The Difference Between You and Me Read online

  “Thanks,” says Jesse, and steps inside.

  It’s so dark inside Esther’s low-ceilinged house that it takes Jesse’s eyes a second to adapt. After a moment, she makes out, through an arched doorway to her left, a living room drenched in murk, thick brown shades pulled down over the windows, one small lamp casting a pool of stained yellow light in the far corner. The room is heaped—heaped—all over with piles and piles and piles of stuff, some of it reaching almost all the way to the ceiling. There are cascading stacks of newspapers, wads of fabric (clothes? sheets? tablecloths? towels?), windup toys, coffee mugs, leaning towers of paperback books, abandoned dishes, a stepladder, shoe boxes full of lightbulbs and extension cords, a porcelain figurine of two swans kissing, a toaster on top of a turned-off TV. In the corner is an old-fashioned bonnet hair dryer that looks like a combination chaise longue and electric chair—a cracked vinyl seat with a silver helmet attached to an extension arm above it. Somewhere under the mountains of stuff, there seem to be a sofa and a couple of armchairs, but the furniture is just a suggestion under the drifts of objects—the hint of land under a heavy snow.

  “The kitchen’s this way,” Esther says mildly, as if she hadn’t just ushered Jesse into one of the most astonishing houses she’s ever seen in her life. “I thought we could get a snack and then go up to my room to work.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “We can go up the back stairs from the kitchen.” Esther leads Jesse along the narrow path that snakes through the overstuffed living room. “And don’t worry about my dad, he’s fine.”

  Only then does Jesse notice that there’s a man on the couch, inches away from where she’s standing. He’s curled up on his side with his back facing the room, wedged into the crush of afghans, pillows, and magazines that cram the sofa: a sleeping giant in a nest of stuff. In a startled moment, Jesse takes in the curved, sharp knobs of his spine through his T-shirt, the droopy behind of his boxer shorts, the dirty soles of his long, white sweatsocks. He shifts a little as they pass and lets out a rumbling sleep-sigh. Jesse hurries after Esther, away from his too-live, shuddering body.

  “He’s just napping,” Esther says, her voice light but a little strained.

  “Oh yeah,” says Jesse. “Yeah.”

  “I know it’s kind of a mess, sorry,” Esther continues. “I didn’t really get a chance to clean up before you came.”

  “Kind of a mess?” Jesse thinks. It would take a week of solid work to clean this place up. But she says only, “No, it’s fine.”

  They pass through a dining room as cavelike as the living room—it seems that there must be a table and chairs in there, but it’s hard for Jesse to tell because of the mixed-up mass of board games, bottles, books, and table lamps that’s piled on top of them—and into the kitchen, which is brighter, more open. The kitchen walls are yellow, the windows are dressed with little white café curtains, and although every surface is covered with crumbs and smears and sticky rings, and the sink is piled high with dirty dishes, at least there’s one little breakfast table that’s clear, not smothered in newspapers and junk. Jesse realizes that she’s been sort of holding her breath since the moment she walked into Esther’s house. She inhales now, and the faint perfume of sour milk fills her nose.

  “Peanut butter and jelly okay?” Esther asks. Peanut butter and jelly—particularly peanut butter and jelly made by someone else in a strange, messy kitchen—is one of the grossest snacks Jesse can imagine. But she says vaguely, “Yeah, sure, great.”

  Esther moves around the kitchen briskly, unself-consciously. She swipes up a filmy juice glass and a cereal bowl with a leftover pool of milk and floating Cheerios in it off the countertop and fits them in, Jenga-style, to the tower of dishes in the sink. Then she gets to work pulling plates, knives, and sandwich ingredients out of the cabinets and fridge.

  “I’m glad you came over,” Esther mentions to the countertop, not looking at Jesse.

  Jesse waits for Esther to explain why it’s helpful or practical or useful to have Jesse there. When she doesn’t add anything after a moment, Jesse answers, “Yeah, me too.”

  In her pocket, Jesse feels her phone buzz. She checks it quickly: Wyatt. Not now, she thinks, and dismisses the call.

  Unsure of what to do with herself, Jesse stands in front of the big mustard-yellow fridge and peruses its surface. The fridge door is a cheery collage of photos, receipts, menus from local restaurants, and happy magnets (an apple with a grinning, googly-eyed worm coming out of it, a blue plastic thermometer in the shape of the state of Michigan, a pig with a bandanna on its head and the words GO HOG WILD! painted on its pink side), but as she peers at it longer, Jesse gets the funny sense that this fridge is a kind of museum exhibit—no one has stuck anything new up here for a long, long time. One of the menus tacked under the map of Michigan is for Martinelli’s Pizza, which closed at least two years ago; Bedazzlers Nail Salon is there now, where Jesse’s mom gets her only-in-the-summertime pedicures. All of the photographs on the fridge are of Esther, but she’s no more than ten or eleven years old in any of them. There’s five-year-old Esther in a little green two-piece bathing suit at the beach, squinting seriously and holding up a pink plastic shovel. There’s eight-year-old Esther in a snowsuit and mittens, grinning and shaking the stick-hand of a tipsy-looking, half-melted snowman. There’s a school picture of Esther from maybe sixth grade, her braids in exactly the same disarray as they are now, her eyes wide—almost startled—above her broad, tiny-toothed smile.

  “You’re so cute in these pictures,” Jesse offers, but Esther doesn’t respond. She’s working on the sandwiches with what Jesse now recognizes is her customary intensity, digging into the peanut butter jar as if she’s stabbing a wild animal, then spreading the peanut butter so fiercely that the bread tears a little under the attack of her knife. Her lips move as she reaches for the jelly, around silent words that Jesse can’t make out.

  Jesse’s phone buzzes again against her thigh, and she reaches in to get rid of the call without even taking it out of her pocket.

  When the two tattered sandwiches are ready, Esther leads Jesse up the back stairs to her room. Jesse’s bracing for it to be a dark, claustrophobic den like the downstairs, but it turns out to be tidy and light, with slanted ceilings, dormer windows, packed-tight bookshelves against almost every wall, and a big area over her desk that’s wallpapered with overlapping images, all of them old-fashioned paintings of girls on horseback, girls pointing into the future, girls holding swords, girls sobbing, girls praying, girls with halos, girls lashed with rope to wooden stakes, girls surrounded by angels.

  “Who are all those girls?” Jesse asks, drawn to the wall.

  “That’s all one girl.” Esther looks at Jesse warily. “That’s Joan of Arc.”

  “Oh.”

  “You know about Joan of Arc, right?” Esther sets the sandwiches down and turns on her clunky old desktop computer. It beeps twice, loud and angry, and whirrs to life, the screen blinking awake.

  “Sort of.” Jesse smiles apologetically.

  “You don’t know about Joan of Arc?”

  Jesse shrugs. “I mean, basically.”

  “How can you not know about Joan of Arc?” Esther almost shouts, then sighs dramatically. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, hardly anybody really knows about her. But you of all people should know about Joan!”

  “Why me of all people?”

  Esther sputters. “Uh, because she was a girl soldier who dressed like a boy and led an army of rebels into battle?”

  “That sounds awesome.”

  “It was awesome! It’s ridiculous that you don’t know about her. I get so upset when people don’t know her story.” Shaking her head in exasperation, Esther crosses to the bookshelf by her bed and pulls out a long, slim hardback picture book. It’s slightly warped and lightly browned at the edges. In 1920s-style Art Deco lettering, it says Joan of Arc: The Story of a Saint on the cover. “Take this home and read it,” Esther commands, and Jesse a
ccepts the book. “If she’s not your new personal idol by the time you’re done with this book, I’ll…”

  “What?” Jesse challenges her, smiling.

  Esther doesn’t smile. “I don’t know, but it’ll be a serious problem between us. And please be extremely careful with this book when you handle it. It’s an antique.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Tentatively, with as much care as she can muster, Jesse goes to open the book, but Esther reaches out and pinches it shut.

  “Not now,” she instructs. “We have research to do. Put it away in your bag.”

  Wordlessly, Jesse does as she’s told. As she slips the book into her backpack, Esther settles herself at the desk in front of her computer.

  In her pocket, Jesse’s phone buzzes a third time.

  “Do you have to get that?” Esther asks a little impatiently. “Someone obviously really wants to talk to you.”

  Jesse opens her phone just long enough to see that it’s Wyatt before she shuts it off.

  “No,” she says. “It’s no one. I’m turning it off.”

  “All right.” Esther clicks open her Internet browser and chuckles a little. “We’re coming for you, StarMart,” she says with unusual relish.

  Jesse is delighted. “You sound like an evil villain.”

  “Oh no,” corrects Esther, turning to Jesse with her dead serious look on again. “They’re the villains. We’re the heroes of this story.”

  ***

  What the Internet will teach you about StarMart:

  One: That the reason it can sell its products so cheaply (only three dollars for a shirt?!) is because it manufactures them in places in the world like Bangladesh or Honduras where the laws are so unfair to workers that you can get away with paying people only a few cents a day for ten hours of work in a hot, filthy factory.

  Two: That even here in the US, StarMart pays its employees so poorly that more than half of them are on welfare or have to get food stamps or other government assistance. They can’t afford to pay for basic food and medical care, even though they’re working full-time for StarMart. And any time the workers in one StarMart store try to come together and form a union so they can bargain for better wages, the company threatens to close down the store, or just fires them all and replaces them with new underpaid workers.

  Three: That NorthStar Enterprises—which is the big company that runs all of the StarMart and StarBasket Select and ShootingStar Bulk Shopping Club stores—gives tons of money to conservative politicians who make laws that benefit big businesses. Their biggest contribution every year in this area is to State Senator Candace Reese-Allen, who famously cast the deciding vote against legalizing gay marriage and who was quoted in the paper as saying that gay people are “biological errors” who are “dangerous to society” and “hateful to God.”

  Four: That when a StarMart moves to the outskirts of your town, it quickly drives all the small stores in the center of town out of business, because they can’t afford to compete with StarMart’s insanely low prices. A lot of times, after StarMart has moved in and killed all the family-owned businesses in one town, they’ll close down that store and open a new one in the next town over, because the new town will offer them fresh bonuses and tax breaks to build a new store. And the first town is left with nothing: no small businesses, no StarMart. A ghost town where a thriving community used to be.

  Five: That StarMart opens a new store somewhere in the world every two days.

  Jesse and Esther sit, stunned, staring at the computer.

  “They’re like… the Death Star of stores,” Jesse murmurs. “It’s like they only exist to ruin people’s towns and take their money. It’s like they don’t even care what they do to the world.”

  “Corporations don’t have consciences,” Esther explains. “They don’t have souls. They don’t care about things. They only exist for one purpose: to make money.”

  “Well, we can’t let that money touch our school. I mean, clearly. We need a plan.”

  “Posters,” Esther says.

  “Posters,” Jesse echoes. She opens her notebook to a blank page to start taking notes for ideas.

  “We’ll make them yellow, the StarMart color. And we need to go to the next student council meeting and make a presentation.”

  Jesse’s stomach lurches.

  “Student council? Do we have to?”

  “Of course. They’re the ones running the dance, aren’t they? The ‘Official StarMart Prom Night,’ or whatever it’s called now?”

  “‘Starry Starry Night,’” Jesse says dully, recalling the flyers announcing the dance that went up around school at the end of the week.

  Jesse looks down at the floor, picks listlessly at the braided rags in Esther’s rug. She pictures herself standing in a room full of student council kids, all looking at her while she looks at Emily. She pictures Emily at the center of the room, giving Jesse her brightest blank smile, banging her gavel on the desk to make Jesse sit down and shut up.

  “Right. So if it’s their dance, we have to go talk to them about it,” Esther says patiently. “Obviously.”

  “Can’t we just go directly to the principal?”

  “If we start by going to Mr. Greil’s office alone, just the two of us, we won’t have any power. We need to develop awareness and solidarity among the student body. We should really start a petition. Oh! We’ll start a petition!” Esther bounces a little in her desk chair with excitement. “The student council meeting is the perfect place for us to start getting the word out about it.”

  “I just…” Jesse feels two tides moving through her simultaneously, a surge of wanting to tell someone about Emily—an urgent, almost physical wave of needing to confess—and a grinding-to-a-halt feeling in her throat, as if her words are drying up and evaporating before they can even reach her tongue. “I just… I just…” she struggles.

  “Do you have some kind of allergy to the student council? Why don’t you want to go to this meeting?” Esther looks at her with open curiosity.

  “I just… hate public speaking,” Jesse says finally, unconvincingly.

  “Oh,” Esther says. “Well, fine. I mean, Mother Teresa used to be afraid of public speaking and she got over it, but that’s fine. I’ll do all the talking. You can just stand there and hand out literature.” It’s a compromise; Jesse doesn’t see how she can keep objecting once Esther offers this.

  “Okay,” she agrees.

  “Okay. So first thing Monday morning we’ll put up posters with, like, bullet points about StarMart and their relationship to Vander, saying that everybody who wants to learn more should come to this week’s student council meeting. Then we’ll write up an information sheet with all the facts on it that we can hand to people when they come to the meeting on Wednesday. Then we’ll start a petition that we can bring to Mr. Greil.”

  “Cool.” Jesse nods. “That’s cool. It’s a lot of work, though.”

  “Yes, I like to work,” Esther says briskly. “I like to do anything that gets me out of the house.”

  WAKE UP, VANDER! SERIOUSLY!

  Say NO to StarMart in Our School!

  DID YOU KNOW that StarMart is trying to move into our town?

  DID YOU KNOW that when StarMart moves into a town, it makes local businesses close down, takes good jobs away from people, and is bad for the environment?

  DID YOU KNOW that StarMart uses unfair sweatshop labor in poor countries to make its cheap products?

  DID YOU KNOW THAT STARMART HAS STRUCK A DEAL TO PAY FOR SOME OF VANDER’S ATHLETIC EXPENSES AND ALSO THIS YEAR’S FALL FORMAL?

  DANCING AT THE STARMART FALL FORMAL IS LIKE DANCING ON THE BACKS OF SWEATSHOP WORKERS!

  DANCING AT THE STARMART FALL FORMAL IS LIKE DANCING ON THE GRAVES OF LOCAL BUSINESSES!

  IS THAT THE KIND OF DANCING

  LET STUDENT COUNCIL KNOW HOW YOU FEEL!

  COME TO THE MEETING ON WEDNESDAY!

  OR GO TO WWW.SPRAWLWATCH.NET!

  12

  Jesse
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  Jesse hovers a little ways down the hall from the door to Room A23 at 2:42 p.m. on Wednesday, half waiting impatiently for Esther to show up, and half trying to pretend that what’s about to happen isn’t actually about to happen. Her whole body is buzzing with a fizzy mix of terror and eagerness; she bounces up and down and flexes her toes inside her boots, using every spare centimeter of wiggle room they allow. The student council meeting is supposed to start at 2:45. T minus three minutes to Emily vs. Esther.

  It’s all gone according to plan so far. The posters went up super early on Monday morning—Jesse and Esther managed to slip into school at the crack of dawn with the custodians, so they were able to sweep through the building unhindered by Snediker, blitzing posters onto every wall with rapid, preplanned precision. (No precious seconds were lost fumbling for tape this time—Jesse came prepared with two rolls of it clipped to her belt loop on a carabiner, like a Boy Scout going for his Office Supplies badge.) By the time first period was over on Monday, the whole school was humming lightly with talk about StarMart, kids questioning each other in the halls about the dance, Mr. Kennerley bringing it up as a case study in Jesse’s social studies class. Between sixth and seventh periods, Esther caught Jesse’s eye in the hall and flashed her a thrilling, significant smile—StarMart out of Vander NOW! had already become a couple kids’ status updates, and Jesse could feel the whole thing simmering, gathering steam, about to take off.

  But on Monday night, Jesse lay in bed wide awake for hours, her eyes glazed open, her mind racing with thoughts about Emily. Around and around she went. First she thought, I have to warn her. I have to tell her that I’m about to come in and bomb her next student council meeting. Then she thought, No, she’s not going to love that I’m doing this. Then: Maybe Esther’s right—maybe Emily will totally be on our side once she finds out the truth about StarMart. Maybe she’s already decided to cut StarMart out of the dance now that she’s seen the posters! And then: What am I thinking, remember the Handi Snak incident? There’s no way Emily’s going to let StarMart go so easily. And then finally: Anyway, what if I tell her what we’re doing and she refuses to kiss me? What if she refuses to ever kiss me again? I can’t tell her. I have to tell her. I can’t tell her.