The Aqua Net Diaries (5 page)

I let the enormity of what he'd done roll around me and over me and through me. Then I said, “Why did you only change one of mine?”

“Because you were doing better than me. I needed more help.”

We went to class the next day and watched Mr. Foos carefully. I didn't breathe as he pulled out the grade book and took attendance, running his finger down the page.
Mr. Foos ran his finger all the way down to the end of the list and then closed the book and put it back in the desk. I started breathing again as he got up and walked to the board and began to draw a perfect triangle.

One weekend, not long afterward, Joey picked me up in his mom's red Oldsmobile Calais, and we barreled down I-70 East from Richmond to Dayton, Ohio, at ninety miles an hour, singing “Rebel Yell” at the tops of our lungs. This was our very favorite song to drive to Dayton to. I balanced pictures of Tom Dehner on my knee. I had stolen the pictures from the school paper, where I was a staff member. Joey craned his neck to see. “Hold them up,” he said. “So I can get a better look.”

“This one's my favorite,” I said. In it Tom and Pierre Hogg were wearing their football uniforms. Tom's fist was raised in a cheer.

“Oh, that's a good one,” Joey said. “Let me see that.”

“He looks so good here,” I said.

“Yes,” said Joey.

We both sighed.

All of a sudden, the car lurched and went careening toward the median. We looked at each other and then down at the dashboard.

“What was that?” I shouted over the music.

“I have no idea,” Joey shouted back.

We kept singing and driving, and after another mile, the car started thumping and bumping in a way we didn't recognize.

I turned down the music. We listened. The car thumped and bumped. “I think we have a flat tire,” I said.

We were, of course, in the far left lane, the fast lane. We
looked over our shoulders and no one was coming because there was never any traffic on the I-70. Joey steered the car in the direction of the far right shoulder. The Calais drifted and wobbled in slow motion, finally limping to rest safely off the highway.

We sat there in silence. “Now what?” Joey said.

“Do you have a spare tire?”

“I don't know.” For about five minutes, Joey searched for a way to pop the trunk. After he found it, he got out of the car and went to check. I waited. He came back. “No spare.”

“Do you have a jack?”

“Hold on.”

He disappeared and then reappeared a minute later. “No jack.” He got back in the car and we sat there. “Now what?”

We looked around us. There was only highway as far as the eye could see. I suddenly felt very small and very sixteen.

“We have to get help,” I said.

We locked the car and climbed down the gulley, then up the hill beside it. At the top of the hill was a wire fence and across the fence was a neighborhood of small brown tract houses, each exactly the same as the one next to it. Joey held the fence wires apart so that I could slip through, careful not to pull my hair or clothes. Then I held the wires for him. We began walking through the neighborhood.

Joey stopped in front of a house. “This is as good as any,” he said. He marched up to the front door and rang the bell. No answer. We went to the next house and rang the bell. No answer. We tried the next house. No answer. By the time we reached the last house on the block, we were in a panic. Joey rang the bell.

The door flew open and a man stood there. He was in his mid-thirties. He was wearing an Ohio State T-shirt and holding
a beer. There was the sound of a television blaring in the background. He looked us up and down. “What?” he said.

Joey explained the situation, how we were from Richmond, how we were headed for Dayton, how we'd hit something on the road and gotten a flat tire, how we had no jack or spare. The man sighed. He turned around and stared at his television. He looked down at his beer. He set the beer down. “Let me get my keys,” he said.

His name was Dave. He drove us in his car—an old two-door Mustang—to a local garage where he knew the guy who drove the tow truck. The guy was missing his teeth and stared at me in a way I didn't like. He said the tow would cost one hundred dollars, and we told him we didn't have that kind of money. Dave drove us back to his house.

“You're sure you don't have a jack and a spare?” he said.

“We're sure,” Joey said.

We helped Dave search through his garage for his own jack and an extra spare tire that he said belonged to a friend. He ran inside to check on the score of the game and then the three of us got back into his car and drove down to the highway. From the I-70 West, we passed our car on the opposite side of the road. We took the next exit and circled around and got on the highway once again, this time headed east. Dave kept the radio on low so he could listen to the game.

I kept apologizing. “We are so sorry to interrupt your day,” I said.

“Yeah, man,” Joey said unconvincingly. He knew nothing about sports. “I hope Ohio State wins big.”

“Thanks,” Dave said.

When we got back to the Calais, Dave popped the trunk and removed the gray flooring and there, in the tire well, were the spare and the jack.

“What are those doing in there?” Joey said. “Seriously.” He looked at me. “Who knew there was a secret panel?”

Dave sighed and then kneeled down on the ground and jacked up the car. We stood a few feet away watching. After he changed the tire, we wrote down his address and thanked him again and promised to send him something for his trouble. “You have about eighty miles on that tire,” he said. “More than enough to get you home.”

He drove off in a cloud of muffler exhaust and we climbed back into the car.

“Should we go home?” I said.

“I guess. Of course, it's only twenty more miles to the mall. And then forty back home. That's only sixty.” This was the only kind of math we were good at.

“That's true.”

“We've still got time,” Joey said. “The day is still young.”

“And so are we,” I said.

“An' I love it,” he said. “So very, very much!”

We popped in Billy Idol, rewound “Rebel Yell” to the beginning, and headed east toward Dayton. (Eventually, all told, we drove another hundred miles all around Dayton on that little spare, which Joey nearly wore to the ground and which, his father later said, almost ruined the axle.)

“I just want you to know that the children are okay,” Melanie Kraemer told my mother when she called her. This was how Mrs. Kraemer and my mom began most of their conversations with each other when Joey and I were out together:
“There is nothing to worry about, but …” “Everything is going to be okay, but …” “The children are fine, but …”

“They're fine and the car is fine,” Mrs. Kraemer said now. “They called me from Dayton to say they'd had a flat tire, but that they got it changed and it's all okay. They decided
that instead of coming home, they would just go on ahead with their plans.”

“Of course they did,” my mom said.

We'd only known each other three months when we discovered the Dayton Art Institute. It was a night when we were tired of Richmond and the usual people and parties. Joey picked me up in the red Calais and we put in Billy Idol and headed to Dayton, as fast as we could. The Institute sat on a hill overlooking the city with steps that lit up at night, and we sat on the highest one and looked out at all the lights. It was so open to the world, yet so removed from anyone who might know us. Joey smuggled vodka from his dad's liquor cabinet, which usually only contained Budweiser or Michelob Light, and we drank straight from the bottle and were cold in the winter wind. We pretended we liked the cold and pretended we liked the vodka. We got caught as a neighboring church let out and the congregation swept over us, Joey hiding the vodka under his XXXL shirt.

Afterward, we drove home fast to “Rebel Yell” and, back in Richmond, climbed a lonely train that sat in the factory yard outside the Purina building. It was just one boxcar that stood abandoned for some reason, as if it had been forgotten. We sat cross-legged on its roof and stared off down the tracks and out toward the high school, its spire lit up in the distance. From where we sat, the high school seemed less intimidating, less grand. Its halls were empty, its students scattered across town, some of them tucked in their houses, sleeping. We talked about what it would be like to some day leave Richmond far, far behind, and about all the places we would go.

Members of student congress: Bottom row—Jeff Shirazi, Ross Vigran, Danny Dickman, Tom Mangas, Ted Fox; Middle row—Robert Ignacio, Teresa Ripperger, Michele Long, Amy Johnson, Sarah Rosar, Beth Jennings, Michelle Zimmerman; Top row—Angie Oler, Ned Mitchell, Chris Jones

At least we're still best friends and we're not starving or Prince Charles or this girl I heard about on
Hard Copy
who was led into the woods by her two closest friends and then beaten to death with a log all because she was more popular than them. Thank God we weren't too popular. Just think what could have happened to us. Sherri Dillon and Tom Dehner might have enjoyed dropping us from the top of the Purina Tower.

—Jennifer to Joey, December 10, 1992

Ancient Egyptian society was structured like a pyramid. At the very top were the gods who controlled the universe. It was important to keep them happy because they could cause famine, make the Nile overflow, or bring on a horrible, grueling death. Pharaohs—human beings elevated to gods—were next in line. Below them were the nobles and priests, followed by the soldiers, the scribes, the merchants, the artisans, the farmers, and finally the slaves and servants.

Every society from the beginning of time has had a social order, from ants to bees to kings to pharaohs. Richmond High School was no different. We had our own complicated hierarchy just like any other high school. As soon as we arrived, we learned the rules.

Ranking was somewhat economic. Not usually racial. A cheerleader far outranked a Devilette drill team member. A football player outranked a tennis player. Some football players outranked others. The Richmond High School social structure was like some sort of invisible edict from God that dictated who was who in the order of things. Mostly it seemed random.

Joey and I set out to try to understand the great mystery of it all, and maybe, in doing so, figure out a way to become popular in the process. There was something we had discovered very early about ourselves and about each other: not only did we share a love for writing, a desire to do big things with our lives, and a need to move beyond our small town, but we wanted to be admired, to be liked, to belong, to do more than fit in: to be embraced.

The best way to try to sort it out was to break it down group by group, as if we were bees or Egyptians. We decided on Egyptians because they were easier and more exotic.

At the very top of the pyramid of the class of 1986 were
Teresa Ripperger (everyone called her “Rip”) and Tom Dehner. Teresa played sports and was in student congress. She was fun and outgoing and gave the very best parties. Tom was a football player—good-looking, easygoing, smart. They had been going out since the sixth grade and moved in a stratosphere all their own. They were, quite clearly, the gods.

Below them, the cool kids (the pharaohs of the school) were made up of many of the jocks, almost all of the cheerleaders, and most of the members of student government. There were always exceptions, based on looks and personality. Having gone to Test Junior High School helped, of course, as did coming from money.

Then there were the soldiers—the normal kids—just trying to get by and do their work and live through high school. Sometimes they dated. Sometimes they didn't. Maybe they didn't date as much as they wished they could. They didn't always get asked to every dance or go to every dance. They didn't show up at parties, or maybe the parties they went to were somewhere other than Teresa's house. Or maybe, every once in a while, they did come to Rip's or to Tom Dehner's. The soldiers made up the majority of the school.

Next were the artisans—the drama nerds, the band fags, the orchestra and choir geeks. These were the diehards who lived for rehearsals, not those (like me) who merely showed up for class or performances and had other things to do with their time.

Then came the scribes, or brains. There were some who tried hard to be cool and to fit in, and some who didn't care to. There were brains who didn't have any social skills whatsoever but who were very good at math and science and computers. There were others who were so much smarter than everyone else that they had no choice but to be nerds.

The hoods (merchants) drove Camaros and Trans Ams, wore Black Sabbath or Iron Maiden T-shirts, and hung out in the Smokers Hall between classes. They took Auto Shop, and if they played sports, it was usually wrestling or baseball, sometimes football. They liked to cut class and were always in detention. Sometimes they were sexy in a bad and dangerous way. The female equivalent was girls with permed, platinum hair, the girls who put out, the ones who smoked openly and got pregnant and then dropped out of school before graduation.