The Aqua Net Diaries (16 page)

Jennifer and Joey before Snowball; Jennifer and Curt Atkisson before Homecoming

The dream was about Curt, and I was dating him, but then I found out your cousin Jack liked me, but there was the relationship with Curt to consider, and there was a dance and no one asked me and my outfit was see-through and my hair was sticking out badly. These are the stuffs nightmares are made of. This is the stuff from which nightmares are born.

—Jennifer to Joey, August 19, 1986

I don't understand,” I told my mom when I had checked the phone connection for the fiftieth time just to make sure it was working. It was two weeks before Snowball my junior year. “Ross said Dean Waldemar liked me, that he
thought I was pretty, that he was asking about me, that he wanted to know if I was free.”

My mom said, “Sometimes high school boys don't ask girls out because they're afraid of rejection. He's probably afraid you'll say no.”

“But I won't say no.”

“But he doesn't know that. It's scary being a high school boy.”

“But I won't say no!”

“But he doesn't know that and it's safer not to ask you than to ask you and be turned down.”

I didn't say anything, but I was beginning to think Dean wasn't afraid of being turned down. I was beginning to think this had something to do with Tim Bullen, who I'd gone out with weeks before. When he tried to kiss me after the world's worst date, I said no, and then he told everyone at school I'd slept with him.

I asked Ross to talk to Dean again for me. Ross called me that night and said, “I hate to tell you this, but Tim Bullen told Dean some of the same lies he's been telling everybody else. Because he doesn't know you firsthand, Dean decided he's not going to ask you to Snowball and he's probably going to take someone else.”

“Did you tell him Tim was lying?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“He just doesn't want to mess with it.”

I hung up the phone and picked up a book Joey had given me. It was a book of poetry by Suzanne Somers, which we liked to read aloud to each other. In it, he'd circled a poem called “Beautiful Girls.” It was about pretty girls who were secretly lonely because they were misunderstood, usually
because boys thought they were busy and never asked them out. He wrote,
Just so you know, this is why you don't always have dates every weekend.

Instead of feeling beautiful I felt awkward and ugly. The week before Snowball, Dean asked someone else to the dance instead of me. The day before the dance, I still hadn't been asked, and Hether wrote me a cheer-up note in Humanities.

The night of Snowball, I sat in my green room while everyone else in the world was at the dance, and wrote in my diary:
I am so tired of this place. The boy I like best of all (Matt Ashton) isn't here, and I want to be far away. Some days I don't think I can stand it much longer. I don't feel like I have anything in common with anyone other than Joey and Laura and Hether. I just want to feel—for once—like I fit in even though I want to get out of here and go somewhere else. Like Teresa or Sherri Dillon. They make it seem so easy. I wonder what it would be like to get up in the morning and be them and not have to worry about a single thing. Not that they don't have
problems—I'm sure they do. But every day they know exactly where they fit.

I sat at my desk and copied down poems by Walt Whitman, Lord Byron, Alexander Selkirk, Louisa May Alcott, and Sara Teasdale.

These were the moments when it was hardest, when I wished I was small and blond with a mouth full of fillings that showed when I smiled like Jennifer Cutter who was crowned Homecoming Queen my sophomore year, and that I knew things like gymnastics and cheering instead of writing and music.

Our senior year, Joey asked my friend Diane Armiger to Homecoming. He was smitten with her and her platinum blond hair. He slipped her a note during Government class and she wrote him back after several agonizing minutes. Her reply said:
I have to make some phone calls. I'll tell you Mon. or Tues.

After she spent the weekend trying to find a more desirable, romantic date, she let Joey know that she would go with him, but only as friends. She emphasized this so there would be no mistaking it. Joey finally said, “Diane, don't worry. I got that message when you told me you had to make some calls before you could tell me yes.”

When it was time for Snowball, Joey and I decided to take the pressure off ourselves and go together. That way Joey wouldn't have to worry about asking anyone and I wouldn't have to worry about whether or not I'd be asked.

He came to pick me up for the dance—wearing navy blue, khaki, and a red tie—in the Calais. I wore long pearls just like Ally Sheedy in
St. Elmo's Fire,
a silky black dress and high black heels, and a quilted satiny black coat that
had belonged to my mom's New York literary agent, who was always giving us her expensive hand-me-downs and then wanting them back at some later time.

We drove to Dayton for dinner and lost our reservations because we were late, as usual. We ran into Eric Lundquist at another restaurant, and not wanting to see him, we slunk back to Richmond, with me in my pearls and Joey in his red tie. We ended up eating at a pizza place, not at all dignified like we'd intended. Afterward, Joey bought cigarettes at a cheap gas station, and we arrived at the high school two hours late.

In the car we gulped Jack Daniel's, which Joey had stolen from his brother. It burned horribly and tasted disgusting, and we put it away after a couple of swigs. We strolled into the dance at eleven o'clock—one hour before it ended—as Angie Oler was crowned queen and Dan Dickman king. Everyone turned to look as we came in, and we were met at the door by Linda McRally, my adviser, who was hovering around sniffing for alcohol.

Out on the dance floor, Joey said, “Stumble a little now and then so Ronnie Stier will think you're drunk.” Ronnie Stier was in our AP History class. He was blond, a football player, good-looking. He wore braces. We were always trying to impress him.

We loved to cause scenes, like Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, our idols. If there had been a fountain in the RHS cafeteria like at the Plaza in New York—the one they had splashed in so famously all those years ago—we would have jumped right in. Instead I tripped into Joey and he caught me and we laughed. Ronnie turned and looked. We danced and danced. The last song was “We Built This City” by Jefferson Starship, and everyone danced together in a circle,
jumping up and down and singing along. When we finally got into the spirit the lights came up and we heard the party would be at Rip's.

There was a flurry of what-to-dos and shouting and searching for coats and purses. We ended up at an all-night eatery, and then we went to the party and found ourselves in Teresa's room, the entertainment of the entire evening, Joey smoking and advising. Someone was passing around Jack Daniel's and we said no thanks, we'd had plenty. We didn't tell them that we couldn't stand the taste or mention the still-full bottle hidden in Joey's car. I did an oral inventory to all who listened of Teresa's wardrobe, while Joey dressed our hostess in his red tie, which he never saw again. Lost also were my pearls and his left penny loafer.

The downtown Promenade

It's funny—everyone here is always asking, “What was it like to grow up in a small town?” “What did you ever do for fun?” And then I usually relate some story involving water balloons or quick trips to Dayton, and after that, I kind of lose steam, and I think, Hey, what
did
we do for fun in Richmond? Did we have fun? I mean, I know we must have …

—Jennifer to Joey, from Los Angeles, October 20, 1991

Even after we were old enough to drive, there was never anything to do in Richmond. There wasn't any place to drive
to,
for one. The only places to go were the same places we had already been a thousand times, like the Skate and
the Putt-Putt and 40 Lanes. For movies, there was the Mall Cinema, with its two screens, Cinema II with four screens, and the Sidewalk Cinema, which was one screen in an old theater downtown on the Promenade across from Readmore Books, where I had once bought all my Nancy Drews, Betty and Veronicas, and Tiger Beats.

The first movie Joey and I ever saw together was
Footloose.
After that there was
Risky Business
and
Purple Rain,
and everyone was there even though it was rated R. We laughed through
The Legend of Billie Jean,
even though it wasn't supposed to be funny, and we laughed so hard at
Troll
that we were asked to leave. We fell asleep in
Pretty in Pink,
and Jessica Howard, who was a cheerleader, had to wake us up. Joey jumped a mile when a gun went off in
Beverly Hills Cop
so that the people behind him snickered through the entire film. But my favorite was
Out of Africa,
not just because we loved the movie, but because afterward he stole the “O” for me off the marquee as a souvenir.

Being scared was something a lot of us enjoyed, mainly because it was so much more interesting than just about anything else we could think up to do. On sunny weekend afternoons or on dark nights, preferably under a full moon, Cliff Lester picked me up in his convertible, and sometimes Ross would be with us and Robert Ignacio, who was smaller than the other boys and smarter than most of them. He was the only Filipino we knew. We drove over to Crestdale to pick up Joey and Hether Rielly. Then we drove out, out into the country near Fair Acres to the Devil House, which was the creepiest house outside of a Hollywood movie. It sat on a country road, on the rise of a small hill, surrounded by fields and corn, and which everyone knew was filled with
evil creatures, some of which were invisible. There was a long, overgrown drive under a canopy of scraggly trees that looked like people in the night, and even during the day, and we crept down this in the convertible, the windows up and the top down (Joey called it a hood).

The house itself was just a burned-out shell with only a fireplace left and skeletons of the rooms. The house was made of brick and had once been two stories. Pentagrams were spray-painted on the walls. The skulls and skins of dead animals lay scattered about the ground in a circle, up to no good. It was the scariest place in the world, even in the middle of the brightest day. Sometimes we just drove up to it and looked at it, and sometimes we got out and stood in the middle of the room with the fireplace, running away at the first strange sound.

There were other ways to scare ourselves and one another. One of Ross's brothers had constructed several enormous spotlights for a Junior Achievement project, and Ross had taken these lights for himself. The lights were so bright and big they could have guided ships home across the sea. Ross kept them in his Camaro because, as he said, “You never know when they might come in handy.”

Sometimes when he was out driving, he would pull those lights out and shine them on his friends and we thought the cops were after us. He and Cliff were out one night, cruising around, when they ran across Joey and me in his mom's car, also cruising around. They pulled out the searchlights and blinded us, and those lights were so bright it was like aliens had landed, like something out of
Close Encounters.

Joey stepped on the gas and began driving wildly through the streets, which of course made Ross start chasing us just as wildly.

“Go to Hell, Ross!” Joey shouted. We were always damning people to Hell behind their backs and sometimes to their faces. We were fascinated by Hell, Joey being a Catholic taught to fear Hell and me being a Quaker taught that Hell didn't exist.

We careened through Richmond, Cliff and Ross blinding us with those damn spotlights. They chased us through the Reid Memorial Hospital parking lot back by the old people's home, Cliff's maniacal face hanging out the passenger's side window, laughing and holding that beam steady on us.