The Difference Between You and Me is a queer high school story that isn’t a coming-out story: Jesse Halberstam is a sophomore, and she’s already been out as a lesbian for a year. She gets harassed at school because she’s out and gay and butch and wears big clompy rubber fisherman’s boots all the time. But that’s not the center of the story, either. Jesse has a delicious secret: she’s been having an ongoing affair (which involves hot make-out sessions in the out-of-the-way/never-used 3rd-floor handicapped restroom at the town public library) with Emily, who’s a junior. There’s a problem, though: Emily has a boyfriend, and isn’t out as bi, if she even is bi: “I just don’t believe in labels of any kind,” she says. “Nowadays people can just be who they are, they don’t have to define themselves in words” (17). Which is fine, when you pass as “normal” and don’t have to deal with other people’s labels and judgments of you. Emily insists that Jesse keep their relationship a secret, and barely acknowledges Jesse in public, but Jesse’s so smitten (and the kissing is so good) that she goes along with it.
But the desire they have for one another is basically the only thing Jesse and Emily have in common: Jesse papers the school with manifestos for her one person organization, NOLAW (National Organization to Liberate All Weirdos), and Emily is the student-council vice-president whose pet project, this year, is getting corporate sponsorship for the school’s athletic teams and dances. The biggest sponsor Emily finds, and the one she’s proudest of, is NorthStar Enterprises, a huge multinational corporation with a local office. NorthStar owns a chain of Walmart-like big-box retail stores, and also a chain of Sam’s Club-like retail warehouse clubs—and they’re trying to open a big-box store on the outskirts of town. When Jesse meets a freshman girl named Esther who’s an anti-war activist, the two of them end up working together to oppose NorthStar/StarMart—and as Jesse speaks up against corporate badness, she also finds herself speaking up to Emily about how their “relationship” has been pretty shitty for her, delicious kissing aside.
The book is told in alternating chapters—mostly alternating between Jesse and Emily, though there are some chapters centered on Esther, too. The style is a little weird, because Jesse’s chapters are in the third person, while both Emily and Esther get first-person narration. The first chapter of the book, which is centered on Jesse, felt a little clunky or overwritten: Emily is putting her hair up, “quick as a samurai,” opening her hand “wide as a starfish” to put a hair elastic around her ponytail (8). And Jesse’s so entranced that it’s “like watching a Cirque du Soleil gymnast flip ten times through the air and stick the landing” (9). Why is that “Cirque du Soleil” in there, why not just “gymnast”? Wouldn’t Cirque du Soleil performers be more likely to be called “acrobats”? (OK, maybe I’m extra-critical on that particular topic.) The good news is, either things got less clunky or I got into the story enough not to care. And even in that first chapter there were great moments: I love this, about Jesse running into Emily and two other girls who are talking and doing their hair in the bathroom:
It’s like there’s a mirror Emily on either side of the real Emily: hoodie hoodie hoodie, jeans jeans jeans, ponytail ponytail ponytail. In the center of the triptych, Emily stands looking at Jesse with terrible blankness, a perfectly placid unrecognition. It’s like she’s never seen Jesse before and doesn’t much care that she’s seeing her now. (10)
Also great: this description from Emily of her boyfriend’s kissing vs. Jesse’s kissing:
It’s not his fault. He just gets really excited, like a dog. Like a sweet, slobbery golden retriever.
When Jesse Halberstam kisses me, she’s really focused and really intense. She puts her hands on the sides of my face to hold me where she wants me, or she winds her fingers up in my hair and tugs it tight, and somehow, just by the way she touches me, she makes my mouth open, she makes my eyes close, she makes me breathe faster and faster until I feel dizzy and think I might black out. (21)
Emily mostly comes off as pretty unlikable, but when she’s talking about desire, and even once when she’s talking about how she revels in the secrecy of her relationship with Jesse, she’s more appealing. And there are occasionally hilarious moments even when she’s being unlikable, like when she’s going on about how totally great it is that she has an unpaid internship at NorthStar: snort:
The whole office is decorated with this series of beautiful framed posters with photographs of tranquil nature scenes above poetic messages about doing your best work and making the most of your opportunities. The one right above my desk has a picture of three flying geese silhouetted against this huge, violet-colored moon rising over a lake, and underneath the picture it says YOU CAN SOAR ONLY AS HIGH AS YOU BELIEVE THE SKY TO BE. I wrote this down on a Post-it note and stuck it on the inside cover of my homework journal for inspiration. (121-122)
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