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.”