I had seen her around. I was curious about her. But I never expected her to say anything to me. I don’t know what made her feel like she could talk to me that night. Maybe she didn’t expect me to say anything back.
We were kind of looking at each other, but we hadn’t even said hi, and all of a sudden she was like, “I like your hair.”
Okay. Lots of girls have said nice things to me about my hair or my outfits or whatever over the years. Thousands of girls, probably. Millions. But when Jesse said it, it didn’t sound like anything that any other girl had said to me before. It had a different meaning. It made my stomach flutter. It was like Jesse had seen something inside me that no one else had ever seen, and complimenting my hair was her way of telling me she’d seen it. It was like a secret code I’d never heard before, but somehow automatically understood.
If you asked me what I said back to her then, or what she said back to me after that, or what the next couple of things were that happened that night, I couldn’t tell you. All I know is that I made the first move. I led her into one of the stalls in the girls’ room and that’s where we kissed for the first time.
I remember it smelled like damp, rotten paper towels. I remember that my insides tumbled over and over the instant she touched me. I remember thinking, This is incredible. And also, This can never happen again.
That boldness that sometimes takes you over before your brain tells you to stop, it can change your life in incredible ways. It can make you stand up for yourself when you need to most, and take big risks, and really put yourself out there. But it can also screw everything up for you.
I’m not saying I don’t miss her. I totally miss her. I sort of feel like my life has gone gray all over since I told her we should take a break. Last Tuesday at work I felt so sick to my stomach shelving in the third-floor stacks that I ended up asking Carol if I could leave an hour early. I couldn’t wait to be out of that library. I couldn’t stand being up on the third floor, knowing that she wasn’t there, too.
But sometimes you have to weigh the pros and cons of a situation and make a really hard decision. Sometimes the kind of brave you have to be isn’t split-second, change-your-life brave, it’s big-picture, think-about-your-future brave. Sometimes you have to sacrifice something you love, if you don’t want to lose everything you have.
18
Jesse
“We could try to get people to boycott?” Esther suggests. “All the people who signed our petition, we could send them emails telling them to, like, boycott something.”
She’s sitting on Jesse’s unmade bed after school on Thursday, brainstorming possible actions for the night of the Starry Starry Night Dance, working through the plate of Fig Newtons that Fran insisted they take upstairs (“Strategizing fuel!” she said just now in the kitchen, as she foisted the plate on Esther). Jesse is standing across the room from Esther in front of the bureau, examining herself critically in the mirror.
Jesse expected Esther to be annoyed at having left so many unreturned messages, but when she called her to make a plan for Esther to come over and work on the anti-StarMart campaign, Esther was totally cheerful about it. They picked up right where they left off: same enthusiasm, no tension.
“But what should they boycott? Boycotts don’t do much unless someone’s already been paying for something, right?” Jesse thinks out loud. She runs her hands through her hair experimentally, making it stick up from her forehead and fall back down in different shapes.
“What about… what about…” Esther chews on a Newton. “What about a picket line?”
“I feel like that’s uncool,” Jesse says vaguely.
“Yeah, I guess, me too. I was just trying to think of what we could do that would distract people from the dance and teach them the truth about StarMart at the same time. Hey, how about a teach-in? Phyllis from the vigil runs a really fantastic teach-in.”
Jesse has been to at least a dozen teach-ins in her life, group-run lecture sessions on topics ranging from natural gas exploration to the death penalty to nuclear waste storage. They tend to be pretty grim affairs: a bunch of already-angry people in a room trying to convince each other to be even angrier. Sometimes they have snacks: apple juice and generic sandwich cookies. They do not, as a rule, compete with a dance for fun and entertainment value.
“Maybe. I don’t know. Teach-ins are kind of boring. We need something exciting that will make people pay attention to us on the same night they were planning to just dance and make out.”
Esther looks up from the plate of Newtons, eyes wide. “I’ve got it. We can have our own dance!”