The Voice on the Radio (15 page)

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN

Monday morning.

Bleak and gray and wet and raw. Reeve felt the same. The only thing November had going for it was the upcoming family holiday. A holiday Reeve decided to skip.

His mother was shocked. “But Reeve,” she said, trying not to cry, “Todd is coming home. We’re going to meet his fiancée. Heather. You’ll be your brother’s best man at their wedding. You have to come home and meet Heather. And Megan and Lizzie both managed time off. The whole family will be here. You have to be home!”

He was still sick with knowing himself.
Mom, I can’t visit. What if you find out what kind of person I really am? It’s bad enough that I found out. I want to see Janie more than anything, but I don’t want that meeting to happen in front of you
.

“Mom, I’ve made friends up here, and I’ve been invited to spend Thanksgiving in”—he thought for a moment—“northern New Hampshire, and—uh—it sounds like fun.”

One of the more annoying things about his mother was that she had brought up four children. Therefore she was an excellent guesser. “Miranda Johnson told me Janie was in Boston for the weekend with the Spring children and hasn’t mentioned seeing you. Did you have a fight with Janie? Are you worried about running into her?”

Reeve couldn’t think of a denial fast enough.

“I’m glad,” said his mother. “You two have been far too serious. This is good. You’ll both branch out, meet other people. You need to date girls in Boston and she needs to date boys here in town. I’m sure it will hurt for a while, but you’ll get over it. It’s for the best. Take the Wednesday evening train, Lizzie will pick you up.”

The radio station was like a firehouse, or a neighborhood bar. People who loved WSCK showed up to talk, watch each other in action, do the gritty paperwork that was miserable when you had to do it alone but fun when you had company.

Vinnie did not seem to have been informed that tapes were missing. Perhaps he had not been serious about syndicating the janies, or perhaps he hadn’t gotten to it yet.

“Can we go into your office, Vin?” said Reeve.

Vinnie’s hard eyes bored into Reeve. Vinnie had become bald while still in his teens. His personality was like his skull: undecorated by anything soft like hair. “No,” said Vinnie.

Okay, fine. He’d say it here, with Derek and Cal and the new crew milling around. “I’m not going to be able to come back to the station after Thanks-giving.”

He had their attention now. He tried not to look at anybody but Vinnie. “I’m not doing well with my studies.”

“Possibly because you’re not studying,” said Vinnie. “What does that have to do with WSCK?”

“My parents are on my case.”

“So what?” Vinnie’s gaze was short and hard. Vinnie was as bad as Reeve’s mother. “Janie found out,” he guessed.

Reeve looked down and breathed deeply.

“She didn’t kill you?” said Derek, interested. “I would have.”

“She broke up with me. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“If she broke up with you,” said Vinnie, “you can still do the janies. You got nothing more to lose. Problem solved.”

“I promised I wouldn’t,” said Reeve.

“Promises to girls you broke up with don’t count.”

“Yes, they do.”

“Reeve. You didn’t keep the promises when you
were
going out with her. Why would you decide to be honorable now that you’re
not
going out with her?”

Reeve must have used the right tone of voice. When he said again, “No. I’m not doing it anymore,” they knew he meant it.

It was not Vinnie who attacked, but Derek. “
You took my hour
,” he said. “I had that hour, Reeve, and I had to give it up.”

For the second time that week, Reeve stood in a small, crowded room while people said how much they hated him.

“I had a perfectly good program, Reeve!” Derek was shaking with the kind of rage that wants to wrap itself around something, like a throat. “You took it, and I became nothing but your lead-in. Vinnie put me on the shelf. And did I put a bullet through you or trip you up or do any of the hundred things I could have done to make you fail? No. I didn’t. Even I had to admit how good you were. And even if it isn’t me doing it, this station has gotten the importance it deserves. I love this station. You’re going to take the audience you’ve built up and throw it away? I’ll throw you away first! Don’t even think about it, Reeve. You’ll be here Tuesday, and you’ll do janies, and you’ll be back after Thanksgiving, and you’ll do your best, too.”

So, his resignation hadn’t gone that well.

The dorm did not prove to be safe.

Vinnie followed Reeve to his room. He’d called in reinforcements. Visionary Assassins came with him.

Naturally Cordell and Pammy stayed to see what was happening. The room had never been so crowded. When everybody was seated, mostly on the floor, Vinnie closed the door and leaned against it, to prevent Reeve from leaving.

“Visionary Assassins,” explained Vinnie, in a new, gentle voice, “has a special club date. Big-name recording companies are sending representatives to hear them play the week after Thanksgiving at Peaches n Crude.”

Reeve was genuinely surprised and thrilled for them. “That’s wonderful!” he said. “What’s the label? When did you find out? Which tape did you send them?”

“We need you,” said the Assassins, brushing aside detail. “WSCK will announce this week and next week that you’re going to do a live janie that night. We’ll have lines out the door of Peaches n Crude. Think how impressed the studios will be! They won’t know it’s for janies and not us. We want a packed house.”

Reeve thought of introducing the Assassins at the club. A live audience. He ached, wanting that mike. “No,” he said. “I’m not doing janies anymore. Good luck with your club night, and—”

“It could be your chance, too, Reeve,” said Vinnie, still in the new, gentle voice.

“The big time,” said one of the Assassins. The kid’s eyes were glowing, heat produced by the fantasy of the big time.

Reeve’s fantasies were just as big. He was in the Little League of radio. He had a chance to make the majors. Stop, he said to himself, stop, stop, stop. “I’m not going into radio, I’m just having fun while I’m getting my degree.”

“Come on,” said Cordell, “you don’t even know what courses you’re taking.”

“In the really top radio markets,” said Vinnie, “they pull in thirty, forty million dollars a year in advertising. You’re wasted on a college station that can’t take advertising, Reeve. We got plans to spring you from this little station. Make you big-time.”

Reeve had never had a close encounter with willpower.

Mostly, he did what he felt like doing.

Okay, senior year in high school he had buckled down to study, so that he could get into college after all. But it had taken no willpower. It had just been the right time for studying.

Reeve made himself think of the Johnsons and the Springs. “No,” he said. “You’ll pack the club on your own, you don’t need me, and I’m done with the janies.”

He thought Vinnie would kill him. Vinnie yanked the wooden school-type chair out from underneath Cordell and raised it like a lion-tamer.

“We don’t mind filth and roaches, Vinnie,” said Cordell, “but we hate blood.”

“What do you think college is for?” Vinnie spat at Reeve. “It’s for finding a place in the world. We’ve got a chance at a terrific place. Reeve, you have to do it.”

I don’t want to be a shock jock, Reeve said to himself, it’s a scum career for scum people. Course, I’d fit right in.

He ran his hands over his unshaved face. Maybe he’d grow a beard; hide behind stubble. “No,” he said.

Vinnie tried to steady himself by setting the chair down very carefully, centering it on some invisible quadrant. “Reeve, she’s not gonna know. You’re making this big sacrifice for a girl who won’t talk to you anymore. So who cares? You’re doing this for somebody who isn’t going to give you points.”

“Rich and famous,” said Pammy, “is always good.”

Reeve didn’t sleep much that night.

Sleep was one of the surprises of college. The dorm divided between people who never slept, who began partying at midnight and were going strong hours later, and people who slept continually, napping, dozing, sleeping on their bed, sleeping on your bed, sleeping through riots and marathons and ringing phones—Olympic levels of sleep.

Reeve envied both.

He could neither party nor sleep.

He could only lie there.

I’m weak, he thought. I managed to say no to Vinnie and the Assassins, but they’ll work on me, and Thanksgiving will be filled with Megan, Todd and Lizzie, who are all better than I am, and Janie will be right next door refusing to talk to me. So I’ll get back here feeling low and crummy and Vinnie will tell me how wonderful I am, how they need me, how I matter, and I’ll fall for it.

So even quitting the station isn’t enough! I have to quit school. Live at home. Work for a while. Maybe next fall go to some college where they don’t have a radio station.

He thought of Janie, and Sarah-Charlotte’s advice in the gym. Fight or flight. He would never have said,
never
, that he, Reeve Shields, would choose flight.

He wanted to talk to Janie. Nobody knew him better. But she had known the old him; the nice, bland high school him. She didn’t want to know the new him.

Neither do I, thought Reeve.

He had the experience of waking up in the morning, so he must have fallen asleep. He tried to remember if he had attended a single class the previous week. Nothing came to mind.

He went to the cafeteria for breakfast. Maybe a nice, wholesome start—bananas, orange juice—would make him a nice, wholesome person. Two pretty girls in heavy sweatshirts walked in as Reeve did.

“Reeve,” said one, delighted. “I love your show.”

He couldn’t help grinning.

She blocked his path to the breakfast line. “What’s this rumor I hear that you’re quitting the station?”

“It’s not a rumor.”

“No, Reeve, come on! Our whole floor listens. We’ve even gotten used to Visionary Assassins. Are they paying you or something?” The girls were bouncing around him, as if he were a star.

“Thanksgiving is such an interruption,” said the other girl. “We leave school tomorrow afternoon! You’ve got to do tonight, anyhow.”

Reeve pretended to look at his watch. “I gotta run. You have a great day.”

“But are you doing a janie tonight?” they called after him.

He waved, jogged out of the building, and kept jogging. The muscles pulling felt good. His body, at least, was pleased with him. He ran down one Boston street after another, until his unaccustomed calves were aching and the stitch in his side could no longer be ignored.

After so much running, he was starving and made the mistake of going back to the cafeteria, where Derek caught him. Reeve had a loaded tray, was coming down the checkout line with his ID card, had nowhere to set the tray except on a table, and Derek joined him. “You coming tonight?”

Reeve began to chew on his food.

“There’s the Visionary Assassins club date to push,” said Derek mildly, “and we’ve logged a lot of calls for more janies before vacation.”