The Aqua Net Diaries (33 page)

“We'll be gone soon,” I say.

“And alone,” he says.

We shiver, like always, and I feel suddenly separate from everything—from the party, from Joey, from my parents, from myself. In the distance, we can see the lights of Richmond.

I say, “Do you realize that we're not going back to high school in the fall, and that we won't see each other every day, and my room won't be my room anymore but someone else's?”

“Leaving home and friends and traveling many hours to a school where we don't know anyone to live with someone we know absolutely nothing about,” Joey says.

We turn the headlights back on, roll up the windows, crank the music. We have gotten ourselves too spooked, too sad. We drive without talking, and when we hit the turn to National Road West, which will take me back to my old house—my dad's house now—Joey continues straight instead.

The high school appears, dark and enormous. We turn into the parking lot next to McGuire Hall and pull around back, where I used to wait at the double doors for my dad to pick me up. The lot is empty. We pop in a tape—the Talking Heads' “Road to Nowhere”—and we turn it loud.

There is a large, yellow circle on the concrete, used maybe to strengthen technique or precision in a Driver's Education class. I think about Mr. Kemper and Tom Mangas and Tommy Wissel and the simulators, and Mr. Fleagle slamming his foot against the emergency brake over and over.

As the music picks up speed, Joey and I run, arms outstretched like airplane wings, around and around in circles, following that wide yellow line. We frantically run those lines, following the perfect circles they make, music spilling from the car, yelling. We shout and laugh and sing along loudly. We are alone in that parking lot we've known for years, the grand spire of our school illuminated by spotlights
high above us. I feel homesick and free all at once as we sing words that echo graduation and a longing to return to bygone places.

It is our last night to be children, and we are spectacles in the moonlight.

The Postscript

In front of my house Joey and I say good-bye, but not really good-bye, and we wonder when we will see each other again. It is all very vague and sad and anticlimactic, and then he drives away.

I go inside and my dad is asleep and I try not to think of the days when my mom would wait up for me—every single time—until I got in, just to make sure I was safe. She could never sleep until she knew I was home. I think that my dad has probably been asleep for hours.

I walk up the stairs to my room—my green room—and turn on the light. My posters are still there. My dollhouse. My records. My books. The picture of Laura and Todd Irwin and me at Devon Johnson's party is still taped to my mirror. Pictures of Joey and me. Of Prom. Of Ross and Hether and Alex and Matt Ashton. Of Jennie, Hill, Hether, Diane, Laura, Joey, and me at my birthday dinner, the night they gave me the Swatch. My yearbooks and dolls and stuffed animals and toys.

I sit there feeling sad and lonely and the house is very quiet and I am leaving the next day and college is starting soon and I wonder what the world holds and if I'm ready for it and how my dad can really sleep through it all.

And then I hear something hit my window.

I go to the window and raise the blind—the one with the funny zoo animals in bright colors that I never replaced
even though I sometimes hated them and long-ago outgrew them. Even as I'm peering out into the night, I wonder vaguely what my dad will do with the blinds once I'm gone again, this time really and truly for good.

Alex Delaney is standing on my front porch step, his hair shining white in the porch light. He is throwing pebbles at my window.

I turn off my bedroom light and sneak down the hall and run down the stairs, hoping Tosh won't bark, and slip out the door. Alex and I hug for a long, long time, and he is sexy and warm and we fall into each other and kiss and kiss and kiss and kiss and it's just like he never left and I never broke up with him and my parents never separated and I never moved, and I wonder if I hold on to him long enough if I can go back in time, back to when we were together and he would walk me to class and write me notes and pick me up in his red car and even back to when he bought me the bear. Back to when my mom still lived here and I still lived here and everything was happy and in its place. And then I shiver and we sit side by side on the step.

“Why are you here?” I ask.

“I'm staying with Travis.” Travis Cummins lives around the corner from my old house.

“He's in the military now,” I say because suddenly I don't know what to say and I'm afraid of what comes next. “His hair is so short!”

“I know.” Alex drops the pebbles into the grass and looks at me. “So how are you really?”

It is just like when we used to date, when Alex would try to get to know me. “You're like this series of boxes,” he would say, “and every time I open one box, there's another one inside, and then there's one inside that, and then another,
and just when I think I'm getting somewhere, there's another and another.” I never told him that I don't open the boxes for just anyone, not for most people, and that so far there has really only been one boy allowed to look in them, and I just said good-bye to him minutes ago.

“I'm worried about you,” Alex says. His voice is small. He looks hurt and lost. “You've got so much going on. How are you really?”

I want to say that he doesn't need to worry, that everything is fine now because he is here and I'm pretending nothing has changed—my parents' separation never happened, Tim Bullen never happened. Everything is fine. Dean Waldemar has finally told me what I always wanted to hear and it is just a little something, but a big thing, too.
I'm sorry,
Dean said when he found me again at the party.
I'm sorry I was so stupid in high school. I wish I'd asked you out. I should have asked you out. I wanted to, but I was too shy and then there was all that stuff with Tim, and I let it get in the way even though I knew he was a liar.

I want to say to Alex that, in the end, Tim Bullen hadn't won with the rumors he spread and the lies he told because Dean and I had still found each other, even if it was just for a moment at a party in the middle of nowhere, and that it had been a wonderful moment in the midst of too much darkness—brief and bright and lovely.

But that would be opening too many boxes. And besides, everything isn't fine. Everything is far from it. Because it isn't 1985, and my mother isn't inside, and Alex and I aren't together, and I don't live here anymore. There are so many things to say.

Instead, I rest my head on Alex's shoulder, and he smells
like he always did—of laundry detergent and Clearasil and, faintly, of cigarettes and beer—and I close my eyes and we sit there. “I'm tired,” I say. “But I'm glad you're here.”

And then he kisses me again. And I kiss him. And he kisses me. And then he takes my hand and holds it.

With each name comes a story. But all stories have a common chapter of high school. Those years form our lives. Unlike college or careers, high school touches our hearts in a different way. It opens the door more slowly—allowing us to invest ourselves in other people in a manner that we just don't take the time for later in life.

Jennifer then and now

Jennifer Niven lives in Los Angeles, where her film
Velva Jean Learns to Drive
won an Emmy Award and she received her MFA in screenwriting from the American Film Institute. She is also a graduate of Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Even though she's always wanted to be a rock star and a Charlie's Angel, her first book,
The Ice Master,
was released in November 2000 and named one of the Top Ten Nonfiction Books of the Year by
Entertainment Weekly.
A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writer, Jennifer has ten different publishers in ten separate countries, and the book has been translated into German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Danish, and Icelandic, among other languages.

Jennifer and
The Ice Master
have appeared in
Newsweek, Entertainment Weekly, Glamour, The New Yorker, Outside, The New York Times Book Review, The London Daily Mail,
and
Writer's Digest,
among others.
Dateline NBC,
the
Discovery Channel,
and the
History Channel
have featured
The Ice Master
in hour-long documentaries, and
The Ice Master
has been nominated for awards by the American Library Association and Book Sense, and received Italy's Gambrinus Giuseppe Mazzotti Prize for 2002.

Jennifer's second book,
Ada Blackjack,
was released in November 2003. It was a Book Sense Top Ten Pick, was optioned for the movies, has recently been published in China, and will soon be released in France and Estonia.

Jennifer's third book and first novel,
Velva Jean Learns to Drive
—based on her Emmy Award–winning film of the same name—was released by Plume in 2009.

With her mother, author Penelope Niven, Jennifer has conducted numerous seminars in writing and she has addressed audiences around the world. Although she no longer wears Esprit, she still loves pretty clothes, tambourines, ABBA, hair spray, rock stars, and continues to be fascinated by prisons.

Joey then and now

Joe Kraemer is the Drama Division's literary director at the Juilliard School in New York City. He oversees a fellowship program for playwrights and has helped to discover many talented young writers from around the United States and the world. He created the program with John Guare and Terrence McNally and has worked since 1994 with the program's current mentors, Christopher Durang and Marsha Norman.

His plays
Find Some Planets, The American Occupation,
and
Dangerous People
were created for actors at Juilliard and performed at the school.

Joe is also director of creative development for Estevez Sheen Productions at Warner Bros. in Los Angeles. While
he has had several lunches with Emilio Estevez, he has yet to mention the impact
St. Elmo's Fire
once had on his life.

Joe received his BA in English from Hillsdale College in Michigan. For the past three years, he has taught play-writing at Barnard College in New York, where he currently lives, and where he drives as little as possible.