The Difference Between You and Me Page 4

  I sent the final draft of the letter out two weeks ago and I’ve already gotten three positive responses. Betty Horn from Horn of Plenty Bakery said she would donate five hundred Death by Chocolate Brownie Bites on presentation platters (sayonara, Costco-brand cheese curls!). Laurie Meloni from Buns of Steel Boot Camp and Cross-Training Gym said she would donate a sampler of Krav Maga and mixed martial arts classes suitable for beginners that we can raffle off at the event. And Howard Willette, director of corporate communications for a Stonington-based company called NorthStar Enterprises, said I should come in and meet with him face-to-face so we can discuss possible ways for their firm to get involved with Vander.

  I mean, this is incredible. I actually flipped out for a second when I got the NorthStar email. I actually cried a little. I’ve never been to a professional corporate meeting before, and I’m so excited to go in person to the offices of NorthStar Enterprises and represent Vander and our student body and meet with someone who might actually be able to help us take things to the next level. I feel like, in all honesty, I’m exactly the right person to build this relationship.

  When I think back on it now, last year’s Fall Formal was really an incredible turning point for me. It was the first time I understood that I could have both Jesse and the rest of my life and one didn’t have to destroy the other. It was the first time I realized that corporate sponsorship could change the whole way student council does business. And at the end of the night, as I was slow dancing the last dance before clean-up in Michael’s arms, I told him I was going to run for student council president this fall, and he said he would support me and my dreams no matter what. He told me I should always shoot for the stars.

  We campaigned really hard this September—I’m really proud of how hard me and Michael worked. And even though Melissa Formosa got president, and I only ended up getting vice president because Julie Dressel quit at the last minute to focus on soccer, everything worked out perfectly in the end. Vice president has turned out to be the best possible role for me. It lets me do a ton of work behind the scenes that actually has a huge impact on the school, work that I might not have time to do if I were president. This corporate sponsorship idea is just one example. Now that I’ve been vice president for a couple of months, I’ve learned that a lot of the real power in school happens behind closed doors, where the general public doesn’t even see it. I’ve realized that I’m right where I want to be.

  5

  Jesse

  It’s so early there’s still a silvery sheen of dew on the grass around Vander High. The Saturday morning sun is a puddle in the dingy sky, and Jesse stands in its watery light watching her mother’s car recede down the access road away from school. She has five bucks, her phone, her notebook, a pen, and her Swiss Army Knife in the pockets of her cargo pants and a crumpled sack lunch in her hand. She didn’t watch her mother pack it, but she’s guessing it’s the health-food version of death-row cuisine: five rice crackers in a used Ziploc bag, soggy bulgur-wheat salad in a curry-stained Tupperware container, two leathery dried apricots in a paper towel, as appetizing as a pair of shriveled human ears. “Enjoy,” her mother said to her grimly as she handed it to her through the passenger’s-side window. “Call me if they violate your human rights. I’ll see you at five.”

  It’s weird to be at school on a Saturday. Empty of inhabitants, it feels creepy somehow, like an abandoned factory, a ghost town. The reflective windows look dead to Jesse, concealing nothing behind them but desks, blackboards, and silence.

  Jesse sits down on the damp wooden bench under the crab-apple tree by the side door. She’s supposed to meet the ASP supervisor there “promptly at 8:00 a.m.,” the disciplinary ticket reads in Snediker’s unnervingly tiny, square-cornered handwriting. The bench is deeply grooved with gouged-out graffiti—LOVE YOU MATT—SK8 OR DON’T—JIZBIZ WAZ HERE—SENIORS 4EVA—and Jesse fingers the smooth bullet of the Swiss Army Knife in her pocket, imagining for a moment what it would feel like to carve JH LOVES EM into the bench. She closes her hand around the knife, then feels a hot flush of embarrassment even thinking about doing such a thing. She pulls her hand out of her pocket, wiggles her toes around vigorously inside her boots to distract herself from the thought of Emily.

  A car turns onto the access road and wends its way toward Jesse, a beat-up pea-green hatchback, crazy with hippie bumper stickers, traveling in a cloud of bouncy music that gets louder and clearer the closer it comes. It accelerates to a squealing stop in front of Jesse’s bench and the passenger’s-side window rolls down jerkily.

  “Halberstam?” a small, bearded, long-haired elf in a black ski hat yells out cheerfully from the driver’s seat. Jesse nods.

  “Where’s Meinz?” he yells. Jesse shrugs, not sure what this means. The music—plinkety, happy, banjo-y—is up so loud on the car stereo that even from twenty feet away Jesse can make out every word. “I will get by,” the singers promise in crooned unison.

  “Parking,” the elf yells, and waves enthusiastically, like a little kid. Automatically, Jesse waves back, then thinks, Why are we waving?

  The hippiemobile pulls away, heading for the side parking lot, and at the same time up the access road a figure comes loping, hunched over, hurrying. As it gets closer, Jesse can see it’s a girl. She’s wearing a shapeless navy-blue overcoat and a long black skirt that reaches halfway down her shins, and she’s carrying a big lumpy black tote bag over one shoulder. Her dark hair is braided in two rough braids, the left one substantially thicker than the right. As she runs—almost lurches—up the hill, her canvas slip-on shoes fall half off her feet with every step. Jesse recognizes her dimly from around school, but she’s never seen her up close. The girl comes to a panting stop in front of the bench, her cheeks rosy from exertion, coarse hairs flying loose from her braids, which seem somehow to be undoing themselves from their rubber bands in real time as Jesse looks at them. The girl’s eyes are cool blue in her overheated face. She doesn’t smile.

  “ASP?”

  Jesse nods.

  “I’m Esther.”

  “Jesse.”

  “Is Huckle not here yet?”

  “Who’s Huckle?”

  The girl looks around her impatiently.

  “I ran here and Huckle’s not even here yet?”

  Esther blows the hair off her damp forehead, wipes the sweat off her upper lip broadly with the sleeve of her coat—somehow the gesture reminds Jesse of an old man—and sits down heavily on the bench next to Jesse, dropping her tote bag on the ground and immediately slipping her bare feet out of her black canvas shoes. The heat from her body hits Jesse in a wave. She smells sweet and clammy, like red peppers left too long in a Tupperware container.

  “He’ll be here,” Esther assures Jesse, not looking at her. “He sometimes has time-management issues.”

  Esther rummages in the tote bag by her feet and pulls out a thick, battered paperback book. She brings her legs up under her so she’s sitting cross-legged on the bench and tucks her skirt around them so her knees are completely covered, like a statue of the Buddha. She opens the book with her left hand and holds it right up to her face to read, chewing at the nail of her right thumb absently. As suddenly as she arrived here, she’s gone—disappeared into the book that she holds five inches away from her face. Jesse can’t help but stare at her.

  Esther bites down hard on the skin at the corner of her thumbnail, gnaws at it, sucks blood out of it. Jesse blinks.

  “Hey, miscreants,” calls the elf from behind them. Jesse turns to see him waving from the corner of the school building, holding a pair of rakes with his left hand. “Let’s get cracking.” He grins.

  “Huckle,” Esther says, an explanation. “Our supervisor.” She snaps her book shut and shoves it down deep into her tote bag, slips back into her shoes and heads over toward the elf, leaving Jesse behind.

  “It’s gravel raking again,” Huckle is saying to Esther regretfully as Jesse reaches them. “Sorry.”

  “Fine by me,�
�� Esther replies. She turns to Jesse. “They get deliveries of these big heaps of gravel out at the edges of the athletic fields and it’s our job to spread them out evenly in the ditches. To collect the rain drainage, right?” She directs the last to Huckle, who shrugs amiably.

  “Do I look like I know about rain drainage or whatnot? Am I a groundskeeper of some sort?” Huckle is wearing slouchy striped Guatemalan pants under his nubbly woven poncho-hoodie. As he talks, Jesse notices that one of his front teeth is gray. “I just check y’all in and sign y’all out. All I know about gravel is that spreading it looks like no fun.”

  “It’s not fun,” Esther agrees, businesslike. “But it’s meditative.”

  “You’ve done this before?” Jesse asks her.

  “Who, Meinz?” Huckle points at Esther. “This one? This one’s been here almost every week this year, haven’t you, Meinz?” Esther shrugs noncommittally. “Meinz is my main ASP buddy. If Meinz doesn’t come on a Saturday, I get lonely. What’re you in for this week, Meinz?”

  “Protesting the mandatory spirit assembly,” says Esther.

  “Hey, me too.” Jesse smiles, but Esther gives her a puzzled look.

  “Really? I didn’t see you in the office.”

  “Oh…” Somehow, suddenly, Jesse knows that the real story of her spirit assembly “protest” will not impress this girl. “I was, um, somewhere else,” she fumbles.

  “Spirit assembly?” Huckle laughs. “Now you’re even protesting spirit assemblies? What do you have against spirit assemblies, Meinz?”

  “Spirit assembly supports football. Football is a war simulation. I don’t support war in any form, real or simulated.”

  “Hard-core,” Huckle says to Jesse, jerking his thumb in Esther’s direction. Jesse nods. Esther thumps her tote bag down on the wet ground and bends to rummage in it.

  “Yeah, so, as far as instructions go for today, you got your rakes, you got your gravel, you got your ditches, you get the picture. I’ll hold on to your bags and your phones for, you know, safekeeping, and you come get me in the phys. ed. office at noon for lunch. If I’m not there, you know, check my car. Sometimes I’m in my car during certain periods of the day. Just chilling.”

  Huckle smiles a big gray-toothed Cheshire-Cat smile.

  From the tote bag, Esther produces her paperback, which she slips into the neck of her coat so that it vanishes, absorbed into the bulky mass of her clothes, and a crumpled-up floppy pink sunhat, which she shakes out to its full, twenty-inch diameter and sets on her head, tying the strings in a big bow beneath her chin. Without looking at Jesse she says, “Even on a cloudy day, UV rays can cause damage. We’ll be out there awhile.” Then she takes one of the rakes from Huckle, deposits her tote bag at his feet, and starts off purposefully toward a distant corner of the lacrosse field.

  “Implement?” Huckle says to Jesse, a note of apology in his voice, extending the second rake toward her. She trades him her phone and her backpack for the tool and heads off across the field after Esther, breaking into a jog to try to close the distance between them.

  ***

  The raking isn’t hard at the start. It’s just boring, and loud—the harsh skritch of the metal rakes on the jagged pebbles bores a hole into Jesse’s skull right at the back of her head. The gravel is freshly pulverized and it smells sharp and chalky, sending up clouds of stony dust whenever Jesse digs into it with the tines of her rake.

  Jesse rakes halfheartedly, distracted by watching Esther out of the corner of her eye. Esther at work is awkward and fierce, flinging the rake out and hauling it back in, flinging and hauling, over and over again. Sometimes her lips move a little as she works, as if she’s reciting something to herself, or she shakes her head suddenly, briefly, as if saying no to an invisible interlocutor. Esther is so focused on her job and whatever it is that’s going on inside her head that Jesse imagines she wouldn’t look up once until lunchtime if Jesse didn’t get her attention on purpose.

  “So you hate pep rallies, too,” she opens, a little louder than normal to make sure Esther hears her.

  Esther pauses and looks around, confused, as if trying to identify the source of the sound she just heard.

  “You hate pep rallies, too?” Jesse repeats.

  Esther makes eye contact with her: Oh, it’s you talking.

  “I oppose them,” she corrects, and turns back to her raking.

  “Me too. I find them hideous.”

  “Where were you registering your objection, if not the main office?”

  “I was actually…” Jesse begins, then pauses to consider whether she should tell Esther the truth. Esther looks up briefly and nods, a bit impatiently.

  “Yes?”

  “I was actually trying to skip the assembly and Sne-diker busted me climbing out the window of the girls’ room.”

  For a second Esther doesn’t respond, and Jesse thinks it was a mistake to admit this. But then, to Jesse’s relief, Esther laughs, sudden and seal-like, a kind of bark-yelp. When Esther opens her mouth, Jesse notices that her teeth are neat, small, and separate—baby teeth in a grown-up mouth.

  “Oh well,” Esther says. “I guess that was a mistake.”

  “Yeah, big mistake,” Jesse agrees, encouraged, “especially since I was planning to use first period to put up my new manifesto around school.” Somehow it’s very important to Jesse that this girl know that she’s serious about things.

  “Oh, that’s you?” Esther raises her eyebrows, curious. “Those manifesto posters, those are you?”

  “My organization.” Jesse nods casually, a quiet pride spreading inside her.

  “I like those.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I look forward to them.” That this girl knows her manifestos, likes them, looks forward to them, sends Jesse’s heart sailing. “They’re hilarious. They’re sort of like episodes of some sitcom about a goofy activist or something.”

  Jesse’s heart hits the ground with a thunk.

  “Sitcom?”

  “Yeah, they’re a parody, right? Like a joke on political manifestos?”

  It seems too late, or too complicated, or just too embarrassing for Jesse to correct Esther. How could she possibly explain at this moment that the manifestos are her earnest work, her best idea about how to change the culture of the school?

  “Yeah,” Jesse says, trying to swing a note of bravado into her voice. “Totally. A joke on manifestos.”

  “That’s cool. Like The Daily Show or something, right? Satire? That’s cool.” Somehow when Esther says the word cool it’s like your grandma trying to say the word cool. Her moist, wide mouth makes the word come out all awkward. And yet it’s also completely sincere. “I mean, that kind of comedy doesn’t change the world or anything, but it’s funny. It gets people’s attention. And it can get people thinking.”

  “Yeah. I always try to get people thinking.”

  Esther stops raking now, holds the rake away from her body and looks at Jesse thoughtfully, sizing her up.

  “What’s your organization called again?”

  “Um, NOLAW?”

  “Which stands for… ?”

  Jesse swallows. “National Organization to Liberate All Weirdos?”

  “Right, very funny. And who are your other members?”

  “Um…” Jesse pictures herself alone at her desk in her room, cutting and pasting, running the posters off in furtive batches on her mom’s printer/scanner/copier before she gets home from work. “We don’t have too many members. We’re not that big an organization.”

  “You know what you could do,” Esther offers, “is join up with my new organization, SPAN. Have you heard of us?” Jesse shakes her head. “SPAN? Student Peace Action Network?” Jesse shakes her head again, and Esther sighs, annoyed.

  “Sorry?” Jesse offers.

  “No it’s okay, it’s just, this is our hugest problem. We’ve had two meetings already, me and Ms. Filarski, our faculty advisor, and we’ve submitted an application to be recognized
as an official student group, but still nobody knows about us.”

  “Yeah, I never heard of you,” Jesse confirms.

  “You should help us.” Esther peers at Jesse directly, almost confrontationally, now. “You should bring NOLAW’s poster-making operation over to SPAN. We could join forces. Then we could both, like, do a better job of getting the word out about our activities, and both of us could get more members. You guys clearly have a really good public relations operation. Margaret says half of activism is advertising. She says you have to let people know what you’re doing, otherwise it won’t have any impact on the world. But that kind of stuff doesn’t come naturally to me.”

  “Who’s Margaret?”

  “Oh, she’s my best friend and mentor and adopted grandmother. She organizes a peace vigil with her husband, Charlie, that I go to every Sunday. You should come.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “You should definitely come!” Esther practically shouts, overtaken by new enthusiasm. “It’s on the common in front of the Town Hall, it’s only an hour, from noon to one. Margaret and Charlie have been doing it every Sunday for forty years, they’re the most incredible people you’ll ever meet in your life. You have to come.”

  “Okay.”

  Jesse takes a second now to look Esther over. She’s completely abandoned her raking at this point and is using the rake as a gesturing tool, waving it around as she speaks. Her eyes are flinty and fierce. She’s as serious, as determined, as any kid Jesse has ever seen.