The Difference Between You and Me (13 page)

The whole office is decorated with this series of beautiful
framed posters with photographs of tranquil nature scenes above poetic messages about doing your best work and making the most of your opportunities. The one right above my desk has a picture of three flying geese silhouetted against this huge, violet-colored moon rising over a lake, and underneath the picture it says YOU CAN SOAR ONLY AS HIGH AS YOU BELIEVE THE SKY TO BE. I wrote this down on a Post-it note and stuck it on the inside cover of my homework journal for inspiration.

It was really just an introductory day for me to get to get my feet wet and start meeting people, Mr. Willette said. Ms. Rinaldi did train me on the large-scale photocopier—which is huger and more complicated than any copier I’ve ever seen, it’s like a tank or a robot hippopotamus or something—and she left me in charge of running off a series of reports in time for a late afternoon meeting, which stressed me out for a second, but which I managed to accomplish just fine. But other than that I didn’t do any real work.

Still. Even though I wasn’t completing any specific tasks, just
being
there I felt like I was doing something real. I don’t even know how to explain it, but everywhere you go in that office, even when you can’t see anyone working, you can
feel
that people are getting things done. People are making decisions. They’re making things happen. Mr. Willette reminded me today that it may look like a small operation over there, but I am now working at the
regional corporate headquarters of the third-largest retail company in the
world
. The mission of the company is to bring affordable, high-quality products to people who might not otherwise be able to get them, all over the planet. Every day, 163 million people from all different faiths, nationalities, creeds, and colors walk through the doors of a NorthStar Enterprises store. The decisions people make in this one office, in this one town, in this one state, could go on to affect 163 million people. It’s so overwhelming, I can barely get my mind around it. It fills me with a crazy kind of pride.

Not that it’s the same, but it reminds me a little bit of the time when I proposed the format change at the student council meetings. Before the change, there wasn’t any kind of order for how the meetings ran, people just raised their hands and brought up whatever topics occurred to them—complaints or proposals or comments or whatever. It was fine, but it felt like we could never tackle anything big, because as soon as we’d start to really dig into a problem, someone would raise their hand and take us off on some random tangent and we’d never get back to the issue we started with. I proposed a new system where we began every meeting with a typed-up agenda of action items, so that we could go down the list in order and really make sure every item got addressed before we moved on to the next one. It seems like such a simple thing, but that small change made such a huge difference in the way student
council meetings ran. The energy got totally efficient, and even though we were getting way more things done, our meetings actually went down from two hours to an hour and a half, on average. And every minute we were in that room together, it felt like something was actually happening. It feels like that in the NorthStar offices, but, like, 163 million times more.

I called Michael after I got home, and he picked me up to go celebrate my first day with ice cream at Twin Teddies Drive-In. Michael’s favorite thing in the world is soft-serve and it’s almost the end of the season and he won’t be able to get it anymore for six months, so that’s why I suggested Twin Teddies for our celebration. Personally, I’d always prefer Beverly Coffee or Panera at the mall, but I wanted to make Michael happy—he’s done so much to make me happy. And he
was
totally happy. He got an extra-large twist cone with rainbow sprinkles, as tall and big around as a thermos, and ate the whole thing in, like, four monster bites. While he was eating, I told him everything about the afternoon at NorthStar, and the thing about the 163 million people across the globe. I told him that pretty soon I could be helping with decisions that will make it possible for people in, like, Bangladesh or Honduras to buy products that will improve their quality of life in ways they never imagined. And he gave me the sweetest look, not like his usual sweet look but a new, more bashful look, like he was just meeting me for the first time and was too nervous
even to look me in the eye. He told me super-seriously that I am an inspiration to him. He said he’s never known anyone else who cared as much as I do about making a difference. He said he felt lucky to be the one who loves me.

Sometimes that boy is so sweet, I swear, it makes my heart ache. It makes my stomach feel queasy. It makes me feel a little like I’m coming down with something.

That night I had the most vivid dream, the kind that leaves you surrounded by a fog of feeling for hours after you wake up out of it. I dreamt that it was the end of the day and I was leaving my job at NorthStar, which I had had for a long time in the dream, and I was incredibly psyched because I had made some really important decision about the company that day and everybody was really excited about it. And I drove home to my house (which turned out to be a sort of giant pumpkin with windows on stilts, but whatever), and as I was driving I thought,
I can’t wait to tell Michael about the important decision!
But when I pulled into the driveway, it was Jesse waiting for me there on the porch, wearing only Michael’s green-plaid bathrobe that his brother brought him home from UPenn and these fuzzy pink socks. In the dream, I realized that we lived there together, in the pumpkin house. I was so excited to see her that I jumped out of the car and ran toward her, leaving the car door open behind me. I couldn’t wait to have my arms around her. As I was running I called out to her, like, almost crying with happiness, “I’m so glad you
got rid of those
boots
!” And she laughed out loud, which she almost never does in real life, and said, “I did it because I love you.”

And then I woke up. It was only 5:10 a.m., but I couldn’t get back to sleep. My heart was racing. I just lay there wide awake for forty-five minutes feeling the thrill of running toward her move through me. I lay there listening to her voice in my mind, saying over and over again:
I love you.
I love you.

When I saw her in the hallway between third and fourth periods—we sometimes pass each other when she’s coming from Spanish at one end of the junior hall and I’m coming from chem at the other end—I felt the dream flood through me again, and without even thinking about it, totally unconsciously, I called out, “Jesse!” But she rushed right past me. She didn’t even look my way.

To be fair, we don’t usually make eye contact at school. I guess she wasn’t used to hearing me use her name.

It was just as well she didn’t stop, because I was walking with Grace Gerena and Kimmie Hersh and I only got away with it because they were busy comparing their chem quizzes right then. If they hadn’t been distracted, what would I have done? What would I have done if Jesse had stopped? What did I think I was going to do, right there in the middle of passing period, right there in front of everybody? Tell her that I loved her, too?

When Esther opens her front door on Saturday morning, the first thing that hits Jesse is the smell. It smells like a pet store or a zoo: the yeasty, sawdusty odor of a caged animal and the nest it lives in. Involuntarily, Jesse backs up a step on the narrow porch to escape it, but Esther smiles her wide smile and says, “Hey, come in.”

“Thanks,” says Jesse, and steps inside.

It’s so dark inside Esther’s low-ceilinged house that it takes Jesse’s eyes a second to adapt. After a moment, she makes out, through an arched doorway to her left, a living room drenched in murk, thick brown shades pulled down over the windows, one small lamp casting a pool of stained yellow light in the far corner. The room is heaped—
heaped
—all over with piles and piles and piles of stuff, some of it reaching almost all the way to the ceiling. There are cascading stacks of newspapers, wads of fabric (clothes? sheets? tablecloths? towels?),
windup toys, coffee mugs, leaning towers of paperback books, abandoned dishes, a stepladder, shoe boxes full of lightbulbs and extension cords, a porcelain figurine of two swans kissing, a toaster on top of a turned-off TV. In the corner is an old-fashioned bonnet hair dryer that looks like a combination chaise longue and electric chair—a cracked vinyl seat with a silver helmet attached to an extension arm above it. Somewhere under the mountains of stuff, there seem to be a sofa and a couple of armchairs, but the furniture is just a suggestion under the drifts of objects—the hint of land under a heavy snow.

“The kitchen’s this way,” Esther says mildly, as if she hadn’t just ushered Jesse into one of the most astonishing houses she’s ever seen in her life. “I thought we could get a snack and then go up to my room to work.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“We can go up the back stairs from the kitchen.” Esther leads Jesse along the narrow path that snakes through the overstuffed living room. “And don’t worry about my dad, he’s fine.”

Only then does Jesse notice that there’s a man on the couch, inches away from where she’s standing. He’s curled up on his side with his back facing the room, wedged into the crush of afghans, pillows, and magazines that cram the sofa: a sleeping giant in a nest of stuff. In a startled moment, Jesse takes in the curved, sharp knobs of his spine through his T-shirt, the droopy behind of his boxer shorts,
the dirty soles of his long, white sweatsocks. He shifts a little as they pass and lets out a rumbling sleep-sigh. Jesse hurries after Esther, away from his too-live, shuddering body.

“He’s just napping,” Esther says, her voice light but a little strained.

“Oh yeah,” says Jesse. “Yeah.”

“I know it’s kind of a mess, sorry,” Esther continues. “I didn’t really get a chance to clean up before you came.”

“Kind of a mess?”
Jesse thinks.
It would take a week of solid work to clean this place up.
But she says only, “No, it’s fine.”

They pass through a dining room as cavelike as the living room—it seems that there must be a table and chairs in there, but it’s hard for Jesse to tell because of the mixed-up mass of board games, bottles, books, and table lamps that’s piled on top of them—and into the kitchen, which is brighter, more open. The kitchen walls are yellow, the windows are dressed with little white café curtains, and although every surface is covered with crumbs and smears and sticky rings, and the sink is piled high with dirty dishes, at least there’s one little breakfast table that’s clear, not smothered in newspapers and junk. Jesse realizes that she’s been sort of holding her breath since the moment she walked into Esther’s house. She inhales now, and the faint perfume of sour milk fills her nose.

“Peanut butter and jelly okay?” Esther asks. Peanut
butter and jelly—particularly peanut butter and jelly made by someone else in a strange, messy kitchen—is one of the grossest snacks Jesse can imagine. But she says vaguely, “Yeah, sure, great.”

Esther moves around the kitchen briskly, unself-consciously. She swipes up a filmy juice glass and a cereal bowl with a leftover pool of milk and floating Cheerios in it off the countertop and fits them in, Jenga-style, to the tower of dishes in the sink. Then she gets to work pulling plates, knives, and sandwich ingredients out of the cabinets and fridge.

“I’m glad you came over,” Esther mentions to the countertop, not looking at Jesse.

Jesse waits for Esther to explain why it’s helpful or practical or useful to have Jesse there. When she doesn’t add anything after a moment, Jesse answers, “Yeah, me too.”

In her pocket, Jesse feels her phone buzz. She checks it quickly: Wyatt.
Not now,
she thinks, and dismisses the call.

Unsure of what to do with herself, Jesse stands in front of the big mustard-yellow fridge and peruses its surface. The fridge door is a cheery collage of photos, receipts, menus from local restaurants, and happy magnets (an apple with a grinning, googly-eyed worm coming out of it, a blue plastic thermometer in the shape of the state of Michigan, a pig with a bandanna on its head and the words GO
HOG WILD! painted on its pink side), but as she peers at it longer, Jesse gets the funny sense that this fridge is a kind of museum exhibit—no one has stuck anything new up here for a long, long time. One of the menus tacked under the map of Michigan is for Martinelli’s Pizza, which closed at least two years ago; Bedazzlers Nail Salon is there now, where Jesse’s mom gets her only-in-the-summertime pedicures. All of the photographs on the fridge are of Esther, but she’s no more than ten or eleven years old in any of them. There’s five-year-old Esther in a little green two-piece bathing suit at the beach, squinting seriously and holding up a pink plastic shovel. There’s eight-year-old Esther in a snowsuit and mittens, grinning and shaking the stick-hand of a tipsy-looking, half-melted snowman. There’s a school picture of Esther from maybe sixth grade, her braids in exactly the same disarray as they are now, her eyes wide—almost startled—above her broad, tiny-toothed smile.