The Difference Between You and Me (9 page)

“I’m so glad I got to see you, even for a second,” Emily says pleasantly, in a voice a bank teller might use with a well-liked regular customer. She turns back toward Jesse as she regathers her hair into a ponytail—the same pony-tail Jesse disassembled just moments ago. She looks past Jesse at her own reflection in the mirror as she twists her perfumed mane up into a single cable, swift and sure, snaps it through its stretchy tie and tightens it up.

“I kind of, actually, wanted to talk to you about something,” Jesse says, low, halting.

“Yeah?” Emily smiles. “About what? I only have a few seconds, so… but what?”

She gives Jesse a look that exactly matches the one she gave her in the girls’ room on Friday morning—brightly lit emptiness, like a sunny, unfurnished room. In a flash,
Jesse pictures herself reaching for Emily in a dozen different bathrooms, a hundred different closets, a thousand different hidden secret stairwells forever….

“I…”

“Yeah?” Emily’s expression doesn’t change, doesn’t expand or contract even a fraction of an inch.

“I feel like, I don’t know, I feel like…”

Now Emily tips her head to the side and scrunches up her eyes and nose into her pity face.

“I
so
want to talk to you about whatever you want to talk to me about?” she promises, hyper-sincere. “But I’m already late coming off break, I have to go back and clock in with Carol. Is it, like, something that can wait for next time? Or maybe you can email me about it?”

“I feel like we can’t do this anymore,” Jesse blurts out, and as soon as she’s said it she feels both relieved and crushed with sadness.

A ripple of something passes through Emily’s face, something strong and violent that Jesse can’t quite identify—panic? terror? rage?—and then it’s gone, dissolved into the shimmering sunshine of her perpetual smile.

“Okay, that’s crazy,” Emily says firmly but lightly. “I know it’s hard right now, but it’s fine, we’re fine.”

“I’m not.” Jesse feels like she’s talking like a caveman—grunts and monosyllables. It’s so hard to get out complete sentences when she’s talking to Emily Miller. What she really
wants to say is,
It’s not hard
right now
, it’s
always
been hard, and it’s never going to get any easier. You’re going to go to this year’s Fall Formal with Mike McDade instead of me, and you’re going to go to next year’s Fall Formal with Mike McDade instead of me, and you’re going to go to college with Mike McDade and get married to Mike McDade and have babies with Mike McDade instead of me, and I’m sorry but I’m not fine about it!

“You are
totally
fine.” Emily gives her reflection a brisk, final once-over in the mirror, then steps up to Jesse and takes hold of her by the shoulders. “Listen,” she says seriously, looking deep into Jesse’s eyes and reaching up to stroke her jawline with two fingers. “I know this isn’t perfect, I know it’s super complicated, but it’s the best we can do now, right? And I actually think it’s pretty good. We have a really good time together, don’t we?”

Jesse just nods.

“We have an incredible time together, because we’re incredible together. We have something incredible between us, you and me.”

Jesse nods again.

“I mean, it sucks not to see each other more, I miss you all the time and I’m always wishing I could be with you more, but when we
do
see each other, it’s totally amazing, right?”

Nod.

“Because
you’re
amazing. You’re not like anyone else I’ve ever known. You’re not like anyone else in the world.”

Jesse rolls her eyes but she can feel herself blushing. The skin where Emily is stroking her tingles under her feathery touch.

“I know I’m really busy and that makes it hard for us to find time to be alone together, but I have to say, I’m not even that upset about it right now, because I have a really good feeling about this fall. I feel like everything is going to work itself out. Really exciting new things are happening, and I just know that everything’s going to change this year.”

“Really?” Jesse can’t help herself. She knows she shouldn’t hear this as Emily saying
I’ll be with you for real by the end of this year.
She shouldn’t hear her saying
I swear I’m going to break up with Mike and make you my girlfriend and take you to prom in the spring.
Of course that’s crazy. Of course that’s not what she means. But somewhere in the secret inner fibers of what she’s saying, Jesse feels like maybe… that
is
what she means?

“Totally.” Emily beams. “I can feel it. This is going to be a big year for everyone. It’s going to be a huge year for Vander. Everything’s going to be different by the time this year’s over.”

Dumb with hope, Jesse smiles, and Emily leans in and kisses her smile. As their lips touch, Jesse feels her whole midsection melt into stars.

In a second it will be over. In two seconds Emily will be saying,
Wait at least a minute before you come out after me.
In a minute Emily will be gone, and in two minutes Jesse will be trudging downstairs alone, sitting back down next to Wyatt, trying to come up with a plausible explanation for why she was gone for so long. In an hour she’ll be yearning so hard for Emily and feeling so rotten about herself that she’ll be swearing to never see Emily again, swearing that she’s just going to stop showing up for their meetings and not even bother to explain why, just cut off all communication with Emily once and for all, to save the last tiny shreds of her pride.

But for now, in this moment, Emily is still kissing her. Her tongue is alive in Jesse’s mouth, her hands are clasped behind Jesse’s neck, and while it’s happening, it’s eternal. While it’s happening, it will never end.

It’s hard for me to tear myself away from Jesse once we start kissing. I’m not going to lie about it, I get really clingy with her sometimes. We don’t get that many minutes together in a normal week, and sometimes I just wish I could call in sick to work one Tuesday and we could spend the whole afternoon in the bathroom there together. Or somewhere else, somewhere nicer. Sometimes I daydream about taking her someplace, like on a camping trip somewhere, or up to the lake house someday in the off-season when no one else is there—someplace where I can have as many hours with her as I want. To do whatever I want with her, for as long as I want to do it.

But then I also think that I’m lucky we can only see each other for short amounts of time. I feel like there are certain things that I can’t do with Jesse without betraying Michael, and we don’t do them ever, but I get so carried away when we’re together… if I didn’t have to tear myself
away from her and go back to work after fifteen minutes or half an hour, I don’t know if I could trust myself to stop. Who knows what might happen if we had, like, a whole hour or more alone. I can hardly bear to think about it.

This last time we were together I felt like she was getting sort of sad about the reality of our situation, and I really wanted to reassure her as much as I could, so much so that I almost came out and told her everything about what’s been going on with me and the corporate sponsorship thing. Honestly, I don’t know, but I feel like this is one of the most exciting new things ever to happen to our school, it’s such an incredible opportunity for us, and it feels to me like a sign that everything’s going to be okay this year. Better than okay—everything’s going to be fantastic.

I was this close to telling Jesse all about the totally incredible meeting I had with Howard Willette, director of corporate communications for NorthStar Enterprises, and Martha Rinaldi, assistant director of corporate communications, on Monday afternoon. They were so amazing to me, so nice and welcoming, and so professional at the same time. They referred to me as “Ms. Miller” throughout the entire meeting. On the phone when we talked last week, Mr. Willette had suggested that I write up a brief proposal of possible ways NorthStar Enterprises could get involved with Vander, so I did, like, a whole presentation about what kinds of projects student council could use
help with. I started out trying to be realistic and modest in my first draft, like I said they could maybe provide hot chocolate for the volunteers who staff the outdoor drop-off sites for our winter clothing drive in the fall, or I suggested they could pay for student-designed, screen-printed T-shirts for the senior class to strengthen class unity and spirit. But when I showed my first draft to my mom, she suggested that I really try to dream big on the page, really aim high, because this meeting was my one chance to impress this large, significant, and, to be honest, very wealthy company, and I had to make my time with them count. So I went back and revised the proposal and I just went to town imagining everything I could think of that a company like NorthStar could possibly do to support our school, academically, artistically, and athletically. The proposal ended up being nine pages; I had to put it in a plastic sleeve. I titled it “VANDER’S DREAMS” in a 24-point font on the first page, and broke all my ideas down into short-term and long-term goals with, like, subheadings and charts. It was pretty amazing by the time I was done.

At the meeting, before I handed them the presentation, I gave Mr. Willette and Ms. Rinaldi a little talk introducing them to Vander as a school. I told them about Vander’s past, present, and future, and I talked about our college statistics, which are some of the best in the state, and I mentioned our several famous alumni, like best-selling
author of the Soul Searchers self-help books Marcy Kirby, nationally known cancer researcher Dr. Ernest Chang, and of course, Channel 8 meteorologist Don Storme. I made sure Mr. Willette and Ms. Rinaldi understood that investing in Vander is investing in the future, not just of our town and of our state but of our country.

Then I handed them the presentation.

I hate to say it, but they
loved
me. They were so into every word I said. They went nuts over the proposal—Mr. Willette had Ms. Rinaldi run off a bunch of color copies right then while I was sitting there. By the time the meeting was over, not only had Mr. Willette agreed to underwrite the Fall Formal—everything about it! food and entertainment and supplies and roving photographer and everything! all we have to do is use their name somehow in the title of the event!—he had also agreed to partner with Vander’s athletics department to improve the facilities and fields for our teams, and—this is the craziest, most amazing part—he had offered me an unpaid internship with the corporate communications department of NorthStar Enterprises. Seriously. Six to eight hours a week. He offered me a job, just based on my professional performance in this meeting.

I can safely say that this was one of the greatest afternoons of my life. And I wanted to tell Jesse about it so, so badly—it was all there, right on the tip of my tongue.
This whole thing has made me feel so hopeful about everything, and I could see that hope was what she needed to feel right then, in the bathroom, more than anything, and I was just dying to tell her about it.

But at the last minute I kept it general, and just talked about my hope for the year without going into specifics about NorthStar. We don’t exactly have a great track record when it comes to talking about things from the real world, me and Jesse. We have the most amazing connection two people could possibly have, it’s almost spiritual what’s between us, but we don’t really have that much in common outside of that connection. A couple of times I’ve tried to talk to her about real stuff, and each time I’ve tried to explain about something I’m doing that I really care about a lot, she’s said something totally hurtful and negative to me about it. I know she’s not
trying
to be hurtful to me, she just doesn’t have the broadest mind of anyone I know, put it that way.

An example I could give is when I got involved last year in student council’s campaign to bring healthier snack options into school to combat obesity, which is a killer. It wasn’t my idea, it was Heather Hughes’s idea, because her mom has diabetes and she has seen firsthand what the obesity epidemic can do to a person. But as soon as Heather proposed it in session I got on board, and I spearheaded a proposal to the school administration to petition
Handi Snak, Inc., the company that owns and maintains the snack machines in the cafeteria, to increase the selection of snacks they offer in the machines. I did all this research about what kinds of healthier options they could be offering the students at Vander, and this one Tuesday I was trying to tell Jesse how excited I was about the whole thing, and she had barely heard like three words from me before she interrupted and was like, “Why are you letting a corporation like Handi Snak tell you what’s healthy and what’s not? Why don’t you work with the people at the farmers’ market and bring in actual fresh fruits and vegetables from local farms, which would be organic and healthy and cheap?” And in my mind I was like okay, A) that’s a totally impractical idea because there’s no way to store the fresh fruits and vegetables, and also in the winter there aren’t any and also who’s going to be in charge of preparing and selling them, and B) thanks a lot for being totally negative and dismissive about this plan I worked on for like two months to do something positive for our school. I guess, like a lot of people in our town, Jesse has a tendency to just criticize things that she thinks are wrong—she doesn’t have any actual ideas or solutions for changing things she doesn’t like in the world. Personally, I’m not a whiner. I don’t believe in complaining about something if you don’t have a realistic plan for how to fix it. Organic fruit in the vending machines at Vander is
not
a realistic solution.
Plus, that day when we got into the fight about the healthy snacks, we barely got two minutes of make-out time total, and I was just like, Okay, this is
so
not worth it. This is the last time I try to talk to her about anything from real life.