The black night is grey, diluted by tears and stardust that's really light pollution from the flickering street lamps that line up outside her house like broken soldiers. Trying to remember why they're doing what they do. She can sympathize with their seemingly redundant inner battle. It's not that Joan has lost her faith, well maybe a little, but mostly it's just the feeling creeping around inside her gut lately that all the good she does isn't really her. The things that she makes better are really all down to Him, they're not her achievement at all, just another vicarious notch on God's belt or bedpost.
And there are times when she thinks that she wants to be somebody else, just to spite Him. That she wants to have a different job, different classes and maybe even different hair. It's irrational, but when you know, without any doubt know, that someone else is responsible for all the actions in your life then everything seems out of control. Those are the times she breaks down and lets everyone around her down too.
No matter how well things turn out, or how much He insists that free will exists Joan can't help but think that she's somehow been set down a path she never had any choice in. That no amount of free will would have taken her down a different path and if it did she would have found herself at the same ending, just because.
On nights like this she goes for long walks, in the dark, on her own despite what happened to her mother, although it worries Adam, maybe because of those things. It's teenage rebellion all over again, but this time her parents aren't the only ones suffering, she's got Him for a target too. And she hopes it hurts Him to watch her squander her potential, put herself in danger, and humiliate herself just to get back at Him. She hopes it does because otherwise she's going to end up looking very stupid, and she does that enough because of Him.
Adam will wake up in the morning and find her in his shed, sitting quietly at his workspace fingering different pieces of metal and wire, aimlessly arranging them into various patterns. No rhyme or reason to their placement, and he won't think they're beautiful but he would never say anything to her.
Her bloodshot eyes and dirty-milk skin would prove to him that she hadn't been sleeping and he would just stand in the doorway for a while, waiting for her to notice him. Sometimes she wouldn't and he would be forced to break her reverie, those times he would wonder for a brief moment if she was faking. Just like the times he would go to her house and she would pretend to be asleep, then appear at her bedroom window as he looked back, hurt, from her path.
Joan didn't like hurting Adam, sometimes it was the only reason she actually did what God told her to, because she knew that things would be okay if she did. Things would turn out for the better, whether or not anyone knew about her own insecurities. Well, He did, but they had never been brought up as a topic of their brief conversations. Even God liked denial, or maybe not. He probably didn't suffer from afflictions that were so human.
On her better days Joan would be thankful, if not a little guilty, that God had chosen her to make the world better through. And she would spend hours wondering if all the great thinkers and geniuses of history had also engaged in chats with The Almighty. Maybe no human truly had it in them to change the world, but God could do that through them. These better days would dissolve into self-doubt pretty quickly if she had no distraction, moping into coffee cups at her hollowness.
Sometimes, very occasionally, she thought that if she hurt herself it would somehow hurt him. After all she was his instrument. But in the end she never went through with it, Joan was just too scared, too vain, maybe. She couldn't face sinking a blade into her soft, white skin or subjecting Adam to what she had done after all that he had been through with his mother. She hadn't been completely sucked in by her own self-pity yet.
And, yes, sometimes she wished she had someone else. Someone she didn't care about so much, because that would make the whole pity party so much easier, if everything that God had given her had sucked. If her family were monsters and her boyfriend didn't give a damn, her brothers were wasters and her education was worthless. But it wasn't. God had never treated her any differently than every other person in the world, and all that he had given her was indirectly out of love. Sometimes it hurt, but when you worked through the process the things he did were for her own good.
And that somehow made it all worse; she had a good life, a great family, a boyfriend she was sure she loved. And she had worked for none of it, as far as she could see it had been handed to her. Yes, sometimes she wanted something else just to lessen the guilt.