Joan’s favorite class was science. She had been interested in the study of microbes and quantum physics, interested in the fact that they were both part of the study of string theory. The small and the large inextricably wedded for eons. Her favorite dead people were Albert Einstein and Rosalind Franklin, whom she sometimes drew pictures of surrounded by a DNA double helix. Her favorite living people were her forever friend, a Vietnamese-French girl named Leone, and her brother, PD. Although she couldn’t talk to animals, she felt more kindred with them than with people. But the world was her deepest intimate. Trees and dirt and rocks and rain, and ocean and river water compelled her almost completely.
At school she could temporarily forget the strange blue light and song in her head. Learning about the world’s geology, she could pretend that her only true relationship was to the natural world. She could ignore the fact that the thing in her head, and her parents’ increasing anxiety while watching the nightly world news, had nothing whatsoever to do with the girlhood of things.
But even at school there had been signs of things to come. Like the day a boy with hair the color of rust pushed Leone in the center of her chest so hard she fell down on the ground, her breathing went wobbly, and Joan ran to call a teacher. They took Leone away in an ambulance.
When they took Leone away, Joan went into a cement recess tunnel and cried and pulled out some of her own hair. After school, she found the boy with hair the color of rust and said “Come here.”
Unafraid of girls, he said “What?” and stepped toward her.
She put her hands on his shoulders and closed her eyes.
“What are you doing, freak?”
She felt the blue light flutter slightly above her ear, underneath her hair. Her mouth twitched slightly.
“Whatever,” he said, but she kept her hands clamped onto his shoulders like girl epaulets. He couldn’t get free.
“What the hell?” he yelled, but it was no use.
She opened her eyes just as the trees around them began to shiver, their leaves rustling off the branches in great swirls. Then the wind kicked up more than seemed normal, and the boy’s feet lifted out from under him, so that he was really pinned to the world only by Joan’s hands on his shoulders, her hair lifting up a little. She opened her eyes.
“Lemme go! Lemme go,” he’d screamed.
“Okay,” she said, and did, and he flew with the force of the wind circling them up into the air and around until she breathed out and he landed on the ground with the loud thud of a boy dropping from the sky. A leg broken. He whimpered.
Before she ran again to get an adult, though, she said to the broken boy, “Don’t ever touch Leone again or you’ll never leave the sky.”
Leone—whose small heart had a defect at birth, who carried a heart that started out in a pig. Xenotransplantation and Leone had become Joan’s favorite words. Xenotransplantation represented a change in the distance between people and animals in a way she loved. Leone represented Leone, just Leone, Leone. Sometimes Joan would spin around alone in a circle saying the beautiful word out loud to no one but her body, hands clasped over her heart, eyes closed, like praying.
Leone with long black hair reaching to the small of her back, Leone with a smile as wicked as a cracked apple, Leone with eyes like blue-green pools, Leone as strong or stronger than any boy who dared to arm-wrestle or chase or race Joan. They swam naked in clear pools in the foothills; they curled into each other’s bodies alone, next to night fires, away from adults. Leone became Joan’s idea of love.
The day Joan threw the boy into the sky and let him drop, things shifted. As adults carried the boy away on a stretcher, Joan heard him yelling, “There’s something wrong with her!” Men with grave faces and women with upside-down smiles stared at her.
Like most gifts emergent too soon in children, Joan’s drew quick scrutiny. Little did we know her next gift would be so perfectly timed with history’s next chapter.
Sometimes I’m not sure I remember the beginning of war or how the Wars ended. It feels like we’d been born into perpetual war, to be honest, and now we hover above our own past like impotent Greek gods, without any use, living off of the dying and dry planet below.
In my memory, back on Earth, the word war stopped being a picture or a subject or a nightly news show somewhere far away in the past. It fragmented and shattered and splayed itself across all times and places. Alliances formed or deformed quickly, as in chemistry experiments. Large powers were dispersed into smaller ones; small powers joined in collectives, like bees in hives, and grew dangerously alive. Leaders rose and fell faster than seasons.
There wasn’t time to educate the children.
As in medieval times, and during other world wars, children simply had to learn to live within the miasma of violence. Pick up this weapon. Don’t think. Act.