The Difference Between You and Me by Madeleine George

my mom, she suggested that I really try to dream big on the page, really aim high, because this meeting was my one chance to impress this large, significant, and, to be honest, very wealthy company, and I had to make my time with them count. So I went back and revised the proposal and I just went to town imagining everything I could think of that a company like NorthStar could possibly do to support our school, academically, artistically, and athletically. The proposal ended up being nine pages; I had to put it in a plastic sleeve. I titled it “VANDER’S DREAMS” in a 24-point font on the first page, and broke all my ideas down into short-term and long-term goals with, like, subheadings and charts. It was pretty amazing by the time I was done.
    At the meeting, before I handed them the presentation, I gave Mr. Willette and Ms. Rinaldi a little talk introducing them to Vander as a school. I told them about Vander’s past, present, and future, and I talked about our college statistics, which are some of the best in the state, and I mentioned our several famous alumni, like best-sellingauthor of the Soul Searchers self-help books Marcy Kirby, nationally known cancer researcher Dr. Ernest Chang, and of course, Channel 8 meteorologist Don Storme. I made sure Mr. Willette and Ms. Rinaldi understood that investing in Vander is investing in the future, not just of our town and of our state but of our country.
    Then I handed them the presentation.
    I hate to say it, but they
loved
me. They were so into every word I said. They went nuts over the proposal—Mr. Willette had Ms. Rinaldi run off a bunch of color copies right then while I was sitting there. By the time the meeting was over, not only had Mr. Willette agreed to underwrite the Fall Formal—everything about it! food and entertainment and supplies and roving photographer and everything! all we have to do is use their name somehow in the title of the event!—he had also agreed to partner with Vander’s athletics department to improve the facilities and fields for our teams, and—this is the craziest, most amazing part—he had offered me an unpaid internship with the corporate communications department of NorthStar Enterprises. Seriously. Six to eight hours a week. He offered me a job, just based on my professional performance in this meeting.
    I can safely say that this was one of the greatest afternoons of my life. And I wanted to tell Jesse about it so, so badly—it was all there, right on the tip of my tongue.This whole thing has made me feel so hopeful about everything, and I could see that hope was what she needed to feel right then, in the bathroom, more than anything, and I was just dying to tell her about it.
    But at the last minute I kept it general, and just talked about my hope for the year without going into specifics about NorthStar. We don’t exactly have a great track record when it comes to talking about things from the real world, me and Jesse. We have the most amazing connection two people could possibly have, it’s almost spiritual what’s between us, but we don’t really have that much in common outside of that connection. A couple of times I’ve tried to talk to her about real stuff, and each time I’ve tried to explain about something I’m doing that I really care about a lot, she’s said something totally hurtful and negative to me about it. I know she’s not
trying
to be hurtful to me, she just doesn’t have the broadest mind of anyone I know, put it that way.
    An example I could give is when I got involved last year in student council’s campaign to bring healthier snack options into school to combat obesity, which is a killer. It wasn’t my idea, it was Heather Hughes’s idea, because her mom has diabetes and she has seen firsthand what the obesity epidemic can do to a person. But as soon as Heather proposed it in session I got on board, and I spearheaded a proposal to the school administration to petitionHandi Snak, Inc., the