01. History
Everything She Knows
Jubilee is not the best student in the whole world. She's not the best student in the whole school. She's not even the best student in her whole class.
She does, however, know what is important.
Physics is important in a way that English literature is not. Books are nice and stuff, but they're mostly just for entertainment and, when she's in the mood for entertainment, she'd rather just watch TV. Physics isn't entertainment. Physics is her. Without physics, she wouldn't know who she is. So, she knows the Universal Gravitational Constant and how to build a Van de Graaf generator and that she can channel five hundred thousand volts of electricity and that, if she's not careful, she could kill someone with it. But ask her to summarize A Tale of Two Cities and all you'll get is a blank stare.
Flight school is important in a way that art is not. Every other Saturday, Scott takes Jubilee and Paige and Alison to the tiny county airport where they take classes and fly tiny single engine planes and do tandem jumps with instructors. At home, Jubilee has logged more hours in the jet simulator than anyone else. But the last time the school went on a field trip to MoMA, Jubilee paid John forty bucks to set the fire alarms off. It was a small price to pay to avoid hours with things that looked like someone had hemorrhaged on a canvas.
History is important in a way that nothing else is. History is Independence Day and the African slave trade. It's feudal Britain and dynastic China. It's the Inquisition and the Holocaust. It's everything that has ever happened before and everything that might ever happen again. Jubilee knows that history is the most important of all; she knows that, if she forgets where she came from, she'll never get where she's going.
And Jubilee knows that she has places to go.