The Difference Between You and Me Read online

  “It’s hard getting people to care about important issues at this school, don’t you think?”

  “I guess,” Jesse says. “No, totally, yeah.”

  “Maybe not for you since you’re a comedian,” Esther concedes, “but for me, I mean, I’m just a freshman, maybe I don’t really know how things work here yet, but I feel like kids are so superficial here. They’re not involved enough in their community. In a lot of ways I hated Sacred Heart, where I used to go, but at least people there were really into service. Everybody had a cause. Here, people are more interested in things like dances and pep rallies, it seems like.”

  “Yeah,” Jesse agrees. “It’s hard to be an outsider here.”

  “But no, I’m not complaining.” Esther shakes her head. “It’s a really good challenge for me. I feel like I was meant to come here and bring some of that spirit of service to Vander. I believe that no matter how much it might seem like people don’t care, if you show them how they’re connected to the things that are wrong with the world, they totally change their behavior. Don’t you think?”

  Jesse squints, thoughtful. “I don’t know.” She thinks about Emily’s blank stare in the bathroom. She thinks about Wyatt: The masses want to stay ignorant. “I hope so,” Jesse says.

  “Oh no, I’m sure of it. I have a lot of faith in people. That’s the whole reason I founded SPAN. SPAN is going to show people the truth about injustice in the world and get people fired up to take action. As soon as we get some members. You have to come to our next meeting.” It’s an assertion, not an offer. “We meet Tuesdays at three thirty in Ms. Filarski’s room.”

  “Oh, Tuesday at three thirty I actually, sort of, already have plans.” Tuesday at 3:30 Jesse has plans to be working her hands up Emily Miller’s shirt in the third-floor handicapped restroom of the Samuel Ezra Minot Public Library.

  “That’s too bad,” Esther says seriously. “We could use a few committed revolutionaries.”

  All her life Jesse has been writing protest letters, going with her parents to marches and demos, giving part of her allowance to PETA, participating in boycotts, and writing manifestos, and she never, ever would have called herself a “revolutionary.” Here, Esther says it so casually, like you’d say, “We could use a few sophomores.”

  “Next Tuesday, then.” Esther nods, and turns back to raking. “So how long have you been running NOLAW?”

  “Um, I guess I started making the manifestos in the middle of last year? Wyatt, my best friend Wyatt, says they’re a symptom of the anger issues I had about my mom being sick, but he doesn’t know anything. He’s a libertarian.”

  “Your mom was sick?”

  “Oh yeah. She had cancer.” Jesse tosses this out casually.

  At the word cancer Esther’s whole face alters, subtly but totally. “Oh,” Esther says. “What kind?”

  “Breast cancer. Pink ribbon, you know, blah blah blah.”

  “My mom, too,” says Esther.

  “Really?” Jesse’s eyes widen.

  “Yeah. Breast cancer.”

  “That’s so cool!” Jesse blurts out, then corrects herself, stumbling over her words. “No, I mean, not cool, it’s not cool your mom had cancer, I just mean, I never met anyone else whose mom had it, too. That’s, like, so amazing.” Jesse smiles.

  “Yeah. My mom died a year and a half ago,” Esther says.

  In the quiet that follows, Jesse hears the sound of the birds in the trees around them. She feels like she never noticed before how specific their songs are. One three-note melody comes from the trees to her right, over and over again, like wind chimes, and a totally different two-note melody comes from the trees to her left. She wonders if the two birds are speaking to each other.

  “Did I just freak you out?” Esther asks finally.

  “No, no way.” Jesse can’t quite look at Esther anymore. “I’m sorry about your mom.”

  “It’s okay,” Esther says. “I’m fine. Don’t be freaked out, all right?”

  “I’m not. I’m not.”

  “Good.” Esther smiles a little, encouragingly. “Let’s get back to work. Huckle will let us go early if we get all three piles spread out by noon.”

  ***

  At lunchtime, Huckle spreads out a ratty blanket on the grass by his car, right at the edge of the parking lot, for all three of them to sit on.

  “This is perfect,” he says, lying back on the blanket and putting his sandaled feet up on the bumper of his hippiemobile. “We’re still on school grounds, but we’re close enough to home that I can get us sodas from the fridge if we want them.”

  “Huckle lives right there,” Esther explains, gesturing with her chin to a little white house through the spindly woods at the parking lot’s edge. She takes a bite of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that looks like it was made in a bomb shelter during an air raid—it’s torn and smeared, a total mess.

  “So um, why did you drive your car here?” Jesse asks.

  Huckle smiles dreamily. “I like to bring my private space with me wherever I go,” he says. “In case I have an urgent need to chill at any time.”

  “Not to be rude or anything,” Jesse says, “but you seem like sort of a weird guy to be an ASP supervisor.”

  “I’m unusual, yes.” Huckle tears a piece of Slim Jim off with his teeth and chews it roundly.

  “So, like, um, how did you get this job?”

  “I used to be a sub?” Huckle turns to look at Jesse from his vantage point on the ground. “At school? And then, there was, like, an incident, and I had to stop subbing? But they were like, it’s cool, we can find a place for you, and they found me this.”

  “Uh-hunh. What kind of—” Jesse is about to ask what kind of incident Huckle was involved in, but he interrupts.

  “I used to go to this school, you know,” Huckle says. “Not a very long time ago. A while ago. Kind of a really long time ago.”

  “Yeah? Did you like it?”

  “I loved it, man, I have to confess. But things are totally different now. You have Snediker? Snediker send you here?”

  “Of course.”

  “That is one sad, sad lady. That lady is compromised, man. She used to be the world’s raddest social studies teacher, back in the olden days. She had us do, like, role-playing games? And watch movies about, like, Che Guevara? And then something happened to her, man, I don’t know. She changed. And now the whole school is different since they put her in charge.”

  “Don’t you hate working for her, then?” Jesse asks. She tries to imagine slouchy Huckle, with his loose pants and stringy hair, taking orders from clenched little Snediker, and can’t make the picture come together in her mind.

  “Yeah, but I gotta eat, man,” Huckle says philosophically. “Gotta pay rent. The freakin’ Foot Locker fired me, the freakin’ Whole Foods fired me ’cause of that thing with the pie. I have a small problem with supervisors, I guess. And with this job, it’s weekends only, I get to be on my own a lot, I get to be outdoors. And spend time in my car.”

  “Jesse’s going to come with me to the vigil on Sunday,” Esther tells Huckle. To Jesse she says, “I’ve been trying to get Huckle to come to the vigil for weeks, but he won’t do it.”

  “I love peace, man, but I don’t need to stand around on a street corner waiting for it to come.”

  Huckle smiles lazily and closes his eyes.

  Esther leans over to Jesse. “Don’t worry,” she says. “It’s not just standing around. You’ll see on Sunday. It’s amazing.”

  6

  Esther

  My first hero: Joan of Arc.

  Before I could even read, I had a picture book about her. My mother got it for me, and she used to read it to me all the time before she got sick. Then I read it to myself basically every day from fourth grade through sixth grade. I was obsessed with Joan. More than anything in the world I wanted to meet her. Or follow her. Or be her.

  In the first couple of pages of the book, they set the scene: France, early 140
0s. The country is occupied by the English, who rape and pillage and terrorize the countryside every few weeks to make sure the French peasants don’t get any ideas about rising up and fighting for their freedom. Everybody hates the English, but nobody knows what to do about them: the true king, King Charles VII, is weak and pitiful, not powerful enough to oppose the English and assume the throne of his own country.

  The French peasants are exhausted. They’re sick. They’re suffering. They have long since stopped expecting their lives to get better.

  Then one day, in a field about a mile from the tiny village of Domrémy, sitting on a stone wall watching her father’s flock, a thirteen-year-old girl named Joan hears a sound. It’s a voice—she can tell it’s a voice because it’s saying her name—but it’s not human. It’s not like any voice she’s ever heard on this earth. It’s huge and silvery and multiple—really three voices braided into one—and it seems to come from the entire sky, falling all around her like mist, like rain. It’s her angels, come to give her instructions from God.

  “Get up,” the angels tell Joan. “Find your way to the town of Vaucouleurs. Cut your hair off and dress like a boy—people will take you more seriously that way. Get a rich man to help you secure an audience with exiled King Charles. Tell him you are come to lead an army on his behalf and drive the hated English out of France and restore him to his rightful throne. Lead an army of ten thousand men into battle. Slay the oppressors. Liberate your country. On your mark, get set—go.”

  Naturally, she’s petrified. She argues with them, as all prophets argue with their voices at first. “This is crazy,” she tells the messengers from God. “I can’t be the One. I’m illiterate. I’m a teenager. I’m a girl.”

  “Sorry,” say the angels. “God says it’s you.”

  It takes a couple of years for the angels to convince her, but eventually, Joan does it. She runs away from her family and prepares in secret. In the best picture in the book they show Joan sitting in a narrow stone room, peering at herself in a small, spotted medieval mirror. She’s holding up a long hank of hair, getting ready to shear it off with a knife. The other half of her head is already cut short. She looks like a half boy, half girl in the picture, but the look she’s giving herself in the mirror isn’t confused—it’s determined.

  She does all of it, everything the angels told her to do. She finds the rich guy, gets him to take her to the true king, convinces the king to let her lead his army, gets a suit of armor and a horse and an embroidered heraldic banner, leads ten thousand men into battle, plans surprise attacks, liberates the besieged city of Orléans. Overnight she becomes famous in France and infamous in England. The French call her the Maid, the Lark, and the Messenger. The English call her witch, cow, sorceress, and whore.

  Secretly, I believed I was the new Joan. I could feel it inside me, my destiny—not to lead an army, maybe, but to do something big that would save the world. I was positive that before my twelfth birthday I would hear my own voices and get my own holy instructions. I tried to put myself into places where they would feel comfortable coming to me—gardens, athletic fields, big outdoor spaces. I waited to be told what God had planned for me to do.

  Twice I was Joan for Halloween, in fourth and fifth grade. My mother wouldn’t let me cut off my hair, but she did make me a helmet out of a gallon milk jug turned upside-down and spray-painted silver, and she helped me tuck my braids up inside it.

  By the time I was thirteen, I realized they weren’t coming for me. I never heard anything directly from God, and I ended up not being able to be outside as much because my mother got sick and I had to be inside all the time, in hospital rooms, in hospital hallways, in waiting rooms, in parking garages, in diners, drinking Coke with lemon while my dad drank coffee and looked out the window.

  In the end, she was burned. Joan. In the end she did everything a human being could do, everything her voices told her to do, and still the English captured her, tortured her, starved her, shaved her head, put her through a five-month show trial, and finally burned her at the stake in a public square. She died forgiving her executioners through the flames.

  In the end, my mother chose to come home. She had been through years of treatments that felt more like punishments than cures—radiation and chemicals and surgeries and poisons—and she said she couldn’t bear to die of something that was supposed to heal her. She wanted to die comfortable and calm, in our house, with us. She wanted to let her body stop naturally. My father thought this was a terrible idea, and he was really badly behaved about it. He said a lot of cruel things to her that I’ll never forget. He told her she was selfish, which was especially unfair. But my mother could be incredibly stubborn when she believed she was right. In the end, she got what she wanted. She was home for thirty days. She died in the temporary hospital bed we set up for her in the living room. Two days before she died, she told my father she forgave him for all the awful things he’d said.

  My father couldn’t handle speaking at the funeral so I did it for him. I wrote a eulogy for her, describing the interesting, kind person she was and listing all the things I loved about her. I talked about the main things she liked to do: gardening, doing hair, reading, volunteering at church. I talked about her sweet voice, her soft hands, and how incredibly stubborn she could be when she believed she was right.

  In the end, France was occupied until 1453, another twenty-two years after Joan was executed. But in 1920, they made her a saint.

  7

  Jesse

  “It was all fine until right before the end,” Wyatt recounts as he tails Jesse, a brisk step and a half behind her, through the sunny autumn afternoon. Somewhere in the stacks of the Samuel Ezra Minot Public Library, two blocks away, Emily Miller is getting ready to go on break. When Jesse meets up with her at 3:30—ten minutes from now—in the third-floor handicapped restroom, it will be the first time they’ve seen each other since the Spirit Assembly Bathroom Incident, and Jesse has been working on some choice words she wants to say. Jesse picks up the pace a little and lengthens her stride, and Wyatt skips to keep up with her. She has already told him twice—though he’s pretended not to hear—that she can’t actually hang out today.

  “We were chatting like perfect ladies, very civilized,” Wyatt continues. “I was lulled into a sense of false security. He hardly even asked me anything about myself, he didn’t make one snide comment about the homeschooling, he didn’t ask me whether my mother was taking her meds, he just went on and on telling me this insanely dull story about Stepmama Louise and her epic battles with the bunny rabbits who live in their backyard and eat her flowers—apparently, she started out poisoning them with rat bait, but now she’s using, like, a blowtorch on them, shooting them with flames off the side of the deck. And I was all, ‘Ha-ha, that Louise is a real spitfire, ha-ha, what a great assassin of bunny rabbits Louise is,’ and then he paid and we left the café, and I was like, oh my God, he’s not even going to mention it, I’m home free, this is the dawning of a new era. And then right when we got to the car he was like, ‘So, did you get the literature I sent you?’”

  “Oh no, the ex-gay pamphlets?”

  “The ones I shredded.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him they were too pornographic for me so I threw them out.”

  “You told him they were pornographic?” Jesse wails.

  “They have a half-naked man on the cover! He’s hanging up there on that cross all muscular and cut with nothing but a little gym towel on—it’s pornographic!”

  “He must have gone ballistic.”

  “Worse, he was totally calm. He said, ‘Son, I’m asking you to please reckon with your choices. I don’t want you to spend eternity paying for your sins in hell.’ I said to him, ‘Howard, thank you so much for the advice, but I’ll take my chances.’”

  “The point of these dates is to be nice to him so he’ll still pay for college, not to antagonize him and make him want to disown you forever.”

&n
bsp; “I know, but I couldn’t help myself, he’s such an irrational idiot. And my comic sidekick wasn’t there to support me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jesse repeats. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ll be there next time, I swear.”

  “Saturday the thirtieth, okay? Ten thirty a.m.” Wyatt steps in front of Jesse and puts his hands on her shoulders so he can stare deeply into her eyes. His dark, tendrilly curls are wild around his pale face. In his red-and-white-checked thrift-store Western shirt with the silver-buttoned pockets and the pointy collar embroidered with red, bucking horses, he looks a tiny bit like a chorus girl from Annie Get Your Gun. “Please be there. I don’t like to beg, but please, please, please.”

  “Saturday the thirtieth, ten thirty. I will be there.”

  “You’ll have to behave yourself in school. No more alternative suspensions. Can you keep your antisocial tendencies in check long enough to avoid Snediker for that one week?”

  “Absolutely. I promise.”

  Jesse breaks Wyatt’s gaze briefly to check her watch—3:24. T minus six minutes till Emily.

  “Late for something?” Wyatt asks, mildly suspicious. No gesture of Jesse’s, not even the most discreet watch-check, escapes Wyatt’s attention.

  “No, I just, I really have to get started on this homework. I’m sorry but I told you, I can’t actually hang out today.”

  “Yes, I actually heard you the first six times you said that, and I have to work, too,” says Wyatt, just a bit testily. “I won’t bug you.”

  “What are you working on, a historically accurate diorama of Ayn Rand’s first apartment?”

  “Actually…” Wyatt lets his gaze drift vaguely up to the air above Jesse’s head. “I’m applying to do study abroad next semester, and I have to write an essay for it.”

  Jesse stops walking.

  “What do you mean, study abroad? Study abroad where?”

  “I don’t know. Denmark, maybe. Somewhere where the boys are tall and dreamy.”