The Difference Between You and Me (19 page)

The first night Joan slept in her new armor, it was so heavy and she was so small that she woke up covered in bruises. She looked her body over, splashed her face with water, got up on her horse, and rode toward battle.

When someone in your family gets sick, really sick, you spend a ton of time waiting, doing nothing. It starts to be your main family activity. You’re always waiting in some salmon-colored vinyl chair under a fluorescent light, waiting in a line to fill out an intake form, waiting for your name to be called, waiting in the kitchen for your parents to get home, waiting a week for the results to come in. People are always telling you, “We’re waiting for this screen to come back,” or “We have to wait to schedule the next treatment until your levels go up.” Meanwhile, all the time, the clock is ticking.

My mom was the patient. I was impatient. I wanted someone—anyone—to do something big.

In principle, I don’t believe in war or violence in any
form. In that way, I’m not like Joan—I hardly ever get that kind of hot, bursting feeling in your chest that makes you want to grab a weapon and charge. But when my mother was being held prisoner in that hospital, at the end, and they were doing all those things to her that seemed like pure torture, I did fantasize all the time about blasting open the doors of the receiving area with a blowtorch, and marching down the halls with a machine gun and chains of ammunition strapped across my chest, picking her up out of that hospital bed, and carrying her out in my arms, through the automatic doors into the parking lot. Swinging her up over the back of my horse and riding off with her. Knocking down anyone who got in my way. It was pretty much the only time in my life when I ever wanted to commit a violent act. So I do know that I’m capable of it.

But I never did it, of course. Dr. Moench said, “We have to wait for six months after surgery before we consider a more aggressive course of treatment.” And we all said, “Okay.” Dr. Ratner said, “As soon as the histology report comes in, we’ll know better what our options are.” And we all said, “Okay.” We weren’t bold. We weren’t demanding. We didn’t want to risk making a mistake, and losing everything.

This is the second thing about Joan that makes her different from other saints. Because she got her instructions directly from saints and angels, and because she liked to do big things, she made, like, a ton of mistakes. Most girl
saints don’t make big mistakes because they don’t have the chance to. They’re, like, walled up in their cell or hanging out alone in their leper colony or whatever, not really bothering anybody. Joan made big mistakes, and in the end they had big, terrible consequences.

Not at first—at first she was a natural-born genius of war. She defied the wisdom of the older male generals and led her army straight into besieged Orléans, even though no army units had been able to liberate that city for over a year. When the generals were like, “You must wait,” Joan didn’t sit back in her salmon-covered vinyl chair and say, “Okay.” She was like, “No more waiting. Now.” Through a few brilliant, insanely bold moves, she beat back the English and Orléans was freed. Nobody could believe it. It was a miracle.

And for a while she rode the miracle. She won battle after battle, against all odds, and the hungry, hopeful peasants of France called her invincible. But eventually, she overreached. The numbers in her army dwindled, and she worked her men—and herself—so hard that they found themselves in over their heads. At Compiègne, Joan was captured mid-battle, and taken prisoner by the English.

When I was little, the one picture in my Joan book that I couldn’t bear to look at showed Joan in the middle of her last battle, when she got shot in the shoulder and dragged down off her horse’s back by the enemy. In this picture, her horse is writhing in pain, his lips and nostrils flaring, his
eyes huge. His front legs are up and he’s halfway through throwing Joan off his back. Joan’s eyes are closed, her hand moving up toward where the arrow has embedded itself in her shoulder, and she’s come a few inches up off her saddle. She’s about to topple into the mud but she hasn’t yet. Her blue standard is on its way down to the ground but hasn’t yet hit. Joan is suspended, floating between glory and defeat.

I used to pinch those pages closed when I read the book to keep from having to see Joan fail. But now I love that picture. I love it so much. I love how Joan kept going right up to the end. It reminds me that sometimes defeat is the price of taking action. If you
do
something, you become a target. People want to take you down. That’s a risk. But it’s better to do too much, better to try too hard, better to have a crisis of faith and get thrown and climb back up on your horse and keep riding, than to see something wrong in the world and not do anything at all.

Anyway, if you need your heroes to be perfect, you won’t have very many. Even Superman had his kryptonite. I’d rather have my heroes be more like me: Trying to do the right thing, sometimes messing up. Making mistakes. Saying they’re sorry. And forgiving other people when they mess up, too.

Jesse lies on the living room couch with the morning sunlight stalled over her, warming her afghan-covered legs. She’s in her navy-blue cutoff sweatpants and white men’s undershirt, and she has the props of illness arranged around her: TV on mute tuned to the Home Shopping Network (a woman’s hands silently stroking a trio of fake diamond bracelets), Tylenol, and flat ginger ale with a bendy straw in it on the end table by her head. She managed to convince Arthur, if not Fran, that she was too unwell for school this morning, but she doesn’t have a fever. Only her heart is sick.

Her parents are huddled outside the living room door right now, arguing in low, urgent voices. Since yesterday, when Jesse broke down sobbing during the confrontation that followed Snediker’s phone call, both Fran and Arthur have given Jesse a wide berth. Her crying was so sudden, so unlike her, and so unstoppable that her parents uncharacteristically
let Jesse retreat to her room before dinner without making her talk it all through.

Now that a night has passed, though, they’re fighting about how to deal with her.

“Don’t let her pathologize this,” Jesse hears Fran hiss to Arthur on the other side of the wall. “Whatever’s going on, it is not a physical illness!”

Arthur says something so rumbly and quiet that Jesse can’t make it out.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Fran responds. “Once was cute, twice is a chronic behavior problem.”

On the table by the Tylenol, Jesse’s phone buzzes, and she reaches over her head to pick it up and see who’s calling. It’s Esther, for the third time already today—she must be trying Jesse between every class. Jesse’s voice-mail box is crowded with unheard messages from Esther, all left since Friday evening. Zero messages from Emily, obviously. Zero messages from Wyatt, whom Jesse hasn’t spoken to since he walked away from her and Esther last Wednesday—the longest they’ve gone without talking in years. Eleven messages from Esther, who apparently can’t take a hint.

“I’m going in there,” Jesse hears Fran say. Jesse quickly dismisses the call, drops the phone back onto the table, and falls back listlessly against the couch cushions.

“Kid,” Fran says, rounding the doorjamb, “we have to talk.”

“How are you feeling?” Arthur asks, following his wife into the room.

They stand there facing Jesse, side by side. On his forest-green sweater vest, Arthur has pinned his button from the Integrated Person Institute that reads “IT’S EASIER TO BUILD STRONG CHILDREN THAN TO REPAIR BROKEN MEN.”—FREDERICK DOUGLASS. He considers Jesse with concern, stroking his beard. Fran stands with her feet spread shoulder-width apart and her arms folded tightly over her chest: lawyer-warrior stance. She’s wearing the faded red baseball cap that became part of her daily uniform during her treatment, the one embroidered with the slogan NO SNIVELING.

Jesse closes her eyes. “I feel horrible.”

“No doubt you do,” Fran says. “It feels horrible when you flush your whole life down the toilet.”

“Provoking,” Arthur admonishes her quietly.

Fran ignores him. “You’re upset about something, fine, that’s understandable, but just because you have a reason for doing something doesn’t make it justified. Everyone who commits a crime has a motive. The point is, what are the consequences of your actions?”

“Escalating,” Arthur intones.

“Shrinkydink!” Fran practically shouts at her husband. “How many calls, Arthur? How many humiliating phone calls from Janet
Snediker
, of all people, do I have to field before we get a handle on this? The day that
woman resigned from the No Nukes Task Force was the best day of my entire
life
, and now I have to be on the phone with her on a weekly basis, defending my daughter against the charge of deviant behavior?” She turns back to Jesse. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

“Please stop interrogating me,” Jesse moans.

“Oh, this is interrogating you? Asking you legitimate questions while you lie back comfortably on your fainting couch, this is
interrogating
you?”

“Everybody’s interrogating me all the time! Snediker interrogated me and now you’re interrogating me—I can’t get the Man off my back no matter where I go!”

It’s a phrase Jesse has heard Fran use before, in a different time, in a different context. From across the room, she feels it trigger something volcanic inside her mother.

“Oh no. Oh
no
, no, no.” Arthur reaches for Fran’s arm, but she steps away from him and starts to pace now, working up a head of closing-argument steam. “Excuse me, no. I am not the Man. I did not march on Washington and get teargassed at Yankee Rowe nuclear plant and get screamed at doing clinic defense and get dysentery organizing sugar-cane workers in Nicaragua and spend ten years of my life working for peanuts as a public defender so I could stand in my own living room and have some fourteen-year-old kid call me the Man!”

“I’m fifteen, Mother,” Jesse interjects.

“Sorry, honey, some
fifteen
-year-old kid call me the
Man. You don’t know the Man, okay? You’ve never met the Man. The Man doesn’t even live in this town! You have no idea how easy you have it, my fifteen-year-old friend, and before you get yourself thrown into juvie—which is by the way
owned
by the Man—I’m gonna need to start hearing some convincing explanations about what’s behind this little misbehavior campaign of yours.”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it!” Jesse grabs the round, crocheted throw pillow from under her head and clamps it down over her face.

“Well, too bad. You had your twenty-four-hour reprieve. You convinced your father to let you stay home from school. Now you’re gonna talk.”

“Leave me alone!” Jesse shouts, muffled. “I’m sick!”

At this Fran chortles. “You are not
sick
. Believe me, I know sick, and this is not sick.”

“I might not have
cancer
,” Jesse snaps from under the pillow, “but I’m still
sick
.”

A fine, high-pitched silence takes over the room. Jesse hears her mother exhale dangerously. Then she hears her father say, low and soothing, “Hey. Take some space. Go to the gym or something. Let me handle this.”

When Jesse drags the pillow down her face a couple inches to peer over its edge, her mother is gone, and her father is sitting in the armchair opposite the couch, his elbows propped on his knees, looking at her.

“Is she mad?” Jesse asks.

Arthur smiles a little. “I believe she is.”

“I shouldn’t have said the cancer thing.”

Arthur nods, but he doesn’t absolve her. He just waits.

They sit there together, not talking, for a while. Across the room on the silent TV, a man’s hand buffs a car door with a poufy white cloth. After a minute, Jesse’s racing heart subsides.

“You know… ?” she begins tentatively. Her father nods, listening. “You know how sometimes… you really wish that someone would just… be themselves? And then they
are
themselves, and it’s, like, so disappointing?”

Arthur nods thoughtfully. “Say more.”

“I don’t know.” Jesse feels tears sting the corners of her eyes and fights to suck them back in. She doesn’t make eye contact with her father, looks down at her lap. “I’ve been doing, like, this really bad thing. I hated doing it, but I kept doing it because I also loved it. I still sort of love it, and I still sort of wish I could keep doing it, but I can’t. And also I hate that I did it. I don’t know.”

“You have conflicted feelings about something,” Arthur offers.

Jesse nods. “I guess.”

Arthur leans forward a little in his chair. “It’s not drug use, is it, honey? I need you to tell me if this is drug use you’re talking about.”

At this Jesse cracks up a little, ruefully. “No,” she says. “No.” But then she thinks about it a second, about how Emily
took her over physically whenever they were together, filled her with desperate craving when they were apart, made her forget her principles and sell out her friends. And gave her the most intense high she’s ever experienced. In some ways, yeah, Emily Miller is a drug. And Jesse just went off her, cold turkey. No wonder she feels so hung over. “Don’t worry, Dad, okay? I would totally tell you if I was doing drugs.”