The Difference Between You and Me Read online

  Jesse wishes—so much wishes—she could tell Wyatt about the encounter with Emily today. For almost a year now she’s been managing to keep Emily a secret. Wyatt doesn’t even know she exists. It’s been excruciating—almost impossible—concealing this huge part of her life, but it seems even more impossible to start telling him about it now. How would she even bring it up? It’s been going on for so long and it’s so terrible, what Jesse’s agreed to. There’s no way Wyatt would let it continue if he knew.

  “Oh, something happened?” Wyatt is sympathetic. “Something digestive?”

  “Ew, no!” Jesse cries. “Gross! I just, it’s so dumb, I had masking tape in my bag and I was trying to get it out so I could put up my manifestos during the pep rally and I couldn’t find it and then the bell rang and I was stuck there. That’s all that happened.”

  Wyatt groans. “Not the manifestos! That’s why you got thrown in jail, for those ridiculous manifestos? Beloved, when are you going to figure out that this little art project of yours is a colossal waste of time?”

  Jesse breathes, wills herself to stay calm. This is the biggest point of contention between them. If she had been thinking straight, she would have made up a totally different story about getting busted and avoided having to discuss this with Wyatt for eight millionth time. But she was not thinking straight. She was distracted by making up a story about being distracted by something other than Emily Miller.

  “Okay, first of all,” Jesse says, forcing herself to stay cool, “they are not a ‘little art project.’ They are a series of serious political wake-up calls that I post around school because I’m trying to change things there and make the world a safer place for weirdos like you and me.”

  “I’m not—” Wyatt starts, but Jesse cuts him off.

  “Yeah, yeah, you’re not a weirdo, I know, and second of all, not that I want to miss our Howard date, I totally don’t, but I do actually think it’s worth getting thrown in jail for a cause you believe is important.”

  “Mm-hm,” Wyatt murmurs. “Have you even started The Fountainhead yet?”

  “I told you I’m not going to read that book. What is the matter with you that your idol is Ayn Rand, why can’t you worship Cher or Judy Garland like any normal gay boy?”

  “Because I don’t have a low opinion of myself,” Wyatt says breezily, and barrels on. “If you would read the book like I’ve asked you to politely, you would understand where you’re going wrong. Miss Rand teaches us that egoism is the highest form of enlightenment. Trying to help other people is a twisted form of condescension, it makes people into dependent babies. And anyway, practically no one is smart enough to understand a ‘serious political wake-up call’ when they get one. The masses want to stay ignorant. And those masses? In that school? I’ve never seen a group of idiots so profoundly idiotic and so determined to stay that way. Why do you think I had to leave?”

  “Because you couldn’t get Rob Strong to stop tormenting you.”

  “Partly.” From seventh grade until the beginning of last year, Wyatt was engaged in a long, slow, torturous war with Rob Strong, varsity wide receiver and king of auto shop. Something about Wyatt—his delicacy, his highly unusual outfits, the frustrating way he showed no fear even when he was about to get pounded—made Rob want to exterminate him. Eventually, it became clear that no amount of adult intervention was going to change their dynamic, and since neither Snediker nor Mr. Greil, the principal, was able to control Rob, Wyatt’s mom gave into Wyatt’s lifelong wish to be emancipated from school and pulled him, right at the beginning of ninth grade.

  A lot of things had been changing in Jesse’s world when Wyatt left. Her mother had just started cancer treatments, and Jesse was spending more time alone at home. And with Wyatt gone at school, she was alone a lot there, too. Since seventh grade, she had had almost all her classes with Wyatt. They had walked to school together almost every morning and hung out almost every afternoon. When Wyatt’s mom took him out, it felt to Jesse like Wyatt had been her clothes, in a way, and now that he was gone she was walking around naked, exposed and alone in the halls of school.

  It was then that she started working seriously on her manifestos. Pretty soon after that, she accidentally kissed Emily Miller for the first time.

  It would have been impossible to keep Emily a secret if Wyatt had been there in school with her. But it didn’t take long for him to lose interest in Vander after he stopped going there every day. In the beginning, he still asked about whether Mr. DiNapoli had worn the red loose baggy sweater or the blue loose baggy sweater that day, or if they’d had the excellent Tater Tots in the à la carte line at the cafeteria, or what kind of polo shirt Justin Hasaki-Bernstein had had on in Spanish. But after only a few weeks, Wyatt started to act like the people Jesse was talking about were characters in some foreign-language soap opera, remote and unreal, instead of the actual flesh-and-blood humans who populated her real life, all day, every day.

  This year, Wyatt doesn’t even know half of Jesse’s teachers. He’s not reading Bleak House or Their Eyes Were Watching God. He doesn’t care about the new schedule change that turns either fourth or fifth period into a long lunch every third day, confusing the hell out of the entire school. When Jesse complains about the new schedule, Wyatt sighs and says things like, “It’s a shame when little things have to take up so much of your time and attention.” He doesn’t get that this schedule change is not a little thing—not if you have hideously un-fun trigonometry and hideously dull Foundations of Western Culture during fourth and fifth periods (Jesse does).

  One thing that hasn’t changed is their favorite afternoon activity. One of Wyatt’s main hobbies—second only to following the stock market online—is the construction of what he calls “sartorial personae,” costumey outfits built around interesting pieces of clothing he finds at Rose’s Turn, a dark little hole-in-the-wall thrift shop tucked under the train bridge down on Route 9. Wyatt will find a curious garment (a plaid blazer, say) and gradually build an iconic outfit around it, adding other items and accessories (lime green slacks, argyle socks, a salmon-colored polyester button-down shirt, gold Scorpio-sign medallion), and refining the effect until he’s worked out a complete persona (Golf Course Lady-Killer). Then this will become his uniform for a while—he’ll wear it every day for a few weeks or months, until he gets bored with it and starts building another persona. Last year he spent time as 1960s Corporate Executive, Ex-Marine, Punk-Rock Street Thug, Mozart in Amadeus, and Friendly Grandpa, feeling them out until they were just right, then abandoning them. Lately he’s been working on a sort of gay Hugh Hefner look—velveteen smoking jacket with a cigarette burn in the sleeve, ascot, fake-silk pajama bottoms, Isotoner slippers.

  As long as they’ve been friends, Jesse has been going with him to Rose’s Turn at least once a week, usually on Wednesday afternoons, since Marla, the college girl who works the register on Wednesdays, is super chill and lets them take an unlimited number of items into the dressing room at one time. Jesse has even found a few choice items for herself on certain Wednesdays, though Wyatt rarely approves of her selections. The best thing she ever found was an insanely awesome light blue tuxedo from the ’70s—ruffled satin shirt, lapels as wide as surfboards, satin racing stripe down the side of each leg, and flappingly huge bell-bottom pants—so wide that her fisherman’s boots fit easily inside. “I cannot permit you to pair those boots with that pantsuit,” Wyatt had said at the time. “The boots or the pants alone are bad enough, but together they are an abomination in the sight of God.”

  “These pants were made for these boots,” Jesse had argued. “That’s why they call them boot cut!”

  “I just wish you could spend your unique, brilliant energy in a more productive way,” Wyatt continues now. “There are a few very extraordinary people in the world—of whom you and I are, of course, two—who strive for greatness in all things, and the way we do this is not by telling other people what to do, it’s by setting an exceptional example and li
ving brilliantly and getting everything we can get and ignoring everybody else. Anyway, that’s what I’m going to do.”

  “Yes, I know you are.”

  “I’m going to get my GED by the end of this year and go to MIT and graduate a year early and start my own nanotech company and make microscopic cell phones that you implant in people’s brain stems and be the youngest person ever to make the Forbes top ten wealthiest Americans list.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “When I’m married to my gorgeous, brain-surgeon husband who loves to cook, you can come stay with us and our two chocolate labs at our beachfront house in Malibu.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And I was thinking,” Wyatt continues, serious now, as if he’s given what he’s about to say a great deal of thought, “there should be one room in our guesthouse that’s specifically designed for you, and no one but you can stay there. And we’ll have, like, copies of all your favorite books on the shelves and a mini-fridge with all your favorite snacks in it, and you can come anytime you want to and stay as long as you want. If you don’t have a job or if you drop out of college or something you can come stay there indefinitely.”

  “Thanks.”

  “For years, even. You can, like, live there. We’ll be so happy to have you.”

  “Thanks, Wy.”

  Wyatt sighs. Jesse pictures him rolling over onto his back on his—always—neatly made bed.

  “Are you in your Hef-wear tonight?” she asks.

  “Western,” he says tonelessly. “I’m starting a new John Wayne thing. I can’t believe I have to spend two hours with Howard without you there.” Wyatt’s bossy Ayn Rand voice has subsided. He sounds tired now, and small. “I wish you hadn’t climbed out that idiot window.”

  “I’m sorry.” Jesse feels a sick-guilty knot twist in her stomach. She can’t stand the thought of Wyatt in his thrift-store Western wear sitting on that spindly metal chair at that wobbly round table in that dimly lit café, opposite coldhearted Howard, with no one to sit between them and absorb the bad energy.

  “Hey,” she offers hopefully, “how about I tell you the knock-knocks I was going to tell him, so you can distract him yourself if things gets tense.”

  “Okay,” Wyatt says balefully. “Not that it’ll help.”

  “Knock knock,” Jesse begins.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Interrupting cow.”

  “Interrupting—”

  “MOO!” Jesse yells into the phone.

  A pause. She can hear Wyatt rolling his eyes to the ceiling.

  “Terrible,” he says, smiling. “Terrible.”

  4

  Emily

  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.)