The Aqua Net Diaries (10 page)

The phone rang. I grabbed it.

Ross was laughing so hard he could barely talk. “That poor asshole. He clicked over and said, ‘Hello?' And I said, ‘For your information, Cliff, I wasn't dumped.' And then I hung up.” We laughed insanely and maniacally for several minutes. This was the funniest thing I had ever heard of involving a telephone.

A few days later, during Algebra, I wrote a poem about it:

I copied it down and gave it to Ross for a little souvenir. It helped him get his mind off Tally.

The best conversations were with Joey. We talked every night and for a long, long time. He stood outside his family room on the back porch, pulling the phone cord as far as it would go. He leaned over the railing and tried to keep his voice down because his parents' window was just above him and they were always having to lean out and tell him to stop laughing so loudly, stop singing so loudly, stop clapping so loudly, stop talking so loudly, that he would wake the neighbors, that he was keeping
them
awake. I talked on the floor of my green room or in my green beanbag, the one that leaked beans because the cats liked to sit in it, too, or from the cave of my canopy bed.

We talked over the school day and about the weekend to come, but there was so much more. We discussed Our Lives Beyond School and what lay ahead for us. And the way we'd
been Separated at Birth. We made up crazy stories, both literary and about the people we knew—we laughed about Tim Bullen chasing one of the fat Lawson twins (wearing wire sunglasses) on a beach, and the Seduction of Tommy Wissel (with his parents' reactions), and the Question of Black and White Love. We became enamored of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, convinced we were them reincarnate, and we wanted to leave as much for posterity and our biographers as they had. We began taping our conversations so that one day we would have a record:

Joey:        “‘The world is too much with us; late and soon …'”

Jennifer:     “
This
world.”

Joey:         “What would our lives have been like if we'd been born some other place?”

Jennifer:     “I
was
born some other place, but I still ended up here.”

Joey:         “What would our lives be like if we'd been raised some other place?”

Jennifer:     “Like where? Los Angeles?” I was mad about Los Angeles.

Joey:         “Anywhere.” We are quiet as we imagine it.

Jennifer:     “What if I'd never moved here at all? What if my parents had stayed in Maryland? What if you and I had never even met?” We are quiet again. As much as we hate Richmond, at least we are living through it together.

Joey:         “I would still be best friends with Beverly Quigley. I would be talking to her right now. Probably about Jesus and
Remington Steele.
”

Jennifer:     “And I would be in Maryland, not quite as miserable, but lonelier because I wouldn't have you and Laura and Hether and Ross, but mostly you, although I like to think we would have found each other anyway.”

Joey:         “Or maybe we found each other here because here is where we need each other most?”

We are quiet for what is, for us, a long time (five seconds).

Joey:         “If you were still in Maryland, you wouldn't know Tom Dehner.”

(We begin talking very fast from this point on.)

Jennifer:     “Oh my God, he looked so good today.”

Joey:         “He said hi to me at his locker. I was talking to Teresa and he said, ‘What's up?'”

Jennifer:     “How did he say it? Like, ‘Hey, I really want to be your friend,' or literally ‘What's up?'”

Joey:         “Somewhere in between.”

For the next hour we talk on and on about Tom Dehner.

When Joey's neighbors went on vacation, we walked over to their house and slipped in the back door and popped microwave popcorn while he made long-distance calls—to New York, to Los Angeles, to Paris, to Russia—not saying anything, just holding the line open so that even for a few minutes we could feel connected to another place, far, far outside of Richmond.

Through all the gripes and grumbles of what we hated about those pop quizzes, ten-minute speeches, and ten-page papers that were assigned, some good prevailed. What an accomplishment we felt when we finally finished that term paper we had worked on for nine weeks, or when we saw that “A” on the physics test we were sure we had flunked. We probably will never cease to be amazed that we actually did learn something in our time at school, even if it was to study in our assigned study halls or to know which stairs led up and which led down.

Kelley Robertson, Jo McQuiston, and Jennifer in math class

What cares one for algebra?
Who delights in solving math?
I only want to live my life
Along the creative path.

—Poem written by Jennifer in Algebra, 1985

If I wanted to get help with math at home, the only option was my father. My mother was as hopeless at math as I was. My father, on the other hand, claimed to be good at it, but I never really knew if this was true because I did anything to avoid asking him for homework help, and this went for
any
subject. My dad had majored in history, and one of his great passions in life, next to humiliating me, running long distances, competing with me at almost everything, and cooking
gourmet meals, was explaining things. If you asked him a simple question, like “Dad, could you please help me with my algebra?” he would say, “To fully understand algebra, we have to first go back to the beginning of time, to the year 21,000
B.C
., before math was ever invented …” And then he would talk on and on and on, leading you up through the years, the discovery of math and all of its branches, the biographies of the greatest mathematicians, and sometime, many days later, he would get around to looking at the actual problem in the actual math book.

Instead, I asked our dog Tosh, my seventh-grade neighbor, the FedEx man, Joey (who was worse at math than I was), and even my mother before I asked my dad for help. Mom and I labored quietly, secretly, in my room, whispering so my dad wouldn't hear, trying between us to make one good math brain. We particularly hated story problems.

Mr. Brumley was a fat little man who looked just like a garden gnome, only without the red hat and suspenders. Each day before Algebra class, he stood in the hall, just outside his door, hands clasped behind his back. Sometimes, every now and then, he held them clasped in front of him. He nodded at students and watched them and yelled at them to slow down if they were running or walking too fast. “Exercise caution, Miss Ripperger!” “Walk, do not run, Mr. Wissel!”

Joey and I always seemed to end up in the same math classes together, but this was not true of Mr. Brumley's class. We both had him for Algebra second semester of our junior year, but Joey had him second period, and I had him fifth.

On one memorable day, Hether Rielly and I arrived at Mr. Brumley's classroom and he was standing in the hallway,
his face a very bright red. His white hair looked more like smoke than hair. He didn't even nod at us as we walked in, just grumbled to himself, which was not like him at all.

“What's wrong with Mr. Brumley?” I said.

“Who knows?” said Hether. “The mysteries of the very old.”

We sat down, waiting for the first bell to ring, and started asking around to see if anyone had done the homework. As usual, no one had. As a group, we then did what we usually did: we tried to get Rob Jarrett to give us the homework answers. Rob Jarrett and Tamela Vance were boyfriend and girlfriend. They weren't the most interesting people at parties, but they were both miraculously smart at math. Tamela Vance was in Joey's class, and everyone in there tried to copy off her. We, in turn, tried to copy off Rob. You couldn't always rely on them, though, because they fought a lot.

When Rob just sat there, not speaking, his math book closed, his notebooks on the floor by his feet, Hether said, “Great. What the hell are we supposed to do?”

Ross said, “Maybe you should do your homework, Hether,” even though he never did his once the entire time I knew him.

Hether said, “Shut up, Ross.”

The bell rang and Mr. Brumley walked into the room. He stood behind his desk and folded his hands, his face still a bright, dangerous red. He said, “Someone has taken the answer pages from my book, so we won't be able to go over the homework today. Let's move ahead with tomorrow's lesson.” He opened his desk drawer, pulled out a piece of chalk, and began to write things on the board.

We all looked at one another. It was an outright miracle, too good to be believed. Rob Jarrett sat there, glaring at
Ross's back. He was the only one who seemed oblivious to the news.

Later that night, Joey told me what happened:

During second hour, Mr. Brumley stood in the hallway before the bell rang. No one had done the homework. Tamela sat in the back of the room sniffling and patting her eyes with a Kleenex. Panic ensued.

Deanna Haskett kept saying, “What are we going to do? What are we going to do?”

From his seat, Joey peered into the hallway. Mr. Brumley still stood there, hands clasped, alternately nodding and barking at students. Joey turned to Diane Armiger and said, “Keep them distracted.” He meant Martha Schunk, who was so dutiful and self-righteous that she seemed more like an adult than one of us, and Deanna Haskett, who was a blabbermouth.

Diane complimented Martha on her penny loafers and then asked Deanna if she didn't have some just like them while Joey stood up and walked toward the front of the room. He marched right up to Mr. Brumley's desk and with one swift motion, ripped the homework pages from the book that lay open there. Joey carried the pages to the window, opened it, and flung them outside. He walked back to his seat and sat down.

Deanna Haskett, who had seen the whole thing, started saying, “OhmyGodohmyGodohmyGod!”

“What's she carrying on about?” Lance Powell said. Lance, who played on the basketball team, was so tall that he always sat at the back of the room because no one could see over his head. He took naps before class and sometimes during.

“Nothing!” Diane said.

The bell rang and Mr. Brumley appeared, shutting the door behind him. He marched over to his desk like a fat little general, hands still clasped, and said, “Let's go over the homework.”

They all opened their books and their notebooks and sat there, waiting. Mr. Brumley circled around behind his desk, and picked up a piece of chalk. “Now.” He glanced at his book. He peered closer at his book. He leaned forward and began flipping through pages. All the while, the top of his head, which was nearly hairless, was growing redder and redder. “Where have the pages gone?” he said. He kept flipping forward and backward through the book.

Everyone sat still as could be, even Deanna.