The Difference Between You and Me(29)

“You like Main Street?” Charlie shouts, undeterred. “You like free trade and little stores and local business? Well, kiss it good-bye! Kiss it all good-bye if StarMart sinks their hooks into this town!”

Charlie waves his hand dramatically over the street in front of him, gesturing to all that will be lost.

Jesse turns to look at the doomed downtown, and just at that moment he rounds the corner and heads up the block: Mike McDade, ambling easy through the afternoon in his khakis, button-down shirt, and baseball cap. Mike McDade, the square-jawed. Mike McDade, the broad-shouldered. Mike McDade, the six-foot-one, all-American shortstop. Mike McDade, the love of Jesse’s love’s life.

Jesse watches him, transfixed.

The guy walks like nothing has ever stood in his way or fallen in his path, like his body has never encountered the slightest resistance in the world. He moves like someone who has never been anything but welcomed wherever he’s gone. His stride is long, his hands are loose and comfortable in his pockets, his chin is up, he seems to be… whistling? Mike McDade is freaking whistling. Because that’s just how zip-a-dee-doo-dah he feels.

This is how he always looks. It’s how he looks when he’s walking Emily down the senior hall, his big, broad hand floating lightly over the small of her back. It’s how he looks when he’s leaning beside her locker looking down at her, or slinging his long arm over her shoulders, or fake-punching her affectionately on the shoulder, or bending down to kiss her in the door to her math class. He looks easy. Relaxed. Satisfied. Mike McDade is living his perfect life.

Without noticing the posse of peaceniks across the street, Mike tugs open the door to Murray and Sons Hardware and disappears inside. Jesse hears the faint, distant tinkle of the bell as the door falls shut.

“I mean, right? Hey, new girl, right?” Suddenly, Jesse is aware that Arlo is speaking to her, has been speaking to her for some time now.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I spaced for a second. What were you saying?”

“Who were you watching over there?” Arlo asks, his voice low and confidential.

“Nobody, I was just… zoning.”

“Come on, you were watching someone. Who? You can tell me.”

Jesse sighs. “My nemesis,” she admits.

“You have a nemesis?” Arlo says. “Excellent.”


***

Twenty minutes later, Jesse is sitting wedged into the backseat of her mother’s Camry with an uncomfortable heap of peace signs in her lap, and her cheek pressed against the gritty two-by-four of the Peace Now banner. The only way it would fit into the compact car was diagonally inside, so that Jesse is stuffed in on one side of it in the backseat, and Esther has the other end resting heavily on her shoulder in the front seat.

Her mom had been pulling out of the parking lot with Jesse in the passenger seat beside her when they both simultaneously spotted Esther, trying to manage the heavy banner under one arm and keep ahold of the whole mess of signs under the other. When she told them she was heading for the bus stop to ride home, Fran told Jesse to get out of the car and help Esther in.

“So how was it, you guys?” Jesse’s mom asks now, overeager. “You get a lot of important things accomplished?”

“The point of a peace vigil isn’t to get things accomplished, it’s just to be there,” Jesse snaps. Even she’s aware of how obnoxious she sounds.

“Pardonnez-moi,” Fran says mock-delicately. “Did you do a lot of good ‘being there’ then?”

“Oh yes,” Esther says sincerely. “It was excellent. It’s excellent every week.”

“You go to the vigil every week?” Fran inquires. Jesse can see her surveying Esther curiously out of the corner of her eye.

“Yeah, for the past two years I’ve been going pretty much every week. I really like the people. Some of them I know from other places, like I work with Phyllis at the soup kitchen, and Louis runs the after-school program for kids where I volunteer tutor. Arlo keeps trying to get me to help out with his anarchist freegan cooperative over in Cold River, but I’m not so interested in what they do. He’s really nice, though, usually.” Esther cranes her neck around to address Jesse in the backseat. “He was just trying to show off for you by being tough because you were new.”

“I didn’t mind him,” Jesse says truthfully.

“And is it still basically Margaret and Charlie’s show over there?” Fran asks.

Esther whips around to face Fran—as far around as she can turn beneath the two-by-fours—her face alive with anticipation and joy. “You know Margaret and Charlie?” Jesse has never seen Esther so openly filled with emotion.