The Difference Between You and Me Read online

  By Tuesday afternoon, when Jesse arrived at the handicapped bathroom on the second floor of the Minot Library, she was practically wall-eyed with sleep deprivation and panic. But in the end, the decision was made for her. The moment she saw Emily, the moment Emily reached for her hand, the words I have to tell you something vaporized from Jesse’s tongue. The only thing to do, it seemed to Jesse then, was to slip into Emily’s arms, pull out Emily’s ponytail, kiss down Emily’s open throat, and stay quiet.

  Now Jesse’s standing outside the door to Room A23, feeling like nothing could be worse than missing the beginning of this meeting and having to barge in with Esther after it’s already underway. Maybe she should just go inside and wait for Esther there. But Emily is almost certainly in there already, and the only fate worse than having to barge in disruptively with Esther is having to walk into that room, and come face-to-face with Emily, who has no idea she’s about to see her, alone.

  Because despite herself, despite the fear of exposure and the seriousness of her mission and the strong possibility that something disastrous is about to go down, knowing that Emily is so close right now fills Jesse with desire. Bold, uncontrollable desire, so that over and over again Jesse imagines flinging open the door to A23 and striding across the room to wherever Emily is sitting and grabbing her by the hand, hauling her to her feet, and dragging her out into the hall to kiss her. Again and again she imagines it: the shock on the faces of the other student council members, Emily’s stunned acquiescence, her stumbling along behind Jesse into the hall, the sweet feeling of her arms looping around Jesse’s neck as Jesse pushes her back against the lockers and—

  “Hey!” At last Esther trundles around the corner, open book in one hand by her side, tote thumping against her other side. Jesse hisses, “Hurry!” and beckons her with big circles, like a third-base coach waving a runner home. “You’re late!”

  “I was reading,” Esther says simply.

  Inside A23 the meeting hasn’t officially started, but the room is crowded and noisy with chatter. The desks have been configured in a big U shape, and the twelve members of student council are already seated at them, facing in. A bunch of other chairs have been set out in rows facing the desks, and ten or twelve kids are sitting there in the audience. Everybody is urgently talking to everybody else.

  Jesse’s eyes find Emily without even trying. She’s presiding over the U, seated right in the center, with a bunch of file folders and an open notebook spread out in front of her, and she’s leaning over to talk to Melissa Formosa, the pointy-nosed student council president. When she meets Jesse’s eye she stops talking mid-sentence. Her mouth hangs open, and she drifts away from Melissa, slowly sitting up straight in her chair. Melissa turns to follow Emily’s gaze and looks confusedly at Jesse, then back at Emily. Automatically, Jesse drops her eyes to the floor.

  “Over here,” Esther says, tugging Jesse by the sleeve to a pair of chairs in the last row of the audience section, directly under the old pull-down map of Europe that still shows the Soviet Union, big, pink, and sprawling. Before they’ve even sat down, Melissa is ineffectually calling the meeting to order.

  “Okay?” she pleads in her hollow, nasal voice. “Okay, people? We need to start, please?”

  Slowly, the chatter dies down.

  “Thanks, you guys,” Melissa whines. “Thanks for listening up. Okay, so we have a lot to get through today, right, Emily?”

  Emily nods, focusing fiercely on the papers in front of her. Jesse can feel Emily not looking at her as intensely as she would feel her looking at her.

  “Will you tell us what’s first on the agenda, Emily?”

  Emily looks up and addresses the room with a careful, assembled smile. “Hi, everyone. Our first action item today is the establishment of a spirit banner committee for the lacrosse tournament at the end of the month. It’s an away tournament, and we need volunteers to come to Maggie or Grace’s house this weekend and help get banners ready that can travel with the team on the bus.”

  In the front row of the audience, a kid with shoulder-length blond curls sticking out from under his striped ski hat raises his hand high.

  “We’re not taking comments from the audience yet,” Emily says briskly, barely looking at him.

  “Yeah, I have a question about the flyers that were posted?” he asks anyway.

  “We’ll take questions once we’ve proceeded through all our action items. There are actually thirteen items on the agenda today, so it might take a little while.”

  Even in this dumb environment, even in the middle of a U of dumb student council members, even saying dumb things like action items, Emily is so, so beautiful to Jesse. She’s pearly and golden and rosebud pink. Her cheeks are painfully soft, and her glossy hair—she’s wearing it down today—is just begging to be touched. Her long, kissable neck draws Jesse’s eye along it, the way it curves down, down, down all the way from her jawline into the crisp, white V of her open collar—

  “Can we, like, talk about the flyers before you talk about the other stuff on your list?” the curly-hat kid asks, and a bunch of other kids in the audience back him up.

  Emily turns to Melissa sharply. “Melissa, are we allowed to deviate from the agenda?” she asks. It’s such a transparent move—clearly she’s issuing a command, but disguising it as a query from a subordinate to a president.

  “Maybe, actually, today we should?” Melissa ventures cautiously, but Emily jumps right on this.

  “No, we can’t deviate from the agenda or we might never get all the issues on the list addressed,” she insists, her voice bright and brittle now. “The list has been planned for over three days. We have an obligation to deal with all these items.”

  Jesse has never seen Emily this close to losing her cool. And she’s seen her in some pretty compromising positions.

  “But people really want to talk about the flyers,” Melissa tries again, timidly.

  “Maybe we should put it to a vote.” Emily sweeps her gaze over her fellow council members. “Council?”

  “I think we totally need to talk about the StarMart thing,” a girl with chunky hipster glasses and a blunt, black bob says, and rapidly the rest of the council agrees.

  “Yeah, I think this is actually a major problem,” the skinny guy in a rugby shirt seated on Emily’s left says.

  “I had no idea we were even taking money from them,” says the tall girl at the end of the U of desks.

  Emily glares down into her binder. Jesse sees that, very slightly, she’s trembling.

  “All right,” Emily says after a beat. “All right, let’s revise the agenda so the NorthStar support question is now the first action item on the list.” She makes a couple of sharp notes on the paper in front of her.

  “Comments from the student body?” Melissa Formosa asks, and though Emily gives her a reproachful look, hands go up all around the room.

  “Yeah, are, like, the flyers true?” Curly-Hat asks.

  “What about them?” Emily shoots back.

  “Well, like, is it true that our school is being taken over by StarMart?”

  “Our school is not being taken over by StarMart,” Emily asserts firmly.

  Beside Jesse, Esther stands up.

  “Everything on the flyers is true,” Esther declares with a certain grandness. Jesse feels her cheeks flush. The whole room turns to look at Esther.

  “Excuse me, can you please raise your hand to be recognized by the council before you speak?” Emily asks crisply. The edges of her words are razor sharp.

  Esther raises her right hand perfunctorily, as if she’s being sworn in on a witness stand, and keeps talking. “The students of Vander High School need to know the truth about StarMart.”

  “Are you the one behind those flyers?” Emily asks Esther.

  “Yes, along with my—”

  “Well, I’m actually really glad you’re here this afternoon, so you can see firsthand how much damage they’ve already caused.”

  “
Damage?” Esther asks. “How can the truth cause damage?”

  “Well,” Emily explains hyper-calmly, just this side of condescendingly, “right now the posters are damaging the student council’s effort to build connections with our larger community. This is something student council has been working really hard on for a couple of months now, and NorthStar is a really important connection we’ve made, a really important potential resource for Vander, and it’s going to be really damaging to us if people start interfering in our relationship with NorthStar based on false or misleading information.”

  “There’s nothing false on the flyer.” Jesse feels herself stand up, hears herself speak. Her awareness is a beat behind her actions, so that she only realizes that she’s on her feet when Emily turns to look at her.

  Emily’s eyes narrow slightly.

  “Are you working with her?” Emily asks Jesse. The question is abrupt—too emotional, too personal—and it hangs oddly in the air between them, out of place in the public forum of Room A23.

  When Jesse meets Emily’s eye, she feels her voice drop away—down, down, down until it lands, far out of reach, at the bottom of her throat.

  “We’re partners,” Esther says in the space left by Jesse’s silence. Jesse sees a quick ripple of something—fear? resentment? rage?—pass through Emily’s otherwise calm face.

  “So, like, where did you guys get the information on the flyers?” Black-Haired-Bob Girl asks Esther and Jesse directly.

  Esther explains. “It’s easy to find out about StarMart and the things they do when they move into a new town. It’s all really well documented. You can look on the Internet, like on or many other different sites about—”

  “The Internet,” Emily interrupts. “Everybody knows you can’t trust what you read on the Internet.”

  “The statistics about local businesses are from an article in The New York Times,” Esther continues. “The stuff about sweatshops comes from Amnesty International. We brought a bibliography of our sources to pass around.” Esther addresses this to Jesse, prompting her, and somehow it breaks the silence spell Emily had cast over her. Her voice surges back into her throat again.

  “Yeah, I have flyers.” Jesse reaches into her bag and pulls out the ream of pink photocopies she brought with her. Her voice grows stronger as she speaks. “If you go to the website we have on here, you can sign our online petition. We believe that, as a public school, we shouldn’t be taking money from private corporations, especially ones that are in, like, disputes with our town government. You guys should seriously all sign the petition. And forward it to your friends.”

  “What was the address for that? Can you read it out?” Black-Haired-Bob Girl asks, her pen poised.

  Jesse opens her mouth to give the web address, but at that moment Emily catches her eye.

  The look Emily gives Jesse is baffled and betrayed. She seems to ask, silently, Why would you do this to me? In this second, Jesse feels the space between them collapse; she’s transported to the bathroom in the library, transported to a place where there is no distance between her body and Emily’s, where they are in perfect alignment, where they know each other extremely well and love each other exactly right. She’s transported, briefly, into the center of a perfect kiss.

  “Sprawlwatch dot net,” Esther supplies, since Jesse’s voice seems to have vanished again.

  “Yeah,” Jesse says hoarsely. She breaks Emily’s gaze to look at Esther. “Sprawlwatch dot net.”

  ***

  When Jesse comes stumbling out of the student council meeting, she is filled with more vibrant, swirling mixed feelings than she’s ever felt at one time before. Esther is ecstatic beside her, practically crowing with glee.

  “All of them,” Esther giggles breathlessly. “Every single one of those kids is signing that petition right now! You know they are.”

  “They were totally into it,” Jesse agrees.

  It’s a gorgeous afternoon, chilly and bright, with red, orange, and gold leaves fluttering hot against the blue sky all around them—the kind of crisp, high-definition fall weather Jesse loves. But her insides are a muddled blur.

  Esther’s right: every single one of those kids is busy forwarding that petition to their friends right now. Moments ago, when Esther and Jesse walked out of A23, every other kid who was not on student council went with them. No one had come to that meeting to make banners for the lacrosse tournament or figure out clever new ways to get kids to sell more fund-raising chocolate. Everyone was there to talk about getting StarMart out of Vander NOW!

  Everyone except Emily. In the end she shut down debate before it was even over—there were still kids who wanted to ask questions when Emily forced them all to move on to the next “action item,” or whatever she called it. She interrupted Esther in the middle of a sentence. She insulted their flyers. Jesse can’t even imagine what’s going to happen in the handicapped bathroom next Tuesday afternoon.

  “Hey,” Esther says, “let’s go get cocoa at Beverly Coffee! Don’t you want to? I feel like a giant hot cocoa with whipped cream and shaved chocolate right now.” She slips her arm companionably through the crook of Jesse’s elbow, and snugs Jesse close in a friendly squeeze.

  “Yeah,” Jesse says. “That sounds perfect.”

  Just then Jesse sees, from across the school’s wide front lawn, Wyatt stand up from the bench where he’s been sitting. Has he been waiting there for her since before school got out? Was she supposed to meet up with him today?

  As he walks toward them, he calls out, “Howdy,” in a relaxed voice. He’s still too far away for Jesse to tell whether he’s mad or not.

  “Hi!” she calls back, and gently disengages her arm from Esther’s. She uses it to wave at Wyatt once it’s free, as if to justify to Esther why she pulled away.

  As Wyatt gets closer, Jesse can see that his Western wear is in full swing now; under his navy-blue windbreaker, it appears he is wearing fringed chaps.

  “This is Esther,” Jesse almost shouts, too loud and too soon. There’s no reason for her to be yelling this introduction across such a distance, except that she’s somehow nervous to be making it and wants to get it over with soon.

  Wyatt keeps walking toward them, unhurried. “Wyatt Willette,” he says when he’s reached hand-shaking distance. He takes Esther’s hand in his.

  “This is Esther,” Jesse says again, gesturing redundantly. “She’s a ninth-grader. Esther, this is Wyatt. He’s homeschooled.”

  “That’s an activity, not an identity,” Wyatt explains suavely.

  “Nice to meet you.” Esther shakes Wyatt’s hand with tons of energy and no grace whatsoever. When she releases it, Jesse catches Wyatt looking down to inspect his open palm, as if Esther had altered it somehow by shaking it.

  “So what kept you kids so long?” Wyatt looks Jesse over, assessing her coolly. “I thought I would catch you on your way out of school. Too bad about your phone being broken.”

  “My phone’s not—” Jesse starts, then bites her lip. “Sorry.”

  “Yeah, I thought after eight messages I should just come find you. Make sure you were still alive.”

  Jesse looks down at the ground.

  “We were just fighting for justice in there!” Esther exults, and laughs her strange little bark-whoop laugh.

  Wyatt raises his eyebrows archly. “Fighting for justice? Inside the halls of Vander High? I find that hard to believe.”

  “Oh, it’s true! You should have seen us. We brought the student council to its knees just now.”

  “Really? Student council?” Wyatt purrs, smooth as a milk shake. “Well, that’s like slaying a dragon, isn’t it? That’s news. I expect to read about that in The New York Times tomorrow morning.”

  “Wyatt—” Jesse begins, but Esther laughs, undeterred.

  “Yeah, okay, that might seem like small potatoes to you, but how do you think big things get done? One little bit at a time, right? Hey, Jesse and I are going to Beverly Coffee to get some cocoa
, do you want to come with us?”

  Wyatt meets Jesse’s eye for a moment.

  “Oh,” he says, careful and polite, “I do appreciate the offer, but I’m afraid I have to visit local thrifting establishment Rose’s Turn this afternoon. I thought my friend Jesse might join me, as she often has in the past. But I see you two have plans. That’s fine. I don’t want to intrude.”

  “You wouldn’t be intruding,” Esther insists.

  “No, come with us. Please come with us?” Jesse urges him.

  Wyatt squints at Jesse for a second now. “It’s tempting,” he says, “but I’m on the verge of a breakthrough with my new Charles Lindbergh look, and I don’t think I can wait another day to find the right aviator scarf. Plus, I don’t want to miss Marla’s shift. Last time I was there she gave me a free pair of tassel loafers. You girls have fun.”

  Wyatt turns and begins walking away, down the access road that leads in the opposite direction from town. And in the opposite direction from Rose’s Turn, Jesse realizes.

  She calls after him, “I’ll totally come with you next week!”

  Without turning around, Wyatt lifts his hand to wave.

  13

  Emily

  I couldn’t wait for next Tuesday—almost an entire week—to talk to Jesse about what she did. I felt like her showing up to my meeting was the beginning of something very, very bad, and I could tell that if I didn’t nip it in the bud, it would be out of control in only a few seconds. So I emailed her—the first time I had ever used the email address she gave me almost a year ago, actually—and asked her if we could move our regular meeting up from Tuesday to Friday afternoon. She emailed back one word: “Okay.”