“Thanks.”
“And I was thinking,” Wyatt continues, serious now, as if he’s given what he’s about to say a great deal of thought, “there should be one room in our guesthouse that’s specifically designed for you, and no one but you can stay there. And we’ll have, like, copies of all your favorite books on the shelves and a mini-fridge with all your favorite snacks in it, and you can come anytime you want to and stay as long as you want. If you don’t have a job or if you drop out of college or something you can come stay there indefinitely.”
“Thanks.”
“For years, even. You can, like, live there. We’ll be so happy to have you.”
“Thanks, Wy.”
Wyatt sighs. Jesse pictures him rolling over onto his back on his—always—neatly made bed.
“Are you in your Hef-wear tonight?” she asks.
“Western,” he says tonelessly. “I’m starting a new John Wayne thing. I can’t believe I have to spend two hours with Howard without you there.” Wyatt’s bossy Ayn Rand voice has subsided. He sounds tired now, and small. “I wish you hadn’t climbed out that idiot window.”
“I’m sorry.” Jesse feels a sick-guilty knot twist in her stomach. She can’t stand the thought of Wyatt in his thrift-store Western wear sitting on that spindly metal chair at that wobbly round table in that dimly lit café, opposite coldhearted Howard, with no one to sit between them and absorb the bad energy.
“Hey,” she offers hopefully, “how about I tell you the knock-knocks I was going to tell him, so you can distract him yourself if things gets tense.”
“Okay,” Wyatt says balefully. “Not that it’ll help.”
“Knock knock,” Jesse begins.
“Who’s there?”
“Interrupting cow.”
“Interrupting—”
“MOO!” Jesse yells into the phone.
A pause. She can hear Wyatt rolling his eyes to the ceiling.
“Terrible,” he says, smiling. “Terrible.”
4
Emily
It was almost a year ago that I figured out that we should get corporate sponsorship for this year’s Fall Formal. I was only student council secretary then, so I wasn’t really involved in decision making, but I couldn’t help taking mental notes during last year’s dance and thinking about ways that it could be better. It’s my nature to look at things that way, always trying to figure out how to improve them. I know I’m a perfectionist and some people think I’m too hard on them because of it, but, first of all, I’m not as hard on anyone else as I am on myself, and second of all I think my perfectionism is one of my best assets. It means that I always think really hard about what the right thing to do is, and I try to make decisions that will benefit the most people possible, no matter what project I’m working on. People know that they can trust me to make good choices. That’s why they feel comfortable putting me in positions of responsibility.
The Fall Formal is student council’s biggest fund-raising event of the year and it’s always super fun, because it’s partly a serious formal dance but partly sort of ironic and relaxed, the way we do it. Like, for example, we don’t call it the Homecoming Dance even though it’s always scheduled to coincide with the Homecoming game, because not everybody at our school feels strongly about football and student council respects that. There are lots of kids at Vander whose main thing is math or science (we have at least two or three kids go to MIT and Caltech every year, even though we’re a public school) and, not to generalize, but those kids don’t necessarily love football, but they still deserve to be able to come to their school dance and not feel excluded. So that’s why we don’t emphasize the football thing too much. And the whole king and queen thing, too, is a little bit ironic—like a lot of times a nontraditional kid will get crowned along with a more typical king or queen. For example, last year’s Formal Queen was Isabelle Howland, who is a very gorgeous and also very friendly and down-to-earth cheerleader, but Formal King was Ralphie Lorris, who is short and chubby and, to be honest, a little Asperger’s-y—he has this obsession with public transit and is always talking loudly about local bus schedules. Everybody thinks Ralphie is super funny—he’s sort of like an unofficial school mascot—and when they called his name to come up to the stage and be crowned next to Isabelle, everyone clapped and cheered extra hard.
Anyway, that’s the kind of dance it is, not totally serious but still basically a pretty normal event, so I was positive Jesse Halberstam would not be there, since normal events are not exactly her cup of tea. We had just started spending private time together then, we were just starting to get to know each other one-on-one, and I guess she came to the dance specifically to find me. I was there in my capacity as student council secretary, making sure things went smoothly at the ticket-taking table and also supervising the refreshment displays, and Michael was my date, of course, and he was helping me reorganize the soft drinks according to flavor and sugar content when I saw Jesse come in on the other side of the gym. She was so… I don’t know, she was a hundred percent strange looking like always, “dressed up” in this totally bizarre powder-blue man’s pantsuit with a ruffled silk tuxedo shirt and bell-bottoms over those boots—those hideous rubber boots! With the powder-blue polyester tuxedo! And she had sort of spiked up her blonde hair so it was kind of punk looking and crazy. I still don’t know where she got her hands on that outfit; I never saw her wear it again. I watched her pay for her ticket and then she was looking around for me, scanning the crowd, and when she found me she gave me this super-intense look, like, You. Me. Here. Now. My stomach did a little backflip inside me. And then she disappeared into the girls’ locker room annex off the side of the gym.