The Aqua Net Diaries by Jennifer Niven

the phone, just because people can now get through,” my dad said. “We did not have this installed so that you could talk indefinitely.”
    â€œOf course.”
    â€œIt also doesn’t mean that you can talk to one person on one line and another person on another line and go back and forth between them.”
    â€œOkay.” I had never even thought of this.
Call-waiting is a miracle. The possibilities are endless.
    â€œDo you understand?”
    â€œYes.”
    I couldn’t wait to call Ned to tell him about the call-waiting. I figured now we could talk on the phone all night if we wanted to.
    We were in danger of failing Typing. Not just because we stayed up half the night talking, which meant we were seriously sleep deprived, but because we typed each other notes in class when we were supposed to be typing things like:
The little duck swims in the pond as the sun settles in the sky.
Mrs. Young, so patient, so kind, threatened to separate us if we didn’t straighten up.
    Then there came a magical day when the sun was out and my hair actually looked good and Tom Mangas wrote me a note in Spanish class, asking me out to a movie for that coming weekend. My heart was light and free and the verynext period I would see Ned and we would type notes to each other about people’s feet and try not to laugh too hard so that we didn’t get in trouble, and that night we would talk for hours, and then there would be just three more days before the weekend and my date.
    I got to class before Ned and was just getting things set up for the hour when he came stalking into the room. He breezed by me and sat down behind me and ripped the cover off his typewriter and threw it onto the floor and started pounding on the keys. I turned around and said, “What’s wrong?”
    He glanced up, just once, and gave me a sort of death stare.
    I said, “What?”
    He said, “I hear you’re going out with Mangas.”
    I thought,
Wow, news travels fast.
But out loud I said, “That’s right.” His fingers went
bang-bang-bang
on the keys. I said, “You’re going to break the typewriter if you keep doing that.”
    He said, “Why don’t you turn around and do your work?”
    For almost thirty seconds I couldn’t speak. I just stared at him. I said, “What is wrong with you?”
    He said, “Nothing. What’s wrong with you?”
    Mrs. Young said, “Jennifer, Ned, class has started. Please keep it down. Jennifer, turn around please.”
    Ned smiled to himself, a gloaty, mean sort of smile. His fingers went
bang-bang-bang.
I turned around and lifted the cover off my typewriter and folded it up and set it on top of my books. I got out a piece of blank paper and slipped it into the carriage and opened my typing book and began to copy the day’s lesson.
    The red rooster runs around the barnyard twenty times …
    Everyone else went
clickety-clack, clickety-clickety
on the keys, but Ned sat there going
bang-bang-bang
in my ear. I knew the entire time he was typing at me. When the bell rang, he threw the cover back onto the typewriter and grabbed his books and pushed past me before I could even stand up. He didn’t call me that night. Or the night after. Or the night after. He stopped talking to me completely. Every day it was the same—
bang-bang-bang. Bang-bang-bang.
    Mrs. Young would say, “Ned, please type a little softer. You’re going to break the machine.”
    Bang-bang-bang.
    I didn’t say a word to him. I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction. Instead I came into class and sat down at my desk and stared at my typewriter or straight ahead and learned exactly what I was supposed to learn. I paid attention. I didn’t talk or write notes. That weekend, I went out with Tom Mangas. I said, “Has Ned said anything to you?”
    He said, “No.”
    The rest of the semester it was the same. I stopped