The Difference Between You and Me (16 page)

“Yeah,” Jesse says. “That sounds perfect.”

Just then Jesse sees, from across the school’s wide front lawn, Wyatt stand up from the bench where he’s been sitting. Has he been waiting there for her since before school got out? Was she supposed to meet up with him today?

As he walks toward them, he calls out, “Howdy,” in
a relaxed voice. He’s still too far away for Jesse to tell whether he’s mad or not.

“Hi!” she calls back, and gently disengages her arm from Esther’s. She uses it to wave at Wyatt once it’s free, as if to justify to Esther why she pulled away.

As Wyatt gets closer, Jesse can see that his Western wear is in full swing now; under his navy-blue windbreaker, it appears he is wearing fringed chaps.

“This is Esther,” Jesse almost shouts, too loud and too soon. There’s no reason for her to be yelling this introduction across such a distance, except that she’s somehow nervous to be making it and wants to get it over with soon.

Wyatt keeps walking toward them, unhurried. “Wyatt Willette,” he says when he’s reached hand-shaking distance. He takes Esther’s hand in his.

“This is Esther,” Jesse says again, gesturing redundantly. “She’s a ninth-grader. Esther, this is Wyatt. He’s homeschooled.”

“That’s an activity, not an identity,” Wyatt explains suavely.

“Nice to meet you.” Esther shakes Wyatt’s hand with tons of energy and no grace whatsoever. When she releases it, Jesse catches Wyatt looking down to inspect his open palm, as if Esther had altered it somehow by shaking it.

“So what kept you kids so long?” Wyatt looks Jesse over, assessing her coolly. “I thought I would catch you on
your way out of school. Too bad about your phone being broken.”

“My phone’s not—” Jesse starts, then bites her lip. “Sorry.”

“Yeah, I thought after eight messages I should just come find you. Make sure you were still alive.”

Jesse looks down at the ground.

“We were just fighting for justice in there!” Esther exults, and laughs her strange little bark-whoop laugh.

Wyatt raises his eyebrows archly. “Fighting for justice? Inside the halls of Vander High? I find that hard to believe.”

“Oh, it’s true! You should have seen us. We brought the student council to its
knees
just now.”

“Really? Student council?” Wyatt purrs, smooth as a milk shake. “Well, that’s like slaying a dragon, isn’t it? That’s news. I expect to read about that in
The
New York Times
tomorrow morning.”

“Wyatt—” Jesse begins, but Esther laughs, undeterred.

“Yeah, okay, that might seem like small potatoes to you, but how do you think big things get done? One little bit at a time, right? Hey, Jesse and I are going to Beverly Coffee to get some cocoa, do you want to come with us?”

Wyatt meets Jesse’s eye for a moment.

“Oh,” he says, careful and polite, “I do appreciate the offer, but I’m afraid I have to visit local thrifting establishment Rose’s Turn this afternoon. I thought my friend Jesse
might join me, as she often has in the past. But I see you two have plans. That’s fine. I don’t want to intrude.”

“You wouldn’t be intruding,” Esther insists.

“No, come with us. Please come with us?” Jesse urges him.

Wyatt squints at Jesse for a second now. “It’s tempting,” he says, “but I’m on the verge of a breakthrough with my new Charles Lindbergh look, and I don’t think I can wait another day to find the right aviator scarf. Plus, I don’t want to miss Marla’s shift. Last time I was there she gave me a free pair of tassel loafers. You girls have fun.”

Wyatt turns and begins walking away, down the access road that leads in the opposite direction from town. And in the opposite direction from Rose’s Turn, Jesse realizes.

She calls after him, “I’ll totally come with you next week!”

Without turning around, Wyatt lifts his hand to wave.

I couldn’t wait for next Tuesday—almost an entire week—to talk to Jesse about what she did. I felt like her showing up to my meeting was the beginning of something very, very bad, and I could tell that if I didn’t nip it in the bud, it would be out of control in only a few seconds. So I emailed her—the first time I had ever used the email address she gave me almost a year ago, actually—and asked her if we could move our regular meeting up from Tuesday to Friday afternoon. She emailed back one word: “Okay.”

I told my mom that I had to check in with Carol at the library about something on the way home and that’s why I’d be late to help with dinner on Friday. She was fine about it. She’s very big on honoring your commitments and showing the people who put their trust in you by hiring you that you’re responsible (partly because at her job as office manager of the Dower Group she’s always having to
cover for people who don’t pull their own weight, so she really disapproves of slacking off of any kind). As soon as school was over on Friday, I went straight to the library, straight through the back entrance, and straight up the back stairs to the handicapped restroom on the third floor. Jesse didn’t get there until 3:05, so I had almost twenty-five minutes to gather my thoughts and prepare for exactly how I wanted to talk to her. I was more than ready to have the conversation I wanted to have with her by the time she knocked on the door.

I started out totally reasonable and calm. I was like, Hey, I just wanted to talk to you for a second about what happened at that meeting, and I know we’re probably going to disagree about some things, but—

Right away she cut me off. She was like, Yeah, we are. All snappish. I could see that she was totally upset.

I could have stopped then or changed direction. I could have tried to calm her down or lied to her about how I felt, but I really wanted us to have an honest conversation, so I was like, Look, we don’t have to talk about the things you said about NorthStar, which I don’t happen to agree with, but—

And she cut me off again. She was like, It’s not a question of you
agreeing
with me or not, the facts are the facts.

I took a deep breath, like my mom always says to do whenever you find yourself in an escalating situation. I reminded
myself that all I had to do was get her to see my side of things. I didn’t need to make her change her crazy mind.

So I was like, Okay, whatever, the thing that I need you to know right now is that the NorthStar project is actually my baby, it’s really, really important to me, and I need you to not keep going with this campaign to get rid of them because it’s seriously messing up all my plans.

She looked at me sort of funny then, and she was like, What do you mean, your “baby”?

I explained my whole history with NorthStar, I was like, This is actually an idea I came up with on my own, I approached NorthStar personally and I made it happen and I’m working with them at their office once a week. I was like, It’s okay, I know you didn’t know that because I didn’t tell you but it’s actually been an incredible experience so far and also it’s a really big deal for Vander and you just need to please back off on this one. For me.

Jesse was weirdly quiet then—kind of scary quiet.

She was like, You’re
working
with them?

I was like, Yeah. I told her about the unpaid internship and the office and the giant copier and how nice everyone is to me over there—all the things I wished I could have told her before—and she just kept getting weirder and weirder, quieter and quieter. I was like, Please don’t freak out, I know this is not something you would probably do but we just have to agree to disagree about this. And
then I said the thing I had been planning to say all along, I was like, Working with NorthStar is just as important to me as your poster things are to you, so I really wish you would respect that and stop doing this right now. I’m not saying stop doing posters altogether, I’m just saying could you please go back to doing posters that are random, like before, where they didn’t actually have any effect on people or cause any damage, instead of using them to try to destroy my life like you are now?

Jesse was like, My posters have never been random. Like,
super
pissed. She was all, Did you even look at the StarMart posters? Did you look at the flyers we handed out at your meeting? Everything on them is real. How can you keep working for them when you know all the horrible things they do? StarMart is the enemy.

So I was like, That is so crazy, they are not the
enemy
, you might not agree with everything they do, but they actually do lots of amazing things for the world that you don’t even know about.

She was like, Esther says they’re the single-most evil corporation in the world.

I was like, Esther? Is she that girl you were with at the meeting? Do you like her or something?

And Jesse was like, No.

I was like, Is she your new girlfriend?

And she was like, No!

But she didn’t look at me when she said it.

I’m pretty comfortable being in competitive situations. I like to work hard, and I like to earn what I get. But I guess I sort of always assumed that I wouldn’t have to be in a competitive situation when it came to Jesse. The thing about being with Jesse that’s been so incredible for me since the beginning is that because we’re so different, because we barely agree on anything, I’ve always been able to feel how pure our feelings for each other are. It’s not like there’s any public part of our relationship, like with me and Michael, where other people want us to stay together, and it’s not like we agree with each other’s ideas or enjoy talking about things or have anything in common or anything. It’s deeper than that. It’s a soul connection. And I guess that’s why I never thought I would have to compete for Jesse’s attention.

Not that I have any objection to that girl she was with at the meeting, I’m sure she has a really great personality and she’s probably good in school, which are both things I’m sure Jesse cares about a lot. She is a little weird looking, to be totally honest—those messy Heidi braids? those long old-lady skirts?—but she’s no weirder than Jesse is. I guess I just thought that wasn’t the kind of girl Jesse was interested in.

I was thinking about this, about the kind of girls Jesse likes, when Jesse launched into this huge rant about NorthStar. She used to do this more before she realized that I’m basically immune to her insanity. And I have to
say, as boring and annoying as it was when she used to rant about stuff that was hardly even real, like nuclear war or famine or whatever, this was so much worse. Listening to her rant about NorthStar, which she doesn’t even
know
anything about and which is part of our actual
lives
, just made me more and more and more angry. She was, like, thlomping back and forth across the bathroom in her hobo boots, going on and on about all the supposedly terrible things NorthStar does, and how they’re trying to take over the world, and asking me, like, don’t I care about workers in Honduras blah blah blah and don’t I care about protecting local stores blah blah and don’t I care about the poor little kids of StarMart employees who can’t even afford to go the doctor blah blah blabbedy blah and finally I was like, Stop, stop,
stop !

I was practically yelling at her—we were both practically yelling. We both totally forgot about staying quiet in our private place. I was like, None of that has anything to do with me! Even if some of that stuff is true about NorthStar, it’s totally beside the point! The point is I’m trying to do something good for our school, which will benefit everybody at Vander,
including you
!

Then Jesse stopped pacing, and came over and stood really close to me and clamped her hands on my upper arms like she sometimes does, sort of holding me in place, and she looked deep into my eyes with that really intense laser-beam gaze she has, where it feels like she’s looking
right through your body into a deeper space, right into the center of your private soul. I can remember every single time in my life Jesse has looked at me like that. Each time it’s been right before she’s touched me or kissed me so intensely that I’ve basically temporarily lost my mind. Each time it’s been right before she got closer to me than any other human being has ever been.

She looked into my eyes like that, and I felt my stomach flip. My eyes closed. I was so ready for her. I was so ready for our fight to be over. I thought,
Finally, she’s going to see my side. As soon as she kisses me, it’ll all be done.

She was so close to me I felt the warmth of her breath on my face when she spoke. She did not kiss me. Instead she said very quietly, Do you even have a conscience, Emily? Do you even have a heart?

It was the first time I ever heard her say my name.

I opened my eyes but I didn’t recognize her. She was four inches away from me—so close—and she looked like a total stranger. The features of her face were off-kilter and odd. Her face didn’t even look like a human face to me.

I felt super scared. I felt super alone.

I realized then that I was going to cry. It was so sudden and so incredible to me. I didn’t plan it. I just, like, felt the tears move up into position, felt that wavery feeling take over inside my chest, and then I was crying and crying and crying. It seemed like I was crying a year’s worth of tears. Once I started, I felt like I was never going to be able to
stop. I felt like I was melting inside. I felt like I was falling down, down, down, and no one was ever going to be able to catch me. I covered my face with my hands and cried.