WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
Chapter 4 On Everybody's Bad Side
Adam was still in class when Joan left the lawyer's building. She decided she might as well start off on the next step, and she got out her cell phone.
"Elizabeth here."
"This is Joan. Can we meet?"
"I'm busy setting up the protest, but you can join us. We're at the Glob Theatre."
"Coming."
A few weeks earlier, Joan, Elizabeth, and Agnes had been acted in a play at the theater, so Joan needed no directions. When she got inside, she saw Elizabeth up on the stage with at least half a dozen other students. She recognized two more actors from the play: Robin, the engineering student who had played the philosopher Plato, and Philip, who had played Pygmalion. Everyone was busy painting signs for the protest. Joan was appalled that it had gotten this far.
"Elizabeth, you've got to call off this protest. Mr. Terrant didn't do it."
Elizabeth looked puzzled. "How do you know?"
"Because—" Joan stopped herself. She had promised the receptionist she wouldn't repeat the story of the phone call. "I just do."
"Oh, so we're to stop this because you just have a feeling."
"Um – yeah," mumbled Joan, wishing she had planned this better.
"Don't you care what happened to Agnes?"
"Yes, but—"
"But you have a feeling. Crazy Joan!"
"What?!" Joan cried in surprise. Not at the phrase, which she had heard numerous times before, but at it being uttered here in college.
"Yeah, I remember how you were in high school, always picking up and dropping projects on whims. Cheerleading. Chess club. Dating the school bully. The musical. The annual. That gay girl who got killed in the drug deal."
"Don't you dare diss Judith!"
"I felt sorry for you at the time, because I thought it was that illness," said Elizabeth. "But that was more than two years ago, and you're STILL acting on whims. Grow up, Joan."
"You've done crazy things too," said Joan, losing her temper. Part of her anger was at God and at the receptionist, for putting her in an awkward position where she could not explain her actions, but at the moment it was directed against Elizabeth. "Remember the day you posed nude for Adam? Then you got in an argument and marched out of the studio without your clothes on, right into February weather. Did I ever mention what a big ass you've got under those jeans?"
Elizabeth turned red. "I was trying to help your boyfriend! Because after two years YOU were still too shy to let him paint your boobs!"
"Girls! Girls! Stop it!" shouted Robin.
Joan looked around herself in dismay. She had gotten so focused on Elizabeth that she had forgotten the presence of an audience. A few looked amused; most, particularly the ones she had met during the play, looked embarrassed at the two friends slanging away.
And Joan had definitely gotten the worst of the argument. Anybody could understand Elizabeth's situation, getting flustered at being seen naked. And the description of her rear end, while accurate, had been a low blow. Elizabeth, on the other hand, had just recited all the embarrassments of Joan's high school career, things that Joan had hoped to leave behind her. And she STILL couldn't explain about the missions.
Philip gestured at a couple of unpainted signs. "Why don't you join us, Joan?" Offering an opportunity to change the subject and restore the old relationships.
"I – I can't. Bye." Joan left the theater, realizing that she needed to think through things before she spoke to Elizabeth any further. But it looked like slinking away after a defeat.
She calmed down a bit during her afternoon math class. Math was far from her best subject, but she had discovered two years ago, while recovering from Lyme Disease, that it was sometimes pleasant to contemplate a subject that was immune from human passions and bewildering divine commands. You had a problem, and if you applied the right rule you could solve it. Not like the real world.
When she called her husband on her cell phone, he said that he was going to work on a project at his studio this evening. Probably, like Joan and the math, his art was a way of retreating away from the messy arguments involving most of their friends.
About 5:00 it occurred to her to pay a call on Mr. Terrant at home; the lawyer should have told him by now that Joan was trying to help him. She reached the residence about 5:30, and rang the bell.
The ring was answered by a girl, roughly twelve years old and in a very sulky mood. "Yeah?"
Joan was not very good with girls of that age range; she remembered trying to deal with Debbie O'Brien a few months ago. "Hi. I'm Joan Girardi-Rove---"
"So?"
"I'm a freshman in college, I know Agnes Mertz."
"So you're one of those bitches interfering with our business."
Joan winced. "I want to help—"
"Then tell your idiot friend that next time she wants to use a horse in a protest, she needs to learn how to stay on it. My Dad had a lot of money riding on a deal, to bring development to the town, and it got all screwed up because some bimbo wants to ride horses. Too bad she didn't land on a pile of horse s***; it might have broken her fall."
"Could I speak to your father?" Joan said desperately.
"He's not home yet. Go away." The girl slammed the door.
Joan turned around and walked home. She had had enough encounters for one day.
Adam came home around 8:00 and, by common consent, neither of them talked about the Agnes vs Mr. Terrant ordeal. Instead, Joan played a DVD she had ordered a few days ago, about some girls who shared a seemingly magic pair of jeans. She sort of identified with one of the girls, who lost a young friend to a fatal disease, just as Joan had lost Rocky three years ago.
Toward the end they heard a knock on the door, and since it was nearly 9:00, and she was a policeman's daughter, Joan took the precaution of looking through the peephole.
Mr. Terrant and his foul-mouthed daughter.
TO BE CONTINUED.
(AUTHOR'S NOTE: The story about Elizabeth's attempt to pose nude for Adam is from an earlier story, TO THE FAIREST)
(AUTHOR'S NOTE: Debbie O'Brien is from another story, ANOTHER JOAN; a younger girl who is being prepared by God to go on missions like Joan.)
(AUTHOR'S NOTE: Joan's DVD is SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELLING PANTS, co-starring Amber Tamblyn)