The Difference Between You and Me (8 page)

“We were chatting like perfect ladies, very civilized,” Wyatt continues. “I was lulled into a sense of false security.
He hardly even asked me anything about myself, he didn’t make one snide comment about the homeschooling, he didn’t ask me whether my mother was taking her meds, he just went on and on telling me this insanely dull story about Stepmama Louise and her epic battles with the bunny rabbits who live in their backyard and eat her flowers—apparently, she started out poisoning them with rat bait, but now she’s using, like, a blowtorch on them, shooting them with flames off the side of the deck. And I was all, ‘Ha-ha, that Louise is a real spitfire, ha-ha, what a great assassin of bunny rabbits Louise is,’ and then he paid and we left the café, and I was like, oh my God, he’s not even going to mention it, I’m home free, this is the dawning of a new era. And then right when we got to the car he was like, ‘So, did you get the literature I sent you?’”

“Oh no, the ex-gay pamphlets?”

“The ones I shredded.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him they were too pornographic for me so I threw them out.”

“You told him they were
pornographic
?” Jesse wails.

“They have a half-naked man on the cover! He’s hanging up there on that cross all muscular and cut with nothing but a little gym towel on—it’s pornographic!”

“He must have gone ballistic.”

“Worse, he was totally calm. He said, ‘Son, I’m asking
you to please reckon with your choices. I don’t want you to spend eternity paying for your sins in hell.’ I said to him, ‘Howard, thank you so much for the advice, but I’ll take my chances.’”

“The point of these dates is to be
nice
to him so he’ll still pay for college, not to antagonize him and make him want to disown you forever.”

“I know, but I couldn’t help myself, he’s such an irrational idiot. And my comic sidekick wasn’t there to support me.”

“I’m sorry,” Jesse repeats. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ll be there next time, I swear.”

“Saturday the thirtieth, okay? Ten thirty a.m.” Wyatt steps in front of Jesse and puts his hands on her shoulders so he can stare deeply into her eyes. His dark, tendrilly curls are wild around his pale face. In his red-and-white-checked thrift-store Western shirt with the silver-buttoned pockets and the pointy collar embroidered with red, bucking horses, he looks a tiny bit like a chorus girl from
Annie Get Your Gun
. “Please be there. I don’t like to beg, but please, please, please.”

“Saturday the thirtieth, ten thirty. I will be there.”

“You’ll have to behave yourself in school. No more alternative suspensions. Can you keep your antisocial tendencies in check long enough to avoid Snediker for that one week?”

“Absolutely. I promise.”

Jesse breaks Wyatt’s gaze briefly to check her watch—3:24. T minus six minutes till Emily.

“Late for something?” Wyatt asks, mildly suspicious. No gesture of Jesse’s, not even the most discreet watch-check, escapes Wyatt’s attention.

“No, I just, I really have to get started on this homework. I’m sorry but I told you, I can’t actually hang out today.”

“Yes, I actually heard you the first six times you said that, and I have to work, too,” says Wyatt, just a bit testily. “I won’t bug you.”

“What are you working on, a historically accurate diorama of Ayn Rand’s first apartment?”

“Actually…” Wyatt lets his gaze drift vaguely up to the air above Jesse’s head. “I’m applying to do study abroad next semester, and I have to write an essay for it.”

Jesse stops walking.

“What do you mean, study abroad? Study abroad where?”

“I don’t know. Denmark, maybe. Somewhere where the boys are tall and dreamy.”

They’ve reached the library and Wyatt starts to head up the sidewalk to the front door, but Jesse grabs his arm to stop him.

“Excuse me, but what are you talking about? I mean, what are you
talking
about, Denmark? You can’t go to Denmark next semester, that’s ridiculous.”

“It’s not ridiculous, it’s intercultural exchange. The American Field Service runs it. My mom thought it might be a good thing for me.” Wyatt’s trying to sound breezy, but he just sounds guilty and strained. He hasn’t made eye contact with Jesse since he dropped this bomb—he keeps looking over her head or just past her shoulder.

“But Denmark is, like, practically a socialist country! You’d hate it there!”

Despite the distance that has grown up between them, Jesse still can’t imagine making it through sophomore year without talking to Wyatt every night and seeing him at least a couple of times a week.

“Just because they have the wrong idea about how to run their government doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy their fjords and clean public transit and herring-based cuisine,” Wyatt says. “If they even have fjords. I believe they have fjords. Anyway, I probably won’t even get accepted. I have to write an essay for the application about what I personally am willing to do to promote equality between nations. Obviously, my real opinions on that topic are unlikely to impress anyone at the American Field Service. As you know, I believe that all countries are equal, but some countries are more equal than others. I may have to lie about my beliefs.”

Wyatt chunks open the heavy library door, and Jesse follows him inside.

The Minot Public Library is one of the places Jesse
knows best in the world. Before they renovated it, it was just like a big, old, funky Victorian house overflowing with books from floor to ceiling, with worn, blood-red Oriental carpets on the floors and mismatched chairs and tables set out here and there for patrons to sit at. There were so many books that some of them were just laid out in stacks on side tables, or shelved in weird cabinets like where you’d keep dishes in your dining room. Some of the categories were strange, too—traces of the curious mind of some long-lost librarian who ignored the Library of Congress and organized the place according to her own interests and predilections: Cowboy Romances, Science FACTion, Travel Guides for the Elderly and Infirm, Intergalactic Adventure Stories. If you wanted to find anything, you had to already know where it was.

Growing up, Jesse knew every corner of every room. She knew exactly where to find her favorite picture books in the children’s room, and she even had favorite toys she would visit on a regular basis. The stuffed animals were overloved and overhandled—communally owned by every kid in town—and they smelled like mold and sand when she brought them up to her face to kiss them, but she adored them anyway: the long, rainbow-striped worm; the thin-furred, floppy-necked dog. As a kid, every time she walked in the front door she would rub the belly of the statue of the bronze boy holding his fishing rod on his shoulder that stood in the corner of the foyer next to the
creaky stairs. It was a ritual; it didn’t feel right to pass him without greeting him that way. For a long time he was taller than she was. Then she was taller than he was. Then one day she read the little bronze plaque on the base by his bare feet and realized that he wasn’t just some random country boy going fishing, he was supposed to be Huck Finn, from the books by Mark Twain. Somehow after that she didn’t feel close to him anymore, and she never rubbed his belly again.

A couple of years ago, the library had a massive fund drive and raised the money to tear off the back half of the building and add on a big, bright new addition—three stories of stacks, a new community room in the basement, an airy atrium for the periodicals section with couches and armchairs for people to sit and read the newspaper in. It’s nice and everything, and much tidier and easier to find things in than the old building, but Jesse feels like the renovation kind of killed the library. The gloomy, odd-shaped rooms, the toffee-dark wood of the old banister, the secret place to hide under the stairs that were the best parts of the library’s back half have all been replaced by an impersonal, featureless newness. The new part of the building feels like a chain hotel. She never goes back there unless she absolutely has to.

But this is where Wyatt leads her today. He loves the big communal reading table in the periodicals room, right
in the center of the new atrium. Jesse hates to sit here—it feels so public, so glaringly bright—but Wyatt is determined. He’s not even finished unpacking his stuff to work when she jumps up from the seat beside him.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she whispers apologetically. “I’ll be right back. Save my seat.”

Jesse bounds up the back stairs two at a time and emerges into the dark of the third floor. The upstairs of the Minot is untouched by the renovation, and the big third-floor room still houses the old Mystery and True Crime section, the Local Revolutionary War History section, and the Cookbook Memoir section. Around a corner and down a long, narrow hall lined with dormer windows is the upstairs handicapped restroom. It’s the dumbest place in the world for a handicapped restroom (up a flight of stairs? down a narrow hall?), which is maybe why no one ever goes in there. And why it’s the perfect place for Jesse and Emily’s weekly meetings.

Emily works as a circulation assistant, shelving books, after school on Tuesday afternoons. She’s the one who found this place for them, and she’s already in there today, waiting impatiently, when Jesse knocks the secret knock (
knock knock
, pause,
knock knock
, pause,
knock
). Emily opens the door a crack, grasps Jesse’s hand, and pulls her inside.

“You’re late,” she says before Jesse can even say hello.
“I only have a few minutes left on my break, and I’ve been
dying
to see you. I’ve been waiting all week for you to walk in that door.”

Jesse has planned to say,
We have to talk about what happened on Friday.
She has planned to say,
From now on, I don’t want to pretend we don’t know each other when we see each other in public.
She has planned to say,
I don’t know how much longer I can do this.
But Emily pulls Jesse close, slips her arms around her neck, and presses her sweet, soft mouth against Jesse’s.

Jesse dissolves.

Kissing Emily is literally the best thing Jesse has ever done. In her life. There is no feeling more right or more perfect than the feeling of having Emily in her arms. It makes Jesse feel larger than life—superpowerful—to touch this girl and be touched by her.

Every time they kiss, no matter how into it Emily seems, she always starts out a little tense, a little jumpy, and it’s Jesse’s job to soothe her, coax her closer, seduce her into the deep making out. Jesse holds her tightly and kisses her gently, and at a certain point, every time, she feels the little latch holding Emily together give way. Then Emily’s head falls back, her neck loosens, her shoulders drop, her fingers relax—she comes a little bit undone in Jesse’s arms. Jesse gathers her up and pushes her back against a handy wall (or tree, or window, or car door—but usually wall, almost always a bathroom wall) and feels
Emily open up to her, draw her in with her entire body.

Emily’s face, so sunny-cheerful in everyday life, so bright and cute and alert, deepens and darkens when Jesse is kissing her. Her eyes fill with smoke and fall half closed, her cheeks flush. Sometimes she slurs her words. A lazy, wicked expression comes over her face, like she’s a little bit hungry and a little bit dangerous—good for nothing, ready to do damage. She can stop Jesse’s heart when she looks at her like this.

When Jesse is kissing Emily, it is all she wants to do for as long as she lives. The kissing becomes her first and last name, her only skill, the reason she was born and the way she wants to die. Most of the time while they’re kissing, it’s impossible for her to imagine how she even made this happen in the first place. How can she have gotten this girl—
Emily Miller!
—to kiss her at
all
, let alone to
keep
kissing her, to come and meet her in secret every
week
to kiss her? It’s a miracle. It’s the best thing that has ever happened. While it’s happening.

“I have five minutes,” Emily breathes, and Jesse slips two fingers into Emily’s ponytail holder and tugs it off, Emily pulling free from it and then shaking out her thick, caramel hair so Jesse can wind her fingers through it. Emily’s hair smells like coconut and pears; Jesse hugs her close and buries her face in the hair at the back of her neck, breathes in the smell deeply. While she’s there she kisses Emily’s hairline, then moves her lips down along the warm
ridge of her shoulder, then along the satin curve of her collarbone in the front. Emily exhales and drops her head back, giving Jesse room. Jesse reaches up with her left hand and undoes the top button of Emily’s sweater, then the second button. (It’s the pink J.Crew cardigan with the fake pearl buttons.) She folds the neck of the sweater back and exposes the line of Emily’s white cotton bra, kisses down along the swell of the top of her breast, the delicate skin there as light and sweet as meringue against Jesse’s tongue as she kisses lower and closer.

Emily breathes, then breathes deeper. Her breath catches in her throat as Jesse kisses into the V at the center of her bra, then slips her whole hand up over Emily’s right breast. Emily leans into Jesse’s palm and whispers, “Yes.” Jesse pushes Emily back against the wall and looks up at her face; it is a picture of total surrender, her eyes closed, her mouth open, her chin tipped up so her long, pale neck is exposed. In a burst of desire, Jesse peels Emily’s bra back to expose her naked breast. Emily pulls back abruptly and stands up straight, shaking her head.

They have some rules that they haven’t ever said out loud to each other but that they both always follow. Jesse just broke one.

“I’m sorry,” Emily says, pulling her sweater closed at the neck. She seems flustered, but mostly genuinely apologetic. “I want to. I wish I could, but I can’t.”

“I know,” Jesse mumbles, furiously embarrassed. “I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry.”

“No, no, it’s okay.” Emily turns away from Jesse to re-button her sweater.

“It was dumb. It was stupid.”

“No, no, it’s okay. I have to go back to work anyway.”

Emily bends at the waist sharply, flipping her tousled hair forward, then whips back up into a standing position so her hair fans out straight and neat down her back. Jesse looks down at her rubber boots dully, at the dingy, tessellated tiles on the floor beneath them.