The Aqua Net Diaries: Big Hair, Big Dreams, Small Town Read online

  On the afternoon of Thursday, June 13, we competed on stage in front of other groups and an audience of people from all over the country. It was our best performance to date—we all knew it and felt it. After it was over we were flushed and excited and jumpy. Strangers came up to congratulate us and tell us how much they loved us and our presentation. “We won,” I said. “I know we won.”

  Not long after, we were called back into the auditorium to hear the results: the announcement of the six groups to make it to the final round. We sat side by side in the audience, surrounded by our families and our teacher, and waited for our names to be called. But when the list was read, six other groups were chosen. They didn’t call our names. We couldn’t believe it. We hadn’t won. We hadn’t even made it to the finals. We sat there deflated while people approached us and said, “What happened?” “You were the best.” “The judges are crazy.” “Don’t give up. You guys can win next year.”

  We were allowed to pick up our scores in the judges’ room. Eric and I went with my mom while the others waited outside. Inside, the room was a mob scene as coaches and teachers and students fought their way through, holding manila envelopes, reading over judges’ comments and scores. My mom was handed ours and passed it back to me. Eric followed her out of the room, staying close. I opened the envelope and pulled out our tally sheet, grabbing on to the back of Eric’s shirt so I wouldn’t get left behind.

  Judge one—98.

  Judge two—99.

  Judge three—97.

  Average score—94.

  “The numbers are wrong!” I was yanking on Eric’s shirt.

  “What?” It was too loud. He couldn’t hear me. I held the sheet in front of his face and pointed.

  “They added wrong! Our average was ninety-eight, not ninety-four. Tell Mom. Get my mom!”

  Eric started reaching for my mom. “Mrs. McJunkin!”

  We stumbled outside into the hall after her. She said, “What is it?”

  We showed her. She went white and then red. Then she moved into action. She found Mr. Johns. Together they went to every official, every representative, every judge they could find for the 1985 National History Day. While they did this, Eric and I found the others and told them what happened. Surely they would fix this. It was their mistake, not ours. The final round hadn’t happened yet. There was still time. We could still compete and win.

  My mother and Mr. Johns were passed from one person to another to another to another until they were finally handed over to the national director of National History Day, Dr. Sharon Lutz. She was a small, defensive woman with white-blond hair and black glasses and a sharp bird’s face. The five of us—Joey, Eric, Holly, Ronnie, and I—went with them to meet her. Mom and Mr. Johns explained what had happened. They showed her the judges’ scores and the miscalculation that had been made.

  Dr. Lutz said, “What do you expect me to do about it?”

  My mother, in her most gracious tone, said, “We’re hoping that you will include them in the final round and not punish them for an error they didn’t make.”

  Dr. Lutz said, “It’s too late. We’ve already made the announcement.” And then she looked at us. “It’s time these children learned that life isn’t always fair. Life is just a poker game. They’ll get over it.”

  We stood there staring at her. She was the first truly horrible person Joey, Holly, Ronnie, Eric, and I had ever met, with her cold voice and her pinched bird face. She looked at my mom again, impatient.

  My mother then gave Dr. Lutz a southern-lady piece of her mind. Mr. Johns—usually so reticent, so happy to be in the background—stepped in and joined her. But Dr. Lutz was unyielding. There was nothing she would do.

  It was the first time we cried as friends. We hugged one another and held on together, all in a group. Ronnie swore and punched a metal trash can and nearly broke his hand. Joey ran away to an empty stadium, surrounded by empty bleachers, and cried a part of his heart out. Holly and I walked and walked all over campus, arm in arm. We cried and looked at the stars, and every now and then we saw an angry blur run by and it was Eric or Ronnie.

  • • •

  Back at the dorm, the disappointment of the day caught up with us. Mitchell Kraemer stayed with us as we lassoed people with a rope in the hall and spent the evening screaming up and down the halls. We played hide and seek. We arranged our history team set inside the elevator, complete with all our antique props, the ones we were so proud of. I put on my hoop dress and Ronnie put on his Yankee blue uniform, and every time the door opened the five of us stood there in full Civil War attire, welcoming people to our reduced but marvelous Confederate world of 1866.

  When we got tired of this, we went back to the boys’ room and talked about what had happened to us. Eric cried then for the first time, sitting on his bed, leaning against the wall. I was across the room from him at the foot of Ronnie’s bed next to Ronnie. Joey was next to Eric. Holly was sprawled on a chair, Mitchell on the floor. As Eric was talking, Joey pulled out a toy gun that belonged to his little brother Matthew, who was seven, and pointed it at Eric who jumped about twenty-five feet into the air. “You asshole,” he said when he could talk again. But we were laughing, which felt good.

  “Let’s go to D.C.,” said Ronnie.

  So at two in the morning, the five of us, with Mitchell, got into Ronnie’s car and drove downtown to the Lincoln Memorial. Together we climbed the steps and stood in front of Abraham Lincoln, the true inspiration for our play. Then we stood looking up at the very words we had spoken. With malice toward none; with charity for all … We read the words out loud just as we had read them in our performance, saying the last lines together.

  I pulled out my camera and gave it to Mitchell. Joey, Holly, Ronnie, Eric, and I stood underneath the words of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. We posed for a photo and then the five of us stood once more in front of Abraham Lincoln. We stood there a long time, and after promising we would be friends forever, we headed back down the steps.

  We knew that we didn’t have it in us to re-form the team senior year and come up with another project. Several weeks after we returned from Maryland, National History Day officials wrote us to say that the history team would be receiving national medals in a special ceremony in Indiana and official letters of regret. They would also be paying special attention to their scoring methods and reevaluating those methods, based on what had happened to us. For us, it was small compensation for the loss we’d endured.

  But there was so much we had gained. We were different, diverse, but we had come together and worked together and were disappointed together and had our hearts broken together. After a while we forgot that Tom Dehner was ever on the team. It seemed like Eric had always been there, from the very start.

  After it was all over, Ronnie wrote me a letter. I was in New York City for the summer with my mom.

  The Richmond State Hospital

  Community Outreach

  No smoking, loud talking, spitting on the floors or stoves will be tolerated.

  —General Rules of St. Stephen’s Hospital, Richmond, Indiana, 1884

  Christmastime in Richmond meant several things: snow days, freezing temperatures, the live manger scene at First Methodist Church on National Road West, Christmas lights and decorations on the downtown Promenade, our dog Tosh howling along with the piano as my mom played our favorite Christmas carols, and long lists to my grandparents detailing every single thing I wanted (posters of Duran Duran, Cheap Trick, and Rick Springfield; T-shirts with cute sayings on them; Esprit clothes; new record albums from all my favorite bands …). It also meant Lois Potts’s annual Quaker Christmas project for the community. This was when Lois Potts—my former Girl Scout leader, the same Lois Potts who had chosen me to play the Virgin Mary and her daughter Kimberly to be Joseph in the yearly Christmas pageant the first year I lived in Richmond—organized members of Clear Creek Friends Meeting to visit the sick at Reid Memorial Hospital or sing carols to shut-ins or take t
he old people who lived at Golden Rule Nursing Center on a field trip to Richmond Square Mall.

  In December 1985, Lois Potts announced that she was going to take her Christmas cheer to the Richmond State Hospital, which, until 1927, had been known as the Eastern Indiana Hospital for the Insane. We were all terrified of the Richmond State Hospital and the people who lived there—crazy people, mentally disabled people, violent people of all ages. There were even criminals who were too wicked and wild to be kept in the tiny Wayne County Jail downtown across from the Courthouse. Growing up, my friends and I lived in fear of someone escaping. Heather Craig lived near the hospital and I was almost too scared to spend the night at her house. Whenever we heard a strange noise outside, we were sure it was an escaped mental patient walking on the roof or hiding in the bushes.

  When Lois Potts announced she was going to the State Hospital to sing carols and take presents, no one—adults or kids—wanted to go with her. Finally, my mother, who was both practical and kindhearted, said that she would go. She was one of the few people I knew who was not afraid of the Richmond State Hospital or the people who lived there. My father was busy, of course, but my mother would take me along. And Joey, because he was my best friend (even though he was Catholic and not Quaker), would go, too.

  To prepare, my mother chose some of her favorite carols, and Joey and I practiced a dramatic reading of ’Twas the Night Before Christmas, which we were going to deliver speech-team style, as we had many a scene from a play, in a kind of duet.

  So it was that four days before Christmas break, the four of us met in the main building of the Richmond State Hospital: Lois Potts (mid-forties—dark short-cropped hair, black-rimmed glasses, no-nonsense manner, resembling a great overbearing string bean); my mother (early forties— slim, blue-eyed, black-haired, pretty, wearing some sort of mid-1980s outfit befitting a Richmond housewife); Joey (eighteen—blond, glasses, pretty); me (seventeen—brunette, pretty, and boy crazy as could be).

  We were not alone. This was ward-party day at the hospital. There were Santa Clauses of various shapes and ages, and bags of gifts (two each for every patient in the twenty-three wards) and holiday goodies and punch. The Old National Road Chapter of Sweet Adelines, a women’s barbershop singing group, was there to perform songs for one of the women’s wards. Volunteers were there from the Eastern Gateway Kiwanis Club and Home Bible Study of Adams County, as well as West Richmond Friends Meeting, which was not to be confused with us. West Richmond Friends had been coming to the hospital at Christmastime for years, ever since a man named Orval Fetters started the tradition.

  A luncheon was prepared for all of the volunteers by Frances Lippke of the hospital’s dietary department, and then we were sent out to spread Christmas cheer to the crazy people.

  When it came time for our particular ward assignment, one of the guards signed us in and said, “Now I’ll escort you to the maximum security building.”

  Lois Potts, whose arms were filled with bags of wrapped presents, didn’t bat an eye. My mother, whose arms were also filled with bags of wrapped presents, said, “Excuse me?”

  The guard said, “It’s one of our Acute Intensive Treatment Wards. We keep them in a separate building because of security risks. We have to with the eighteen- to thirty-five-year-old maximum security male inmates. A lot of ’em are violent or dangerous to themselves or others. But don’t worry. We’ll have a guard with you at all times. If anything happens, we’ll get you out of there.”

  My mother and Joey and I stood there, staring at the guard, staring at one another. Lois Potts said, “Lead the way.”

  The maximum security building was barred up and locked tight as any prison, and I knew about prisons because I had a fascination with them that went back to childhood, so much so that, at the age of nine, I had created a prison mystery series in the vein of the Nancy Drew stories: Debby, who was the prettiest of the group, was full of mysteries and puzzles. She sang and danced in nightclubs and spent her time at home reading. Debby turned into the driveway which led to Sandsky Prison. She parked the car and climbed out. “Ah, smell that fresh air!” she said, spreading her arms far apart.

  My parents weren’t sure where this fascination came from—it was just one of those mysterious, unexplainable interests of mine, like my unreasonable love and affinity for Jesse James, Sweden, tambourines, and Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.

  The maximum security ward looked a lot like a prison, so much so that a tiny part of me did a thrilling little jump as the guard let us in.

  The inmates, as they called them, were very happy to see us. These were men, black and white, big and strong, tall and short, broad and skinny—but most of them big and strong and broad—who, as my mom said later, looked as if they had not seen a female in years. They remained happy—and friendly, and surprisingly well-behaved—throughout the singing of Christmas carols (Lois Potts banging away at the piano), the opening of presents, and the eating and drinking of refreshments.

  At one point I went into the kitchen to look for some more paper cups, and a boy followed me in there. He was maybe a couple years older than I, with feathered blond hair that was also a little wavy. He had dark eyes and he was good-looking in a bad news kind of way. He shambled when he walked and had an air about him like he had been horribly wounded and hurt by someone somewhere down the line. He reminded me of Matt Dillon in Rumble Fish.

  “Hey,” he said. He kind of slumped against the counter.

  “Hey.”

  “You got any cigarettes?”

  “No.”

  He shrugged, and then he smiled and it was wicked and sweet all at once, and I thought, Uh-oh.

  He said, “What’s your name?”

  I said, “Jennifer,” wondering if I should have told him my real name, if maybe now he might break out one night and come find me. He was, after all, a patient in the eighteen- to thirty-five-year-old maximum security all-male ward at the state mental health facility.

  He said, “I’m Andy. What year are you?”

  “Senior.”

  He nodded. “I was a senior when they busted me.”

  Thrillthrillthrill. “What did they bust you for?”

  “Drugs. I was stupid. And now I’m here getting clean.”

  It was the same little thrill I felt when I looked at the cover of Cheap Trick’s Heaven Tonight, at Tom Petersson’s bloodshot eyes, and imagined all the wicked and unspeakable things he had done even minutes before the picture was snapped—smoking, drinking, having sex, maybe even taking drugs.

  Andy said, “Maybe I could call you sometime.”

  I was trying to picture him calling and my dad answering in one of his many foreign accents. “Do they ever let you out of here?” I said. Where would we go? I tried to imagine us at a football game or at Noble Roman’s or Clara’s or at Rip’s house for a party. Would I have to drive? Was he allowed to drive? Did he even have a license?

  “No, but I don’t have much longer. I’d like to take you out.”

  At that moment, my mother, who had an uncanny ability to sense when I was about to make a horrible decision or endanger my life, appeared. “I found some cups in the other room,” she said, smiling tightly at both of us. “Jennifer, why don’t you come help me pour?”

  After refreshments, Joey and I performed our dramatic reading of ’Twas the Night Before Christmas. The men were surprisingly attentive while we read—standing in front of them, side by side, the book open before us, alternating lines. At one point, two or three of the men started getting a little restless, whispering to each other and talking over us. We kept reading:

  Joey: “When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter …”

  Jennifer: “I arose from my bed to see what was the matter …”

  The men kept talking, so we just spoke a little louder to be heard above them.

  Joey: “When, what to my wondering eyes should appear …”

  Jennifer: “But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer …”

&nb
sp; Finally, one of the men—a great big, burly man with a head as bald and shiny as a melon and tattoos up and down both arms—stood up and shouted, “Shut up, goddammit! I want to hear the story!” The talking men stared at him and fell silent. We all stared at him. Joey and I didn’t say a word until he waved us on. “Keep reading,” he said. “I want to hear the rest of it.” And he sat back down.

  We kept reading, and for the rest of the story everyone was quiet.

  We should have stopped there, of course. It would have been a perfect way to end the evening. Everyone was sleepy and settled and somewhat content. My mom and Joey and I were more than ready to leave. But Lois Potts had one more activity planned. Square dancing. I will never understand why she thought this could possibly be a good thing to do with eighteen- to thirty-five-year-old maximum security male inmates at a mental hospital, but she was very cheerful as she said, “I want everyone to join me in the Virginia Reel.”

  It’s hard to know who was more shocked: my mother, Joey, me, or the men, who began stomping and whistling. You’d have thought she had introduced a stripper out of a cake or that she’d just passed around a box of Playboys. I’d never seen a group of people so excited about square dancing.

  “Now let’s choose our partners,” she said.

  “I want that one!” one of them shouted, pointing at me. My mother moved in front of me, standing between me and them.

  “I’ll take that one,” another yelled, pointing at my mother.

  “Well, I’ll have that one,” screamed the bald man, pointing right at Joey. No one wanted Lois Potts.

  We paired up, standing across from our partners in two lines, most of the men forced to dance with each other, and Lois Potts explained that there would be no touching in this version of the Virginia Reel because we were leaving out the twirl. (Lois explained later that she thought it would be “overstimulating” for the inmates.) Then she lowered a needle on the record she had brought with her, unbeknownst to my mother and Joey and me, just for this purpose. Over the sounds of fiddles and banjo, we met our partners in the middle and began to promenade and do-si-do—something I had learned in gym class back in the fourth grade.