The Difference Between You and Me (5 page)

It was almost a year ago that I figured out that we should get corporate sponsorship for this year’s Fall Formal. I was only student council secretary then, so I wasn’t really involved in decision making, but I couldn’t help taking mental notes during last year’s dance and thinking about ways that it could be better. It’s my nature to look at things that way, always trying to figure out how to improve them. I know I’m a perfectionist and some people think I’m too hard on them because of it, but, first of all, I’m not as hard on anyone else as I am on myself, and second of all I think my perfectionism is one of my best assets. It means that I always think really hard about what the right thing to do is, and I try to make decisions that will benefit the most people possible, no matter what project I’m working on. People know that they can trust me to make good choices. That’s why they feel comfortable putting me in positions of responsibility.

The Fall Formal is student council’s biggest fund-raising event of the year and it’s always super fun, because it’s partly a serious formal dance but partly sort of ironic and relaxed, the way we do it. Like, for example, we don’t call it the Homecoming Dance even though it’s always scheduled to coincide with the Homecoming game, because not everybody at our school feels strongly about football and student council respects that. There are lots of kids at Vander whose main thing is math or science (we have at least two or three kids go to MIT and Caltech every year, even though we’re a public school) and, not to generalize, but those kids don’t necessarily love football, but they still deserve to be able to come to their school dance and not feel excluded. So that’s why we don’t emphasize the football thing too much. And the whole king and queen thing, too, is a little bit ironic—like a lot of times a nontraditional kid will get crowned along with a more typical king or queen. For example, last year’s Formal Queen was Isabelle Howland, who is a very gorgeous and also very friendly and down-to-earth cheerleader, but Formal King was Ralphie Lorris, who is short and chubby and, to be honest, a little Asperger’s-y—he has this obsession with public transit and is always talking loudly about local bus schedules. Everybody thinks Ralphie is super funny—he’s sort of like an unofficial school mascot—and when they called his name to come up to the stage and be crowned next to Isabelle, everyone clapped and cheered extra hard.

Anyway, that’s the kind of dance it is, not totally serious but still basically a pretty normal event, so I was positive Jesse Halberstam would not be there, since normal events are not exactly her cup of tea. We had just started spending private time together then, we were just starting to get to know each other one-on-one, and I guess she came to the dance specifically to find me. I was there in my capacity as student council secretary, making sure things went smoothly at the ticket-taking table and also supervising the refreshment displays, and Michael was my date, of course, and he was helping me reorganize the soft drinks according to flavor and sugar content when I saw Jesse come in on the other side of the gym. She was so… I don’t know, she was a hundred percent strange looking like always, “dressed up” in this totally bizarre powder-blue man’s pantsuit with a ruffled silk tuxedo shirt and bell-bottoms over those boots—those hideous rubber boots!
With
the powder-blue polyester tuxedo! And she had sort of spiked up her blonde hair so it was kind of punk looking and crazy. I still don’t know where she got her hands on that outfit; I never saw her wear it again. I watched her pay for her ticket and then she was looking around for me, scanning the crowd, and when she found me she gave me this super-intense look, like,
You. Me. Here. Now.
My stomach did a little backflip inside me. And then she disappeared into the girls’ locker room annex off the side of the gym.

I knew she wanted me to follow her. I also knew that I was there with Michael and it would be impolite to leave him alone with the soft drinks, and I
also
knew that I was responsible for keeping some important logistical things going on the dance floor. But to be honest, at that point I was getting pretty annoyed with some of the people working under me on the refreshments committee (like Lauren Weiss and Kim Watson and Kimmie Hersh, to name three) because they kept putting out more and more Costco-brand cheese curls, which were the only refreshments we were serving that night, even though I told them repeatedly that they had to ration the snacks so they would last for the entire event, and all of a sudden I was just like, you know what, screw this, let them put out however many cheese curls they want, whenever they want to. And I told Michael I had to use the restroom and I went to find Jesse.

That was the first time I ever let the two parts of my life come so close together. So close they almost touched.

I hardly even remember what happened in the locker room, except that she got me over in the little laundry cubicle in the back corner and somehow I ended up sitting on top of the dryer and she was standing in front of me and she had her hands up the skirt of my dress. I remember it was hot and dark, and Jesse felt like a smooth animal; her shirt was like a second silk skin over the hot, smooth skin of her arms and shoulders. She kissed and kissed my neck and shoulders and up just behind my ears—no one
had ever kissed my neck before that night—and I thought I was going to pass out. I could hardly see. It smelled like dryer sheets and hair gel in there.

I knew I couldn’t be gone for too long so I made her leave after just a little bit, and when I came back into the gym and everyone was still there, dancing and laughing and drinking soft drinks and eating cheese curls, and no one knew where I had been or what I had been doing and no one even thought to
ask
, I felt this amazing new feeling come over me: not like I was all-powerful exactly, but
sort
of like I was all-powerful, like I was a little bit larger than life. For the first time, I saw that I could be in two places at once, like a superhero. At that moment in the gym, I felt like I could do anything I wanted and be anything I wanted and have everything I wanted to have in the world. And I looked around at the crappy Costco-brand snacks, and skinny sophomore Mark Salfrezi pretending to be a real DJ with his mom’s sunglasses and his iPod plugged into a pair of AV speakers, and the childish harvest-themed decorations (leaves cut out of construction paper—cute, but
please
), and I just thought, this whole event could be so much better. All of it. Everything. It could all be so much more polished and classy. All we would need would be a couple of corporate sponsors, like the ones my mom gets every year for her Struggle Against Alzheimer’s Gala at the Hyatt Regency ballroom in Stonington.

That was the moment I first had the idea for corporate
sponsors. I sat on it all year long, then this past summer when we were at the lake house I drafted a letter to send out to selected members of our local business community. If you want to appeal to a business, you have to think like a business. What does a business want? To make money. How do they make money? By getting more customers. And how do they get more customers? Two ways: Either 1) by making a better product, or 2) by making themselves look good to potential customers. And what could make a business look better to potential customers than showing that they support kids, who are our future? I made all this clear in the letter. I also said that in these troubled times, when public school budgets are getting slashed left and right, it’s harder and harder for schools to get the basic educational resources they desperately need, and Vander has some really interesting, smart, diverse students who will certainly have important roles in shaping the world of tomorrow, and don’t these businesses want to be part of all that by donating funds or services to our Fall Formal, where we raise money to improve the educational resources of the school, such as computers? (Actually, the money we raise at the Fall Formal goes to fund the senior class trip every year, but I feel like that still counts as an educational resource—last year the seniors went to Cape Cod but they stopped by Plimoth Plantation on the way, and this year they’re going to Disney World, and Epcot is a very educational destination.)

I sent the final draft of the letter out two weeks ago and I’ve already gotten three positive responses. Betty Horn from Horn of Plenty Bakery said she would donate five hundred Death by Chocolate Brownie Bites on presentation platters (sayonara, Costco-brand cheese curls!). Laurie Meloni from Buns of Steel Boot Camp and Cross-Training Gym said she would donate a sampler of Krav Maga and mixed martial arts classes suitable for beginners that we can raffle off at the event. And Howard Willette, director of corporate communications for a Stonington-based company called NorthStar Enterprises, said I should come in and meet with him face-to-face so we can discuss possible ways for their firm to get involved with Vander.

I mean, this is incredible. I actually flipped out for a second when I got the NorthStar email. I actually cried a little. I’ve never been to a professional corporate meeting before, and I’m so excited to go in person to the offices of NorthStar Enterprises and represent Vander and our student body and meet with someone who might actually be able to help us take things to the next level. I feel like, in all honesty, I’m exactly the right person to build this relationship.

When I think back on it now, last year’s Fall Formal was really an incredible turning point for me. It was the first time I understood that I could have both Jesse and the rest of my life and one didn’t have to destroy the other. It was the first time I realized that corporate sponsorship
could change the whole way student council does business. And at the end of the night, as I was slow dancing the last dance before clean-up in Michael’s arms, I told him I was going to run for student council president this fall, and he said he would support me and my dreams no matter what. He told me I should always shoot for the stars.

We campaigned really hard this September—I’m really proud of how hard me and Michael worked. And even though Melissa Formosa got president, and I only ended up getting vice president because Julie Dressel quit at the last minute to focus on soccer, everything worked out perfectly in the end. Vice president has turned out to be the best possible role for me. It lets me do a ton of work behind the scenes that actually has a huge impact on the school, work that I might not have time to do if I were president. This corporate sponsorship idea is just one example. Now that I’ve been vice president for a couple of months, I’ve learned that a lot of the real power in school happens behind closed doors, where the general public doesn’t even see it. I’ve realized that I’m right where I want to be.

It’s so early there’s still a silvery sheen of dew on the grass around Vander High. The Saturday morning sun is a puddle in the dingy sky, and Jesse stands in its watery light watching her mother’s car recede down the access road away from school. She has five bucks, her phone, her notebook, a pen, and her Swiss Army Knife in the pockets of her cargo pants and a crumpled sack lunch in her hand. She didn’t watch her mother pack it, but she’s guessing it’s the health-food version of death-row cuisine: five rice crackers in a used Ziploc bag, soggy bulgur-wheat salad in a curry-stained Tupperware container, two leathery dried apricots in a paper towel, as appetizing as a pair of shriveled human ears. “Enjoy,” her mother said to her grimly as she handed it to her through the passenger’s-side window. “Call me if they violate your human rights. I’ll see you at five.”

It’s weird to be at school on a Saturday. Empty of inhabitants,
it feels creepy somehow, like an abandoned factory, a ghost town. The reflective windows look dead to Jesse, concealing nothing behind them but desks, blackboards, and silence.

Jesse sits down on the damp wooden bench under the crab-apple tree by the side door. She’s supposed to meet the ASP supervisor there “
promptly at 8:00 a.m.
,” the disciplinary ticket reads in Snediker’s unnervingly tiny, square-cornered handwriting. The bench is deeply grooved with gouged-out graffiti—LOVE YOU MATT—SK8 OR DON’T—JIZBIZ WAZ HERE—SENIORS 4EVA—and Jesse fingers the smooth bullet of the Swiss Army Knife in her pocket, imagining for a moment what it would feel like to carve JH LOVES EM into the bench. She closes her hand around the knife, then feels a hot flush of embarrassment even thinking about doing such a thing. She pulls her hand out of her pocket, wiggles her toes around vigorously inside her boots to distract herself from the thought of Emily.

A car turns onto the access road and wends its way toward Jesse, a beat-up pea-green hatchback, crazy with hippie bumper stickers, traveling in a cloud of bouncy music that gets louder and clearer the closer it comes. It accelerates to a squealing stop in front of Jesse’s bench and the passenger’s-side window rolls down jerkily.

“Halberstam?” a small, bearded, long-haired elf in a
black ski hat yells out cheerfully from the driver’s seat. Jesse nods.

“Where’s Meinz?” he yells. Jesse shrugs, not sure what this means. The music—plinkety, happy, banjo-y—is up so loud on the car stereo that even from twenty feet away Jesse can make out every word. “I will get by,” the singers promise in crooned unison.