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

knife, then feels a hot flush of embarrassment even thinking about doing such a thing. She pulls her hand out of her pocket, wiggles her toes around vigorously inside her boots to distract herself from the thought of Emily.
    A car turns onto the access road and wends its way toward Jesse, a beat-up pea-green hatchback, crazy with hippie bumper stickers, traveling in a cloud of bouncy music that gets louder and clearer the closer it comes. It accelerates to a squealing stop in front of Jesse’s bench and the passenger’s-side window rolls down jerkily.
    “Halberstam?” a small, bearded, long-haired elf in ablack ski hat yells out cheerfully from the driver’s seat. Jesse nods.
    “Where’s Meinz?” he yells. Jesse shrugs, not sure what this means. The music—plinkety, happy, banjo-y—is up so loud on the car stereo that even from twenty feet away Jesse can make out every word. “I will get by,” the singers promise in crooned unison.
    “Parking,” the elf yells, and waves enthusiastically, like a little kid. Automatically, Jesse waves back, then thinks,
Why are we waving?
    The hippiemobile pulls away, heading for the side parking lot, and at the same time up the access road a figure comes loping, hunched over, hurrying. As it gets closer, Jesse can see it’s a girl. She’s wearing a shapeless navy-blue overcoat and a long black skirt that reaches halfway down her shins, and she’s carrying a big lumpy black tote bag over one shoulder. Her dark hair is braided in two rough braids, the left one substantially thicker than the right. As she runs—almost lurches—up the hill, her canvas slip-on shoes fall half off her feet with every step. Jesse recognizes her dimly from around school, but she’s never seen her up close. The girl comes to a panting stop in front of the bench, her cheeks rosy from exertion, coarse hairs flying loose from her braids, which seem somehow to be undoing themselves from their rubber bands in real time as Jesse looks at them. The girl’s eyesare cool blue in her overheated face. She doesn’t smile.
    “ASP?”
    Jesse nods.
    “I’m Esther.”
    “Jesse.”
    “Is Huckle not here yet?”
    “Who’s Huckle?”
    The girl looks around her impatiently.
    “I
ran
here and Huckle’s not even here yet?”
    Esther blows the hair off her damp forehead, wipes the sweat off her upper lip broadly with the sleeve of her coat—somehow the gesture reminds Jesse of an old man—and sits down heavily on the bench next to Jesse, dropping her tote bag on the ground and immediately slipping her bare feet out of her black canvas shoes. The heat from her body hits Jesse in a wave. She smells sweet and clammy, like red peppers left too long in a Tupperware container.
    “He’ll be here,” Esther assures Jesse, not looking at her. “He sometimes has time-management issues.”
    Esther rummages in the tote bag by her feet and pulls out a thick, battered paperback book. She brings her legs up under her so she’s sitting cross-legged on the bench and tucks her skirt around them so her knees are completely covered, like a statue of the Buddha. She opens the book with her left hand and holds it right up to her face to read, chewing at the nail of her right thumb absently. As suddenlyas she arrived here, she’s gone—disappeared into the book that she holds five inches away from her face. Jesse can’t help but stare at her.
    Esther bites down hard on the skin at the corner of her thumbnail, gnaws at it, sucks blood out of it. Jesse blinks.
    “Hey, miscreants,” calls the elf from behind them. Jesse turns to see him waving from the corner of the school building, holding a pair of rakes with his left hand. “Let’s get cracking.” He grins.
    “Huckle,” Esther says, an explanation. “Our supervisor.” She snaps her book shut and shoves it down deep into her tote bag, slips back into her shoes and heads over toward the elf, leaving Jesse behind.
    “It’s gravel raking again,” Huckle is saying to