The Difference Between You and Me (4 page)

Arthur picks up Fran’s hand and kisses the back of it. She rolls her eyes at him a little, but she’s still smiling.

“Are you guys about to make out?” Jesse demands.

“We might,” her father says, not taking his eyes off his wife. “We might make out.”

“You know”—Jesse gets up from the table—“it’s fine that you guys are heterosexual, your lifestyle choice is none of my business, but I don’t see why you have to rub my face in it all the time. This house is totally gender-oppressive and I’m sick of it. I’m here, I’m queer—”

“We’re used to it,” her mother sighs.

***

“Typical,” Wyatt sighs on the phone when Jesse explains what has happened.

Jesse is lying on her bed with her head hanging off the end and her sock feet up on the pillow, talking to her best friend. Since Wyatt left school in the middle of last year to be homeschooled by his aromatherapist-slash-animal-psychic mom, he basically does nothing but read books about finance and wait for Jesse to get home from school so they can talk. “Nice job, getting yourself thrown into jail on the
one
day you were going to come run interference for me with Howard.”

“It’s not jail, it’s Alternative Suspension.”

“Whatever. You don’t seem particularly devastated not to be spending your Saturday with me and Mr. Willette.”

Howard Willette is Wyatt’s father. He and Wyatt’s mother got divorced ten years ago, shortly after he accepted Christ as his personal savior—apparently, evangelical Christianity and aromatherapy proved to be incompatible belief systems. Four years ago, Howard married Louise, an even more conservative Christian than he is, and moved to Stonington, two towns away, to Wyatt’s great relief. But he still insists on honoring his monthly court-mandated coffee date with Wyatt, even though they have trouble exchanging even the most basic pleasantries without arguing. (Wyatt is a card-carrying member of the Atheist Alliance International. And the Queer Libertarian
League.) For a while now, Jesse has been coming with Wyatt on these coffee dates to distract them both and cut the tension with dumb jokes. She saves up G-rated punch lines and wholesome anecdotes about heroic pets all month long to use as subject-changers.

“I am
so
devastated. I’m totally devastated not to be there with you on Saturday. I have, like, three great new knock-knocks all ready to go!”

“What were you doing hiding in the bathroom anyway? That’s amateur stuff—you
know
how Snediker is with bathroom sweeps.”

“No, I know, it’s so dumb, I wasn’t supposed to be in there, or I was, but I was only supposed to be in there for a
second
. I just—something happened and I got distracted.”

Jesse wishes—so much wishes—she could tell Wyatt about the encounter with Emily today. For almost a year now she’s been managing to keep Emily a secret. Wyatt doesn’t even know she exists. It’s been excruciating—almost impossible—concealing this huge part of her life, but it seems even more impossible to start telling him about it now. How would she even bring it up? It’s been going on for so long and it’s so terrible, what Jesse’s agreed to. There’s no way Wyatt would let it continue if he knew.

“Oh, something happened?” Wyatt is sympathetic. “Something digestive?”

“Ew, no!” Jesse cries. “Gross! I just, it’s so dumb, I had masking tape in my bag and I was trying to get it out so
I could put up my manifestos during the pep rally and I couldn’t find it and then the bell rang and I was stuck there. That’s all that happened.”

Wyatt groans. “Not the manifestos!
That’s
why you got thrown in jail, for those ridiculous manifestos? Beloved, when are you going to figure out that this little art project of yours is a colossal waste of time?”

Jesse breathes, wills herself to stay calm. This is the biggest point of contention between them. If she had been thinking straight, she would have made up a totally different story about getting busted and avoided having to discuss this with Wyatt for eight millionth time. But she was not thinking straight. She was distracted by making up a story about being distracted by something other than Emily Miller.

“Okay, first of all,” Jesse says, forcing herself to stay cool, “they are not a ‘little art project.’ They are a series of serious political wake-up calls that I post around school because I’m trying to change things there and make the world a safer place for weirdos like you and me.”

“I’m not—” Wyatt starts, but Jesse cuts him off.

“Yeah, yeah, you’re not a weirdo, I know, and
second
of all, not that I want to miss our Howard date, I totally don’t, but I do actually think it’s worth getting thrown in jail for a cause you believe is important.”

“Mm-hm,” Wyatt murmurs. “Have you even started
The Fountainhead
yet?”

“I told you I’m not going to read that book. What is the
matter
with you that your idol is Ayn Rand, why can’t you worship Cher or Judy Garland like any normal gay boy?”

“Because I don’t have a low opinion of myself,” Wyatt says breezily, and barrels on. “If you would read the book like I’ve asked you to politely, you would understand where you’re going wrong. Miss Rand teaches us that egoism is the highest form of enlightenment. Trying to help other people is a twisted form of condescension, it makes people into dependent babies. And anyway, practically no one is smart enough to understand a ‘serious political wake-up call’ when they get one. The masses
want
to stay ignorant. And
those
masses? In
that
school? I’ve never seen a group of idiots so profoundly idiotic and so determined to stay that way. Why do you think I had to leave?”

“Because you couldn’t get Rob Strong to stop tormenting you.”

“Partly.” From seventh grade until the beginning of last year, Wyatt was engaged in a long, slow, torturous war with Rob Strong, varsity wide receiver and king of auto shop. Something about Wyatt—his delicacy, his highly unusual outfits, the frustrating way he showed no fear even when he was about to get pounded—made Rob want to exterminate him. Eventually, it became clear that no amount of adult intervention was going to change their dynamic, and since neither Snediker nor Mr. Greil, the principal, was able to control Rob, Wyatt’s mom gave into Wyatt’s lifelong
wish to be emancipated from school and pulled him, right at the beginning of ninth grade.

A lot of things had been changing in Jesse’s world when Wyatt left. Her mother had just started cancer treatments, and Jesse was spending more time alone at home. And with Wyatt gone at school, she was alone a lot there, too. Since seventh grade, she had had almost all her classes with Wyatt. They had walked to school together almost every morning and hung out almost every afternoon. When Wyatt’s mom took him out, it felt to Jesse like Wyatt had been her clothes, in a way, and now that he was gone she was walking around naked, exposed and alone in the halls of school.

It was then that she started working seriously on her manifestos. Pretty soon after that, she accidentally kissed Emily Miller for the first time.

It would have been impossible to keep Emily a secret if Wyatt had been there in school with her. But it didn’t take long for him to lose interest in Vander after he stopped going there every day. In the beginning, he still asked about whether Mr. DiNapoli had worn the red loose baggy sweater or the blue loose baggy sweater that day, or if they’d had the excellent Tater Tots in the à la carte line at the cafeteria, or what kind of polo shirt Justin Hasaki-Bernstein had had on in Spanish. But after only a few weeks, Wyatt started to act like the people Jesse was talking about were characters in some foreign-language
soap opera, remote and unreal, instead of the actual flesh-and-blood humans who populated her real life, all day, every day.

This year, Wyatt doesn’t even know half of Jesse’s teachers. He’s not reading
Bleak House
or
Their Eyes Were Watching God
. He doesn’t care about the new schedule change that turns either fourth or fifth period into a long lunch every third day, confusing the hell out of the entire school. When Jesse complains about the new schedule, Wyatt sighs and says things like, “It’s a shame when little things have to take up so much of your time and attention.” He doesn’t get that this schedule change is not a little thing—not if you have hideously un-fun trigonometry and hideously dull Foundations of Western Culture during fourth and fifth periods (Jesse does).

One thing that hasn’t changed is their favorite afternoon activity. One of Wyatt’s main hobbies—second only to following the stock market online—is the construction of what he calls “sartorial personae,” costumey outfits built around interesting pieces of clothing he finds at Rose’s Turn, a dark little hole-in-the-wall thrift shop tucked under the train bridge down on Route 9. Wyatt will find a curious garment (a plaid blazer, say) and gradually build an iconic outfit around it, adding other items and accessories (lime green slacks, argyle socks, a salmon-colored polyester button-down shirt, gold Scorpio-sign medallion), and refining the effect until he’s worked out a complete
persona (Golf Course Lady-Killer). Then this will become his uniform for a while—he’ll wear it every day for a few weeks or months, until he gets bored with it and starts building another persona. Last year he spent time as 1960s Corporate Executive, Ex-Marine, Punk-Rock Street Thug, Mozart in
Amadeus
, and Friendly Grandpa, feeling them out until they were just right, then abandoning them. Lately he’s been working on a sort of gay Hugh Hefner look—velveteen smoking jacket with a cigarette burn in the sleeve, ascot, fake-silk pajama bottoms, Isotoner slippers.

As long as they’ve been friends, Jesse has been going with him to Rose’s Turn at least once a week, usually on Wednesday afternoons, since Marla, the college girl who works the register on Wednesdays, is super chill and lets them take an unlimited number of items into the dressing room at one time. Jesse has even found a few choice items for herself on certain Wednesdays, though Wyatt rarely approves of her selections. The best thing she ever found was an insanely awesome light blue tuxedo from the ’70s—ruffled satin shirt, lapels as wide as surfboards, satin racing stripe down the side of each leg, and flappingly huge bell-bottom pants—so wide that her fisherman’s boots fit easily inside. “I cannot permit you to pair those boots with that pantsuit,” Wyatt had said at the time. “The boots or the pants alone are bad enough, but together they are an abomination in the sight of God.”

“These pants were made for these boots,” Jesse had argued. “That’s why they call them boot cut!”

“I just wish you could spend your unique, brilliant energy in a more productive way,” Wyatt continues now. “There are a few very extraordinary people in the world—of whom you and I are, of course, two—who strive for greatness in all things, and the way we do this is not by telling other people what to do, it’s by setting an exceptional example and living brilliantly and getting everything we can get and ignoring everybody else. Anyway, that’s what
I’m
going to do.”

“Yes, I know you are.”

“I’m going to get my GED by the end of this year and go to MIT and graduate a year early and start my own nanotech company and make microscopic cell phones that you implant in people’s brain stems and be the youngest person ever to make the Forbes top ten wealthiest Americans list.”

“Yes, I know.”

“When I’m married to my gorgeous, brain-surgeon husband who loves to cook, you can come stay with us and our two chocolate labs at our beachfront house in Malibu.”

“Thanks.”

“And I was thinking,” Wyatt continues, serious now, as if he’s given what he’s about to say a great deal of thought, “there should be one room in our guesthouse that’s specifically designed for you, and no one but you can stay there.
And we’ll have, like, copies of all your favorite books on the shelves and a mini-fridge with all your favorite snacks in it, and you can come anytime you want to and stay as long as you want. If you don’t have a job or if you drop out of college or something you can come stay there indefinitely.”

“Thanks.”

“For years, even. You can, like, live there. We’ll be so happy to have you.”

“Thanks, Wy.”

Wyatt sighs. Jesse pictures him rolling over onto his back on his—always—neatly made bed.

“Are you in your Hef-wear tonight?” she asks.

“Western,” he says tonelessly. “I’m starting a new John Wayne thing. I can’t believe I have to spend two hours with Howard without you there.” Wyatt’s bossy Ayn Rand voice has subsided. He sounds tired now, and small. “I wish you hadn’t climbed out that idiot window.”

“I’m sorry.” Jesse feels a sick-guilty knot twist in her stomach. She can’t stand the thought of Wyatt in his thrift-store Western wear sitting on that spindly metal chair at that wobbly round table in that dimly lit café, opposite coldhearted Howard, with no one to sit between them and absorb the bad energy.

“Hey,” she offers hopefully, “how about I tell you the knock-knocks I was going to tell him, so you can distract him yourself if things gets tense.”

“Okay,” Wyatt says balefully. “Not that it’ll help.”

“Knock knock,” Jesse begins.

“Who’s there?”

“Interrupting cow.”

“Interrupting—”

“MOO!” Jesse yells into the phone.

A pause. She can hear Wyatt rolling his eyes to the ceiling.

“Terrible,” he says, smiling. “Terrible.”