The Difference Between You and Me (2 page)

And the bell rings and the announcement comes over the PA—“annual spirit assembly being held at this time in the gym, all students proceed to the gym at this time”—and Jesse whispers, “Shit!” and starts to sweat.

The door swings open, admitting a blast of hallway-at-passing-time noise, and a clutch of girls come in, mid-giggling-conversation. In her stall, Jesse freezes, presses back against the cool cinder-block wall.

“Um, I mean, no
way
? It’s
obviously
a lie?”

Through the sliver of space between stall door and stall wall, Jesse makes out a blur of blonde as the girls arrange themselves in front of the long mirror over the sinks. One of the girls is explaining something to the others in a tone that implies that they are totally stupid. She says every sentence with an implied
“I mean, duh”
after it.

“She can
say
they hooked up? She can go around
telling
everyone they hooked up if she wants people to think she’s a total
slut
? But there is no
way
they hooked up, just because I
know
that guy and that guy is
impossible
to get with.”

“Impossible,” one of the other girls echoes, and giggles a little.

Jesse’s knee begins to bounce. Her jaw tightens. If they were just here to pee it would be one thing, but these girls are settling in for a full hair-and-makeup session in front of the mirrors. Prepping for pepping.
Go go GO!
Jesse
shouts at them telepathically. She has to be clear of this bathroom by no later than one minute before first period, otherwise—

“Like, remember at Dylan’s party how hard I had to work to get him to hook up with me?” the first girl continues. “I practically had to slip him a roofie, remember?”

“A roofie.” The second girl giggles again vaguely.

“Remember I practically had to slip him a roofie and like beat him over the head with a club and like drag him back to my
lair
to get him to hook up with me at Dylan’s party? So there is
no
way he got with Lauren. If
I
have to go through all that just to get him? And she’s like a total barking
dog
? I’m sorry, I just don’t believe it.”

“But why would she lie about it?” A third girl speaks, and Jesse’s heart stops, briefly—just pulls into a parking space and pauses. It’s Emily.

“I don’t see why she’d spread a rumor about her own sluttiness,” Emily continues evenly, reasonably. Emily always sounds like that, like she’s making a point that everyone else is guaranteed to agree with.

“Uh, to seem less ugly, obviously?” First Girl sneers. Second Girl giggles:
Duh.

“I don’t see where her lying about being slutty would make anybody think she’s less ugly,” Emily says. “It doesn’t make sense.” Jesse can picture her shrugging her I-guess-there’s-nothing-more-to-say-about-it shrug, perfect round shoulders in their soft J.Crew sweater
bobbing up and down, a smooth, case-closed bounce.

But is it the J.Crew sweater today? Jesse’s curiosity rises in her like a blush to her cheeks. Is it the pink one with the fake pearl buttons? Or maybe the black V-neck she wears over the white button-down? It could be the Vander High hoodie—it is spirit assembly today, after all, and Emily
loves
spirit. If Jesse were smart she wouldn’t move a muscle until these girls were gone, but she can’t help herself. Even a tiny slice of Emily is worth seeing.

Carefully, soundlessly, Jesse brings her big, galumphy fisherman’s boot down off the toilet seat, cradling her backpack to her chest to keep it from slipping out of her grasp and crashing to the floor. She hunkers down and leans against the stall door, pressing her eye to the cold gap between door and wall. Emily is right there, not even three feet away, her back to Jesse, slim, denim hip jutted out to one side, gathering her long, thick, strawberry blonde hair into a single rope rising straight up off the top of her head. Quick as a samurai, she twists the hair-rope around and around, then spreads her left hand wide as a starfish with a ponytail holder stretched around her fingers, open to its widest width, then pulls the hair through the holder once, twice, then splits it into two hanks and yanks the whole thing tight. She tips her head first to one side, then the other, assessing the ponytail’s height, form, and placement in the mirror. It’s a move Jesse has seen her do dozens of times, but she could watch it a thousand
more and never get tired of it. It’s like watching a Cirque du Soleil gymnast flip ten times through the air and stick the landing.

“You guys, whatever about Lauren, we have to not be late right now.” Emily’s voice is clear and judgment free, brightened only by enthusiasm. “We have to get seats by the back wall if we want to help hold the banner.”

As Emily steps out of viewing range, Jesse strains against the stall door, trying to keep her in her sights as she moves. It’s this pressure, probably, plus the shift in her weight as she goes to set her backpack down gently on the floor, that causes the rickety, worthless stall door to unlatch and fly open, sending Jesse sprawling face-forward onto the floor right at the girls’ feet, her backpack beneath her and her big green boots kicked out behind her.

The girls squeal. Jesse grunts.

“Oh my God,” shrieks First Girl, “oh my God oh my God!”

“Sorry”, Jesse mumbles, facedown. She hauls herself not terribly gracefully to her feet, afraid to look up, afraid to meet Emily’s eye.

“Um, excuse me,” First Girl says, her initial shock mellowing into casual contempt. “Don’t you know this is the
girls’
room?”

Second Girl giggles abruptly, then stops.

Ocean roars, distantly, in Jesse’s ears.

She lifts her head and looks straight at them. Emily is
in the center of the trio (it
is
the Vander High hoodie—navy blue with the big yellow V on the left breast), her arms crossed over her chest, summery head tipped quizzically to one side, flanked by her two virtually identical friends. It’s like there’s a mirror Emily on either side of the real Emily: hoodie hoodie hoodie, jeans jeans jeans, ponytail ponytail ponytail. In the center of the triptych, Emily stands looking at Jesse with terrible blankness, a perfectly placid unrecognition. It’s like she’s never seen Jesse before and doesn’t much care that she’s seeing her now.

Jesse turns to First Girl, on Emily’s left. First Girl’s eyes and the corners of her mouth are merry with evil. Jesse feels her fists clenching involuntarily.

“I’m sorry, what?” Jesse says. The calm she tries to maintain in these moments is fraying, and this comes out sounding a little bit like a threat.

First Girl takes it as one. She lengthens her neck defensively, tosses her blondeness over one shoulder, and repeats, “I said, this is the
girls’
room.”

Every time this happens—and it happens to Jesse a couple of times a week, in the bathroom at the library, the locker room at the pool, Friendly’s, Starbucks, the ladies’ fitting room at the hideous disgusting hateful Fashion Bug, at school, at school, all the time at school—there comes a moment in the confrontation when it is Jesse’s turn to speak. Sometimes, especially with confused adults, she
says politely, “I know, I
am
a girl.” Sometimes she gets it together and educates the person: “There are lots of different ways to be a girl.” Sometimes, if she’s having a bad day, she says, “Yes, it
is
the girls’ room, are you lost?”

But today, with Emily looking at her, just looking at her and not saying anything in her defense, Jesse comes up empty. She opens her mouth but nothing comes out.

First Girl gasps a little and grips Emily’s arm. “Oh my God, you guys,” she says, “she was watching us in there!”

“Ew gross!” Second Girl wails.

Jesse’s heart starts to pound. Her tongue thickens in her half-open mouth.

“She must have been, like, waiting for us to take our shirts off or something,” First Girl hisses. “Oh my God, disgusting. Oh my God, I feel so gross right now.”

Jesse turns back to Emily, searching her face for anything—backup; sympathy; defense; some big, distracting move that would steal their attention away from Jesse. But there’s nothing there.

Over the PA comes the final announcement: “One minute remaining in passing period. All students proceed to the gym for spirit assembly at this time.”

Now Emily springs into action. “Okay, you guys, come on, let it go,” she says in a light, coaxy-friendly way to her friends. “We cannot be late for assembly today.”

First Girl turns a fake-sympathetic face on Emily. “Oh,
Em, that’s so
nice
that you’re trying to protect your boyfriend. You should stay and hang out with her, look, she totally wants you.”

Instantly, Jesse looks down at the floor. Her face cannot sustain examination for traces of lust for Emily Miller—it might be there, even if she’s trying to suppress it with every ounce of her energy.

“Oh, stop it,” Emily says, exasperated—the way you’d speak to a pesky child. “I’m leaving.” Emily turns and holds open the bathroom door, a wordless command. Despite herself, Jesse thinks,
You’re not even going to look at me one more time?

First Girl sighs. “Whatever, you’re such a control freak, Em.” She gives her hair a final check in the mirror. “Bye, dyke!” she chirps cheerfully over her shoulder as she leaves, pulling Second Girl along with her.

As Emily turns to walk out the door she meets Jesse’s eye for a fraction of a second. Her expression is scrunched-up and confusing, part
Sorry
and part
What can you do?
and part
I know, this is so dumb
and part
Hey, it’s no big deal!
A pity mishmash. This is not at all what Jesse wants. Jesse wants
These girls are titanic mega-idiots and I renounce their friendship as of this moment and I’ll meet you in our usual spot at the library this afternoon and totally,
totally
make it up to you.
Jesse takes a step forward as if to stop Emily, but even as
she moves, Emily lets the door fall shut behind her.

A moment of quiet.

Jesse realizes that her heart is pounding.

In the mirror above the row of sinks, Jesse looks back at herself. She doesn’t look like much. Dark, angry eyes, messy thatched-roof haircut the color and texture of straw, clenched fists, square shoulders, ringer tee, cargo pants, fisherman’s boots.

Why do you have to wear those boots?
Wyatt asks her almost every time he sees her.
If you have to wear boots, fine, but why giant, loose, flopping, knee-high rubber boots that make you look like you just got off work at the slaughterhouse?

They make me feel solid,
Jesse almost always says.
I like to feel planted when I walk.

Crazy
, Wyatt says to her.
Rebel Without a Cause.

From outside the door in the hallway comes a muffled blast of static, like a blip from the sound track of the moon landing—far away, but close enough that it makes Jesse’s neck stiffen, wild-animal style. Blast of static means Snediker’s coming, walkie-talkie live and crackling, clipped to the lower pocket of her blazer.

Ms. Snediker, dean of students, is an iron marshmallow. She’s short and stout, pink cheeked and gray haired, and she rarely blinks. She always wears a flower-print dress with a skinny belt straining to stay clasped around
her high, tight basketball of a middle. In her yearbook picture every year she poses, unsmiling, plump arms hanging stiffly by her sides, beside the wall of mug shots she keeps in her office, photos of kids she’s caught violating handbook rules or trying to sneak off campus during school hours. She calls this her “Hall of Shame.” She has a small, nasal voice that she never raises and that in no way matches the things she uses it to say: “busted,” frequently; “suspended,” whenever she gets the chance; and sometimes, on her luckiest days, “expelled.” Snediker is the Terminator. Snediker is coming.

Jesse is trapped.

The bathroom sweep is Snediker’s specialty. Out the door would mean running right into her meaty arms—a one-way ticket to disciplinary. But back into the stall is the fool’s direction: Snediker keeps a long-handled retractable mirror tool on her person at all times that she snaps out to its full length during bathroom sweeps to check under stall doors for toilet-crouchers. Anyway, the boots make crouching impractical. Jesse scans the bathroom desperately for an exit strategy, molten panic bubbling in her chest.

High up by the ceiling above the radiator unit is a long, narrow portal window, the kind you push out to open. It’s too high and too small for anyone but a moron or a super-hero to try to squeeze through. It’s decoration, not an escape hatch. It’s not part of a realistic plan. Jesse tugs
her backpack over her shoulders and clambers up onto the radiator unit to reach it.

In her mind, Jesse hears Wyatt, calm and firm:
Absolutely not.
Absolutely
not, have you finally, completely lost your mind? First of all it’s as high as your head, you’ll never get up there. Second of all it’s as wide as a Pop-Tart, you’ll never fit through it. Third of all what are you gonna do if you
do
get through,
fly?
It’s fourteen feet down to the ground and
then
you’re trapped in the inner courtyard, where do you think you’re gonna go from there?

Jesse thinks about Emily’s scrunched-up, confused expression as she left the bathroom:
Sorry, sort of!

She unhooks the window latch and punches the swivel frame out—it opens about twenty inches, not nearly enough for her to squeeze through. She grips the sharp sill with both hands and, sending all her strength to her arms and shoulders,
jumps!
up and manages to wedge herself into the window frame. Her head and shoulders are crammed through, but her whole back three-quarters is still dangling inside the bathroom. The rounded tiptoes of her fisherman’s boots just graze the radiator cover now—not enough contact there for leverage—and her shoulders are so squeezed she can’t wriggle another inch forward. She tries to reverse course but the backpack, fat with manifestos, has her stuck.