The Difference Between You and Me (6 page)

“Parking,” the elf yells, and waves enthusiastically, like a little kid. Automatically, Jesse waves back, then thinks,
Why are we waving?

The hippiemobile pulls away, heading for the side parking lot, and at the same time up the access road a figure comes loping, hunched over, hurrying. As it gets closer, Jesse can see it’s a girl. She’s wearing a shapeless navy-blue overcoat and a long black skirt that reaches halfway down her shins, and she’s carrying a big lumpy black tote bag over one shoulder. Her dark hair is braided in two rough braids, the left one substantially thicker than the right. As she runs—almost lurches—up the hill, her canvas slip-on shoes fall half off her feet with every step. Jesse recognizes her dimly from around school, but she’s never seen her up close. The girl comes to a panting stop in front of the bench, her cheeks rosy from exertion, coarse hairs flying loose from her braids, which seem somehow to be undoing themselves from their rubber bands in real time as Jesse looks at them. The girl’s eyes
are cool blue in her overheated face. She doesn’t smile.

“ASP?”

Jesse nods.

“I’m Esther.”

“Jesse.”

“Is Huckle not here yet?”

“Who’s Huckle?”

The girl looks around her impatiently.

“I
ran
here and Huckle’s not even here yet?”

Esther blows the hair off her damp forehead, wipes the sweat off her upper lip broadly with the sleeve of her coat—somehow the gesture reminds Jesse of an old man—and sits down heavily on the bench next to Jesse, dropping her tote bag on the ground and immediately slipping her bare feet out of her black canvas shoes. The heat from her body hits Jesse in a wave. She smells sweet and clammy, like red peppers left too long in a Tupperware container.

“He’ll be here,” Esther assures Jesse, not looking at her. “He sometimes has time-management issues.”

Esther rummages in the tote bag by her feet and pulls out a thick, battered paperback book. She brings her legs up under her so she’s sitting cross-legged on the bench and tucks her skirt around them so her knees are completely covered, like a statue of the Buddha. She opens the book with her left hand and holds it right up to her face to read, chewing at the nail of her right thumb absently. As suddenly
as she arrived here, she’s gone—disappeared into the book that she holds five inches away from her face. Jesse can’t help but stare at her.

Esther bites down hard on the skin at the corner of her thumbnail, gnaws at it, sucks blood out of it. Jesse blinks.

“Hey, miscreants,” calls the elf from behind them. Jesse turns to see him waving from the corner of the school building, holding a pair of rakes with his left hand. “Let’s get cracking.” He grins.

“Huckle,” Esther says, an explanation. “Our supervisor.” She snaps her book shut and shoves it down deep into her tote bag, slips back into her shoes and heads over toward the elf, leaving Jesse behind.

“It’s gravel raking again,” Huckle is saying to Esther regretfully as Jesse reaches them. “Sorry.”

“Fine by me,” Esther replies. She turns to Jesse. “They get deliveries of these big heaps of gravel out at the edges of the athletic fields and it’s our job to spread them out evenly in the ditches. To collect the rain drainage, right?” She directs the last to Huckle, who shrugs amiably.

“Do I look like I know about rain drainage or whatnot? Am I a groundskeeper of some sort?” Huckle is wearing slouchy striped Guatemalan pants under his nubbly woven poncho-hoodie. As he talks, Jesse notices that one of his front teeth is gray. “I just check y’all in and sign y’all out. All I know about gravel is that spreading it looks like
no fun
.”

“It’s not fun,” Esther agrees, businesslike. “But it’s meditative.”

“You’ve done this before?” Jesse asks her.

“Who, Meinz?” Huckle points at Esther. “This one? This one’s been here almost every week this year, haven’t you, Meinz?” Esther shrugs noncommittally. “Meinz is my main ASP buddy. If Meinz doesn’t come on a Saturday, I get lonely. What’re you in for this week, Meinz?”

“Protesting the mandatory spirit assembly,” says Esther.

“Hey, me too.” Jesse smiles, but Esther gives her a puzzled look.

“Really? I didn’t see you in the office.”

“Oh…” Somehow, suddenly, Jesse knows that the real story of her spirit assembly “protest” will not impress this girl. “I was, um, somewhere else,” she fumbles.

“Spirit assembly?” Huckle laughs. “Now you’re even protesting spirit assemblies? What do you have against spirit assemblies, Meinz?”

“Spirit assembly supports football. Football is a war simulation. I don’t support war in any form, real or simulated.”

“Hard-core,” Huckle says to Jesse, jerking his thumb in Esther’s direction. Jesse nods. Esther thumps her tote bag down on the wet ground and bends to rummage in it.

“Yeah, so, as far as instructions go for today, you got your rakes, you got your gravel, you got your ditches, you
get the picture. I’ll hold on to your bags and your phones for, you know, safekeeping, and you come get me in the phys. ed. office at noon for lunch. If I’m not there, you know, check my car. Sometimes I’m in my car during certain periods of the day. Just chilling.”

Huckle smiles a big gray-toothed Cheshire-Cat smile.

From the tote bag, Esther produces her paperback, which she slips into the neck of her coat so that it vanishes, absorbed into the bulky mass of her clothes, and a crumpled-up floppy pink sunhat, which she shakes out to its full, twenty-inch diameter and sets on her head, tying the strings in a big bow beneath her chin. Without looking at Jesse she says, “Even on a cloudy day, UV rays can cause damage. We’ll be out there awhile.” Then she takes one of the rakes from Huckle, deposits her tote bag at his feet, and starts off purposefully toward a distant corner of the lacrosse field.

“Implement?” Huckle says to Jesse, a note of apology in his voice, extending the second rake toward her. She trades him her phone and her backpack for the tool and heads off across the field after Esther, breaking into a jog to try to close the distance between them.

***

The raking isn’t hard at the start. It’s just boring, and loud—the harsh
skritch
of the metal rakes on the jagged pebbles bores a hole into Jesse’s skull right at the back of her head.
The gravel is freshly pulverized and it smells sharp and chalky, sending up clouds of stony dust whenever Jesse digs into it with the tines of her rake.

Jesse rakes halfheartedly, distracted by watching Esther out of the corner of her eye. Esther at work is awkward and fierce, flinging the rake out and hauling it back in, flinging and hauling, over and over again. Sometimes her lips move a little as she works, as if she’s reciting something to herself, or she shakes her head suddenly, briefly, as if saying no to an invisible interlocutor. Esther is so focused on her job and whatever it is that’s going on inside her head that Jesse imagines she wouldn’t look up once until lunchtime if Jesse didn’t get her attention on purpose.

“So you hate pep rallies, too,” she opens, a little louder than normal to make sure Esther hears her.

Esther pauses and looks around, confused, as if trying to identify the source of the sound she just heard.

“You hate pep rallies, too?” Jesse repeats.

Esther makes eye contact with her:
Oh, it’s you talking.

“I oppose them,” she corrects, and turns back to her raking.

“Me too. I find them hideous.”

“Where were you registering your objection, if not the main office?”

“I was actually…” Jesse begins, then pauses to consider
whether she should tell Esther the truth. Esther looks up briefly and nods, a bit impatiently.

“Yes?”

“I was actually trying to skip the assembly and Sne-diker busted me climbing out the window of the girls’ room.”

For a second Esther doesn’t respond, and Jesse thinks it was a mistake to admit this. But then, to Jesse’s relief, Esther laughs, sudden and seal-like, a kind of bark-yelp. When Esther opens her mouth, Jesse notices that her teeth are neat, small, and separate—baby teeth in a grown-up mouth.

“Oh well,” Esther says. “I guess
that
was a mistake.”

“Yeah, big mistake,” Jesse agrees, encouraged, “especially since I was planning to use first period to put up my new manifesto around school.” Somehow it’s very important to Jesse that this girl know that she’s serious about things.

“Oh, that’s you?” Esther raises her eyebrows, curious. “Those manifesto posters, those are you?”

“My organization.” Jesse nods casually, a quiet pride spreading inside her.

“I like those.”

“Thanks.”

“I look forward to them.” That this girl knows her manifestos, likes them, looks forward to them, sends Jesse’s heart sailing. “They’re hilarious. They’re sort of like episodes of some sitcom about a goofy activist or something.”

Jesse’s heart hits the ground with a thunk.

“Sitcom?”

“Yeah, they’re a parody, right? Like a joke on political manifestos?”

It seems too late, or too complicated, or just too embarrassing for Jesse to correct Esther. How could she possibly explain at this moment that the manifestos are her earnest work, her best idea about how to change the culture of the school?

“Yeah,” Jesse says, trying to swing a note of bravado into her voice. “Totally. A joke on manifestos.”

“That’s cool. Like
The Daily Show
or something, right? Satire? That’s cool.” Somehow when Esther says the word
cool
it’s like your grandma trying to say the word
cool
. Her moist, wide mouth makes the word come out all awkward. And yet it’s also completely sincere. “I mean, that kind of comedy doesn’t change the world or anything, but it’s funny. It gets people’s attention. And it can get people thinking.”

“Yeah. I always try to get people thinking.”

Esther stops raking now, holds the rake away from her body and looks at Jesse thoughtfully, sizing her up.

“What’s your organization called again?”

“Um, NOLAW?”

“Which stands for… ?”

Jesse swallows. “National Organization to Liberate All Weirdos?”

“Right, very funny. And who are your other members?”

“Um…” Jesse pictures herself alone at her desk in her room, cutting and pasting, running the posters off in furtive batches on her mom’s printer/scanner/copier before she gets home from work. “We don’t have too many members. We’re not that big an organization.”

“You know what you could do,” Esther offers, “is join up with
my
new organization, SPAN. Have you heard of us?” Jesse shakes her head. “SPAN? Student Peace Action Network?” Jesse shakes her head again, and Esther sighs, annoyed.

“Sorry?” Jesse offers.

“No it’s okay, it’s just, this is our hugest problem. We’ve had two meetings already, me and Ms. Filarski, our faculty advisor, and we’ve submitted an application to be recognized as an official student group, but still nobody knows about us.”

“Yeah, I never heard of you,” Jesse confirms.

“You should help us.” Esther peers at Jesse directly, almost confrontationally, now. “You should bring NOLAW’s poster-making operation over to SPAN. We could join forces. Then we could both, like, do a better job of getting the word out about our activities, and both of us could get more members. You guys clearly have a really good public relations operation. Margaret says half of activism is advertising. She says you have to let people know what you’re doing, otherwise it won’t have any impact on the world.
But that kind of stuff doesn’t come naturally to me.”

“Who’s Margaret?”

“Oh, she’s my best friend and mentor and adopted grandmother. She organizes a peace vigil with her husband, Charlie, that I go to every Sunday. You should come.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“You should definitely come!” Esther practically shouts, overtaken by new enthusiasm. “It’s on the common in front of the Town Hall, it’s only an hour, from noon to one. Margaret and Charlie have been doing it every Sunday for forty years, they’re the most incredible people you’ll ever meet in your life. You have to come.”

“Okay.”

Jesse takes a second now to look Esther over. She’s completely abandoned her raking at this point and is using the rake as a gesturing tool, waving it around as she speaks. Her eyes are flinty and fierce. She’s as serious, as determined, as any kid Jesse has ever seen.

“It’s hard getting people to care about important issues at this school, don’t you think?”

“I guess,” Jesse says. “No, totally, yeah.”

“Maybe not for you since you’re a comedian,” Esther concedes, “but for me, I mean, I’m just a freshman, maybe I don’t really know how things work here yet, but I feel like kids are so superficial here. They’re not involved enough in their community. In a lot of ways I hated Sacred Heart,
where I used to go, but at least people there were really into service. Everybody had a cause. Here, people are more interested in things like dances and pep rallies, it seems like.”

“Yeah,” Jesse agrees. “It’s hard to be an outsider here.”

“But no, I’m not complaining.” Esther shakes her head. “It’s a really good challenge for me. I feel like I was meant to come here and bring some of that spirit of service to Vander. I believe that no matter how much it might seem like people don’t care, if you show them how they’re connected to the things that are wrong with the world, they totally change their behavior. Don’t you think?”

Jesse squints, thoughtful. “I don’t know.” She thinks about Emily’s blank stare in the bathroom. She thinks about Wyatt:
The masses
want
to stay ignorant.
“I hope so,” Jesse says.

“Oh no, I’m sure of it. I have a lot of faith in people. That’s the whole reason I founded SPAN. SPAN is going to show people the truth about injustice in the world and get people fired up to take action. As soon as we get some members. You have to come to our next meeting.” It’s an assertion, not an offer. “We meet Tuesdays at three thirty in Ms. Filarski’s room.”

“Oh, Tuesday at three thirty I actually, sort of, already have plans.” Tuesday at 3:30 Jesse has plans to be working her hands up Emily Miller’s shirt in the third-floor handicapped
restroom of the Samuel Ezra Minot Public Library.