The Difference Between You and Me(65)

“Don’t thank me, I’m thanking you. Have a very nice party, girls. And make a lot of money for your cause.”

The day is gray and clammy, and it goes by in a blur of details. Jesse and Esther hammer tent poles into Huckle’s lawn, run extension cords through Huckle’s windows, cram day-old donuts into their mouths, share day-old do-nuts with Huckle, figure out Wyatt’s speaker system, and work with Arlo, who shows up at four, to lay out eight big pieces of plywood on the grass for people to dance on.

The dance floor was Arlo’s idea—his collective always puts out plywood on the lawn whenever they throw a party—but still he kvetches about it the whole time they’re setting it up.

“I need you to please take excellent care of this plywood,” he instructs them. “This is the collective’s plywood and it was difficult to salvage and we’re using it again next Saturday for our straightedge rave, so please pay attention and make sure it doesn’t get stolen or harmed in any way.”

But after they’re done working he doesn’t leave. Jesse notices him mooning around the edges of the tent, thumbing his BlackBerry, picking at the nearly empty Beverly Coffee box, and waiting for the party to start.

As it gets darker and darker, Jesse gets more and more excited. At six o’clock, her mother brings by the coffee urns and hot cocoa–making supplies they’re borrowing from Esther’s church. At six thirty, Arthur comes with an armload of stuff: thermoses of black bean soup for Jesse and Esther; a bunch of extra hats and mittens from the hall closet; the still-roofless birdhouse, to be used as a cash box; and Jesse’s light blue tuxedo, which she left by the front door in a shopping bag this morning so her father could bring it to her tonight, in time to change before the party starts. At six forty-five, dressed up now and ready to host, Jesse plugs in the last extension cord in Huckle’s front hallway, and the inside of the tent—filled with clip-lights and strung with a crisscrossed web of Christmas lights—glows like a giant canvas lantern.

At seven o’clock, people start to come.


Emily

I knew about the alternative dance, of course. Everybody knew about it. People were reposting the invitation all over the place, and they even ran a notice about it in the paper. It wasn’t a surprise.

I was a little bit surprised by how many people from school ended up going over there. Not hundreds of people or anything, not everyone, and not for the whole night, but a kind of surprising number of people spent at least some time out there in Jesse’s tent. Which I was really glad about for her. Even after everything we’d been through, and even though we’ll never, ever agree about NorthStar, I could still guess that her dance must have been really important to her. I’m the first person to support students doing all different kinds of activities to help out the causes they believe in. (As long as they respect each other and don’t try to undermine each other’s events or start misinformation campaigns about each other around school, or things like that.) I guess what really surprised me was how many people didn’t mind that Jesse’s dance was outside. It was such a chilly night out, and I didn’t expect people to want to go hang out under a tent when it was so cold. I wouldn’t have thought people would enjoy dancing all night in their coats like that.

The Starry Starry Night Vander High School Fall Formal, which was held inside the gym like always, was an incredible success. It seemed like at least as many people came this year as last year, maybe one or two fewer, I didn’t get the actual numbers. And anyway, the quality of everything at this year’s dance was vastly, vastly superior to last year. It was an incredibly beautiful event, thanks to NorthStar but also, even more important, I think, thanks to the hard work that people like me and Michael and the members of the student council Fall Formal committee put in to turn our gym into a beautiful autumn wonderland.

Some of the highlights of the themed décor: realistic fake fall leaves spread rakishly on every surface, helium-filled balloons in warm fall colors arranged in bunches on either side of all the doors and in an arch over the souvenir photo-booth area, frozen punch rings floating in the faux-crystal punch bowls, and a slowly morphing projection of trees turning from green to orange to red to gold that we had going constantly on the wall behind the basketball hoop. People were unanimous about how fantastic and sophisticated everything looked.

I had originally planned to have a professional DJ, Phil Holland, who does music for the events at the Women’s Club where my mom belongs, cover the dance, but he ended up getting a high-paying job on a river cruise that night, and I had to talk Mark Salfrezi into bringing his iPod again. But he and I had a meeting beforehand about the playlists and appropriate outfits for DJing that would fit in with the evening’s theme, and in the end he looked and sounded great. Practically professional.