The Difference Between You and Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    I knew she wanted me to follow her. I also knew that I was there with Michael and it would be impolite to leave him alone with the soft drinks, and I
also
knew that I was responsible for keeping some important logistical things going on the dance floor. But to be honest, at that point I was getting pretty annoyed with some of the people working under me on the refreshments committee (like Lauren Weiss and Kim Watson and Kimmie Hersh, to name three) because they kept putting out more and more Costco-brand cheese curls, which were the only refreshments we were serving that night, even though I told them repeatedly that they had to ration the snacks so they would last for the entire event, and all of a sudden I was just like, you know what, screw this, let them put out however many cheese curls they want, whenever they want to. And I told Michael I had to use the restroom and I went to find Jesse.
    That was the first time I ever let the two parts of my life come so