The Difference Between You and Me(16)
“I used to go to this school, you know,” Huckle says. “Not a very long time ago. A while ago. Kind of a really long time ago.”
“Yeah? Did you like it?”
“I loved it, man, I have to confess. But things are totally different now. You have Snediker? Snediker send you here?”
“Of course.”
“That is one sad, sad lady. That lady is compromised, man. She used to be the world’s raddest social studies teacher, back in the olden days. She had us do, like, role-playing games? And watch movies about, like, Che Guevara? And then something happened to her, man, I don’t know. She changed. And now the whole school is different since they put her in charge.”
“Don’t you hate working for her, then?” Jesse asks. She tries to imagine slouchy Huckle, with his loose pants and stringy hair, taking orders from clenched little Snediker, and can’t make the picture come together in her mind.
“Yeah, but I gotta eat, man,” Huckle says philosophically. “Gotta pay rent. The freakin’ Foot Locker fired me, the freakin’ Whole Foods fired me ’cause of that thing with the pie. I have a small problem with supervisors, I guess. And with this job, it’s weekends only, I get to be on my own a lot, I get to be outdoors. And spend time in my car.”
“Jesse’s going to come with me to the vigil on Sunday,” Esther tells Huckle. To Jesse she says, “I’ve been trying to get Huckle to come to the vigil for weeks, but he won’t do it.”
“I love peace, man, but I don’t need to stand around on a street corner waiting for it to come.”
Huckle smiles lazily and closes his eyes.
Esther leans over to Jesse. “Don’t worry,” she says. “It’s not just standing around. You’ll see on Sunday. It’s amazing.”
6
Esther
My first hero: Joan of Arc.
Before I could even read, I had a picture book about her. My mother got it for me, and she used to read it to me all the time before she got sick. Then I read it to myself basically every day from fourth grade through sixth grade. I was obsessed with Joan. More than anything in the world I wanted to meet her. Or follow her. Or be her.
In the first couple of pages of the book, they set the scene: France, early 1400s. The country is occupied by the English, who rape and pillage and terrorize the countryside every few weeks to make sure the French peasants don’t get any ideas about rising up and fighting for their freedom. Everybody hates the English, but nobody knows what to do about them: the true king, King Charles VII, is weak and pitiful, not powerful enough to oppose the English and assume the throne of his own country.
The French peasants are exhausted. They’re sick. They’re suffering. They have long since stopped expecting their lives to get better.
Then one day, in a field about a mile from the tiny village of Domrémy, sitting on a stone wall watching her father’s flock, a thirteen-year-old girl named Joan hears a sound. It’s a voice—she can tell it’s a voice because it’s saying her name—but it’s not human. It’s not like any voice she’s ever heard on this earth. It’s huge and silvery and multiple—really three voices braided into one—and it seems to come from the entire sky, falling all around her like mist, like rain. It’s her angels, come to give her instructions from God.
“Get up,” the angels tell Joan. “Find your way to the town of Vaucouleurs. Cut your hair off and dress like a boy—people will take you more seriously that way. Get a rich man to help you secure an audience with exiled King Charles. Tell him you are come to lead an army on his behalf and drive the hated English out of France and restore him to his rightful throne. Lead an army of ten thousand men into battle. Slay the oppressors. Liberate your country. On your mark, get set—go.”
Naturally, she’s petrified. She argues with them, as all prophets argue with their voices at first. “This is crazy,” she tells the messengers from God. “I can’t be the One. I’m illiterate. I’m a teenager. I’m a girl.”
“Sorry,” say the angels. “God says it’s you.”
It takes a couple of years for the angels to convince her, but eventually, Joan does it. She runs away from her family and prepares in secret. In the best picture in the book they show Joan sitting in a narrow stone room, peering at herself in a small, spotted medieval mirror. She’s holding up a long hank of hair, getting ready to shear it off with a knife. The other half of her head is already cut short. She looks like a half boy, half girl in the picture, but the look she’s giving herself in the mirror isn’t confused—it’s determined.