The Difference Between You and Me Read online

  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.

  16

  Jesse

  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 defen
der 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.”

  “I hope so.” Arthur’s expression is shaded with worry.

  “I would. I swear to God I’m not doing drugs.”

  “All right. I believe you.”

  “It doesn’t matter what it is. Forget it. It’s nothing.”

  “I have my own theory about what’s been going on with you,” Arthur says. “If you don’t mind my sharing it.”

  Jesse shrugs: okay.

  “We talked about your mother’s illness a lot while it was happening. But we haven’t talked about it so much since she started to get better. One thing I’m wondering is if you’re still thinking about it now. I wonder if you’re realizing, now that she’s healing, just how close we came to losing her.”

  Jesse stays very still, keeps her voice perfectly calm, when she says, “No. I’m not thinking about that.”

  “Okay.” Arthur nods, and waits. He never expects Jesse to finish what she’s saying in only one sentence.

  “She’s too tough to die,” Jesse observes.

  Arthur smiles. “That’s funny, and she is very tough, but we both know that’s not really true. That’s the kind of thing we say to comfort ourselves when we’re feeling worried.”

  “I’m not feeling worried,” Jesse insists, sharper this time.

  “Okay. Well, I’ll speak for myself, then. I’ve noticed that lately I feel a lot of confusing things about Mom. Sometimes right in the middle of doing something unrelated to her, right in the middle of feeling perfectly fine, I’ll suddenly feel very angry or sad. Just out of nowhere, I get a big burst of sadness or anger. And I think to myself, Ah, this must be a little bit of those feelings that I had to put to the side when we were so focused on her treatment, coming back to haunt me now. You know what I’m talking about?”

  “Not really. No.” Jesse keeps her voice light and disengaged. “I told you, I’m not thinking about that at all. I have, like, real problems to deal with.”

  Arthur raises his eyebrows. “I see. Well, that’s fine. We don’t have to talk about this right now.”

  He gets up and goes to leave the room. When he’s almost at the door, Jesse calls after him. “I just don’t want to live in a cave, okay?”

  Arthur stops and turns to look at her.

  “What do you mean, ‘live in a cave’?”

  “I mean, I don’t want to live in the dark with, like, piles of junk and garbage everywhere. No matter what happens I just want you to always get dressed in the mornings. And sleep in your own bed.”

  Arthur considers his response, as always. “I don’t know exactly what you’re referring to,” he says carefully, “but I hear that you’re worried that something might happen that would cause me to neglect our daily routines. And you don’t want that.”

  “No I don’t!”

  “You want me to keep taking care of myself, and you, even if something happens to disrupt our life.”

  “Yes.”

  Arthur crosses the living room to sit down on the couch beside his daughter. Jesse pulls her legs up close to her chest to make room for him, and he puts his arm around her bent knees.

  “You know, I’ve had the funniest feeling lately, like I want to try to build something with my hands. You know how terrible I am with power tools, so nothing big, just something small for the yard. Like a birdhouse, maybe. I don’t see clients until four forty-five. You want to come with me to the hardware store and get some supplies? And then maybe we can work together on a little building project?”

  “Okay.” Jesse leans down and puts her cheek on her father’s arm. She feels him bend to kiss the back of her head.

  “Something tangible,” he says, into her too-long hair. “Something solid, that won’t go away.”

  ***

  Arthur holds the door to Murray and Sons Hardware open for Jesse, and it tinkles nostalgically as it falls closed behind them. The store is dark and smells like paint, tar, and chalk.

  “Somewhere in here I know they’ve got birdhouse kits,” Arthur says thoughtfully, more to himself than to Jesse. He disappears down the Plumbing and Electrics aisle, and Jesse wanders down Screws and Brackets, letting her fingertips dip into and get nipped by each box of sharp metal barbs.

  “Help you, dude?” Jesse turns and looks up into the baseball-cap-shaded face of Mike McDade. When he sees her he takes a step back and begins to stammer. “Oh, sorry, I mean, sorry, I just—”

  “It’s cool,” Jesse says automatically.

  “I just, I thought you were a guy from behind.” Mike is obviously flustered; he’s also obviously never heard of quitting while he’s ahead.<
br />
  “Yeah,” Jesse says. “I get it. It’s cool.”

  Mike nods. They stand there, waiting to see what will happen next. Jesse’s mind is racing. She thinks, I’ve kissed her a hundred times. You’ve never even heard of me. Her tongue was in my mouth only days ago. You don’t know anything about me. You get to kiss her today and tomorrow and probably for the rest of your life. I’ll never touch her again. You don’t even know my name.

  “Jesse, right?” Mike says experimentally, pointing a little finger gun at Jesse’s chest.

  Surprised, Jesse nods.

  “From Vander.”

  She nods again.

  “Are you, like, one of the ones doing the whole anti-StarMart thing?” Jesse’s mouth falls open in surprise. “I don’t know, maybe that’s not you, I don’t know.”

  Mike swallows hard. He’s more awkward than Jesse would have imagined, only having ever watched him operate from a distance. He always looked so relaxed and confident from afar. But he has a certain nerdiness to him, a certain hesitancy. It throws her off.

  “Yeah,” she says, “I am. I mean, I was.”

  “Oh, you quit?”

  “I didn’t—I sort of—no. No. I’m still doing it.” Jesse makes a mental note to call Esther tonight and pick up where they left off.

  “So it was you who put those flyers up?” Jesse nods. “Cool. Cool. I was just wondering, like, is there some way I could get involved in that?”