Jesse takes a deep breath and presents her case.
“Pep rallies revolt me. I refuse to attend them and in this quote unquote free country I shouldn’t have to. I can’t believe I have to explain this to you guys! Pep rallies are fascist demonstrations of loyalty and I am not loyal to my school. I hate my school. I’m the opposite of loyal to it. If I wouldn’t end up in jail, I would blow it up.”
“If you wouldn’t end up in jail, blowing it up wouldn’t be much of a principled statement,” Fran observes. She’s a lawyer; she can’t resist a counterargument.
“I’m curious about why we’re talking about the violent destruction of property all of a sudden,” asks Arthur.
“Because apparently your daughter is an incipient terrorist!” Fran shouts, turning on her husband. “And not, I might add, a particularly competent one.”
Jesse looks down at her lap, stung.
“I’m sorry.” Jesse’s mother flushes red. She gives Jesse a look of sincere apology. “I’m sorry, honey. I’m sure if you were a terrorist, you’d make a wonderful one.”
“Okay, so what I’d really like right now,” interjects Arthur again, “is to turn away from talking about terrorism and violence and move on to talking about the actual consequences of Jesse’s actions today. Is that okay with everyone?”
The women in his life nod.
“All right. So what exactly is ‘alternative’ about this Alternative Suspension Program?”
Jesse sighs. “You have to like, ‘give back,’ or whatever. They make you come in on Saturday morning and do chores. That way, you don’t miss class and you benefit the school.”
“Well,” Fran says, “that seems reasonable enough. Maybe if you spend a little time giving back, next time you’ll consider whether skipping a pep rally is really the best place to put your revolutionary energy.”
“And sweetheart, think of this as an opportunity,” Arthur offers. “You never know what’s going to happen when you take on the establishment. You know your mother and I met in prison after a No Nukes demonstration.”
“God I know,” Jesse sighs exasperatedly, “please do not tell me the story again and you always say prison and it was not prison, it was a holding area in the gym at the university!”
“Still,” Fran says. She smiles sweetly, almost shyly, at her husband.
Arthur strokes the back of his wife’s hand with two fingers. “They booked us one right after the other,” he says dreamily. “I stood behind her in line at the fingerprint station they had set up on this little card table under the basketball hoop. I was there with some of my buddies from the Men Finding Power Through Peace Coalition, and there she was, all alone. She came there all by herself because she saw something wrong in the world and wanted to make it right. And I thought, ‘What a brave person.’ And then I thought, ‘They’re going to press her fingers down in the ink and then they’re going to press my fingers down in the ink right afterward. It’s almost like we’ll be holding hands.’”
Arthur picks up Fran’s hand and kisses the back of it. She rolls her eyes at him a little, but she’s still smiling.
“Are you guys about to make out?” Jesse demands.
“We might,” her father says, not taking his eyes off his wife. “We might make out.”
“You know”—Jesse gets up from the table—“it’s fine that you guys are heterosexual, your lifestyle choice is none of my business, but I don’t see why you have to rub my face in it all the time. This house is totally gender-oppressive and I’m sick of it. I’m here, I’m queer—”
“We’re used to it,” her mother sighs.
***
“Typical,” Wyatt sighs on the phone when Jesse explains what has happened.
Jesse is lying on her bed with her head hanging off the end and her sock feet up on the pillow, talking to her best friend. Since Wyatt left school in the middle of last year to be homeschooled by his aromatherapist-slash-animal-psychic mom, he basically does nothing but read books about finance and wait for Jesse to get home from school so they can talk. “Nice job, getting yourself thrown into jail on the one day you were going to come run interference for me with Howard.”
“It’s not jail, it’s Alternative Suspension.”
“Whatever. You don’t seem particularly devastated not to be spending your Saturday with me and Mr. Willette.”
Howard Willette is Wyatt’s father. He and Wyatt’s mother got divorced ten years ago, shortly after he accepted Christ as his personal savior—apparently, evangelical Christianity and aromatherapy proved to be incompatible belief systems. Four years ago, Howard married Louise, an even more conservative Christian than he is, and moved to Stonington, two towns away, to Wyatt’s great relief. But he still insists on honoring his monthly court-mandated coffee date with Wyatt, even though they have trouble exchanging even the most basic pleasantries without arguing. (Wyatt is a card-carrying member of the Atheist Alliance International. And the Queer Libertarian League.) For a while now, Jesse has been coming with Wyatt on these coffee dates to distract them both and cut the tension with dumb jokes. She saves up G-rated punch lines and wholesome anecdotes about heroic pets all month long to use as subject-changers.