Lucky Caller(9)

Joydeep snapped his fingers. “Grab Your Joystick.”

Jamie was taking a draw from his bottle of water and choked.

“You just said you hated wordplay!” Sasha said.

“That was before I thought of a good one.”

Jamie was still coughing.

“Does that mean you like it?” Joydeep asked, slapping him on the back.

Jamie caught his breath. “Wouldn’t say it’s an endorsement.”

“Into the Deep is good, though,” Sasha insisted.

“It’s garbage,” Joydeep said definitively.

“I’m putting Sounds of the Nineties in the proposal unless someone thinks of something better,” I said.

“I did,” Joydeep said.

“No,” Sasha replied.

“This is a democracy!” Joydeep looked out into the room as if the art was going to back him up. “We need a vote.”

“All opposed, raise your hand,” Jamie said, and three of us raised our hands.

“Sounds of the Nineties is fine, Nina,” Sasha said. Joydeep crossed his arms, face sunk into a pout.

“You guys suck.”



* * *



By the end of our meeting, it was official.

The show would be called Sounds of the Nineties. And Joydeep had solved what he called Jamie’s “it’s all too broad” problem.

“It wasn’t my problem,” Jamie replied, “I was just pointing out—”

“Each week is a different year of the nineties,” Joydeep said. “That way, we narrow it down a little, but not so much that it’s any more complicated than just searching 1994 or whatever in the catalog.”

Jamie frowned. “We have to do more than ten shows, though. What happens when we run out of years?”

“We start over again,” Joydeep said. “Or you can play all of Britney Spears’s albums back to back, fuck if I care.”

“That would take way longer than two hours. She has a ton of studio albums,” Jamie said.

I cracked a smile.

“Not that I’m saying we should do that,” Jamie continued, glancing between us. “Not that I’m not saying that, if people are into it—”

“One year a week sounds good to me,” Sasha said, and it was decided.





4.


WE USUALLY WENT TO DAN’S house on Sundays for an early dinner.

He lived in Carmel, on the north side of Indianapolis, an area rife with yoga studios and car dealerships and traffic circles. To rid us of the horror of unsightly traffic lights, Rose joked, and Dan replied, You know, they really have been proven to help with traffic flow.

He had a house there, smallish but still way bigger than our apartment, with white siding, black shutters, and a plush green lawn. I knew from my mom that he had lived there for about eight years, ever since he and his wife got divorced. They never had any kids.

He had a lot of hobbies, though, the most curious being his YouTube channel. It was called The Artful Heart, and he did paint-by-numbers tutorials, with tips and suggestions for the beginning painter (paint-by-number-er?). His most recent video was titled “COLOR-INVERTED LIGHTHOUSE!!!” (All the dark values were swapped for light ones, and vice versa.) It had almost ten thousand views.

That was the strangest part—Dan was something of a sensation. I don’t know how much of a market there really was for paint-by-numbers instructional videos specifically, but among the comments here and there from people thanking him for the tips or sharing their own suggestions were things like “this is so pure” and “why is this wholesome as fUCK????” and “i dont know him but id trust him with my life.” Something about Dan—his quiet demeanor, his calm but enthusiastic advice—had made people on the internet like him.

He even had an online persona—worried about online safety, Dan went by the pseudonym of Mr. Paint.

So we found ourselves at Mr. Paint’s house on Sunday, as per usual.

Rose had cried off, out for one last hurrah before her semester started again. “Tell Dan I’m gonna send him the updated design,” she told Mom before we left. She was into screen printing and had agreed to make T-shirts for The Artful Heart after enough of Dan’s viewers (fans?) had requested it.

We talked about the shirts over dinner, among other things, including the new equipment at Dan’s dental practice and Sidney’s upcoming audition for the Meridian North Middle School spring musical. It was “kind of a huge deal,” she had stressed to us, since the spring musical got to be in the high school auditorium, “on the actual mainstage.”

“As opposed to the imaginary mainstage,” I said, and she rolled her eyes at me.

Sidney and I cleaned up in the kitchen after dinner. Whoever didn’t cook had to clean, and neither of us had cooked, nor did we usually. We were restricted to only the simplest of meal prep since the frozen pizza debacle of some years ago. (We tried to bake the thing whole, with the plastic on, cardboard, everything—Sidney had convinced me it was like making a microwave meal, where all you have to do is poke holes in the plastic wrap across the top. The smoke from it triggered the fire alarm, and the entire building had to evacuate.)

This evening, as Sidney halfheartedly stuck the dinner plates under the faucet before loading them in the dishwasher, I couldn’t help but ask: