The Voice on the Radio (7 page)

He skipped the dorm elevator and took four flights of stairs two steps at a time. Speed made Reeve feel better, too.

Three boys were getting off the elevator near his room. Nobody Reeve knew. Computer geeks. You were supposed to refer to your fellow students as men and women, but sometimes the words didn’t fit. These were boys.

“Hi,” said one boy timidly. “We’re Visionary Assassins.”

“
You
are?” said Reeve. This trio would have trouble looking both ways before they crossed a street, never mind being assassins.

“We’re here to thank you.” They were visibly delighted to meet him. He was Somebody. “You play us whenever you’re on. We’re your signature. Everybody’s talking about the janies now, and they think of us at the same time. We just got our first paid gig because of you.”

His radio show worked
. It meant something!

“Can you announce on the next janie that we’re going to be playing Saturday at Peaches n Crude?” they said anxiously. “We’d love it if you’d come, Reeve.”

Reeve did not want them to see how happy he was. Famous people were cool. So he didn’t leap into the air and smash through the ceiling panels with his fist. He said, “I might.” He gave a casual good-night salute and opened his door.

Cordell now had a steady girlfriend, and he had given Pammy a key to their room. Reeve was just as apt to find Pammy living there as Cordell. He was still getting used to girls in various stages of undress sharing his actual bedroom. College was definitely different from home.

Pammy draped herself around Reeve, who peeled her off like a sweater and set her aside.

“We were just talking about you,” said Pammy. “What was in the box in the attic? You never went back to that.”

How strange to be quoted.

“Come on, Reevey, tell.”

“If you call me Reevey,” said Reeve, “I’m going to put a hand grenade in your cereal.”

“But what
was
in the box?” asked Cordell. “I’m your roomie. You have to tell me. College rule.”

Reeve had a vision of his audience. The unwashed Cordells and the worthless Pammys. The dry, unpleasant taste filled his mouth.

“It would be easier to keep track of the story if you’d use last names,” said Cordell.

Last names Reeve omitted because that way it wasn’t the Johnsons and the Springs; it was generic; it could be any kidnap family in this situation.

Not that there was any other family in this situation.

Reeve busied himself with their shared computer. Maybe he had mail. He never went past the dorm letter boxes without checking for a written letter, but he preferred e-mail. Written letters were exhausting. They required written answers. Reeve hated handwriting. Steering that little stick with the ink at the bottom of it was a chore he had never conquered. When he had to handwrite, the words got cramped into the upper corners of the page, and his fingers hurt, and his brain went dead.

At the computer, there was no long, blank page like an accusation from a teacher that he hadn’t finished the assignment.

Another cool thing about e-mail was that for some reason spelling didn’t matter, and if you were a terrible typist, that didn’t matter either; you didn’t have to do it over. The first time was always good enough.

If I go into radio, thought Reeve, I can skip handwriting. My life will be wired.

YOU HAVE MAIL
, said the cute little blinking postman icon.

Reeve smiled idiotically, the way people do when someone writes to them, personally. The letter was from Janie.

Reeve, I’ve had the worst day. Of course I did something stupid and made it worse. Reeve, I need you. Can I come up and visit you? Mommy and Daddy would never let me stay overnight, but I could stay all day. I could go to class with you, I wouldn’t get in your way. I’d take the train that arrives in Boston at 9:22 a.m. How’s Friday?

Loooooooovvvvvvve Janie

CHAPTER
FIVE

Reeve’s hair prickled. He hated that feeling, as if his hair had come alive, or he had lice. Janie here? On campus? It was the hair that would give it away, just as that hair had been proof from the beginning. He remembered the spread of that coppery-red mass; the right he had, as boyfriend, to play with it, and kiss the face hidden beneath it.

Reeve imagined himself and Janie bumping into Vinnie. Or Derek Himself. Pammy or Cordell. Kerry’s boyfriend Matthew. They’d know in a heartbeat who she had to be.

Reeve had known he shouldn’t be doing this, but it was such fun that he had pretended he didn’t know.

He had been doing the janies for a month now. They were the major part of his life. Reeve so routinely cut classes that he hardly thought of himself as having any.

How was he to handle a college visit? He was hardly even a college student.

If I don’t take her to the student center, he thought, and I don’t take her to my dorm, which I’ll say is all grungy disgusting guys, which is true, and I tell her I’ve got to get off campus, being cooped up here is making me insane, and think how much there is to see and do in Boston…we could go straight from the train to Quincy Market, Janie loves shopping. Take her to some elegant restaurant like Legal Seafoods. Dinner at that kind of restaurant takes hours, no time to visit the campus, got to rush to Back Bay Station.

He clicked his mail closed. It vanished in a screen sort of way, sucking itself backward into the hardware.

Janie lay on her bed, flipping through TV stations with her remote. Talk show after talk show. Why did the rest of world love witnesses? How could they hop onto TV and blurt out their entire lives without a twitch? To ten million witnesses?

The phone rang.

“Hello,” she said. She wanted Reeve the way she wanted oxygen. She pressed Mute on her remote. The talk show hostess struck silent, dramatic poses and thrust the mike into the faces of eager audience members. You could tell the audience was after blood.

“Hey, Janie,” said Reeve. “What made the day so awful? Tell me about it.”

“Oh, Reeve! I’m so glad you called. I was afraid you wouldn’t check your e-mail. Sarah-Charlotte is smarter than I am, is what happened.” If only she could picture him now—where he was, how the room was shaped, what he sat on, the color of the phone, what he was wearing.

She missed all of him, all ways. Talk for hours, she thought, tell me everything, blot away today.

“This is about Sarah-Charlotte’s IQ? Who cares?” said Reeve.

“No, it’s about fight or flight. Sarah-Charlotte knew all along and I still haven’t figured it out.”

“Talking to you always starts in the middle,” said Reeve.

“I know, and the best thing about you is, you always catch up.” Janie told him about Lipstick Day, which he loved.

“That’s great! We didn’t do that when I was in school. Whose idea was that?” said Reeve.

“Sarah-Charlotte’s. You know her. People obey her. So even with this weird idea that I didn’t think a single person would participate in, five hundred people did.”

“I wish I’d seen you. Anybody take photographs?”

“Oh, Reeve! That’s the point! I tried to kill the kid who tried to take my picture!” She told him about the scene in the gym.

The silent TV disrupted her thoughts, so she clicked it off, getting rid of the confessing guest and the avid audience. Even without sound, it was clear that a second guest was hearing something he hadn’t known; hadn’t wanted to know; was hearing for the first time ever in front of the world.

How could people cut out their own hearts—or the heart of a person they used to love? And then hand it around, a little joke between commercials?

“Reeve, I’m just material to them. I’m not a person. I’m a page in a yearbook.”

He didn’t answer for a moment. Then, strained, he said, “That’s awful, Janie.”

She loved the anxiety in his voice. “Oh, Reeve, I want to talk, I want to come up and visit you.”

“That would be great. I’d love to see you. But I don’t know where you’d stay. My roommate is too disgusting for you even to meet. And it’s so crowded; every double room’s a triple this year. I don’t know any girls I could ask to take a guest.”

“But I want to get away, Reeve, to where it’s safe and nobody knows me.”

He laughed oddly. She did not know what to make of it. “If you had been at school, Reeve, it would have been okay. I would have put a lip print on your cheek.”

“I would have reserved my cheeks for your prints exclusively.”

“Send me those kisses over the phone,” she ordered.

He sent kisses over the phone.

“Send me a tape of your show,” she said.

“I don’t do anything. I’m the new kid. Besides, college radio plays pretty rough stuff. Your parents would pass out if they heard the lyrics I’ve memorized.”

“Sing me some,” said Janie.

“When I get home,” he promised.

Reeve lay on his back in the lower bunk and stared up at the blue-striped bottom of Cordell’s mattress. There was no privacy in a college dorm. He had to think things through in the middle of a room full of people he detested.

If Janie was hurt by a page in the yearbook…if she had grabbed the guy’s camera, and nearly smashed it on the gym floor, all but hit him in the face with it…

She shouldn’t be so sensitive, he told himself. She’s not in step with the decade. This is routine. Everybody airs their emotions in public.

He imagined Janie lying here beside him, snuggled in on the wall side of the bunk. He had ended any chance of bringing Janie into his college life.

So don’t do it again, he told himself, don’t stay at the radio station, don’t do any more janies.

Very early that morning, long before it was light, Reeve got up, dressed warmly, and left the dorm for a different kind of station.

The day after Lipstick Day had the first truly winter-is-coming weather of the school year. Janie wore layers. Winter clothes felt safer than summer clothes. She put on a hunter-green river driver shirt and tucked it into a darker green corduroy skirt. She yanked on trail walkers, padded for hiking, and laced the boots tightly. She tied a scarf around her neck and shrugged into an extra-large tweed blazer. For earrings she picked out heavy dangling silver moons, crescents to swing beneath her red hair. Janie loved earrings and had a huge collection, but never fixed her hair so that her ears showed. She kept meaning to analyze this but had never gotten around to it.

After breakfast she kissed her parents good-bye. “What are you guys grinning about?” she said suspiciously.

They pointed outside. It looked pretty ordinary to Janie. Nothing out there but their driveway, pocked with ice-rimmed puddles, and the Shieldses’ driveway and Reeve’s Jeep waiting for her—

“Reeve!” she shrieked.

She whirled around and hugged her parents. “Did you know he was coming?”

“His mother called before you were up. He was in the mood to see you and he caught the dawn train out of Boston,” said her father. He was smiling in the way of parents whose children are happy before their eyes.

“Ooooh!” said Janie. “How romantic!”

“Have a great day,” said her mother.

“I will! There is no doubt of that! None!” Janie spun out of the house. How wonderful the Jeep looked, idling away, Reeve grinning at her from the driver’s seat. He leaned over to open the passenger door with his right hand, but she ignored that, raced around the car and ripped open his door.

When they finished hugging, he looked her up and down. “You going fishing maybe? Hiking the Appalachian Trail?”

“At least I look interesting. You look exactly the same as you did last year. Rugby shirt, khakis, loafers, no socks.”

“It’s the boy-next-door look.”

“I thought once you went to college you’d act out. Wear gang clothes, or get tattoos.”

Reeve gave her a look. “You want tattoos? I’ll get tattoos. Where do you want your initials?”

“Ugh! No! Don’t even think about it. I hate tattoos. I just thought that eighteen-year-old boys at college went wild.”

Reeve shook his head. “No, that’s girls.”

“Oh. Do you think I’ll go wild when I get out of town?”

Reeve laughed. He had been asking her to go wild for two years. “There’s always hope.”

She wanted to sit in his lap for the drive to school. That long, thin face with that big, wide grin, so that when he laughed, there was nothing on his face but laugh. He’d gotten a buzz last year, but never trimmed it, so now the hair was in desperate need of cutting, but at the same time perfect, as if he were a windblown model. Reeve drove with his left hand and slipped his right hand under her hair, at the back of her neck, and his big made-for-footballs hand lay warm and wonderful against her pulse.

Reeve discovered the earrings. He grinned, tucked her hair back and untangled the crescent moons from her curls.

“Oh, Reeve, forget school, let’s skip,” she said. “The way we did that New Jersey day.”

“No, I’m coming in with you. I’m going to attend classes with you.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I think they’ll let me. But actually, I’m not going to ask. I’ve learned one entire thing at college. Don’t ask. Just do it.” He grinned again. Janie would take bets. No teacher at her high school was going to turn down a guy with that grin.

Reeve proceeded to disrupt Janie’s English class by gluing his eyes on her and never moving, never blinking. She felt his eyes right through her hair. She twitched and shifted, wrapped her hair in a ponytail and let it go, rested her chin in her hands, and then tilted sideways to see if he was still staring.

He was.

Every girl was envious, and every boy wondered how Reeve had acquired the composure to demonstrate so vividly how he felt about a girl.

In the halls Reeve wound his fingers through her hair, and they walked in step, half leaning on each other.

Tyler, camera bouncing on his chest, saw them coming. He pantomimed a photograph, but Reeve shook his head.

I was going to say yes! thought Janie. When people stare at me because I’m a milk carton freak, I could kill them. But stares because we make a cute couple—I love it. “I have gym now, Reeve,” she said regretfully. “It’s really unlikely that they’re going to let you in the girls’ locker room.”

“It’s okay. I have stuff to do,” he said breezily. “People to blackmail, places to rob.”

She didn’t see him again till lunch, when he scooped her up and said they were going to Mickey D’s. The school had just started letting kids go off campus for lunch. You had to have parental permission, and Janie, of course, had no such thing.

She and Reeve sauntered out of the building, following his rule of Don’t ask, just do it, and nobody in authority noticed, and everybody in the student body did.

She’d be delighted to have a yearbook page for the romance of Reeve Shields and Janie Johnson.

He opened the Jeep door for her. They loved doing things for each other. When she was seated, he tucked her skirt in so that it wouldn’t get caught in the door, and it felt like being tucked in at night. He started the engine and revved it a few times. “That’s my heart,” he told her, and they laughed.