The Aqua Net Diaries (22 page)

Joey did most of the talking. I stood next to him and smiled and tried very hard to look both gracious and commanding. “As copresidents of the speech team, Jennifer and I would work for broadened publicity and individual excellence. We will always be ready to hear your proclamations or protests, or maybe just to hear your material! With
good humor and dedication through and through, we hope that by strengthening the individual we will strengthen our group. And by strengthening our group we give backbone to our school. And by heartening our young, we hearten the future of America! A vote for a shared presidency is a vote for a shared future.”

When Joey was finished, there was a faint round of applause, and then Jonetta Sowers-Clark said, “Who do you and Jennifer think you are, king and queen of the world?” She got up and left the room.

Joey and I looked at each other and shrugged. I thought,
Maybe we should go after her. After all, we don't have many members left.

Joey said, “Yes?”

No one else found it funny.

By the beginning of our junior year, Brenda Frazier-Christie had left us completely. It was clear that if we still wanted Richmond High School to have a speech team, it was up to Joey and me to save it.

On a warm October day, Joey and I drove from school across the bridge by Miller's Cafeteria, past the burned-out shell of Swayne-Robinson, past the post office, down to the old train depot district where the empty warehouses and the factories were. Joey pulled into the Purina Factory lot. Up close the factory looked as tall as the Empire State Building, which was funny because from far away it didn't look very tall at all. To the right of the parking lot, there was the abandoned boxcar, just sitting there, pointed east as if it had been heading somewhere once upon a time. We climbed onto the top and sat there under the sun, looking out across
the Whitewater Gorge toward the high school. We always thought best when we were somewhere we shouldn't be.

“I want a team with more interesting people,” Joey said.

“Like Tom Dehner?” I said. The metal was hot under my skirt. My legs were already burning.

“Yes. That's my vision of the new speech team. You, me, and Tom Dehner.”

I felt a tiny thrill in my heart—the same thrill I always felt when we discussed Tom. “But how do we get him?”

“That's the question.” Joey was thinking. I could tell because he was squinting hard into the distance like he was trying to see inside each window of the high school from here.

“And can he speak, I mean, before an audience?”

“Does it matter?”

“No.”

The air felt heavy and light all at once. The sun beat down. Joey's fair skin was already freckling. I tipped my head back and let the sun warm my face.

We got the best-looking teacher in the school, Mark Alexander, to agree to be our coach. Just before Christmas, an article was published in
The Register—Speech Team to Expand
—which mentioned that
ten of the school's top students will receive invitations to join the varsity squad.

Then Joey and I sat down together and went through the yearbook and picked out the fifteen best people to be our new team. The first one we picked was Tom Dehner. Everyone else fell in around him. We didn't choose many girls because we didn't like them. We chose Beth McDougall because Joey liked her, and Lisa Fanning because I liked
her, and Hether Rielly because she was our friend. We chose all of the good boys—except for Tom Mangas, whom I was mad at for something or other.

We called them “Speech Team Nominees” because it had a nice ring to it. We sent out letters to our chosen group informing them that the 1985/86 RHS Varsity Speech Team had been tentatively established and that
decisions concerning your membership were reached through speech interests, teacher/panel recommendations, extracurricular activities, and scholastic showmanship. You may now feel free to list Speech Team membership on college applications …

Being on the speech team really wouldn't take much time, we promised. Public speaking wasn't nearly as bad or scary as classroom speaking. We added:
We have already received over 40 applications, but your spot on the Varsity Team of 15 has been secured.
Then we invited our nominees to join us on April 24 at three-fifteen p.m. for a short photo session in the library for the
Pierian. Once again, you have made no commitment, you have simply been honored for your scholastic and extracurricular aptitude. If nothing else, the pictures will get you a big spot in the yearbook and add to your momentum on the quickly arriving road to college!
Joey convinced Millie Carroll, who was the faculty sponsor in charge of yearbook photos, to send a photographer.

As part of our publicity push, Joey and I went on the local radio station with my mom and Eric Lundquist on a snowy, stormy night and talked about the new speech team. Afterward my mom drove Joey and me back to Hidden Valley to our house, and the snow was coming down so fast and white and the road was so thick with ice that we went sailing right off the road and down into a creek, screaming all the way. Luckily, the snow cushioned everything and the creek was frozen solid. We had to leave the car and climb
up the hill, up to our knees in snow. We kept falling and laughing, and when we looked back, we couldn't see the car anymore. We got up to the street and walked around the corner, slipping and sliding, to my house in the blizzard, as Joey recited Robert Frost.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep …

The morning of the pictures, my hair, of course, didn't cooperate. It was big in all the wrong places but not big enough in all the right ones. Standing in my yellow bathroom, dressed in my favorite Esprit sundress, suffocating from Aqua Net fumes, I thought I would have a breakdown. Here it was, one of the most important days of my life, and my hair, as usual, wasn't doing what it was supposed to do. Was it too much to ask that it look good? That, just this once, it would behave? I knew that Sherri Dillon and Deanna Haskett never had these problems. They probably just jumped out of bed and their hair bounced right into perfect, perky position.

I saw Joey in AP History class, and we passed a note back and forth while Mr. Johns rattled on at the board.
We look like the ultimate Speech Presidents,
Joey said.
God, I'm sooooooooo nervous! I saw almost everyone on the new team already, but I was too scared to say anything! I have to remind Beth & Ronnie now about pictures! Good article in the paper, huh? Almost makes you think it's true, doesn't it? Almost makes you want to be a Speech Team member, doesn't it?

I wrote back and said,
No … I'll never believe it. If I see it with my own eyes, then maybe—but not a second before.

Last hour, Joey ran into Jonetta Sowers-Clark, who said, “I heard speech team photos are being taken for the yearbook after school. What time should I be there?”

Joey said, “Where did you hear that?”

She said, “Ned Mitchell was talking about it at lunch.”

“Really? Did he say he was coming?”

“I don't know. So is it right after school? Why didn't you tell us? I don't think Stephanie or Michelle know. Do you want me to tell them?”

Joey said, “No. We're only taking pictures of new members now.”

She gave him a suspicious look before huffing away and Joey knew it was only a matter of time before we heard from the other members, the ones who had put in so many hours in room 81 and given up so many Saturdays to make the team what it was.

Nearly everyone was in the library—and, most important, Tom Dehner was there. The new speech team members asked one or two questions about team protocol, but mostly we posed for pictures—all together—and in smaller groups by the card catalog. We were there for an hour, laughing, rearranging ourselves, smiling. The new Richmond High School speech team.

Beer, beer for old Richmond high.

Bring in the whiskey, bring in the rye …

And then, one by one, before we could talk about what would happen next and what our plans were for the team and its future, everyone disbanded. Tom Dehner was the first to leave. He gathered his books and grinned his crooked grin and said, “Thanks guys. I'm off.”

I thought,
Where? Where?
And,
Take me with you!

Joey and I watched him push through the turnstile, jacket and books under his arm, already heading toward the next place. Some of the others stayed around and talked.
We talked with them, but our hearts weren't in it anymore.

Joey, Hether, Ross, and I walked out to the parking lot. Hether climbed in her Cougar and Ross got into his Camaro, and Joey and I stood there waving at them till they disappeared. Then he and I jumped into the red Calais and went screaming all the way to Dayton. Joey had somehow talked Millie Carroll into giving us the negatives, and now we headed to the Dayton Mall to the one-hour developer. We were never so breathless, the music blasting, the car flying, me clutching the roll of film in my hand. We talked and laughed, and pulled up to the mall in what seemed at once like minutes and hours, and tumbled out and started running.

“These are very important pictures,” we told the man behind the One-Hour Moto Photo counter, who looked bored and ready to go home for the day.

“Okay,” he said.

“No,” I said. “You don't understand. These are the most important pictures you will ever develop. Please be
very, very, very
careful.”

His eyes got wide. “Okay,” he said. He seemed a little scared of us. He looked at the negatives. “Since these were shot in black and white, I can print them in either black and white or sepia. That's with a brown tint. So it looks kind of old-fashioned.”

We said at the same time, “Sepia.”

After he promised to have them done in an hour, we milled about and bought hot pretzels and an Orange Julius each and sat and ate.

“I can't believe they showed up,” said Joey. “That
Tom Dehner
showed up.”

“I know,” I said. I sighed a little. “Did it really happen?”

“I don't know. We'll see when the pictures come back.”

“What if the pictures come back blank?” I said.

We shivered. We ate.

I said, “What do you think will happen to the team?”

Joey said, “As long as those pictures come back fine, who cares?”

When the hour was up, we went back to the photo place and stood at the counter, waiting. The man brought us our pictures and asked if we wanted to check them first before we walked away, and we told him no, we wanted to sit down and enjoy them.

We chose a bench that was quiet and away from the crowd and sat down side by side. We opened the envelope. We were very quiet. We pulled them out of the sleeve. At the same time, we caught our breath. They were more wonderful than we'd imagined. It was maybe our greatest success so far.

Here was one of all of us together. And another. Another. Another. Ned Mitchell with his fist in the air, his arm around Robert Ignacio. Danny Dickman, Ian Barnes, Eric Ruger, Ross, and me. Joey, Hether, Ronnie Stier, Robert, Ned, and me with Tom Dehner. The entire group of us milling around, unposed, laughing. Joey and me, just the two of us, leaning on the card catalog, grinning like two Cheshire cats. Tom Dehner leaving the library, pushing through the turnstile, his books and jacket under his arm, on his way to somewhere …

When we got all the way through to the end, we went back and began to talk over them, choosing our favorites, analyzing this one and that one. We sat there for nearly an hour, lost in the moment.

The speech team fell apart after that. None of the new
members ever came to meetings or practices. They didn't show up for meets. Mr. Alexander abandoned us. One by one, the original members of the team disappeared. We saw them in the halls of school and some of them smiled and waved, and some of them looked away. But we still had our pictures, which we got out from time to time and looked at, of the speech team that might have been, that almost was, that still existed, just for a moment, on film.

The Richmond High School History Team. From left to right: Ronnie Stier, Joe Kraemer, Jennifer McJunkin, Holly Ogren, and Eric Ruger

It was hard working as a group at first. We're all very different people. But then everything came together somehow—the ideas, the research, us—and before we knew it, we were a team.

—Jennifer, interviewed in the
Palladium-Item,
April 1, 1985

When we were still in the midst of planning the new speech team, Joey and I drove down to the Purina Factory and this time we walked past our favorite boxcar. We climbed instead up the narrow metal ladder on the side of the Purina tower, the one that stretched toward the sky, careful not to let anyone see us. This was something we usually did only at night. I looked only up, not down, as I climbed, till we got to the very top, up where the Christmas
tree sat year-round slightly tilted. We stood for a moment before sitting down in the sun. From up here you could see all of Richmond.