The Difference Between You and Me (14 page)

“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 accepts 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
!

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.