The Difference Between You and Me(15)

“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.

“That’s too bad,” Esther says seriously. “We could use a few committed revolutionaries.”

All her life Jesse has been writing protest letters, going with her parents to marches and demos, giving part of her allowance to PETA, participating in boycotts, and writing manifestos, and she never, ever would have called herself a “revolutionary.” Here, Esther says it so casually, like you’d say, “We could use a few sophomores.”

“Next Tuesday, then.” Esther nods, and turns back to raking. “So how long have you been running NOLAW?”

“Um, I guess I started making the manifestos in the middle of last year? Wyatt, my best friend Wyatt, says they’re a symptom of the anger issues I had about my mom being sick, but he doesn’t know anything. He’s a libertarian.”

“Your mom was sick?”

“Oh yeah. She had cancer.” Jesse tosses this out casually.

At the word cancer Esther’s whole face alters, subtly but totally. “Oh,” Esther says. “What kind?”

“Breast cancer. Pink ribbon, you know, blah blah blah.”

“My mom, too,” says Esther.

“Really?” Jesse’s eyes widen.

“Yeah. Breast cancer.”

“That’s so cool!” Jesse blurts out, then corrects herself, stumbling over her words. “No, I mean, not cool, it’s not cool your mom had cancer, I just mean, I never met anyone else whose mom had it, too. That’s, like, so amazing.” Jesse smiles.

“Yeah. My mom died a year and a half ago,” Esther says.

In the quiet that follows, Jesse hears the sound of the birds in the trees around them. She feels like she never noticed before how specific their songs are. One three-note melody comes from the trees to her right, over and over again, like wind chimes, and a totally different two-note melody comes from the trees to her left. She wonders if the two birds are speaking to each other.

“Did I just freak you out?” Esther asks finally.

“No, no way.” Jesse can’t quite look at Esther anymore. “I’m sorry about your mom.”

“It’s okay,” Esther says. “I’m fine. Don’t be freaked out, all right?”

“I’m not. I’m not.”

“Good.” Esther smiles a little, encouragingly. “Let’s get back to work. Huckle will let us go early if we get all three piles spread out by noon.”


***

At lunchtime, Huckle spreads out a ratty blanket on the grass by his car, right at the edge of the parking lot, for all three of them to sit on.

“This is perfect,” he says, lying back on the blanket and putting his sandaled feet up on the bumper of his hippiemobile. “We’re still on school grounds, but we’re close enough to home that I can get us sodas from the fridge if we want them.”

“Huckle lives right there,” Esther explains, gesturing with her chin to a little white house through the spindly woods at the parking lot’s edge. She takes a bite of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that looks like it was made in a bomb shelter during an air raid—it’s torn and smeared, a total mess.

“So um, why did you drive your car here?” Jesse asks.

Huckle smiles dreamily. “I like to bring my private space with me wherever I go,” he says. “In case I have an urgent need to chill at any time.”

“Not to be rude or anything,” Jesse says, “but you seem like sort of a weird guy to be an ASP supervisor.”

“I’m unusual, yes.” Huckle tears a piece of Slim Jim off with his teeth and chews it roundly.

“So, like, um, how did you get this job?”

“I used to be a sub?” Huckle turns to look at Jesse from his vantage point on the ground. “At school? And then, there was, like, an incident, and I had to stop subbing? But they were like, it’s cool, we can find a place for you, and they found me this.”

“Uh-hunh. What kind of—” Jesse is about to ask what kind of incident Huckle was involved in, but he interrupts.