so good, so good.

Let's explain the concept of senior week. Many people take a week-long vacation to the beach in the summer after they graduate high school with all their high school buddies. I guess it acts as a last high school fling before everyone goes their separate ways. In most cases, it's a chance to get away from your parents and get either drunk or naked or both.

I was never the kind of girl to go on a senior week trip. I was invited on one, but declined, figuring it would be the completely typical senior week that I knew I wouldn't enjoy. I heard the details of the said trip after it occurred, and I was totally right. There had been lots of debauchery type things, except for one girl who apparently spent the week doing word searches. That would have been me, except I might have done crosswords instead. I don't mean to condemn the girls who went, all of which I liked very much, but I wouldn't have enjoyed it. (Well, everything but the crosswords - I love those things!)

But towards the end of the summer, someone in another circle of friends, a much quieter and more prone to crosswords than drunkenness (for the most part) circle, suggested we take our own trip. Not to the overwhelming sea of young scantily-clad bodies that is Myrtle Beach, but to the penny loafer and polo shirt area of Hilton Head. It seemed safe enough and we were all good pals, so we packed up a couple of cars and went.

There were six of us, males and females equally represented. I drove the girl car, while the fellas piled into Josh's jeep. We had walkie-talkies, which we used to tell stupid jokes, give directions, and make fun of the people in the other car. For a good seven hours, our spirits stayed high and we sent frequent conversation over the walkie-talkies waves.

We got to Hilton Head and decided that the first order of business was food. We were trying to be at least somewhat thrifty, which is why we went to the grocery store and spent $150 for five people for a week. (Wesley insisted on doing his own shopping, making his diet consist mostly of bread and Veg-All, which he told us repeatedly was "so good, so good.") I guess we were a little new to grocery shopping, but we were very proud of ourselves for buying store-brand cheese and using coupons.

One of the guys, Greg I think, brought a video camera. Greg always brought the camera, and the rest of us were mad if he didn't. We developed the love of filming ourselves at the Beta Club convention weekends, when we immortalized some classic moments. It wouldn't have been right spending a week together without the camera, and we took it everywhere we went. We filmed the grocery store outing, me making stupid faces, Wesley carrying around a gallon of milk and a pack of deli turkey, Josh looking amused. We were all still in good moods. We teased Wesley about the Veg-All, but it was very light-hearted at this point.

There was never a huge knock-down, drag-out fight that left us not speaking to each other the rest of the week. It was a build-up of tension, a slow steady rise of everyone's tempers. The gender lines became team lines as the girls became more and more frustrated with the boys and vice versa.

It was due to many things, but a lot of it was money. This trip was coming entirely out of my own pocket, and I didn't once forget it during the week. I'm not sure how anyone else was paying for it, but the boys never treated it as an issue and the girls always did. I'm sure there was a middle ground somewhere, and we were all trying to find it, but we were probably looking too close to our own sides to be successful.

Then there was the Savannah incident, much of which was probably my fault. One night we drove down to Savannah since there was no night-life to speak of in Hilton Head. We were split in the two cars, passing insults back and forth, but the friendly kind. But you have to understand something about me and friendly insults. I'm terribly good at dishing it out, but not so much at taking it. I have to win, I have to have the last laugh, and I've been known to get unnecessarily mean in order to do so. And that's silly. I can destroy a light-hearted teasing session and turn it into trying to really hurt someone in the guise of "just picking", as long as I win. And that happened. I said some terrible, awful things, and we were all left more than a little put out. But I won and was left feeling uprighteous rather than idiotic and ashamed.

Anyway, after the unpleasant drive down, we got to a restaurant that Wesley had said was fabulous. We walked in the door, took one look at the menu, and the girls put forth a mighty protest. $20 an entree? I don't think so. The guys rolled their eyes, but said fine. Someone suggested Applebees or Ruby Tuesdays or something of that genre, but we wanted something we couldn't get at home. We piled back in the cars and looked for some particular street by the river that would be sure to have food. We got separated and as a result, very very upset. The girls were lost and the walkie-talkies were out of range. There were nearly tears, and there was the coarsest of language coming from the mouths of these usually very tame females. Finally, we found the now-familiar figure of Josh's Jeep, parked our cars and headed down to the riverside, barely speaking at this point.

The search for food was only more miserable from then on. We were all hungry, and that's never good for the temper. Every restaurant we passed had an entree price average at $15. And every cotton-pickin' time we shook our heads and walked on by, Wesley said, "You know, Sandra, they're all going to be about the same price. You know, Sandra, you're not going to find anything cheaper." Every time. At first I argued, then I just stopped replying at all and seethed inside.

Finally, finally, we found something less than $10. An Irish pub with an upstairs balcony where we sat and watched the boats. We sat down and said little besides our orders.

What a difference food makes. With our tummies full, our moods improved. We talked to each other, laughed, decided not to hate each other after all. We took a leisurely walk on the boardwalk, looking for souvenirs to take back to our mothers. We ran out of boardwalk before we ran out of time and had nothing else to do. We spent the drive back arguing over who had suggested the stupid trip to Savannah in the first place.

Besides the money, Wesley himself was a real arguing point. He never failed to irritate the girls, who would nag him, which would upset the other guys, who would nag us to stop nagging him. It was a ridiculous chain reaction of nagging that turned into real arguing. We were probably a little unfair. My fuse has always been a little shorter where Wesley is concerned, and I think the same is true for the other girls. He's a great guy, but with lots of quirks. He's terribly uptight and anal. And if you spend a lot of time with him, his idiosyncrasies become grating. A week is a whole lot of time. We were always upset with him for not spending enough group-time. He was usually asleep or on the computer. Josh brought his laptop so that we could use the internet. (We always forgot to unplug it from the phone line, so our parents were eternally frustrated at never being able to call us.) I think Wesley checked his stocks five times a day. The rest of us were normal 18-year olds and didn't have stocks.

We didn't fight all the time. Yes, there was a little tension at least all the time, but we did have our fun moments too. We had a football game on the beach, where the boys kicked our tails despite us having one more player (Wesley was filming). We went shopping, where we got cool stuff at the outlet centers. Josh bought a copy of Sex for Dummies on sale for $6, and we giggled about it for the rest of the week. We played putt-putt and discovered that six people playing on the same game takes a very long time indeed. We had one of those nights where we sat in semi-darkness and played Truth or Dare. It was mostly truth, since no one was ever brave enough to pick a dare. I sat the game out and just watched. They were all dying to know some intimate things about Casey and I, and that's none of their business. Amy wanted to insist that I not get to hear everyone else's secrets, but the others were in a giving mood and let me stay. (My not sharing those kinds of details was always a sore point with Amy and me.) We cooked a big meal one night, and we all mmm-ed our way through the steak dinner even though they were way too salty, because no one wanted to hurt Josh's feelings. We stayed up late goofing off and always woke up too late to go to the beach before it got too hot. There are a million little happy moments from that week, each of us remembering a different set looking back fondly to the time before we went to college and either got fat, got laid, or just went back home. We probably bonded as much as we fought, but no one ever remembers those things.

At the end of the week, we had a ridiculous amount of food left over. (I know you're not surprised.) The guys wanted to just throw it away. The girls were appalled. There was a ton of perfectly good, barely used food in the cabinets and refrigerator and we were not about to waste it. Early on the morning we left, I went to the grocery store and bought a cheap styrofoam cooler, which we packed full. (Actually, I bought two. We broke the first one because I bought the cheaper one and it broke from being packed too full. Cheaper does not always equal better.) We loaded it into the already-full car and it made the trip back with us. The girls split up the food upon arrival back at home. The boys were obviously were not interested in having any of it. Besides, they got home before we did, due to my poor navigation in Columbia. (I assume they did. We didn't speak at all after lunch.) I couldn't even bear to throw away Sex for Dummies, which I think is still at the bottom of my closet.

The trip home was in direct contrast to the trip down. We used the walkie-talkies maybe five times outside of icy directions home. We were just tired and just mad. After meeting for lunch, we didn't even take the same way home because we couldn't agree on which way was better. The mood in the car was subdued, too. We got along just fine, but we were tired and Heather and Amy slept a lot while I drove.

We went to college and kind of lost touch. Or maybe that was just me, though I think there was general drifting all around. The next summer, we got together at Josh's house and watched the video. It was maybe the first time we had all been together since the trip. There was footage of the grocery store, footage of a ridiculously long and violent Monopoly game, footage of people sleeping in strange positions, footage of grilling steaks, footage of the football game, footage of the alligator in the drain pipe, footage of the first car ride, an excessive amount of footage with Wesley sitting at the computer in the background, footage of the deer on the golf course, footage of me being mean on the way to Savannah, footage of a romantic encounter between the girls that we filmed hurriedly while the boys were out (they were unimpressed, much to our disappointment), entirely too much footage of the Sex for Dummies book, footage of a bunch of high school graduates sitting around in their pajamas. Other than the Savannah trip, there was very little proof of us not getting along. We looked happy, we looked like we belonged together.

Wesley suggested going again the next month. We talked excitedly for a little while, and then decided inwardly that maybe it wasn't such a good idea and the subject was never brought up again.

I remember the bad more than the good when I look back, and I feel more than a little embarrassed. As much as I nagged Wesley about being uptight, I realize that I was being, well, uptight about it. It was hard to remember that that's just the way Wesley was and had always been, and that it just wasn't important. I needed to mellow. Both sides could have been better about the money. I remember yelling at Wesley over fifty cents. I forget sometimes that I save money to spend it on something that matters, that I save money so that I don't have to be uptight about it. Obviously, this isn't an exact science. But the guys weren't very understanding about it either. When you've never had to worry about money, it's hard to understand people that do and vice versa. There are so many things I would do differently if I had that week to live over.

Maybe we all should've just done less arguing and more crossword puzzles.