The Difference Between You and Me (17 page)

Then I felt Jesse put her arms around me.

Not looking at her, just feeling her hold me, I recognized her again. This was the Jesse I knew, the holding Jesse, the strong and quiet Jesse, the sweet-smelling Jesse who knows me so well, who makes me feel better in that one particular way than anyone else in the entire world.

After the crying wound down and I got myself together again I went back to the conversation I had planned to have. I told her, point-blank, to please please
please
choose something else to protest. I told her that I know she always needs to have a cause or whatever, but couldn’t she please go save baby seals or help illegal immigrants become citizens or something? Anything, anything other than this? I kept my arms around her while I said it, so she couldn’t break free from me and start ranting again. And I tried to reassure her that NorthStar is actually a really good company with strong values and an incredible mission. I told her that she’s seriously overreacting when she talks about them trying to take over the world.

I could feel her trying to figure out what to do. She was looking up at the ceiling and down at the floor and out the little frosted window above the sink but not at me, not
at
me. So I kissed her. I put my hands on her head like she always puts her hands on mine, and I turned her face
to me and I kissed her. Thank God she kissed me back. It felt incredible. It was such a relief, like taking a first deep breath of air after being underwater for too long.

We had a sort of scary-intense time after that. She was so… I don’t know, she was so hungry and bold. Somehow, at some point, she got my shirt all the way off. I let my shirt go, and then I let myself go. I gave in to her completely.

Something amazing happened between us then—something deeper, and different from everything that came before. She didn’t say it to me out loud, but I know she’s going to drop the NorthStar protest. She has to. We’ve both made sacrifices for each other now, and I feel more bonded to her than ever.

But I also feel like I have to be more careful from now on about how I interact with her, and how often. When I was walking home, more than an hour late to help my mom, I started to think that maybe we should take a little break from seeing each other, just for a while, just until we both cool down a little. When she was kissing me this time… I don’t know how to explain it. She was so aggressive. She bit me all over a little, hard and sharp. Like she was trying to leave marks.

First period on Monday morning, and Jesse is clutching the smooth wooden bathroom pass in her right hand. She hovers in the drinking-fountain alcove by the sophomore hall girls’ room, waiting for a pair of girls to clear out of there so she can go in and sweep the room for the last traces of the anti-StarMart campaign. Most of the yellow posters have already been taken down by teachers and custodians, the ones in the high-traffic areas: bulletin boards and fire doors and hallways. And of course, the campaign has already done what it was supposed to do: people can’t un-see what they’ve seen, un-talk-about what they’ve talked about. But for Emily’s sake, Jesse has decided to eradicate every last remnant of the poster campaign, the ones she knows are still up in nooks and crannies around the school: girls’ rooms, mostly, and out-of-the-way, high-up places where even custodians don’t think—or don’t bother—to look. The pockets of her cargo pants and the
front pouch of her backpack are already full of crumpled goldenrod-yellow paper.

She spent the past weekend in self-imposed isolation, ignoring phone calls from Esther and trying to keep her eyes closed as much as possible so she could stay in the memory of Emily in the bathroom on Friday afternoon. The feel of her skin against Jesse’s own, the explosion of softness and intensity, like an underground nuclear bomb test…. Jesse felt her loyalties melt away completely the moment she pulled Emily’s shirt off over her head. She felt ravenous, half blind with hunger, like an animal. When they left the bathroom, neither one of them could look the other one in the eye. And the aftershocks kept moving through Jesse all weekend. Esther called twice on Saturday to ask if Jesse was coming to the vigil again or not, but Jesse let the calls go to voice mail and didn’t call back. This morning on her way in to school, she was careful to avoid the freshman hall and head straight to homeroom, so she wouldn’t have to see Esther and explain herself to her.

The two girls leave the bathroom at last, and Jesse slips in. There are four posters still on the wall in here, high above the bank of mirrors over the sinks. Apparently, it was easy enough to tape them up there in the first place—she must have leapt up onto the sinks like Superman and sailed back down: No fear. Was Esther with her
in this bathroom, spotting her when she climbed up, tearing off pieces of tape and passing them to her? How can Jesse not remember what it was like to post these, which she herself personally did, only a few days ago? She was in a haze of purpose then. Only the plan existed, and the partnership between her and Esther—the logistical details were nothing to them, tiny hurdles they sailed over on wings of enthusiasm.

Now she’s wingless. Land-bound, with two left feet inside a pair of boots that couldn’t be more wrong for this operation. She feels unprepared, out of balance. As she starts to hoist herself up onto the sink, she catches her own reflection in the mirror.

She doesn’t look like much. Dark, empty eyes. Backpack hanging, lopsided, off her shoulders. Ringer tee, cargo pants, and a suddenly girly haircut. Overnight, her hair has gone from just right to way too long. It does this—puffs up from badass to embarrassing over the course of what seems like a matter of hours. She needs to take her Swiss Army Knife to it as soon as she gets the chance. When she gazes back at herself from the mirror she looks shaggy and lost.

Jesse scrambles awkwardly to her feet on the sink, but she’s wobbly in the boots, unsteady on the wet, slippery porcelain. She clutches desperately at the mirror’s narrow edge as she reaches for the first bright-yellow poster. When
the burst of static comes from right outside the door, she’s about as hidden as a target at a shooting range.

Jesse freezes mid-reach. She closes her eyes and feels the slight breeze move around her as the door creaks open. She senses more than sees Snediker’s squat, compact body anchored in the door frame down to her left.

“Well, well, well,” Snediker whines. “This is getting to be kind of a habit with you.”

Jesse swallows, and looks down at her. From this vantage point, with Snediker so short and Jesse up so high, the dean of students looks like a peevish elf. Her round, rosy face is placid, as always, under the tight cap of her perm. She props her small, balled fists up on either side of her belly. When she moves her arms, the ring of warden-keys she keeps bungee-corded around her wrist jingles.

“I was trying to take it down,” Jesse says dumbly. She hasn’t moved since the door opened; her arm is still stretched over her head, reaching. Her big green boots are still propped wide on either side of the sink.

Snediker smiles her miserly smile, her lips drawn into a short, straight line. “I’m afraid that’s neither here nor there.” The walkie-talkie clipped to her blazer pocket emits a staticky crackle. A voice on it says, “We have a situation in four ten, situation in four ten, over.”

“Come on down,” Snediker says, a chillingly friendly invitation. She beckons to Jesse. “You’re coming with me.”

***

Snediker makes Jesse wait for some time in the row of red chairs lining the narrow hallway outside her office.

“Ms. Yost is probably waiting for her pass… ?” Jesse suggests when Snediker seats her there, holding up the bathroom pass in question.

“Ms. Yost knows where her pass is.” Snediker passes Jesses calmly, without looking at her. She goes into her office and shuts the door.

The last time Jesse was remanded here, she only made it as far as the outside reception area. The inner sanctum, where she is now, is reserved for more serious offenders—Jesse has never been this far in before. She peers at the closed, featureless office door. Maybe Snediker actually does have something to do in there, or maybe this is just her tactic to get kids worked up into a frenzy of fear before she brings them in to skin, fillet, and fry them in oil.

Jesse waits.

It’s the opposite of the peace vigil. The longer Jesse stood still at the vigil, the more it felt right, and alive, and real. The more she felt like she was putting her body where her beliefs were. And she noticed more and more things about the world around her, too, the longer she stood there with Esther, Margaret, Charlie, and Arlo. The exact blue of the sky, the exact grain of the bark on the tree near
the exact Ford Taurus parked near the exact toothpaste-green parking meter… the exact stride of Mike McDade striding down the sidewalk to the exact door with the exact bell of Murray and Sons Hardware.

Now the details of the world around her are blurring, not sharpening. She sees less and less, hears less and less, sinks deeper and deeper into the murky tide of disgust and disappointment—mixed with a little bubbly water of fear—that’s rising up through her, taking over her whole midsection, the breathing and digesting parts of her body, making her feel like she’s drowning inside herself. What could Snediker have in store for her this time? If she went straight to ASP for the spirit-assembly window-leap, what will the sentence be for her second offense? Out-of-school suspension? For a week? For a month? And a big black mark on her permanent record that will ruin her chances of
ever
getting into NYU?

When Jesse thinks of what her mother’s going to do when she hears about this… she
can’t
think about what her mother’s going to do when she hears about this.

In a burst of self-recrimination, Jesse thinks,
See,
this
is why Emily is with Mike!
Obviously, Mike McDade would never do something like this. Obviously, he would never dream of undermining his girlfriend’s student council project. And more than that, he would never be so idiotic as to be caught trying to take back something he had already irrevocably done. He would never be so inconsistent,
so sloppy, so dumb. He would never end up outside Snediker’s office, waiting to be dragged in to answer for his own stupid actions. Mike McDade is a solid citizen. And Emily is, too.

The door swings open, and Jesse looks up. Snediker is all the way across the wood-paneled room, perched behind her metal desk. With what dark art did she make the door open from so far away?

“I’m ready for you now,” Snediker says tonelessly, and Jesse rises.

The chair of the condemned, opposite the desk, is intentionally hard and straight-backed. When Jesse sits in it she immediately feels the seat bore into her butt in two knobbly places. Does Snediker have special butt-boring panels installed in her punishment chair? It’s possible.

Snediker settles a little in her seat. Above her on the wall hangs a huge, framed painting of autumn trees fringing the edge of a rippling blue lake. In front of her, the desk is bare except for her computer monitor and keyboard, placed at an angle to her seat; a white mug filled with identical black-capped ball-point pens; and an ancient push-button phone the color of an Ace bandage.

“I haven’t called your folks yet,” Snediker begins, and Jesse experiences a surge of relief so strong she has to hold herself back from weeping. She nods vigorously. “But I will when we’re done talking.” The relief drains away, and Jesse nods again listlessly. From a drawer in the right-hand
side of her desk, Snediker produces a manila folder, which she opens casually in front of her. It’s full of brightly colored papers—familiar to Jesse from a year’s worth of manifesto work—which she pages through as she speaks.

“Destruction of school property,” Snediker intones, and flips a neon-orange paper over facedown on the desk. Jesse recognizes it as her first-ever manifesto. “Destruction of school property.” Snediker flips an emerald-green paper over—Jesse’s second opus. “Vandalism.” Cherry-red paper—flip. “Destruction of school property.” Sky-blue paper—flip. “Destruction of school property and misuse of hall pass.” She holds this last paper—bright goldenrod yellow—up for Jesse to inspect. WAKE UP, VANDER! it reads across the top in 46-point font. SERIOUSLY!

Jesse bites her lip. “I was trying to take that one
down
,” she explains again, but when she hears herself say this it sounds like such a feeble excuse that she wishes she had just kept her mouth shut.

“You’ve accumulated quite an evidence file here over the past year,” Snediker observes. “What do you want to tell me about it?”

Jesse opens her mouth. What does she want to tell glassy-eyed, monotonous Dean Snediker about her manifestos? About her passion, her life’s work, her best way of expressing herself, the thing that first brought her into contact with Esther, the thing that has ruined her love life and damaged her closest friendship and forced her to
make up a series of pitifully stupid lies to explain to her mother why she kept burning through her toner? There’s nothing she wants to tell Snediker about her manifestos. She shrugs.