Free The Aqua Net Diaries by Jennifer Niven Page B

anything, just holding the line open so that even for a few minutes we could feel connected to another place, far, far outside of Richmond.

Academics
    Through all the gripes and grumbles of what we hated about those pop quizzes, ten-minute speeches, and ten-page papers that were assigned, some good prevailed. What an accomplishment we felt when we finally finished that term paper we had worked on for nine weeks, or when we saw that “A” on the physics test we were sure we had flunked. We probably will never cease to be amazed that we actually did learn something in our time at school, even if it was to study in our assigned study halls or to know which stairs led up and which led down.

Kelley Robertson, Jo McQuiston, and Jennifer in math class
Algebra
    What cares one for algebra?
Who delights in solving math?
I only want to live my life
Along the creative path.
    â€”Poem written by Jennifer in Algebra, 1985
    If I wanted to get help with math at home, the only option was my father. My mother was as hopeless at math as I was. My father, on the other hand, claimed to be good at it, but I never really knew if this was true because I did anything to avoid asking him for homework help, and this went for
any
subject. My dad had majored in history, and one of his great passions in life, next to humiliating me, running long distances, competing with me at almost everything, and cookinggourmet meals, was explaining things. If you asked him a simple question, like “Dad, could you please help me with my algebra?” he would say, “To fully understand algebra, we have to first go back to the beginning of time, to the year 21,000 B.C ., before math was ever invented …” And then he would talk on and on and on, leading you up through the years, the discovery of math and all of its branches, the biographies of the greatest mathematicians, and sometime, many days later, he would get around to looking at the actual problem in the actual math book.
    Instead, I asked our dog Tosh, my seventh-grade neighbor, the FedEx man, Joey (who was worse at math than I was), and even my mother before I asked my dad for help. Mom and I labored quietly, secretly, in my room, whispering so my dad wouldn’t hear, trying between us to make one good math brain. We particularly hated story problems.
    Mr. Brumley was a fat little man who looked just like a garden gnome, only without the red hat and suspenders. Each day before Algebra class, he stood in the hall, just outside his door, hands clasped behind his back. Sometimes, every now and then, he held them clasped in front of him. He nodded at students and watched them and yelled at them to slow down if they were running or walking too fast. “Exercise caution, Miss Ripperger!” “Walk, do not run, Mr. Wissel!”
    Joey and I always seemed to end up in the same math classes together, but this was not true of Mr. Brumley’s class. We both had him for Algebra second semester of our junior year, but Joey had him second period, and I had him fifth.
    On one memorable day, Hether Rielly and I arrived at Mr. Brumley’s classroom and he was standing in the hallway,his face a very bright red. His white hair looked more like smoke than hair. He didn’t even nod at us as we walked in, just grumbled to himself, which was not like him at all.
    â€œWhat’s wrong with Mr. Brumley?” I said.
    â€œWho knows?” said Hether. “The mysteries of the very old.”
    We sat down, waiting for the first bell to ring, and started asking around to see if anyone had done the homework. As usual, no one had. As a group, we then did what we usually did: we tried to get Rob Jarrett to give us the homework answers. Rob Jarrett and Tamela Vance were boyfriend and girlfriend. They weren’t the most interesting people at parties, but they were both miraculously smart at math. Tamela Vance was in Joey’s class, and everyone in there tried to copy off her. We,