The Aqua Net Diaries (4 page)

Jennifer on her beloved tricycle

So I forgot which way is right,
So the stoplight was out of my sight,
So I missed the four-way stop,
So I made the forty-foot drop,
So I ran over the yellow curb,
So I lost the wheel and began to swerve …

— “Driver's Education,” original song by Jennifer McJunkin

The summer before high school began, I was eligible to take Driver's Education. The Driver's Ed students came from the four corners of town, from four different junior high schools, converging in the middle of Richmond at the gigantic school on the hill. Each of the junior highs had a distinct personality: Hibberd, in the run-down area of town,
was home to the black kids and the hoodlums of all races, or “hoods,” as we called them; Pleasant View, situated on the edge of town, out by the hospital and true farm country, was home to the farm kids; on the bucolic west side of town, close to Earlham College, was Dennis, where all the “liberal” Earlham kids, including me, went to school; on the comparatively bustling east side of town, out by the mall and the restaurants, was Test, which was filled with the rich, upwardly mobile, power-hungry kids, some of them descendants of Richmond's original forty-seven millionaires.

Most everyone who attended Test lived in a neighborhood called Reeveston. This was the closest thing Richmond had to Beverly Hills. Reeveston was grand and tree-lined, dotted with an eclectic mixture of stately homes—brick Victorian, Georgian Revival, Colonial Revival, English Manor.

It was a well-known fact that if you came from Test, you were, but for the rare exception, guaranteed popularity and success in high school. This was because privilege and money mattered, even in high school and even in a factory and farm town like Richmond.

We would have orientation in August, when we would walk around the school and get our student handbooks and be given our locker assignments and meet our teachers. But Driver's Ed was the first time that kids from Hibberd, Pleasant View, Dennis, and Test were all brought together.

The first day of Driver's Ed, I could spot the kids from Test, because they were the ones who seemed cool and collected and completely at ease. There was a confidence to them that came from money, from having known their place in the town, in the world, since childhood.

The rest of us were a different breed altogether. We chattered nervously and dropped our pencils. Some kids
smelled like cigarettes. One boy had dirt under his fingernails. Another had acne so bad that he looked as though he had a nasty case of chicken pox. There was one girl so enormous that she had to sit in the very back of the classroom on a bench. There was a girl named Martha Schunk who dressed in sweater sets and looked forty. She raised her hand repeatedly and told on people. Our teacher, Mr. Kemper, had unnaturally black hair that shone blue in the light like crow feathers, and he wore button-down shirts with short sleeves and a tie. He was the kind of man who had probably been, once upon a time two or three hundred years ago when he was our age, good-looking.

In the classroom, we studied the Driver's Education Manual and practiced driving on simulators. With the lights out, we sat at individual computer screens, with steering wheels, a brake pedal, a gas pedal, and a gearshift. On the screen, little computer-generated people would fling themselves into the middle of the road or drivers from other cars would throw their doors open suddenly or animals would wander into the street. It was my favorite part of class. At the steering wheel, I was Kelly Garrett (Jaclyn Smith), my favorite Charlie's Angel, driving my beige Mustang. I expertly dodged the errant pedestrians, deer, and runaway shopping carts while tailing the bad guy and looking glamorous.

Some of the boys, like Tommy Wissel, turned the simulators into a video game. Tommy had gone to Catholic school through the eighth grade, and after that he went to Dennis, where he quickly earned the reputation as a fun-loving troublemaker. He brought with him an air of mystery because Catholic school seemed exotic and foreign. We knew that instead of teachers there were nuns, and that, in addition to classes, students were required to go to mass. Tommy regaled
us with stories of dropping Pop Rocks into the holy water at mass so that they fizzed like firecrackers throughout the service. His life's ambition was to be the laziest professional athlete ever.

During simulators, Tommy ran over every computer-generated pedestrian and curb on purpose, and then talked back to our teacher, Mr. Kemper, when he told Tommy to stop it.

“You can't pass Driver's Ed if you don't pass simulators, Mr. Wissel,” Mr. Kemper said. Mr. Kemper never called us by our first names. For some reason, it was always “Mr. Wissel” or “Miss McJunkin.” We found it maddening.

“So?” Tommy said. “I'll just take it again next summer.”

Tommy had lots of cousins, and there was always someone to drive him places, and besides, Tommy was the sort who didn't think twice about driving illegally. The Wissels were famously wayward. They were all manfully handsome and loved to fight and have fun. Everyone said they got their high spirits from their mother and their temper from their daddy. Roughhousing was in the Wissel blood. It was why many of them didn't have all their front teeth—they were always getting them knocked out in brawls.

“Fine,” Mr. Kemper said, because he knew he couldn't win. Mr. Kemper was one of those teachers, like so many I had known, who seemed resigned to his fate. He always looked as if he was kind of surprised at the path life had chosen for him, but as if he didn't have the energy or the strength to change it. He ultimately gave Tommy a D in simulators, which meant that Tommy passed Driver's Ed and Mr. Kemper never had to have him in class again.

When my classmates and I weren't actively engaged in simulators, we were busy checking one another out. Tentative
friendships were already forming. After years of knowing the same old people, here, suddenly, were all these new ones. It was like a curtain being lifted to reveal a brand-new world.

The Test kids fascinated me most. They were shiny and golden—as much as anyone in Richmond could be—as if they came from somewhere else. Their king was Tom Mangas, who had reportedly been president of the student council. He was tall and blond with long, tennis player legs, blue eyes, and a big nose, the kind that immediately brought to mind Jimmy Durante or Telly Savalas. He wasn't great-looking, but he had so much confidence that you thought he was. He was smart and clever and funny and he loved to argue with teachers, like Mr. Kemper, who was no match for Tom intellectually.

“Who can tell me the proper procedure for exiting a parallel parking space?” Mr. Kemper asked. He sat behind his desk, hands folded.

“Put the car in reverse and pray to Jesus,” said Tommy Wissel.

“That's enough, Mr. Wissel,” said Mr. Kemper. Tom Mangas raised his hand and Mr. Kemper looked at once hopeful and wary. “Mr. Mangas?”

“I need some more information before I can answer the question,” Tom said. “For instance, how far am I from the curb and from the cars in front of me and in back of me? Am I on a hill or on flat ground? Am I on a busy street or on a residential street or in an alleyway? Am I surrounded by cars at all, because if not that simplifies things.”

Mr. Kemper covered his face with his hands and began rubbing his temples.

I thought Tom Mangas was the most exciting boy I had ever met, and every day during class, we made eye contact.

We eventually reached the part in the course where we'd had enough practice on simulators and were let out on the road, three to a car, with one of several teachers sitting shotgun, feet hovering over the passenger-side brake. I had Mr. Fleagle, who normally taught Health and P.E. and looked just like a weasel. He was tall and skinny and his eyes were too close to his nose. He always looked as if he had just popped up out of the ground and was having trouble seeing in the sunlight, or like he was smelling something unpleasant.

I was the only girl in my car, which meant I spent most of the time flirting—with Tommy Wissel and Mike Shockney,
not
with Mr. Fleagle. I wasn't a bad driver. The only thing I couldn't do well was parallel park.

One sunny afternoon when it was my turn at the wheel I accelerated a little too hard when backing up. We jumped over the asphalt and into a cornfield—Tommy yelling: “Yeah! Floor it!”—and Mr. Fleagle slammed his foot against the emergency brake on the passenger side of the car so that we came to a really hard stop and almost went through the windshield. He shouted, “For God's sake, McJunkin! Brakes! Brakes!” He couldn't stand girls anyway, especially behind the wheel of a car. He thought they should all be taking home economics, learning the things that would be useful to them later in life, like cooking and sewing. I know this because he said these very words to me while we were sitting in the cornfield.

Then he made me get out of the car and sit in the passenger's seat. He got behind the wheel and, after checking each mirror at least five times, slowly backed us out of the corn. “Dude, that was awesome,” Tommy said to me.

The next morning, Mr. Fleagle came to class and handed Tommy the keys. “I want you to get on the interstate and
just drive,” he told him. Mike Shockney and I sat in the backseat while Tommy drove up and down I-70 going as fast as he damn well pleased. Up in the front beside him, Mr. Fleagle closed his eyes and took a nap.

Back in the classroom, Mr. Kemper began showing us films. Each day, he showed us one gory film after another about every possible horrifying thing that could happen to us in a car. The most horrific of all was one about underriding, which was what happened when a car followed a semitrailer truck too closely and then accidentally crashed into its rear end and went underneath it. Nine times out of ten, this led to decapitation, but sometimes—rarely—people survived, usually living out the rest of their lives as vegetables.

As we sat there in the dark watching accident film after accident film, eyes huge, the color drained from our faces, even Tom Mangas and Tommy Wissel fell silent, except for a “Great Jesus” or a “Holy shit” from Tommy every now and then. At night, when I slept at all, I dreamed about people getting their heads chopped off.

On the last day of class, Mr. Kemper perched on the end of his desk and told us we were, for the most part, a good group of kids and that we'd all passed.

“Of course, it doesn't much matter,” he said. “It will be a miracle if any of you live to be twenty-one.”

Somehow I got an A– in Driver's Ed. And on the last day of class, Tom Mangas asked me to a movie. I decided I was ready for high school. I might never drive again, but clearly the boys I would meet there would be so much more exciting than the ones I had known at Dennis.

Jennifer and Joey

My best friends are Heather, Beth, Maya, Tia, Regina, Tina, Rhonda, Vicki, Sharonda, Becky, Andrea, Susie, Shannon, Kara, and Ned. My other best friends are Kelley, Melissa, Merri, Julie, Nancy, Shelley, Maida, and the paper boy who lives near us. His name is Matt Hanes and he is 15 years old and he hits Maya and I on the head with the paper.

— Jennifer McJunkin, “My Life in Indiana,” September 25, 1977

On the first day of Geometry class, first period of my first semester, Bernie Foos called me to the board to draw a trapezoid. I stood there, chalk in hand, and had no idea what to do. I drew a sort of fat, drunken triangle and then sat down. Mr. Foos crossed his arms and gave a fifteen-minute lecture on the basics of geometry. “How can we hope to learn when we don't even know our triangles?” he said.

A boy sitting next to me leaned over and said, “I hate all things math.” He wore glasses and had hair more shiny-blond than Marcia Brady.

I said, “Yes.”

When the bell rang, the blond boy and I walked out of class together. He said, “My name's Joe Kraemer. You may not know this, but we're going to be best friends.”

I said, “Oh, really?”

He said, “Yes. In fact, I think we're already best friends. Call me tonight and I'll prove it to you.”

He gave me his number. I called him that night and we talked for four hours. It was then I learned: He loved to write, just like I did. He was trapped in Richmond, just like I was. He was counting the days till he could leave. He felt above the place and beyond it and like he wasn't really a part of it, yet he wanted badly to be a part of it, like I did. He was from Richmond, but he wasn't
of
it. It was platonic love at first sight.

One month later, he broke into Mr. Foos's room during lunch and changed one of my grades and three of his own and also two grades of Alex Delaney, the cutest boy in the class.

“Joey!” I said, after he told me about it. “What if you get caught? What if Mr. Foos finds out?”

“No one will ever know.” He was unnervingly calm.