The Difference Between You and Me(38)

“Hey!” At last Esther trundles around the corner, open book in one hand by her side, tote thumping against her other side. Jesse hisses, “Hurry!” and beckons her with big circles, like a third-base coach waving a runner home. “You’re late!”

“I was reading,” Esther says simply.

Inside A23 the meeting hasn’t officially started, but the room is crowded and noisy with chatter. The desks have been configured in a big U shape, and the twelve members of student council are already seated at them, facing in. A bunch of other chairs have been set out in rows facing the desks, and ten or twelve kids are sitting there in the audience. Everybody is urgently talking to everybody else.

Jesse’s eyes find Emily without even trying. She’s presiding over the U, seated right in the center, with a bunch of file folders and an open notebook spread out in front of her, and she’s leaning over to talk to Melissa Formosa, the pointy-nosed student council president. When she meets Jesse’s eye she stops talking mid-sentence. Her mouth hangs open, and she drifts away from Melissa, slowly sitting up straight in her chair. Melissa turns to follow Emily’s gaze and looks confusedly at Jesse, then back at Emily. Automatically, Jesse drops her eyes to the floor.

“Over here,” Esther says, tugging Jesse by the sleeve to a pair of chairs in the last row of the audience section, directly under the old pull-down map of Europe that still shows the Soviet union  , big, pink, and sprawling. Before they’ve even sat down, Melissa is ineffectually calling the meeting to order.

“Okay?” she pleads in her hollow, nasal voice. “Okay, people? We need to start, please?”

Slowly, the chatter dies down.

“Thanks, you guys,” Melissa whines. “Thanks for listening up. Okay, so we have a lot to get through today, right, Emily?”

Emily nods, focusing fiercely on the papers in front of her. Jesse can feel Emily not looking at her as intensely as she would feel her looking at her.

“Will you tell us what’s first on the agenda, Emily?”

Emily looks up and addresses the room with a careful, assembled smile. “Hi, everyone. Our first action item today is the establishment of a spirit banner committee for the lacrosse tournament at the end of the month. It’s an away tournament, and we need volunteers to come to Maggie or Grace’s house this weekend and help get banners ready that can travel with the team on the bus.”

In the front row of the audience, a kid with shoulder-length blond curls sticking out from under his striped ski hat raises his hand high.

“We’re not taking comments from the audience yet,” Emily says briskly, barely looking at him.

“Yeah, I have a question about the flyers that were posted?” he asks anyway.

“We’ll take questions once we’ve proceeded through all our action items. There are actually thirteen items on the agenda today, so it might take a little while.”

Even in this dumb environment, even in the middle of a U of dumb student council members, even saying dumb things like action items, Emily is so, so beautiful to Jesse. She’s pearly and golden and rosebud pink. Her cheeks are painfully soft, and her glossy hair—she’s wearing it down today—is just begging to be touched. Her long, kissable neck draws Jesse’s eye along it, the way it curves down, down, down all the way from her jawline into the crisp, white V of her open collar—

“Can we, like, talk about the flyers before you talk about the other stuff on your list?” the curly-hat kid asks, and a bunch of other kids in the audience back him up.

Emily turns to Melissa sharply. “Melissa, are we allowed to deviate from the agenda?” she asks. It’s such a transparent move—clearly she’s issuing a command, but disguising it as a query from a subordinate to a president.

“Maybe, actually, today we should?” Melissa ventures cautiously, but Emily jumps right on this.

“No, we can’t deviate from the agenda or we might never get all the issues on the list addressed,” she insists, her voice bright and brittle now. “The list has been planned for over three days. We have an obligation to deal with all these items.”

Jesse has never seen Emily this close to losing her cool. And she’s seen her in some pretty compromising positions.

“But people really want to talk about the flyers,” Melissa tries again, timidly.

“Maybe we should put it to a vote.” Emily sweeps her gaze over her fellow council members. “Council?”

“I think we totally need to talk about the StarMart thing,” a girl with chunky hipster glasses and a blunt, black bob says, and rapidly the rest of the council agrees.