The Difference Between You and Me by Madeleine George

casually, like you’d say, “We could use a few sophomores.”
    “Next Tuesday, then.” Esther nods, and turns back to raking. “So how long have you been running NOLAW?”
    “Um, I guess I started making the manifestos in the middle of last year? Wyatt, my best friend Wyatt, says they’re a symptom of the anger issues I had about my mom being sick, but he doesn’t know anything. He’s a libertarian.”
    “Your mom was sick?”
    “Oh yeah. She had cancer.” Jesse tosses this out casually.
    At the word
cancer
Esther’s whole face alters, subtly but totally. “Oh,” Esther says. “What kind?”
    “Breast cancer. Pink ribbon, you know, blah blah blah.”
    “My mom, too,” says Esther.
    “Really?” Jesse’s eyes widen.
    “Yeah. Breast cancer.”
    “That’s so
cool
!” Jesse blurts out, then corrects herself, stumbling over her words. “No, I mean, not
cool
, it’s notcool your mom had cancer, I just mean, I never met anyone else whose mom had it, too. That’s, like, so amazing.” Jesse smiles.
    “Yeah. My mom died a year and a half ago,” Esther says.
    In the quiet that follows, Jesse hears the sound of the birds in the trees around them. She feels like she never noticed before how specific their songs are. One three-note melody comes from the trees to her right, over and over again, like wind chimes, and a totally different two-note melody comes from the trees to her left. She wonders if the two birds are speaking to each other.
    “Did I just freak you out?” Esther asks finally.
    “No, no way.” Jesse can’t quite look at Esther anymore. “I’m sorry about your mom.”
    “It’s okay,” Esther says. “I’m fine. Don’t be freaked out, all right?”
    “I’m not. I’m not.”
    “Good.” Esther smiles a little, encouragingly. “Let’s get back to work. Huckle will let us go early if we get all three piles spread out by noon.”
    ***
    At lunchtime, Huckle spreads out a ratty blanket on the grass by his car, right at the edge of the parking lot, for all three of them to sit on.
    “This is perfect,” he says, lying back on the blanketand putting his sandaled feet up on the bumper of his hippiemobile. “We’re still on school grounds, but we’re close enough to home that I can get us sodas from the fridge if we want them.”
    “Huckle lives right there,” Esther explains, gesturing with her chin to a little white house through the spindly woods at the parking lot’s edge. She takes a bite of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that looks like it was made in a bomb shelter during an air raid—it’s torn and smeared, a total mess.
    “So um, why did you drive your car here?” Jesse asks.
    Huckle smiles dreamily. “I like to bring my private space with me wherever I go,” he says. “In case I have an urgent need to chill at any time.”
    “Not to be rude or anything,” Jesse says, “but you seem like sort of a weird guy to be an ASP supervisor.”
    “I’m unusual, yes.” Huckle tears a piece of Slim Jim off with his teeth and chews it roundly.
    “So, like, um, how did you get this job?”
    “I used to be a sub?” Huckle turns to look at Jesse from his vantage point on the ground. “At school? And then, there was, like, an incident, and I had to stop subbing? But they were like, it’s cool, we can find a place for you, and they found me this.”
    “Uh-hunh. What kind of—” Jesse is about to ask what kind of incident Huckle was involved in, but he interrupts.
    “I used to go to this school, you know,” Huckle says. “Not a very long time ago. A while ago. Kind of a really long time ago.”
    “Yeah? Did you like it?”
    “I loved it, man, I have to confess. But things are totally different now. You have Snediker? Snediker send you here?”
    “Of course.”
    “That is one sad, sad lady. That lady is
compromised
, man. She used to be the world’s raddest social studies teacher, back in the olden days. She had us do, like, role-playing games? And watch movies