Lucky Caller(7)

“All right, how are we doing?” Mr. Tucker called. “All grouped up?”

GREA/TEST/OF/ALL/TIME looked back at us, hesitating like maybe he had changed his mind, but then he plowed ahead. “Group? Us three?”

“Sure,” Sasha replied, glancing at me. I nodded.

“Cool,” the guy said, but a bit flat like it really wasn’t cool, like maybe he didn’t want to partner with people who pretended not to understand his T-shirt. “He’s with us too.” He gestured toward the back of the room, and a few rows behind us, Jamie Russell—wearing the same red-and-white-striped sweater he had worn on Christmas—gave us a little wave.

There seemed to be no way out of it.

“Works for me,” Sasha said, and I echoed it weakly:

“Yeah. Great.”

The Greatest of All Time was named Joydeep Mitra. He gestured Sasha and me to where Jamie was sitting in the back. As we followed him, he looked up at Sasha appraisingly.

“You’re really tall.”

“Thanks, I hadn’t noticed.”

“No, but for real. Is the atmosphere, like, different up there?”

Sasha’s expression was unwaveringly placid. “I don’t know, what’s the gravity like down there?”

A smile flickered across his face, but he didn’t respond, just plopped down at the desk next to Jamie’s.

“You guys know Jamie?” Joydeep said, and I nodded. Jamie nodded back, but not without a flash of that same kind of embarrassment he had worn on Christmas. I told Gram we shouldn’t bother you guys …

Sasha greeted Jamie too, and then we were a group, I guess, officially. Mr. Tucker told us we needed to brainstorm the concept for our show—we would have a proposal due at the end of the week, and then we’d get our time slot. Once we officially started broadcasting, we would be on the hook for one show a week for most of the semester.

“The live broadcasts are a large portion of your final grade,” Mr. Tucker told us after everyone had rearranged into their groups. “Since I obviously can’t listen live to every single time slot, you’ll be responsible for archiving each show as an audio file. Think of these audio files as assignments—failing to archive means a zero for that assignment for the whole group. No exceptions.” He leaned on his desk, his pants riding up on one leg to reveal socks that were a shock of neon stripes. “I want you to be creative with your concepts. And I want you to have fun. And”—he smiled—“to make it a little more interesting, we’re going to have bonus points for the group that has the highest average listenership at the end of the semester.”

When we were turned loose for brainstorming, Joydeep said with no preamble, “Who here is just so fucking psyched about radio? Anyone? No one? Good. Because my brother Vikrant took this class three years ago, and he told me the secret.”

“There’s a secret?” Jamie said.

“Of course there is. There’s a secret to everything.”

“Okay,” I said. “What is it?”

“Are you ready?”

I looked at Sasha, who just raised an eyebrow skeptically. “Pretty ready?”

Joydeep held his hands up like he was framing it in the air: “The nineties.”

“What about them?”

“That’s our theme.”

“But why?”

“The station’s catalog is full of nineties music. The school doesn’t have access to a lot of the current stuff, but they do have permission for a shit-ton of stuff from the nineties. So if you pick the nineties as the theme for your show, you have a ton of music to choose from. All you gotta do is queue it up and do a few breaks where you say what the songs are, and that’s it. Coast on by for the rest of the semester.”

Jamie was frowning. “What do you mean by nineties though?”

Joydeep frowned back. “Music that was released between the years 1990 and 1999?”

“No, I just mean—that could be anything. Gin Blossoms or Boyz II Men or Chumbawamba or Nirvana or Biggie—”

“That’s a lot of dudes on your list,” Sasha said.

“Britney Spears or Aaliyah or Celine Dion or Lauryn Hill,” Jamie amended.

Joydeep frowned. “What the fuck, did you study nineties artists?”

“I just like music,” Jamie mumbled. “All I’m saying is, I think nineties is too broad.”

“So you want us to narrow it down to, like, hip-hop recorded in a basement in February of ’92?”

“That’s kind of an extreme way to put it, but we could at least … pick a genre or something.”

Joydeep shook his head. “No. Come on. The point is that there’s a bunch of stuff to pick from. If we limit ourselves too much, we’ll have to do actual work. If we say we’re only doing hip-hop or whatever, we’ll have to actively search out hip-hop in the catalog. Too much work. I’m telling you, all we need to do is search the year and queue up songs at random.”

Jamie didn’t look convinced.

“How about this: If you want, you can be music guy. Do you want to be music guy? Do our programming?”

Jamie looked to me and Sasha. “What roles do you want?”

“I don’t care about being music guy,” I said.