Lucky Caller(59)

“Don’t worry about that right now,” Sasha replied.

“But—”

“It’ll keep,” she said with a small smile.

Jamie was back in class on Wednesday and was the first one in the student gallery when I arrived for a Sounds of the Nineties meeting that afternoon.

“How’s Papa doing?”

“Okay. He’s back home now, which is good.”

“Good. That’s good. Just … let me know if you need anything.”

“Yeah, thanks.” When he spoke next, he was trying very hard to sound casual, which I knew as someone who often tried very hard to sound casual. “Hey, so. About the other day.” A pause. “Sorry if I … made it weird. I shouldn’t have…” He trailed off, shook his head.

“Nah, it’s…” I couldn’t say it was nothing because it wasn’t nothing to me. Just the idea of kissing Jamie felt sufficient to light me on fire.

But Jamie didn’t want that—he was saying so now. He thought it was a mistake.

I swallowed, and tried to convey the vibe of someone whose heart was not plummeting to the floor. “Don’t worry about it,” I said, like my heart was exactly where it should have been, like this didn’t hurt at all.

But I couldn’t leave it at that. I didn’t want it to be like it was before. I didn’t want to drift apart again, not if I could help it. “We’re … friends, right?”

A complicated series of emotions broadcast across the Jamietron, and then he nodded, a brief jerk of the head.

“Good,” I said, and I couldn’t stop it from tumbling out, something about Jamie sitting there and the quiet of the student gallery and the memory of the warmth coursing through me that night in my room, in my bed—“I’ll always be your friend. I’ll always … want to be your friend.” I swallowed. “Just … so you know.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said. There was something indecipherable happening behind his eyes. “Okay.”

It wasn’t I’ll always be your friend too. But it was something. I could work with that.



* * *



Joydeep and Sasha arrived, and we sat around the gallery—Joydeep stood, periodically pacing between the sculpture stands—and brainstormed.

“I think there’s only one real solution,” Sasha said eventually.

“Yes,” Joydeep said. “Save us, Wonder Woman.”

“We’ve gotta lean into it.”

“What do you mean?”

“We can’t fake Lucas. The fans will know him from a mile away, there’s no getting around that. But we could potentially satisfy part of the audience—the Existential Dead part.”

“And how do we do that?”

“Basically,” she said, “we need a fake Tyler Bright.”

“Sorry, what?” I blinked.

“What else can we do? The guy is a hermit anyway. No one’s positively identified him in public since 2001. He could look totally different now. We just need a guy that’s kind of the same age. We can, like, get him a jacket or something.”

“What kind of jacket?” Jamie asked.

“A jacket that Tyler Bright would wear, I don’t know! Some kind of jacket!”

“For real?”

“He’s not going to sing or anything. He just comes out, we do a brief interview, wave wave wave to the crowd, we’re done.” Sasha looked at each of us in turn. “Come on, who here knows a middle-aged white guy?”

No one replied.

“I can’t believe we’re actually considering this,” Joydeep said.

“She’s right, though,” Jamie said. “We’ve got to do something.”

“Okay, so think,” Sasha said. “Who do we know who’s an adult that we can trust?”

I took a deep breath.

I got us into this. I could—potentially—get us out of it.

With some help.





57.


DAN AGREED TO MEET AT Lincoln Square the following evening. He thought he was meeting me to talk about college stuff, but he was unknowingly meeting the entire Sounds of the Nineties team.

“Hello there,” he said, when he reached our booth. We had one of the circular ones in the corner. I was on the end, next to Joydeep. We all shifted over to make room for Dan to slide in.

“These are my friends, Sasha and Joydeep,” I said. “And you’ve met Jamie, from downstairs. We all have radio class together.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Sasha and Joydeep,” Dan said, nodding at each of them. “I’m Dan. It’s good to see you again, Jamie.”

A waitress swooped in and took our order. Dan ordered a black coffee. The rest of us ordered pancakes.

“So … I’m guessing this isn’t a chat about college,” Dan said, when the waitress had retreated.

“Not exactly,” I replied.

“Though our collective futures may depend on it,” Joydeep chimed in. “’Cause if this thing goes sideways, we may be in some real deep—”

“We were hoping to talk to you about something for class,” I interrupted. “We actually kind of … need your help…”