Aqua Net

Inviting her friend on the camping trip had been risky. The halls at school were filled with invisible booby-traps of social disgrace; tough girls with eyes circled in sticky black eyeliner wearing pegged, too-tight jeans stood in clusters staring pointedly at everyone that wasn’t them. Sniggering boys huddled in loose groups talking loudly to each other making jokes about girls or farts or maybe both.

Some kids, like her, tried to lay low and blend into the walls. They kept their eyes down on the shiny linoleum, staring at the dark gray Rorschach splotches of gum as if they were divination tools. “Will I be left alone today? Please God; I’m begging you to let no one notice me.” She hid her face behind shaggy bangs sprayed heavily with Aqua Net and kept her hands full of books. Elbows in, head down. Walk quickly but not too quickly.

By some accident - how could she have not predicted it from the gum? - she had become tentative friends with a girl in her math class. Enough to ask the first shy questions about home work, then moving up to giggling together about the cute TA that delivered messages from the school office. Eventually they progressed to long phone calls about absolutely nothing and sleepovers where one parent or the other shouted to “Keep it down for Christ’s sake!”

The camping trip and the subsequent walk toward the swimming hole were new territory. The dark fir trees and smooth alders created a protective canopy over their heads as they chattered about This Boy and That Girl; laughing but still trying to look cool in perfectly fringed cut-offs slung low over crisp new bathing suits. They discussed the daily march toward the yawning boredom of their classes while small gusts of hot air blew the scent of baked pine needles around them. Casually, they brushed damp strands of hair off their necks. The caste system of squirmy self-consciousness was still firmly in place.

The sound of the river grew from a distant gurgle to loud rumble as the girls neared. The halls full of lockers began to fade and they were just two girls laughing about bathing suit wedgies and a bag of marshmallows lost somewhere on the trail.

They left the green canopy and approached the rocky banks, shielding their eyes from the glaring sun. Still laughing, they stripped off their cut-offs and perched diver-style above the deep eddy. Before she leapt into the river, she glanced quickly at the other girl. Something light and feathery had changed. She knew with certainty that they were really friends. She had not made a mistake inviting her on the camping trip.

Legs trembling involuntarily on the chalky rock, she jumped. In an instant she hit the silty water with a roar and then was surrounded by blissful silence. The tight coils of worry in her belly began to loosen, water carrying it away and flattening it on smooth brown rocks. She burst through the surface of the river, hair washed free of Aqua Net, her eyes wide open and staring up, up at the impossibly blue summer sky.