“I would be careful how I threw around the word evil, if I were you,” Snediker reproaches her. “But I do… I do…” Snediker blinks now, and blinks again. Her eyelashes flutter unsettlingly for a moment, as if her inner workings have hit a glitch. Then she recalibrates, regains her evenness. “In principle, I understand the points you’re trying to make here about StarMart. I may even agree with some of them. There was a time in my life when I might have been tempted to put up a couple of posters myself on behalf of a cause like this. But Jesse, I can’t allow you to plaster your personal opinions all over school in this way. Especially if you excuse yourself from class to do it.”
Jesse squints. Did Snediker just say she agrees with her?
“Listen. Some friendly advice from me to you. Have you ever heard the expression ‘Pick your battles’?”
“Um… yes?”
“All right. You need to pick your battles right now. You may think you’ve got some kind of David and Goliath thing going on with StarMart, but I can guarantee you, this is a losing proposition. You’re not going to change the way StarMart operates. They are an extremely powerful multinational corporation, and you’re deluding yourself if you think that you and a couple of friends and a roll of tape can succeed in changing their global business model. What you will succeed in doing, if you continue to pursue this, is damaging school property, creating unrest and unhappiness in the student body, upsetting the community, and throwing your own future into jeopardy by making decisions that have negative disciplinary consequences. I won’t hesitate to suspend you, or worse, if you continue to violate school rules. I will throw the book at you, Jesse. And I wouldn’t like to see you permanently limit your life options by making reckless choices. That would be a real shame. You have a lot of potential. When I look at you, in some ways I see a young me.”
“What?” Jesse can’t keep the appalled look off her face. To her horror, Snediker laughs, a tinkly, dry little laugh.
“Oh, you think I was always a dean of students? I have been some places and done some things that I’m sure you wouldn’t believe if I told you about them.” Snediker gets a brief, vivid look of mischief in her eyes—it skeeves Jesse out so much that she has to look away. “I learned the hard way that there’s nothing waiting at the end of that road down but pain and futility. Take it from me: pick your battles. Don’t be a hero. The flyering stops now.”
Jesse doesn’t nod, doesn’t say anything. After a moment she asks, “Am I suspended or something?”
“I’m going to issue you a warning at this time, because I believe that you listened well during our conversation and you understand what I’m saying to you about consequences. I’ll call your parents to let them know that we’ve talked. But that’s all. You’re done. Back to Ms. Yost.”
Snediker dismisses Jesse with a single stiff wave of her hand. She picks up the receiver of her clunky phone as Jesse gets up to go.
“Yes,” Jesse hears behind her as she heads for the door, “this is Janet Snediker calling for Frances Halberstam.”
When Jesse opens the door to Snediker’s office, Emily is right there, in the first red chair by the door, slender legs crossed in her light blue jeans, hands folded on the neat stack of folders resting on her lap. She looks up, sees Jesse, and gasps faintly. Jesse closes the door so abruptly it almost slams.
“Are you waiting for me?” Jesse says, her eyes wide. It can’t be, of course Emily’s not waiting for Jesse, but in a shimmering moment of hope Jesse sees it all in heartbreaking detail: somehow Emily heard that Jesse got busted taking down the last posters, and she was so touched by the gesture that she gave up her open period to sit in patient vigil outside this office door, waiting for the moment when Jesse would be released. Now she’ll grab Jesse’s hand and lead her to the parking lot and the two of them will jump into Emily’s little blue Honda, and kiss and kiss, and drive over to get lattes from Beverly Coffee—
“I have a meeting with Dean Snediker,” Emily whispers. She looks around her furtively. They’re the only two in the hallway, but still she contracts away from Jesse, trying to put as much distance between them as she can without crawling out of her chair. “To talk about Starry Starry Night.”
“Oh.” Jesse nods. “Cool. Hey, I did it. I took them all down.”
“Took all what down?” Emily keeps shooting little looks over Jesse’s shoulder.
“The anti-StarMart posters. I went through the whole school and took the last of them down this morning.”