The Aqua Net Diaries (13 page)

When it came time for the bowling part of class, we piled onto a school bus and drove to the east side of town, past the mall, to 40 Lanes, which had a pro shop, an arcade, a snack bar, a nursery, and a lounge. I wasn't one bit interested in bowling. I hated the ugly shoes and the stale smell of the place—a combination of socks and old feet and cigarettes and beer. Tennis was one thing. I was good at tennis. Bowling was another. I had never bowled. I might not be good at it, and I didn't like to not be good at things. When it was my turn to bowl, I said, “I don't care if I never bowl in my life. Who wants to bowl for me?”

Joey was the fastest to volunteer. He grabbed a ball and jammed his fingers inside and went marching toward the pins. He said, “I hope you're watching this. Because this is how it's done.” He flung his arm back and let the ball go and at the same time he went flying forward onto his stomach and slid halfway down the lane. Just like in a movie. The
ball went right into the gutter. We all clapped and cheered. He did this over and over again. In the end, my total score was a nine and I hadn't once picked up a ball.

On the bus ride home, Mr. Fleagle came barreling down the aisle, his face red, and shouted: “Where's McJunkin?”

I was sitting next to Joey, laughing and talking. I said, “Here.”

He shouted, “A
NINE?!
”

I just blinked at him and shrugged. I didn't think it was a good idea to mention that I hadn't done my own bowling. I said, “I don't seem to be cut out for this sport.”

He stared at me. I hadn't seen him this furious since Driver's Ed. He said, “You can say that again!” He went back down the aisle, back to the front of the bus, sputtering and muttering, shaking his head, talking to himself.

After the summer of 1984, I never bowled again.

During our sophomore year, we were forced to take Health. This was where we learned CPR and practiced bandaging each other, which meant we turned ourselves into mummies when our teacher, Mr. Rogers, wasn't looking.

Mr. Rogers was very serious. He knew that he had been entrusted with a great responsibility, that he was teaching us perhaps the most important lessons we would ever learn in our lives. Because of this, he tried not to lose his temper when we used up all the bandaging tape on our mummification rituals and went stumbling into walls, blinded and sightless, our arms stretched out before us. Time and again, he tried to impress upon us the seriousness of life. He made it very clear that our homes were “accidents waiting to happen.”

I was already paranoid about driving, thanks to Mr. Kemper and Mr. Fleagle, and now I became nervous in my own house. Everywhere I looked, I wondered if things were going to catch fire or explode without warning (for some reason, these were the accidents that came to mind). I made my mother buy extra fire extinguishers and test the smoke alarms. My parents bought a rope ladder we could use to climb out of the second-floor windows if we ever had to. We went over an emergency evacuation plan, in case we had to leave the house quickly—who would be responsible for grabbing the cat, the dog, my ABBA albums, my best shoes, my hair spray, etc.

One day Mr. Rogers announced that we were having an all-school assembly so that we could watch a film on the dangers of doing drugs. This was exciting, of course, because it meant getting out of class. It was early in our sophomore year, when we were still new to the school. Mr. Rogers lined us up and we followed him down to Civic Hall, where the entire school was gathered.

Principal French stood on the stage with a giant movie screen behind him. He tested the microphone and it squeaked and squawked, making us groan and cover our ears. He said, “Sorry, sorry. Some of our friends have joined us today from the Richmond Police Department.” He waved at a group of officers who sat in the front row on the floor of the gym. “They've been kind enough to bring a film to share with you about a very real problem, and afterward they will be on hand to answer any questions you might have. I thought this was a very important thing for all of us to learn about because drugs are terrible and such a problem not only in this country but in this school. There is drug use going on
right this very minute around us, and maybe this will help put a stop to it.”

I looked around me and wondered who was doing drugs right this minute. I didn't see anyone doing anything unusual, but then I didn't know anything about drugs, other than what I'd read in
Rolling Stone
and the one book I owned about Donovan and the Beatles.

The film started and it wasn't animated but real—with real people (played by actors) and real situations. There were a lot of needles. There were kids shooting needles into their arms at school and in parks and at home. Anywhere they could shoot up, they were shooting up with those needles. They shot up in cars and in alleyways and at movie theaters. And then they threw up and walked into walls and yelled at their parents and made them cry, and then they found some more needles and shot up again. I thought it seemed unrealistic, and the acting was really bad—worse than on
Fantasy Island.

After a long time of all this shooting up, the kids who were doing it were then rushed to the emergency room and then there were more needles as the doctors and nurses were sticking needles in their arms to give them IVs. I had seen
Trapper John, M.D.
and I didn't think this was realistic at all. There had never been a single episode in which so many kids were rushed to the hospital at once for using drugs.

But the strangest thing was happening around me. Everywhere I looked, people were falling over in and out of their seats. Every now and then someone stood up and wobbled and a teacher ran forward and caught them. It was mostly girls. A few of them were crying. Students were swaying back and forth and teachers were running this way and
that, trying to keep them from falling over. Some of them were so overcome by the movie, they just fainted outright.

Across the auditorium, upstairs near the front of the screen, Joey stood up from where he was sitting with his World History classmates. He started down the long concrete steps that led to the next level, down to the floor, and that's when I saw him, teetering there, before a teacher caught him and handed him to Lance Powell, who led him out of Civic Hall.

He could have died falling down those stairs,
I thought.

When the lights went on, we got up and filed out with our classes. I felt a little shaky. The room had gotten hotter and hotter. So many students were missing. Later I learned they had been taken to a room—all girls, Steve Kutter, who was a hood, and Joey.

When Joey recovered the ability to speak he said to Steve, “Man, that was some film, huh?”

Steve said, “Shut up!” He walked to the other side of the room and faced the wall, too embarrassed to even look at Joey. He didn't talk to him again for a week.

As I walked out of Civic Hall I thought,
However bad drugs are, they can't be as bad as what we saw in that movie.
Drug films were every bit as dangerous as drugs themselves.

Jennifer and Joey

Everyone looks particularly tired and Midwestern across the room today.

—Joey to Jennifer in Mrs. Thompson's Russian Lit. class

Mrs. Thompson taught my favorite class of all time, Russian Literature. It was very popular and everyone took it at one time or another even if they hated English or reading or school or Russia (which a lot of people did at that time because we were so afraid of nuclear war).

Mrs. Thompson was petite but had enormous black hair that seemed almost suspended above her head. Her husband worked at Earlham with my father.

Joey and I took Russian Literature together. My girlfriends Hether Rielly, Hillary Moretti, and Diane Armiger
were also in there, along with Gina Hurd (whose brightly patterned outfits we loved to make fun of) and Sean Mayberry, who was so big and strong and gorgeous it was hard to know where to look. Sean was good friends with Tom Dehner, and I sometimes caught him looking at me, which was, I thought, the next best thing to being flirted with by Tom Dehner himself.

I was wild about Russian Literature. I loved the books and the writers—especially Turgenev's
Fathers and Sons
and Dostoevsky's
Brothers Karamazov.
I read every book Mrs. Thompson assigned us, and I never used CliffsNotes like most of my friends. Joey and I both did well on our papers and participated in class, and something about all that excitement made us especially prolific when it came to our note writing. We sat next to each other and not only passed notes, but after a while we carried on entire conversations in our spiral notebooks. Not about the class, of course, but about the people in it (usually Sean Mayberry and his intentions toward me, or Gina Hurd and her crazy wardrobe) and about Mrs. Thompson, and about all the other many, many things in the world that interested us. The paper never left our notebooks—we just each wrote down our side of the dialogue on our own pages and looked over now and then to read what the other had to say. Through it all, we were very quiet. We didn't speak a word. Unfortunately, Mrs. Thompson wasn't stupid. She watched Joey and me like hawks.

Every so often she separated us, placing me on the opposite side of the room by Diane, who had chosen to separate herself from Joey, Hether, Hill, and me because she said we distracted her too much, and she would never get anything done sitting beside us. When she saw me coming, she did
a bit of eye rolling. Now, because we sat in a kind of half circle, I was directly across from Joey, which meant we could mouth things to each other. Every time Mrs. Thompson would turn to the board, Joey would mime something and I would mime something back. Sometimes Joey would write something down in his notebook, big enough for me to read, and hold it up. The unfortunate thing was that everyone else could read it, too.

I still remembered some sign language from sixth grade—from the time Heather Craig and I learned it so we could communicate across the room—so after school one day I taught some to Joey. Unfortunately, I had only taught myself the individual letters of the alphabet, so it was very slow having to spell out words, much less entire sentences, one letter at a time. Joey and I tried this the next day in class, but it took too long to spell things, and Mrs. Thompson kept turning around, which made us have to start over again. Every time she turned around, she'd look at us, first Joey, then me, and she'd frown.

Finally, after a week of this, she let us sit together again, but she gave us a warning. She said, “My eyes are on you.” She looked mostly at Joey as she said it. “I know you are good friends. You are two of my best students, but don't let me catch you talking to each other anymore during this class.”

I decided it was best not to point out that, technically, we weren't actually
talking,
because I had learned my lesson about that back in seventh grade after an unfortunate run-in with my sewing teacher. Instead, we promised Mrs. Thompson and nodded and said we would be good. The next day, I opened my notebook and started copying down Mrs. Thompson's lecture dutifully. To the left of me, Joey made a
little noise. I ignored him. He made it again. I looked over out of the corner of my eye. On his paper, he had written,
Gina is looking especially lovely today.

And we were off and running.

Joey and I were, as a rule, competitive with each other—in speech meets and in English classes. I wouldn't cheat for him on quizzes, much as he asked me to, and he sometimes beat me at grades and I sometimes beat him. Somehow we almost always came out even. But on one memorable day, Mrs. Thompson gave Joey an extension on some work, which I thought was unfair.

Teacher's pet,
I wrote to him.
She looooooves you.

He wrote back,
Oh, calm down. It's a one-day extension. Not a proposal of marriage.

I wrote,
A one-day extension that no one else got, Mr. Sensitive. Did I hit a nerve?

He wrote,
Um. No. But you've certainly
got
nerve.

Suddenly we were fighting. This had never happened before. We sat side by side, not writing back and forth. I didn't hear a word of Mrs. Thompson's lecture. Hether slipped me a note but I didn't even open it.

That night, Joey didn't call me and I didn't call him. My mom said, “The phone is awfully quiet.” She picked it up to make sure it was working. I sighed at her and went up to bed early and didn't even turn on the television. I just got in my bed and lay there wondering if this was it, if the very best friendship I'd ever had was over. Suddenly I had visions of myself alone in Richmond without Joey, trying to survive RHS on my own till graduation, and it was terrifying. Of course I blamed him. He was too touchy, I told myself. It wasn't fair that he should get preferential treatment. Just
lying there, I got mad all over again. I hadn't been this mad at him since he stole Tom Dehner's class schedule from the guidance office and managed to get changed into all his classes when I hadn't been able to change a single one of my own.