Lucky Caller(10)

“What if we move in with the Dantist?”

I had been staring at one of the many completed paint-by-numbers paintings that hung in Dan’s house. This one hung by the fridge—it depicted a small cabin nestled among some thick-trunked trees.

“You’ll have to go to Carmel High School instead of Meridian North,” I continued.

“So?”

“Sooo … doesn’t that suck?”

Sidney shrugged. “School is school. Doesn’t really matter to me.”

How could she be so chill about this?

“What about all your friends?” I said.

She took her phone from her back pocket and held it to her chest. “They’re right here.”

“Broadway soundtracks are not your friends, Sidney.”

“Okay, number one, you’re wrong. Two, I meant I can reach them through here. We don’t have to be in the same place all the time to be friends. We transcend just, like, being in the same class together.”

She said this with the implication that I couldn’t possibly understand, and maybe she was right. Alexis was probably my closest friend at school now that Rose had graduated, but it was a casual kind of friendship. We’d text, grab lunch together, hang out occasionally on the weekends, but I wouldn’t necessarily say we transcended anything.

I scraped a plate vigorously into the trash. Too much wisdom coming from Sidney made me feel untethered. I was older. I was supposed to be wiser. I was supposed to be the one transcending. Then again, I was the one who went along with the frozen pizza plan way back when.

“I just feel like everyone’s being really okay with everything,” I said eventually.

“That’s bad?”

“I don’t know.”

She gave me a skeptical look.

“I mean obviously it’s not bad, it’s just…” Unsettling.

I didn’t finish. Just shrugged and kept on scraping.





5.


BASED ON EVERYONE’S AVAILABILITY, OUR radio time slot was to be Thursdays from 5–7 p.m. Sasha volunteered as a tutor a couple of days a week, and her Thursday session knocked us out of a 3–5 block. Jamie initially floated the idea of going for a morning time slot, but it was resoundingly vetoed by the rest of us.

“I’m not getting up earlier than I have to,” Joydeep said. “And anyway, we can’t stomp on Maddie in the Morning’s turf. She’s a certified legend.”

The student radio station was populated with not only shows from the radio broadcasting class, but also from student volunteers who were just, as Joydeep put it during our first class, “so fucking psyched about radio.” Maddie, of Maddie in the Morning, was one such volunteer. She was Meridian North’s equivalent of a breakfast show host: On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Maddie was on-air from 6–8 a.m. Evidently, she was the only person who wanted that time slot, which is how she somehow acquired three of them.

Maddie had a remarkable ability to talk about nothing—it was almost hypnotic. Even though it was terrible, you couldn’t stop listening. A typical link or break, as Mr. Tucker told us the on-air bits were called, was something like: Homecoming. Everyone’s got an opinion on it. E-ver-y-one. My opinion? I’m okay with it. I didn’t always feel that way. But I think I feel that way now. [long pause] But if you think about it … it’s not that great. Actually. Now that I think about it. Anyway, here’s Wham!

One rumor was that for music programming, she just put the catalog on shuffle and let it ride. She played the most random things: Norwegian rap followed by The Beatles followed by Shania Twain, followed by Maddie’s opinions on electric vs. manual toothbrushes. (Should we call it a manual toothbrush? You call it a manual car, and there are electric cars too, but also automatic cars. So should we call it an automatic toothbrush? Let me know what you think. Anyway, here’s the third movement from Beethoven’s fifth symphony.) A 5–7 p.m. time slot meant that I had two hours to hang around and do nothing after school since it didn’t make sense to get the bus home, turn around, and take it right back. So I hung out in the library watching videos online, wasting perfectly good time I could’ve used doing homework in favor of doing it later and complaining about not having enough time to finish it.

The evening of our first show, we met in the studio. We were given a code from Mr. Tucker to get in since it was an after-hours show.

He had taken us all on a tour of the station during class, showed everyone the booth where we would do our shows and the editing bays where we would work on promos and stuff. Everything was carpeted and a little run-down looking. Shelves of CDs lined the walls of the sound booth, and there were even racks that must have held tapes at one point, but now sat empty. An L-shaped table was set up with the soundboard, three computer monitors, and a few mics. There were also several rolling chairs, and a beat-up looking black leather loveseat shoved in one corner.

When I arrived, Jamie was already there, browsing one of the CD racks.

“What do you think the point of the CDs are?” I said. Jamie looked up, startled. “I mean, it’s all digital anyway, right?”

“Oh. Yeah. I guess it’s just like … set dressing.”

“To really nail down the authentic radio feel?”

He smiled a little. “Exactly.” He nodded toward the loveseat. “I was more trying to figure out why this was here. Kind of unexpectedly chilled out.”