The Voice on the Radio
Read The Voice on the Radio Online
Authors: Caroline B. Cooney
For Harold, who knew what happened to Reeve
And with thanks to Lynne Hawkins,
a great line editor
To Sayre, whose idea of editing is
“Wow, Mom, this is perfect!”
And to Beverly Horowitz, my editor,
whose ideas
are
perfect
“Once upon a time,” he repeated helplessly, stuck in horrible repetition of that stupid phrase.
And then talk arrived, like a tape that had come in the mail.
“I dated a dizzy redhead. Dizzy is a compliment. Janie was light and airy. Like hope and joy. My girlfriend,” he said softly, into the microphone. Into the world.
Never had Reeve’s voice sounded so rich and appealing.
“Except,” said Reeve, “except one day in the school cafeteria, Janie just happened to glance down at the picture of that missing child printed on the milk carton.
“And the face on the milk carton,” said Reeve, “was Janie herself.”
CHAPTER
ONE
FROM:
[email protected]
SUBJ:
unfair ccalendar practices rfor studentsc
You have been at college 39 days = how have i survived without you? Not easily. Why do i need high school? 599 days before i graduate. Come get me—i have THSD…terminal high school disease. Only cure = you. loooooooove janie
FROM:
[email protected]
SUBJ:
h.s. diploma
Necessary 4 you to pay full price of high school like every other American. remember that 599 days is really only 19 monthys, which is a very low number. cannot come and get you til I am rich and famous, which is soon…in ONE HOURr…thats 1 hour…I, yours truly, will be a real live dj on a real live radio station…Reeve
He ran out of things to say.
Reeve had never expected to have mike fright.
How could he have run out of things to talk about?
Eleven minutes into the hour for which he had begged and pleaded, and he was about to blow it. His tongue was drying out. Another sixty seconds and he wouldn’t even be able to make sounds.
Reeve felt he could go to war in the jungle and not be scared. Be a cop at night in the projects during a drug war and not be scared. He was in a radio station with a mike at his mouth and nothing to say, and he was scared.
Dead air. You could kill a lot of things in a big city and nobody would look up, but people don’t stayed tuned to dead air. Dead air is a dead jock.
Derek Himself, an experienced deejay, was sitting in one of those office chairs that bend back-ward, so he was grinning at the ceiling, flopping his right hand toward Reeve, planning to take back the mike.
Reeve grabbed himself a safety zone. “This is WSCK, We’re Here, We’re Yours, We’re Sick! Coming to you live from the basement of your very own administration building. Now let’s hear a brand-new release from Visionary Assassins, a Revere Dorm band.”
Visionary Assassins were three guys who hadn’t known each other when college began on August twenty-seventh, but now, October fourth, they had a band and a demo tape and wanted to be famous, respected and rich, performing live to packed, adoring audiences nationwide.
Reeve had loved radio all his life: talk shows and call-in shows, hard rock and soft rock, country and western and acid rock—anything except Easy Listening. He could even stand the two-hour news programming his parents liked at dinnertime, and now and then, for laughs, he’d tune in the local station—lost dog descriptions and advertising so pathetic he was embarrassed.
But he had never thought of being a jock himself.
Radio was so completely a thing for the car or the house that it never occurred to Reeve that radio could be
him
.
He had walked into the studio of WSCK only because the freshman dorm made him nervous: fifteen hundred college students he didn’t know. How did you find a life among so many strangers? His roommate gave him the creeps. Reeve could not believe he was going to have to share a ten-by-twelve cubbyhole with this animal for nine months. Cordell didn’t brush his teeth, didn’t wash his underwear, didn’t plan to change his sheets. It was a stage, Cordell said proudly. Well, move on to a better one, said Reeve, who was inviting smokers to drop by in order to cover the odor of his roommate.
How Hills College had ever admitted Cordell was a mystery. An even greater mystery was that girls were flirty with Cordell.
But after just one night volunteering on the college radio station, roommate problems became too minor to bother with.
Reeve knew what he wanted in this world: the sound of his own voice on the air. People listening to him. People saying Hey, shut up, everybody, Reeve Shields is coming on.
Of course he wasn’t using his last name. He wanted to be one of those few people on earth for whom one name is plenty. Reeve.
And here he was: so scared he was in danger of forgetting his name, never mind making it immortal.
Inside the headphones, Reeve listened to Visionary Assassins. The music was so live. The drumbeats meshed with Reeve’s pulse, and the bass thrummed in his heart. The headphones were extremely good: soft and easy to wear, no sense of weight or pressure. Just complete enclosure within strong, hot sound.
Unfortunately, this was supposed to be a provocative talk hour, not a music hour.
Derek Himself smiled an I-told-you-so smile. Derek had a purple Mohawk, seven earrings in one ear and three in the other. “Hey, honey,” he said, “want me to take over for you?”
“I’m fine,” said Reeve, smiling falsely. One dark night, he would ambush and mutilate Derek for calling him honey.
Through most of his life, Reeve had had one goal: to top six feet. Having done that, he had yearned for muscles. Having acquired those, he had been willing to consider studying. By that time, it was his senior year in high school. It was kind of a kick to get A instead of C minus. Reeve had had every intention of studying at college, too. Studying was cool. It was him, it was good, it was the whole point behind his parents’ forking over tens of thousands of dollars.
When he had wandered into WSCK, though, that had been it for studying.
Now—all six feet of Reeve looking at all five-five of Derek—Reeve understood that muscles and strength were meaningless on radio. Ability to go on talking was what counted. Broad shoulders were not going to rescue him.
“Think of a topic you can run with,” said Derek. “Maybe you’ll be lucky and some creep will call in and you can get mileage out of a sick phone call. Or maybe you’ll be so boring that a normal person will call in and ask you to yield the mike to Derek Himself.”
This was Derek’s name on the air: Derek Himself. Derek managed these two words as if he were introducing the President of the United States.
Visionary Assassins unfortunately had a short opening song. It ended.
Reeve had forty-six minutes to fill and nothing to say.
Janie and Sarah-Charlotte sat on Janie’s bed studying brides’ magazines. They had split the cost of two new ones. Sarah-Charlotte, who was very practical, read the articles on joint checking accounts. Janie, who detested practicality, looked at gowns.
“Your marriage will never last,” observed Sarah-Charlotte, “because you’re too romantic. The only reason you’d get married is to wear a long white dress. Remember, you only get to wear the dress for a few hours.”
“Who asked you?” said Janie. “Anyway, if I marry Reeve, he’s a romantic too.”
“Wouldn’t that be fun?” said Sarah-Charlotte. “I can just see Reeve waiting for you at the altar.”
So could Janie. Ever since senior prom, the first and only time she had seen Reeve in a tuxedo, she had had wedding dreams. The crisp black and white, the formal tension of starch and cuffs—she could transfer whole hours of prom memory into her future wedding.
Of course, she didn’t tell Reeve about this. She was a high-school junior and Reeve a college freshman. If Janie said “wedding” out loud, he’d probably buy a sailboat and circumnavigate the globe for a decade or two.
There was no stopping a Reeve fantasy once it took off. Now Janie saw herself keeping house on a yacht.
Sarah-Charlotte studied flower arrangements for modern brides. “Janie, which of your fathers would walk you down the aisle?”
This was a serious problem. Janie considered Daddy her father, of course; and he was; he had brought her up. But there was also her New Jersey dad, of whom she was becoming quite fond. “I could have both of them,” she said. “One on each arm.”
“Yikes! Would they do that for you?”
“Sure,” said Janie. Could I do that to them? she thought. It would be so hard on them both. Of course, I’ve done everything else to them—why flinch now?
“But,” said Sarah-Charlotte, who had learned to ask for details without a question, “everything should be settling down now.”
She’ll probably be a reporter, thought Janie, getting silent people to talk by saying something they have to contradict. “I don’t think things ever settle down in this kind of situation,” said Janie. “It’s like an extra-extra-extra-extra-wicked divorce.”
“I don’t know if it’s four-extra,” said Sarah-Charlotte. “Two-extra, tops.”
They heard Janie’s mother on the stairs, tucked the brides’ magazines under the bed and began a loud, pointless discussion about chemistry assignments. Mrs. Johnson went into her own room and, moments later, ran back downstairs.
“I don’t know why we act as if we’re doing something bad,” said Sarah-Charlotte, retrieving the magazines. “Every normal girl dreams of her wedding day.”
“We’re supposed to be reading investment magazines so we can plan our Wall Street careers, or computer magazines so we can plan our high-tech careers,” agreed Janie, “when all we want to do is design our wedding invitations.”
They designed a wedding invitation. How pleasingly the names
Reeve Shields
and
Jane Elizabeth Johnson
rested on the page.
“You’ll have to get married under your real name, you know,” said Sarah-Charlotte. “Otherwise it won’t be legal.” Sarah-Charlotte wrote another wedding invitation.
Reeve Shields
and
Jennie Spring
.
The name
Jennie Spring
still made Janie queasy. She felt that she had barely escaped demolition; she was a building that had been scheduled to be blown up. The switch was still there, and
Jennie Spring
was still an explosive device.
Janie changed the subject. “Let’s do one for you, Sarah-Charlotte.” Janie drew a rectangle for another wedding invitation. “You still have a crush on Alec, don’t you?”
“Yes, but not on wedding invitations. His last name is too hideous. Kinkle. Ugh. He’s going to have to take my name instead.”
“Sarah-Charlotte Kinkle. I don’t know, it has kind of an interesting sound. Nobody would forget you.”
Sarah-Charlotte was insulted. “I will have such a spectacular career that nobody will forget me anyhow.”
“Cool. What will you do?”
“I don’t know yet, but I’ll do it better than anybody.” Sarah-Charlotte turned to the beginning of the magazine and studied the masthead. “Editor-in-chief,” she said. “That’s a possibility. I’ll put out a magazine so startling it will change the wedding world.”
Janie giggled. “I don’t think brides want to be startled.” Janie would have been happy to stay on frothy subjects, but Sarah-Charlotte, of course, got sick of it, stopped being subtle and said, “So what exactly is happening in New Jersey, Janie?”
New Jersey was code for the Other Family. The Biological Family. The Springs.
The Springs had actually visited Janie, in this very house. Well, the kids, of course, not the parents. The parents she had dumped were not ready to visit the parents she preferred. But Stephen, Jodie and the twins had come twice. Amazingly, her Spring brothers and sister seemed peaceful about the two families.
“What do you mean—
exactly
?” said Janie grumpily. “Nobody ever knows anything
exactly
.”
“Okay, start here. Are they getting better about it?”
Everybody said
it
. Nobody called
it
by any other name because
it
was too crazy and complicated. Janie said not only
it
but also
them
because she did not know what to call her other family. A person with two sets of parents, one of whom had been involved in kidnapping her, had trouble constructing sentences.
Janie could never talk about
it
. When Sarah-Charlotte brought
it
up over and over again, so bluntly, insisting that the best friend deserved the most gossip, Janie wanted to scream, or else go attend college with Reeve. She couldn’t stand how
it
never closed up, never went away, but was always in front of her, like fresh tar she’d step in and her life would stick.
Janie felt herself turning into a paper doll again. As a paper doll, she could keep her smile out front and her agony flat and hidden on the back.