The Difference Between You and Me(3)

First Girl sighs. “Whatever, you’re such a control freak, Em.” She gives her hair a final check in the mirror. “Bye, dyke!” she chirps cheerfully over her shoulder as she leaves, pulling Second Girl along with her.

As Emily turns to walk out the door she meets Jesse’s eye for a fraction of a second. Her expression is scrunched-up and confusing, part Sorry and part What can you do? and part I know, this is so dumb and part Hey, it’s no big deal! A pity mishmash. This is not at all what Jesse wants. Jesse wants These girls are titanic mega-idiots and I renounce their friendship as of this moment and I’ll meet you in our usual spot at the library this afternoon and totally, totally make it up to you. Jesse takes a step forward as if to stop Emily, but even as she moves, Emily lets the door fall shut behind her.

A moment of quiet.

Jesse realizes that her heart is pounding.

In the mirror above the row of sinks, Jesse looks back at herself. She doesn’t look like much. Dark, angry eyes, messy thatched-roof haircut the color and texture of straw, clenched fists, square shoulders, ringer tee, cargo pants, fisherman’s boots.

Why do you have to wear those boots? Wyatt asks her almost every time he sees her. If you have to wear boots, fine, but why giant, loose, flopping, knee-high rubber boots that make you look like you just got off work at the slaughterhouse?

They make me feel solid, Jesse almost always says. I like to feel planted when I walk.

Crazy, Wyatt says to her. Rebel Without a Cause.

From outside the door in the hallway comes a muffled blast of static, like a blip from the sound track of the moon landing—far away, but close enough that it makes Jesse’s neck stiffen, wild-animal style. Blast of static means Snediker’s coming, walkie-talkie live and crackling, clipped to the lower pocket of her blazer.

Ms. Snediker, dean of students, is an iron marshmallow. She’s short and stout, pink cheeked and gray haired, and she rarely blinks. She always wears a flower-print dress with a skinny belt straining to stay clasped around her high, tight basketball of a middle. In her yearbook picture every year she poses, unsmiling, plump arms hanging stiffly by her sides, beside the wall of mug shots she keeps in her office, photos of kids she’s caught violating handbook rules or trying to sneak off campus during school hours. She calls this her “Hall of Shame.” She has a small, nasal voice that she never raises and that in no way matches the things she uses it to say: “busted,” frequently; “suspended,” whenever she gets the chance; and sometimes, on her luckiest days, “expelled.” Snediker is the Terminator. Snediker is coming.

Jesse is trapped.

The bathroom sweep is Snediker’s specialty. Out the door would mean running right into her meaty arms—a one-way ticket to disciplinary. But back into the stall is the fool’s direction: Snediker keeps a long-handled retractable mirror tool on her person at all times that she snaps out to its full length during bathroom sweeps to check under stall doors for toilet-crouchers. Anyway, the boots make crouching impractical. Jesse scans the bathroom desperately for an exit strategy, molten panic bubbling in her chest.

High up by the ceiling above the radiator unit is a long, narrow portal window, the kind you push out to open. It’s too high and too small for anyone but a moron or a super-hero to try to squeeze through. It’s decoration, not an escape hatch. It’s not part of a realistic plan. Jesse tugs her backpack over her shoulders and clambers up onto the radiator unit to reach it.

In her mind, Jesse hears Wyatt, calm and firm: Absolutely not. Absolutely not, have you finally, completely lost your mind? First of all it’s as high as your head, you’ll never get up there. Second of all it’s as wide as a Pop-Tart, you’ll never fit through it. Third of all what are you gonna do if you do get through, fly? It’s fourteen feet down to the ground and then you’re trapped in the inner courtyard, where do you think you’re gonna go from there?

Jesse thinks about Emily’s scrunched-up, confused expression as she left the bathroom: Sorry, sort of!

She unhooks the window latch and punches the swivel frame out—it opens about twenty inches, not nearly enough for her to squeeze through. She grips the sharp sill with both hands and, sending all her strength to her arms and shoulders, jumps! up and manages to wedge herself into the window frame. Her head and shoulders are crammed through, but her whole back three-quarters is still dangling inside the bathroom. The rounded tiptoes of her fisherman’s boots just graze the radiator cover now—not enough contact there for leverage—and her shoulders are so squeezed she can’t wriggle another inch forward. She tries to reverse course but the backpack, fat with manifestos, has her stuck.