Free The Aqua Net Diaries by Jennifer Niven

with.”
    â€œAsking you out?”
    â€œI don’t think so. He was calling from jail.” Which, of course, was the wrong thing to say to my mother, who wanted to know how he got our number from prison and were they just handing out numbers of young girls to inmates and letting them make phone calls to every girl in town, and however I felt about it I needed to let my father answer the phone from now on, etc. As she talked, I ate my butter crunch cookie—best in the world—and felt a little thrill. I would have to get the yearbook out to remember who BobbyWatts even was exactly, so the thrill wasn’t about him at all. There was just something about prisons.
    Ross Vigran called me one night and said, “Guess where I’m calling you from?”
    I said, “Your room.” Because this was always where Ross called me from.
    He said, “No. Guess again.”
    Ross liked people to guess things, which was very annoying. He would make you keep guessing until you either guessed whatever it was or lost your mind.
    I said, “No.”
    Because I either sounded like I meant business or because he was too excited to wait for me to guess, he said, “I’m in my front yard.”
    I said, “What?”
    He said, “I’m on a cordless phone.”
    This was a very big deal and I was very, very envious. I wanted to get my own hands on a cordless phone right that minute—just the idea of a phone without limits, of one that you could talk on anywhere. I wondered if Target was still open, even though I wouldn’t be caught dead in a Target because it was in Richmond and Richmond people shopped there and they didn’t sell Esprit.
    I said, “No you’re not.”
    He said, “Wanna bet?” And he rustled around a little in what sounded like leaves, making outdoor-type noises.
    I paced around my room, twisting the phone cord as I went. Ross told me all about his cordless phone, and after we had finally exhausted everything there was to say about it, we moved on to other subjects—his ex-girlfriend Tally (they had just broken up), my boyfriend Alex, the upcoming footballgame, Teresa’s party. Ross was still sad about Tally and I was mostly trying to cheer him up.
    Suddenly there was some sort of static on the line. We both heard it. “What’s that?” I said. It sounded almost like a voice. It was fuzzy and hard to make out. We stopped talking and listened. Static-static. Fuzz-fuzz.
    â€œI don’t know,” Ross said.
    We went back to talking. A few minutes later, Ross said, “Hold on a minute.” We listened again. This time there was no static or fuzz.
    A voice—thin and clear, though far away, came over the phone from somewhere else: “Tally dumped Ross’s ass, but he’s telling everyone they broke up with each other and that they both wanted it.” There was wild laughter.
    I said, “Is that Cliff?” Cliff Lester lived across the street from Ross. He was the only person I knew except for Ross to have a cordless phone. (Cliff had everything before anyone else—a convertible, MTV, HBO, call-waiting.)
    Ross said, “I’ll call you right back.” And hung up the phone.
    I sat down on my floor and waited, my heart racing. I tried to picture Cliff’s face when Ross called him. Cliff, of course, would click over because he had call-waiting. And there would be Ross, who had heard everything Cliff said …
    The phone rang. I grabbed it.
    Ross was laughing so hard he could barely talk. “That poor asshole. He clicked over and said, ‘Hello?’ And I said, ‘For your information, Cliff, I wasn’t dumped.’ And then I hung up.” We laughed insanely and maniacally for several minutes. This was the funniest thing I had ever heard of involving a telephone.
    A few days later, during Algebra, I wrote a poem about it:

    I copied it down and gave it to Ross for a little