother, and from Moon Murano, made him out to be a vegetable.

When I approach the holding cell, he’s lying on the floor, knees curled to his chest. On his head, he’s sporting a bandage. The skin around his eyes is black and blue, and his hair is matted.

Christ, if I’d had him in the courtroom, he would have gotten out of jail in ten seconds flat. “Jacob,” I say quietly. “Jacob, it’s me, Oliver. Your lawyer.”

He doesn’t move. His eyes are wide open, but they don’t flicker as I come closer. I motion for the deputy to open the door of the cell and squat down beside him. “I have some papers I need you to sign,” I tell him.

He whispers something, and I lean in.

“One?” I repeat. “Actually, it’s several. But hey, you don’t have to go back to jail, buddy. That’s the good news.”

For now, anyway.

Jacob wheezes. It sounds like one, two, three, five.

“You’re counting. You’re down for the count?” I stare at him. This is like playing charades with someone who has no arms and no legs.

“Ate,” Jacob says, loud and clear.

He’s hungry. Or was hungry?

“Jacob.” My voice is firmer. “Come on already.” I start to reach for him but see his whole body tense an inch before my hand makes contact.

So I back off. I sit down on the floor beside him.

“One,” I say.

His eyelids blink once.

“Two.”

He blinks three times.

That’s when I realize that we’re having a conversation. We’re just not using words.

One, one, two, three. Why five, and not four?

I take my pen out of my pocket and write the numbers on my hand until I see the pattern. It’s not ate, it’s eight. “Eleven,” I say, staring at Jacob. “Nineteen.”

He rolls over. “Sign these,” I say, “and I will take you to your mother.” I push the papers toward him on the floor. I roll the pen in his direction.

At first Jacob doesn’t move.

And then, very slowly, he does.

Once Theo asked me if there was an antidote for Asperger’s, would I take it?

I told him no.

I am not sure how much of me is wrapped up in the part that’s Asperger’s. What if I lost some of my intelligence, for example, or my sarcasm? What if I could be afraid of ghosts on Halloween instead of the color of the pumpkins? The problem is that I do not remember who I was without Asperger’s, so who knows what would remain? I liken it to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that you peel apart. You can’t really get rid of the peanut butter without taking some of the jelly as well, can you?

I can see my mother. It’s like the sun when you’re underwater, and brave enough to open your eyes. She’s unfocused and slightly runny and too bright to see clearly. I am that far below the surface.

I have a sore throat from screaming so loud; I have bruises that reach to the bone. The few times I fell asleep, I woke up crying. All I wanted was someone who understood what I had done, and why. Someone who gave a damn as much as I did.

When they gave me that injection at the jail, I dreamed that my heart had been cut out of my chest. The doctors and the correctional officers passed it around in a game of Hot Potato and then tried to sew it back into place, but it only made me look like the Frankenstein monster. See, they all exclaimed, you can’t even tell, and since that was a lie, I could trust nothing they said anymore.

I would not take the jelly without the peanut butter, but sometimes, I wonder why I could not have been lunch meat, which everyone prefers.

There used to be a theory that autistic brains didn’t work right because of the gaps between the neurons, the lack of connectivity. Now there’s a new theory that autistic brains work too well, that there is so much going on in my head at once I have to work overtime to filter it out, and sometimes the ordinary world becomes the baby tossed out with the bathwater.

Oliver-who says he is my lawyer-spoke to me in the language of nature. That’s all I’ve ever wanted: to be as organic as the whorl of seeds in a sunflower or the spiral of a shell. When you have to try so hard to be normal, that means you’re not.

My mother walks forward. She’s crying, but there’s a smile on her face. For God’s sake, is it any wonder I can’t ever understand what you people are feeling?

Usually, when I go where I go, it’s a room with no doors and no windows. But in jail, that was the world, and so I had to go somewhere else. It was a metal capsule, sunk to the bottom of the sea. If anyone tried to come for me, with a knife or a chisel or a crust of hope, the ocean would sense the change and the metal would implode.

The problem was the same rules applied to me, trying to get out.

My mother is five steps away. Four. Three.

When I was very small, I watched a Christian television program on a Sunday morning geared to kids. It was about a special-needs boy playing hide-and-seek with some other children in a junkyard. The other kids forgot about him, and a day later, the police found him suffocated in an old refrigerator. I did not get a religious message out of that, like the Golden Rule or eternal salvation. I got: Do not hide in old refrigerators.

This time, when I went where I went, I thought I’d gone too far. There was no more pain and nothing mattered, sure. But no one would find me, and they’d eventually stop looking.

Now, though, my head is starting to hurt again, and my shoulders ache. I can smell my mother: vanilla and freesia and the shampoo she uses that comes in a green bottle. I can feel the heat of her, like asphalt in the summer, the minute before she wraps her arms around me. “Jacob,” she says. My name rises on the roller coaster of a sob. My knees give with relief, with the knowledge that I have not faded away after all.