I called Michael after I got home, and he picked me up to go celebrate my first day with ice cream at Twin Teddies Drive-In. Michael’s favorite thing in the world is soft-serve and it’s almost the end of the season and he won’t be able to get it anymore for six months, so that’s why I suggested Twin Teddies for our celebration. Personally, I’d always prefer Beverly Coffee or Panera at the mall, but I wanted to make Michael happy—he’s done so much to make me happy. And he was totally happy. He got an extra-large twist cone with rainbow sprinkles, as tall and big around as a thermos, and ate the whole thing in, like, four monster bites. While he was eating, I told him everything about the afternoon at NorthStar, and the thing about the 163 million people across the globe. I told him that pretty soon I could be helping with decisions that will make it possible for people in, like, Bangladesh or Honduras to buy products that will improve their quality of life in ways they never imagined. And he gave me the sweetest look, not like his usual sweet look but a new, more bashful look, like he was just meeting me for the first time and was too nervous even to look me in the eye. He told me super-seriously that I am an inspiration to him. He said he’s never known anyone else who cared as much as I do about making a difference. He said he felt lucky to be the one who loves me.
Sometimes that boy is so sweet, I swear, it makes my heart ache. It makes my stomach feel queasy. It makes me feel a little like I’m coming down with something.
That night I had the most vivid dream, the kind that leaves you surrounded by a fog of feeling for hours after you wake up out of it. I dreamt that it was the end of the day and I was leaving my job at NorthStar, which I had had for a long time in the dream, and I was incredibly psyched because I had made some really important decision about the company that day and everybody was really excited about it. And I drove home to my house (which turned out to be a sort of giant pumpkin with windows on stilts, but whatever), and as I was driving I thought, I can’t wait to tell Michael about the important decision! But when I pulled into the driveway, it was Jesse waiting for me there on the porch, wearing only Michael’s green-plaid bathrobe that his brother brought him home from UPenn and these fuzzy pink socks. In the dream, I realized that we lived there together, in the pumpkin house. I was so excited to see her that I jumped out of the car and ran toward her, leaving the car door open behind me. I couldn’t wait to have my arms around her. As I was running I called out to her, like, almost crying with happiness, “I’m so glad you got rid of those boots!” And she laughed out loud, which she almost never does in real life, and said, “I did it because I love you.”
And then I woke up. It was only 5:10 a.m., but I couldn’t get back to sleep. My heart was racing. I just lay there wide awake for forty-five minutes feeling the thrill of running toward her move through me. I lay there listening to her voice in my mind, saying over and over again: I love you. I love you.
When I saw her in the hallway between third and fourth periods—we sometimes pass each other when she’s coming from Spanish at one end of the junior hall and I’m coming from chem at the other end—I felt the dream flood through me again, and without even thinking about it, totally unconsciously, I called out, “Jesse!” But she rushed right past me. She didn’t even look my way.
To be fair, we don’t usually make eye contact at school. I guess she wasn’t used to hearing me use her name.
It was just as well she didn’t stop, because I was walking with Grace Gerena and Kimmie Hersh and I only got away with it because they were busy comparing their chem quizzes right then. If they hadn’t been distracted, what would I have done? What would I have done if Jesse had stopped? What did I think I was going to do, right there in the middle of passing period, right there in front of everybody? Tell her that I loved her, too?
11
Jesse
When Esther opens her front door on Saturday morning, the first thing that hits Jesse is the smell. It smells like a pet store or a zoo: the yeasty, sawdusty odor of a caged animal and the nest it lives in. Involuntarily, Jesse backs up a step on the narrow porch to escape it, but Esther smiles her wide smile and says, “Hey, come in.”
“Thanks,” says Jesse, and steps inside.
It’s so dark inside Esther’s low-ceilinged house that it takes Jesse’s eyes a second to adapt. After a moment, she makes out, through an arched doorway to her left, a living room drenched in murk, thick brown shades pulled down over the windows, one small lamp casting a pool of stained yellow light in the far corner. The room is heaped—heaped—all over with piles and piles and piles of stuff, some of it reaching almost all the way to the ceiling. There are cascading stacks of newspapers, wads of fabric (clothes? sheets? tablecloths? towels?), windup toys, coffee mugs, leaning towers of paperback books, abandoned dishes, a stepladder, shoe boxes full of lightbulbs and extension cords, a porcelain figurine of two swans kissing, a toaster on top of a turned-off TV. In the corner is an old-fashioned bonnet hair dryer that looks like a combination chaise longue and electric chair—a cracked vinyl seat with a silver helmet attached to an extension arm above it. Somewhere under the mountains of stuff, there seem to be a sofa and a couple of armchairs, but the furniture is just a suggestion under the drifts of objects—the hint of land under a heavy snow.