The Difference Between You and Me (24 page)

But Howard continues with perfect patience. “Excuse me, you don’t have to be rude to me, Wyatt. I’m trying to have a civil conversation with you and your friend, and I don’t appreciate being shouted down when I’m trying to speak.”

“I feel a lecture about values coming on,” says Wyatt, “and I just want to, like, head it off at the pass before it starts.”

“Okay,” Jesse says, panicky. “Okay, okay—”

Howard shakes his head. “I do not lecture you about values. I have never lectured you about values.”

“You lecture me about values every time I see you!”

“I respect you enough to tell you the truth about my beliefs and to make clear to you the objections I have about your problematic life choices, but I do not lecture you about—”

“Right now, right now you’re starting to do it! Problematic life choices! And you called Jesse ignorant!”

“It’s okay,” says Jesse, but Wyatt scoops his backpack off the floor and gets to his feet.

“We don’t have to do this anymore, really,” he tells his father. “If we never meet like this again, it’ll be fine with me. Come on, Jesse.”

“Sorry,” Jesse says to Howard as she follows Wyatt out the door.

“See you next month,” Howard replies drily.

***

In the mildewy button-down-shirt aisle of Rose’s Turn, Jesse follows a couple of paces behind Wyatt, fingering collars. Still coursing with rage, Wyatt flips through shirts fiercely, flicking the hangers along the pole with a metallic
click. Click. Click.

“Horrible,” he declares. “All horribly ugly. Anyway, I don’t even need a shirt. I need a scarf. Where are their scarves? Where are their freaking
scarves
?”

“In the, um, scarf aisle?” Jesse says timidly.

Wyatt ignores her.
Click. Click. Click.

“Wyatt, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.” Wyatt shrugs. “My job is to tell jokes, not to start fights. I know.”

“It’s not your fault. He’s a congenital idiot.”

“Yeah. It was nice of you to stand up for me, though.”

“I couldn’t let him talk to you like that. He wants to call me a sinner and a pervert, fine, but I’m not going to let him insult my best friend.”

Jesse bumps up against Wyatt a little, shoulder-to-shoulder. A closed-arm hug.

“Hey. Me and Esther are putting together this thing,” she says, “in a couple of weeks. This, like, dance?”

“I hate dances,” Wyatt responds automatically.

“I know, they’re totally gender-oppressive and awful, but this one is going to be super awesome. We’re holding it in the parking lot of Vander as like, an alternative to the StarMart dance. You should come.”

“Do I have to physically dance?”

“You could just stand there. Actually, we still need a DJ. You want to DJ for us? In your excellent new scarf, once you find it?”

“As you’re aware,” Wyatt says, “I loathe popular music.”

“Yeah, but you know how to work an iPod, right? I’ll set up the playlists, you just need to press PLAY. It’s going to be a ton of fun. And you can hang out with me and Esther. Can you handle that?”

“I can press PLAY,” Wyatt says.

On the morning of the dances, two weeks later, Jesse wakes up extremely early, before dawn. The sky is a cold ink-blue through the window across from the foot of her bed, and a single star hangs right where Jesse can see it from her pillow, just above the slate gable of the Claussens’ roof across the street. It’s a piercingly bright pinpoint of light, and it seems to throb slightly as Jesse looks at it, like a pulsar.

Jesse lies perfectly still for a couple of minutes in the deep quiet, suspended in thought and time. Her body feels long, strong, and smooth under the covers. Her mind is still. Somewhere just outside the sphere of her mind and body is the reality of what’s going to happen today. It floats closer to Jesse, and closer, moving around her in a sparkly cloud of excitement.

Jesse closes her eyes for a moment, suffused with the starry anticipation of what’s in store, and when she opens
them again her room is washed with gray light. She must have fallen back to sleep—now the day is on. Jesse sits bolt upright in bed, her mind suddenly racing with the things she has to do. Pick up donuts and day-old cakes at Beverly Coffee. Meet Esther at Murray and Sons at nine o’clock to collect the cables and clip-lights they’re borrowing. Call Wyatt to check on the sound system ETA. Extension cords, don’t forget the bag of extension cords from Dad’s worktable in the basement, and call Esther and remind her to bring the ones from her house, too. Tape, tape, tape—masking, Scotch, and duct. Don’t forget scissors. Don’t forget rope. Don’t forget to load the folding table into the back of Mom’s Camry so she can bring it over to Vander later. Don’t forget to get the Christmas lights down from the attic.

When Jesse shows up at Murray’s at ten minutes past nine, Esther is sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk to the right of the door, reading. She’s in her bulky coat with a ski hat on her head, and apparently, the October chill doesn’t bother her. Jesse is already a little strung out—Beverly Coffee doesn’t open till ten, it turns out, so she and Esther will have to go back there after this to get the refreshments. She can’t believe she’s already behind on her jobs.

“Why didn’t you go in already?” she asks Esther, mildly miffed.

“I was reading,” Esther explains. “And waiting for you.”

“It doesn’t feel like we’re changing the world,” Jesse
says as they head into the store. “It feels like we’re running a million dumb errands.”

“I guess one thing feels a lot like the other.” Esther grins.

For better or worse, Mike McDade isn’t working this morning. But Mr. Murray himself is there, and he greets Jesse warmly when she introduces herself. Mr. Murray is a grandfatherly guy with a mustache and a cardigan, only one button of which closes over his round belly. He smells strongly of cigars, the same cigars, no doubt, that have rasped his voice into a gravelly growl.

“Here’s what I got for you guys,” Mr. Murray says, sliding a big cardboard box—marked HALBERSTAM in Sharpie on one side—across the countertop toward the two of them. “Mike said you just wanted the lighting stuff, right? Take a look in there and see if you want me to throw in anything else.” Esther and Jesse peer into the box, which is filled to the brim with neatly coiled electric cables, metal clip-lights, and surge protector strips.

“Thanks,” Jesse says. “It’s perfect. Thank you so much, Mr. Murray.”

“Don’t thank me, I’m thanking
you
. Have a very nice party, girls. And make a lot of money for your cause.”

The day is gray and clammy, and it goes by in a blur of details. Jesse and Esther hammer tent poles into Huckle’s lawn, run extension cords through Huckle’s windows, cram day-old donuts into their mouths, share day-old do-nuts
with Huckle, figure out Wyatt’s speaker system, and work with Arlo, who shows up at four, to lay out eight big pieces of plywood on the grass for people to dance on.

The dance floor was Arlo’s idea—his collective always puts out plywood on the lawn whenever they throw a party—but still he kvetches about it the whole time they’re setting it up.

“I need you to please take excellent care of this plywood,” he instructs them. “This is the collective’s plywood and it was difficult to salvage and we’re using it again next Saturday for our straightedge rave, so please pay attention and make sure it doesn’t get stolen or harmed in any way.”

But after they’re done working he doesn’t leave. Jesse notices him mooning around the edges of the tent, thumbing his BlackBerry, picking at the nearly empty Beverly Coffee box, and waiting for the party to start.

As it gets darker and darker, Jesse gets more and more excited. At six o’clock, her mother brings by the coffee urns and hot cocoa–making supplies they’re borrowing from Esther’s church. At six thirty, Arthur comes with an armload of stuff: thermoses of black bean soup for Jesse and Esther; a bunch of extra hats and mittens from the hall closet; the still-roofless birdhouse, to be used as a cash box; and Jesse’s light blue tuxedo, which she left by the front door in a shopping bag this morning so her father could bring it to her tonight, in time to change before the party starts. At six forty-five, dressed up now and ready
to host, Jesse plugs in the last extension cord in Huckle’s front hallway, and the inside of the tent—filled with clip-lights and strung with a crisscrossed web of Christmas lights—glows like a giant canvas lantern.

At seven o’clock, people start to come.

Emily

I knew about the alternative dance, of course. Everybody knew about it. People were reposting the invitation all over the place, and they even ran a notice about it in the paper. It wasn’t a surprise.

I was a little bit surprised by how many people from school ended up going over there. Not hundreds of people or anything, not everyone, and not for the whole night, but a kind of surprising number of people spent at least some time out there in Jesse’s tent. Which I was really glad about for her. Even after everything we’d been through, and even though we’ll never, ever agree about NorthStar, I could still guess that her dance must have been really important to her. I’m the first person to support students doing all different kinds of activities to help out the causes they believe in. (As long as they respect each other and don’t try to undermine each other’s events or start misinformation campaigns about each other around school, or things like that.) I guess what really surprised me was how
many people didn’t mind that Jesse’s dance was outside. It was such a chilly night out, and I didn’t expect people to want to go hang out under a tent when it was so cold. I wouldn’t have thought people would enjoy dancing all night in their coats like that.

The Starry Starry Night Vander High School Fall Formal, which was held inside the gym like always, was an incredible success. It seemed like at least as many people came this year as last year, maybe one or two fewer, I didn’t get the actual numbers. And anyway, the
quality
of everything at this year’s dance was vastly, vastly superior to last year. It was an incredibly beautiful event, thanks to NorthStar but also, even more important, I think, thanks to the hard work that people like me and Michael and the members of the student council Fall Formal committee put in to turn our gym into a beautiful autumn wonderland.

Some of the highlights of the themed décor: realistic fake fall leaves spread rakishly on every surface, helium-filled balloons in warm fall colors arranged in bunches on either side of all the doors and in an arch over the souvenir photo-booth area, frozen punch rings floating in the faux-crystal punch bowls, and a slowly morphing projection of trees turning from green to orange to red to gold that we had going constantly on the wall behind the basketball hoop. People were unanimous about how fantastic and sophisticated everything looked.

I had originally planned to have a professional DJ, Phil
Holland, who does music for the events at the Women’s Club where my mom belongs, cover the dance, but he ended up getting a high-paying job on a river cruise that night, and I had to talk Mark Salfrezi into bringing his iPod again. But he and I had a meeting beforehand about the playlists and appropriate outfits for DJing that would fit in with the evening’s theme, and in the end he looked and sounded great. Practically professional.

People danced like crazy. People really, really enjoyed the donated brownie bites, and the other store-bought snacks that Michael and I had picked out. We didn’t run out the whole night, and we never had to ration like last year. People really appreciated that.

At about eight o’clock, when I took over manning the snack table from Kimmie Hersh, I realized that I was standing in exactly the same spot I had been in last year when Jesse came striding through the door in her crazy tuxedo. I caught myself looking over at the door every time it opened, to see if she would come through it again, even though I knew that was ridiculous—she would never leave her own event and come over to mine. Not now. A year ago, when she came into the gym through that door, it was one of the most powerful moments in my life. Everything changed for the better that night. And even though I knew it was totally, absolutely not going to happen, I guess I thought that maybe, if she somehow came through those doors again tonight, everything
would change again, and go back to how it was.

I was standing there alone at that snack table for I don’t know how long, watching the doors open and close, open and close, with Jesse not coming through them. After a while, I started to feel kind of panicky, and I looked over to the souvenir photo-booth area by the wall to find Michael. One of the key things that NorthStar donated to us was a fantastic new photo printer that allowed us to take fancy pictures and print them out right there for people to take home. We had little gold card-stock sleeves with the Vander logo and NorthStar logo printed side by side on the back and the words STARRY STARRY NIGHT embossed on the other front, and the pictures slipped inside. It was such a great take-home gift. I had put Michael in charge of running the whole operation, along with a couple of other guys I knew he got along with. But when I looked over to find him right then, he was gone. There was no one in charge of souvenir pictures. No one was preserving our memories anymore.