Jesse’s phone buzzes again against her thigh, and she reaches in to get rid of the call without even taking it out of her pocket.
When the two tattered sandwiches are ready, Esther leads Jesse up the back stairs to her room. Jesse’s bracing for it to be a dark, claustrophobic den like the downstairs, but it turns out to be tidy and light, with slanted ceilings, dormer windows, packed-tight bookshelves against almost every wall, and a big area over her desk that’s wallpapered with overlapping images, all of them old-fashioned paintings of girls on horseback, girls pointing into the future, girls holding swords, girls sobbing, girls praying, girls with halos, girls lashed with rope to wooden stakes, girls surrounded by angels.
“Who are all those girls?” Jesse asks, drawn to the wall.
“That’s all one girl.” Esther looks at Jesse warily. “That’s Joan of Arc.”
“Oh.”
“You know about Joan of Arc, right?” Esther sets the sandwiches down and turns on her clunky old desktop computer. It beeps twice, loud and angry, and whirrs to life, the screen blinking awake.
“Sort of.” Jesse smiles apologetically.
“You don’t know about Joan of Arc?”
Jesse shrugs. “I mean, basically.”
“How can you not know about Joan of Arc?” Esther almost shouts, then sighs dramatically. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, hardly anybody really knows about her. But you of all people should know about Joan!”
“Why me of all people?”
Esther sputters. “Uh, because she was a girl soldier who dressed like a boy and led an army of rebels into battle?”
“That sounds awesome.”
“It was awesome! It’s ridiculous that you don’t know about her. I get so upset when people don’t know her story.” Shaking her head in exasperation, Esther crosses to the bookshelf by her bed and pulls out a long, slim hardback picture book. It’s slightly warped and lightly browned at the edges. In 1920s-style Art Deco lettering, it says Joan of Arc: The Story of a Saint on the cover. “Take this home and read it,” Esther commands, and Jesse accepts the book. “If she’s not your new personal idol by the time you’re done with this book, I’ll…”
“What?” Jesse challenges her, smiling.
Esther doesn’t smile. “I don’t know, but it’ll be a serious problem between us. And please be extremely careful with this book when you handle it. It’s an antique.”
“Oh. Okay.” Tentatively, with as much care as she can muster, Jesse goes to open the book, but Esther reaches out and pinches it shut.
“Not now,” she instructs. “We have research to do. Put it away in your bag.”
Wordlessly, Jesse does as she’s told. As she slips the book into her backpack, Esther settles herself at the desk in front of her computer.
In her pocket, Jesse’s phone buzzes a third time.
“Do you have to get that?” Esther asks a little impatiently. “Someone obviously really wants to talk to you.”
Jesse opens her phone just long enough to see that it’s Wyatt before she shuts it off.
“No,” she says. “It’s no one. I’m turning it off.”
“All right.” Esther clicks open her Internet browser and chuckles a little. “We’re coming for you, StarMart,” she says with unusual relish.
Jesse is delighted. “You sound like an evil villain.”
“Oh no,” corrects Esther, turning to Jesse with her dead serious look on again. “They’re the villains. We’re the heroes of this story.”
***
What the Internet will teach you about StarMart:
One: That the reason it can sell its products so cheaply (only three dollars for a shirt?!) is because it manufactures them in places in the world like Bangladesh or Honduras where the laws are so unfair to workers that you can get away with paying people only a few cents a day for ten hours of work in a hot, filthy factory.
Two: That even here in the US, StarMart pays its employees so poorly that more than half of them are on welfare or have to get food stamps or other government assistance. They can’t afford to pay for basic food and medical care, even though they’re working full-time for StarMart. And any time the workers in one StarMart store try to come together and form a union so they can bargain for better wages, the company threatens to close down the store, or just fires them all and replaces them with new underpaid workers.
Three: That NorthStar Enterprises—which is the big company that runs all of the StarMart and StarBasket Select and ShootingStar Bulk Shopping Club stores—gives tons of money to conservative politicians who make laws that benefit big businesses. Their biggest contribution every year in this area is to State Senator Candace Reese-Allen, who famously cast the deciding vote against legalizing gay marriage and who was quoted in the paper as saying that gay people are “biological errors” who are “dangerous to society” and “hateful to God.”