The Difference Between You and Me(42)

Jesse was weirdly quiet then—kind of scary quiet.

She was like, You’re working with them?

I was like, Yeah. I told her about the unpaid internship and the office and the giant copier and how nice everyone is to me over there—all the things I wished I could have told her before—and she just kept getting weirder and weirder, quieter and quieter. I was like, Please don’t freak out, I know this is not something you would probably do but we just have to agree to disagree about this. And then I said the thing I had been planning to say all along, I was like, Working with NorthStar is just as important to me as your poster things are to you, so I really wish you would respect that and stop doing this right now. I’m not saying stop doing posters altogether, I’m just saying could you please go back to doing posters that are random, like before, where they didn’t actually have any effect on people or cause any damage, instead of using them to try to destroy my life like you are now?

Jesse was like, My posters have never been random. Like, super pissed. She was all, Did you even look at the StarMart posters? Did you look at the flyers we handed out at your meeting? Everything on them is real. How can you keep working for them when you know all the horrible things they do? StarMart is the enemy.

So I was like, That is so crazy, they are not the enemy, you might not agree with everything they do, but they actually do lots of amazing things for the world that you don’t even know about.

She was like, Esther says they’re the single-most evil corporation in the world.

I was like, Esther? Is she that girl you were with at the meeting? Do you like her or something?

And Jesse was like, No.

I was like, Is she your new girlfriend?

And she was like, No!

But she didn’t look at me when she said it.

I’m pretty comfortable being in competitive situations. I like to work hard, and I like to earn what I get. But I guess I sort of always assumed that I wouldn’t have to be in a competitive situation when it came to Jesse. The thing about being with Jesse that’s been so incredible for me since the beginning is that because we’re so different, because we barely agree on anything, I’ve always been able to feel how pure our feelings for each other are. It’s not like there’s any public part of our relationship, like with me and Michael, where other people want us to stay together, and it’s not like we agree with each other’s ideas or enjoy talking about things or have anything in common or anything. It’s deeper than that. It’s a soul connection. And I guess that’s why I never thought I would have to compete for Jesse’s attention.

Not that I have any objection to that girl she was with at the meeting, I’m sure she has a really great personality and she’s probably good in school, which are both things I’m sure Jesse cares about a lot. She is a little weird looking, to be totally honest—those messy Heidi braids? those long old-lady skirts?—but she’s no weirder than Jesse is. I guess I just thought that wasn’t the kind of girl Jesse was interested in.

I was thinking about this, about the kind of girls Jesse likes, when Jesse launched into this huge rant about NorthStar. She used to do this more before she realized that I’m basically immune to her insanity. And I have to say, as boring and annoying as it was when she used to rant about stuff that was hardly even real, like nuclear war or famine or whatever, this was so much worse. Listening to her rant about NorthStar, which she doesn’t even know anything about and which is part of our actual lives, just made me more and more and more angry. She was, like, thlomping back and forth across the bathroom in her hobo boots, going on and on about all the supposedly terrible things NorthStar does, and how they’re trying to take over the world, and asking me, like, don’t I care about workers in Honduras blah blah blah and don’t I care about protecting local stores blah blah and don’t I care about the poor little kids of StarMart employees who can’t even afford to go the doctor blah blah blabbedy blah and finally I was like, Stop, stop, stop !

I was practically yelling at her—we were both practically yelling. We both totally forgot about staying quiet in our private place. I was like, None of that has anything to do with me! Even if some of that stuff is true about NorthStar, it’s totally beside the point! The point is I’m trying to do something good for our school, which will benefit everybody at Vander, including you!

Then Jesse stopped pacing, and came over and stood really close to me and clamped her hands on my upper arms like she sometimes does, sort of holding me in place, and she looked deep into my eyes with that really intense laser-beam gaze she has, where it feels like she’s looking right through your body into a deeper space, right into the center of your private soul. I can remember every single time in my life Jesse has looked at me like that. Each time it’s been right before she’s touched me or kissed me so intensely that I’ve basically temporarily lost my mind. Each time it’s been right before she got closer to me than any other human being has ever been.