preface part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 part 8 part 9 part 10

My phone rang.

“Hello?” I said.

“It’s me,” came Joey’s voice from the other end of the line.  “I miss you already.”

I melted.

Although Joey had left for the summer without defining our relationship, it was fairly obvious we had something going on.  Although Joey didn’t have much access to the Internet over the summer and his cell phone didn’t work out of state, we had a communication plan.  It felt kind of old-fashioned and romantic, but we had exchanged snail-mail addresses before he had driven off that Thursday night.  I felt silly on Friday afternoon when I dove for my mailbox, rifling through the junk mail to look for a letter from Joey.

There wasn’t one, of course.

He hadn’t even been gone for 24 hours.

Friday evening, though, began our telephone routine.  At nine o’clock, my cell phone rang.  (Verizon has unlimited minutes after 9:00, you know.)  Joey used a phone card to call from where he was staying in Minnesota and he gave me a number to call him back.  We hung up after the briefest exchange of information, and I directly dialed the number he had just given me.

We usually talked for three to five hours.

The conversations ranged from his days as an intern, my house and general safety, work, friends, school…and life.

It was when the conversations turned to the serious stuff, LIFE!, that I tended to get skittish.  I kept waiting for the bomb to drop, for the bottom to fall out, for Joey to discover something he didn’t like about me and start acting like X had – which, unfortunately, I still expected that to be “normal”.  But, the more Joey learned, the more he seemed to like me.

It was weird.

For the first two weeks of June, I was a total jitterbug.  I would sit on my couch watching CSI reruns and staring at my cell phone, just sure that this evening’s conversation would be The One, the last one.  (Honestly, I’m not sure how Joey put up with all this, but he did.)

When I wasn’t stressing myself out about when Joey would stop calling, I was spending hours (and hours, and hours) praying and seeking wise counsel.  (I was a busy girl!)  I’m not really sure when it happened, or what happened exactly, but one day I woke up after a particularly significant phone call with Joey…and I felt peaceful.

It was fantastic to not see X behind every bush anymore.  Frankly I didn’t like seeing him anywhere, but especially not nasty vestiges of his influence in my blossoming relationship with Joey.

I think Joey could tell when I finally got things figured out.  I think he had just been biding his time, waiting for me to get myself sorted out.  And once I realized that, I realized I liked Joey even more.

During these two weeks of indecision, Joey and I had been exchanging letters with lightning speed, probably 3-5 a week.  They weren’t short little letters, either, they were three page tomes.

Honestly, I don’t know what we found to write about, what with those five hour phone conversations every evening, but puppy love does strange things to one’s communication skills, ain’t so?

I’d get a letter from Joey one afternoon, then I’d read it four times while I sat on my blue plaid couch watching the TV that I had moved closer to me by putting it on the piano bench, VCR player precariously resting on top, DVD player on the floor below…my makeshift entertainment center.

I wish I didn’t have to admit how much CSI and Law and Order I watched that summer in the evenings.  When I wasn’t mowing the lawn (and subsequently getting catcalled by the creepy neighbors, so I usually tried to rearrange my schedule so I could do it in the early afternoon before everyone was home from work or school), sitting on the grass in the back yard, whipping up something delicious in the kitchen or waiting for Joey to call, I was definitely watching TV.

“What were you watching,” Joey would often ask me right off the bat when he’d call.

Usually a cop show.

Those things scare the pants off me, but I love them to death.  I have to watch them with an afghan over my head, squeezing a pillow to death and with one eye closed (especially if I’m home alone), but I’m willing to make those concessions.  And now I’m off track, we’re supposed to be talking about how Joey’s awesome, not how much I like cop shows.

Toward the end of June, I drove in my driveway and noticed a little brown box sitting on my porch.

A package?  For me?!?

Yes ma’am.

I turned off the car, bounded up the stairs and sat down on the porch, using my keys to tear through the tap.  Inside was a letter (of course) and three matchbox Mini Coopers – from The Italian Job, the movie Joey and I had watched the night before he had driven up to Minnesota.

Written in Wite-Out was “I Miss You!!”, one word on each of the different Minis.

“Oh my gosh!”  I breathed, thinking that Joey was probably the sweetest, creativest, most thoughtful boy (who still was not technically dating me) in the entire world.  I sat there, leaning against the yellow siding, and read the three page letter Joey had written me.  The last page very thoroughly emphasized how much he missed me; I got butterflies in my stomach like any self-respecting girl would.

I read the letter about two more times between the time I received the package  and 9:00, when I knew Joey would call me.  (I could set my watch by Joey’s impeccable accuracy.)  Sure enough, as I was sitting on the couch fiddling with my Rubik’s cube, my phone rang.

“Hi!” I chirped.

“Call me right back?” Joey asked.

“Yep,” I said, and clicked END on my phone.  I redialed his number, and one ring later, he picked up.

“What’s going on?” He asked.

“I’m just working on my Cube,” I said.

And when I said “working on my Cube” I meant that I was sort of trying to follow the entire sheet of algorithms he had written out for me before I left, so I could “practice” while he was gone.  I had (sort of) solved the thing “by myself” once before he left, but we both knew that Joey had given me several key suggestions while I was working on that last side.  No way could I solve one of those things on my own.  And that sheet of algorithms?  They were written on a sheet of college rule paper, single spaced. I have enough trouble memorizing long Bible verses, people.  It was nothing but the severest of puppy love that induced me to even attempt mastery at solving a Rubik’s Cube.

“How are you doing?” Joey said.

“Oh…good.” I said.  I was stuck on getting all the four corners part near the end, and I’d even followed the algorithms to a T.  “Actually, not good.  I’m stuck.”

I explained to Joey what my Rubik’s Cube looked like, and he thought about it for a few seconds and said, “Oh, here’s what you need to do.”

If he didn’t solve that Rubik’s Cube over the phone from 600 miles (this was way, way before iChat) then my name wasn’t Jenna Laird. (And it definitely used to be.)

“You did it!”  Crowed Joey when I told him it was solved.  We both knew that wasn’t true, but I just went with it.

“I got a package today,” I said, about half an hour later.

“Oh?” Asked Joey.

“I did!”  I went to the trouble of explaining in great detail what the package had contained, and how it had come with a very, very nice letter.  I will spare you the majority of the sentimental, schmoopsy stuff.  (It always gives me the willies after I write it down, and I just wind up backspacing it anyway.  Yes, I actually do have a TMI limit, and it’s that.)

“You’ll have to keep your eyes open, you have another one coming in a few days,” Joey said.  “I think you’ll like this one better.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Yep.”

I pressed him for details, but I was unsuccessful.  He knew how to be coy when he needed to be.

The next morning, I woke up hard.  I had gotten about four hours of sleep the night previous, it had been a long phone call, and I grumped around my little house, making breakfast and stubbing my toe on the bathtub until I remembered Joey’s words about the package.

I rushed off to work, eager to get home and check the mail.

There was no package yet, of course.  For four days I repeated this, until on the fifth day, there it was on my porch waiting for me when I got home.  I drove recklessly into my driveway, jammed the parking brake on and flew out of my car and up the steps.  I picked up the package and shook it….it was very, very light.  Tucking it under my arm, I unlocked my front door and dumped my bag and shoes inside.

I sat on the couch and tore back the brown paper and opened the box.

It was filled with dozens of white packing peanuts, and each one had something different written on it, very small in black permanent marker.

OH MY GOSH, I thought.  I knew exactly what this was…my hands were shaking as I took out the first white foam blob.  It said “I miss Jenna!” on it.  I smiled and laughed and shook the box.

This could take awhile.

I pulled out dozens and dozens of packing peanuts.  They read innocuous things like “Jenna is nice!” and “My hand hurts from writing on packing peanuts!” and “4th of July!” (the next time we planned to see each other, just two weeks away!) and “I like Jenna”.

The one I was looking for I could not find.

There were about ten packing peanuts left in the box, aside from the attached letter, which read “DO NOT READ FIRST” on it, and I was beginning to think that my original assumption of the box’s purpose was incorrect.

But then…

The next one I pulled out read, “Will you be my girl?”

I screamed.

Fortunately I lived by myself and no one was home to hear me, or see the packing peanut mess I had all over my couch.  I went ahead and read the remaining few packing peanuts in the box (they said very similar things to the previous hundred I had read) and ripped open the letter.

I shall not here detail the contents of that letter.  (You don’t even really care, do you?  Hehehehe.)  Considering the box only contained about a hundred white packing peanuts and a single letter, I was flying high as a kite until the 9:00 phone call later that evening.

“I got your box,” was about the first thing out of my mouth once I had called Joey back.  Gotta maximize those free minutes, you know.  (Frankly I’m surprised Verizon didn’t go under that summer.)

“Oh did you?” Joey said.

“I did.  And I found your message.”

It was here that the conversation got a little awkward.  “Yeah?” Joey said.

“Yeah,” I said.

He was quite for a few minutes. Then – “Do I need to talk to your dad or anything?”

“Yes, you do,” I said, rather relieved that he had brought it up.  My family really thinks it’s important to be involved in significant relationships from their earliest formation, and sometimes that’s a little bit foreign to the potential “significant other”.  Once I got to college and grew up a bit, knowing that I could screen potential guys through my Dad’s wisdom was really encouraging.  Dad knows a lot more about boys than I do…he’s the one who helped set me free from X after all.  I trust my Pops’ judgment implicitly.

“OK, can you give me his phone number or email address?”  Joey asked, snapping me out of my reverie.

I gave him both, and he wrote them down, promising to call my dad tomorrow or the next day.  The plan was to get this worked out before the Fourth of July, we were going to Creston so Joey could juggle in a contest and be in a parade with his friend Joel.  I was going to tag along and hang out with Joel’s girlfriend Amber.

As was our habit, we talked until 2:00 a.m. before calling it a night.  The next morning, I made a call to my dad to warn him that Joey would either be calling or emailing, depending on his ability to access technology.

Dad was ready.

Dad and I had done this drill before, but this time was different.  I had my brain engaged this time – I was not going to screw this up twice…not after the mess I’d made the previous year.

Later, about 7:00 that evening, my cell phone rang.  It was my dad.  My heart began to race; this likely meant that he had just gotten off the phone with Joey and was going to relay the conversation to me and ask my opinions.

“Hi, Dad!” I said.

“Well, I just got off the phone with Joey…”

To be continued…one more time