Radio Silence

by Alice Oseman

  The friends looked at me and waited.

  “Er, no,” I said, and laughed nervously. “We’re just friends.”

  None of them believed me. I glanced around for Raine, but she wasn’t there.

  “What did you do with him then?” said a friend, grinning.

  Aled had told me weeks ago that nobody could know that he made Universe City. He said it quite forcefully, actually, with a kind of panic in his eyes – a contrast to his usual tentative air. If anyone knew it was him, he said, the entire concept, mystery and intrigue of the show would be ruined. But then he chuckled and joked that also he really didn’t want his mum to find out, because that would be embarrassing and he’d feel awkward making it if she was listening.

  I shrugged. “We just hung out! We live opposite each other so … yeah.”

  I knew it didn’t sound convincing and they knew it didn’t sound convincing, but they accepted it anyway. They started talking about other things and I stayed silent because I had nothing to contribute, which was nothing unusual for me around my school friends, but it felt weird, because I’d forgotten that this was how I normally behaved.

  TOULOSER

  “… I was so confused about how friendships worked by that point that I just accepted that I didn’t have any real ones, old sport,” said Aled into the microphone in his Radio voice, then glanced at me when I didn’t read my line and tapped me on the hand. “It’s you.”

  We were recording the mid-September episode on a Thursday evening a couple of weeks into term. Aled’s room was dark apart from the glare of his laptop screen and the fairy lights wrapped around his bed. I hadn’t been paying attention because I had been staring at my phone. I had been staring at my phone because I had just received an email notifying me that someone had sent me an anonymous Tumblr message. The anonymous Tumblr message said this:

  Anonymous said:

  is your real name frances janvier

  I stared at it. Then Aled stared at it. Then my phone buzzed as a second email arrived.

  Anonymous said:

  Hey don’t know if you’ve seen but lots of people in the Universe City tumblr tag are saying you’re a girl called Frances? No pressure to say anything about it but just thought you should be aware

  “Fuck,” said Aled. Aled rarely swore.

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  Without saying anything, Aled opened up an Internet tab and went straight to Tumblr. He had an account on there, but never posted anything – he just used it to lurk and spy on the fandom.

  The top post in the Universe City Tumblr tag, with over 5,000 notes, was a long post dedicated to identifying me as the voice of Toulouse, the show’s artist, and the owner of the blog touloser, known online only as ‘Toulouse’.

  Someone – someone maybe from school or the town, I don’t know – had made a Tumblr post comparing a video of me presenting a speech for the parent governors at a past school event (uploaded to the school’s website) to my voice in the last few episodes and some blurry screenshots of me from the ghost school episode.

  Underneath the evidence, the person had written:

  OMFG! Do you think Toulouse is this ‘Frances Janvier’ person!!? They look and sound the same lol!! XD @touloser @touloser @touloser

  The ‘XD’ made me grind my teeth.

  “They’re literally one step away from finding me,” said Aled. I glanced towards him and saw he was fiddling with his jumper sleeves.

  “What do you want me to do?” I said, genuinely asking. “What should we do? They’d probably respect me if I asked them not to look for you.”

  “That’s not going to stop them,” he said, and rubbed his forehead.

  “I could deny it …”

  “They won’t believe you.” He groaned. “This is all because of that stupid episode … I’m such an idiot …”

  I shuffled in my chair. “Well … I mean, it’s not your fault, but, like, if they find out it’s you … it won’t be a disaster, will it? I mean, it’s probably got to come out at some point, especially if you carry on getting subscribers—”

  “No, it was going to be a mystery forever! That’s what makes it so great!” Aled shook his head, his eyes gazing out of focus into the computer screen in front of him. “That’s what makes it special – it’s so— it’s all contained, it’s just this, kind of … ethereal thing, this special magical ball of happiness hanging in the air above everyone’s heads that nobody can touch. And it’s just mine and nobody gets to interfere, not the fandom, not my mum, not anyone.”

  I felt myself losing track of what he was saying so I didn’t reply. I looked back at my emails and found ten new messages there.

  I went ahead and made a post about it anyway.

  touloser

  yes, you guessed it lol

  so for the past two years on tumblr you’ve known me as toulouse or touloser, which I’m sure you guessed was a fake name. i kept myself anonymous because no one irl knew that i did these drawings or was so embarrassingly obsessed with this beautiful youtube channel.

  i guess i underestimated people’s ability to put voices to faces, and there’ve been a lot of rumours flying around about me over the past couple of weeks.

  so, yes. my real name is Frances Janvier, and i’m the artist for universe city and the voice of toulouse. i used to be just a massive fan of the show, and now suddenly i’m helping make the show, which is weird, but here we are.

  no, i’m not going to tell you who radio is. please stop asking. it’d also be cool if you could not stalk me.

  ok. bye.

  #universe city #radio silence #universe citizens #lol can ppl stop sending me asks of the same questions now #thank u #i’ll get back to drawing now

  By this point, I had around 4,000 followers on Tumblr.

  By the weekend, that went up to 25,000.

  By the Monday after, five separate people had come up to me at school to ask me if I was the voice of Toulouse from Universe City, and, of course, I had to say yes.

  By one week after, everybody at school knew that I, Frances Janvier, the extremely studious and boring head girl, was doing some weird YouTube thing in secret. Or not so secret any more, I guess.

  ARTISTIC WAS DISAPPOINTING?

  “You’re probably aware of the reason I needed to speak to you, Frances.”

  I was sitting in Dr Afolayan’s office in the third week of September in a chair that was awkwardly positioned at the side of the room so I had to turn my head to look at her. I was completely unaware of the reason why she needed to talk to me, which is probably why I’d felt especially shocked when I got a note in the register that morning calling me to her office during break.

  Afolayan was a pretty good head teacher, not gonna lie. She was mostly known for her annual speech about how she got from a tiny village in Nigeria to getting a PhD from the University of Oxford. She had her PhD certificate on her office wall in an ornate wooden frame, just to remind everyone who came in here that underachievement is unacceptable.

  I never really liked her, to be honest.

  She crossed her legs and interlocked her fingers on her desk. She gave me a small smile which said, ‘You are very disappointing to me.’

  “Erm, no,” I said with a vague laugh at the end as if that would make anything better.

  She raised her eyebrows. “Right.”

  There was a pause as she leaned back in her chair and clasped her hands together over one crossed leg.

  “You seem to have been involved with a viral Internet video that gives a very bad impression of what we’re all about here at the Academy.”

  Oh.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Yes, it’s a very entertaining video,” she said with absolutely no expression. “And it contains a lot of … well, ‘propaganda’.”

  I’m not too sure what face I was making at that point.

  “It’s garnered quite a lot of attention, hasn’t it?” she continued. “Almost 200,000 views now? A few parents have
been asking questions.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Who— who told you about it?”

  “I heard about it from a student.”

  “Oh,” I said again.

  “So I was just wondering, really, why you would post something like that? Are your views the same as—” she glanced at a Post-it note “—Universe City’s? Do you think we should abolish the school system and all go and live in the woods and learn to start fires? Buy food by trading chickens and grow our own vegetables? End capitalism?”

  There were several reasons I disliked Dr Afolayan. She was unnecessarily rude to students and believed passionately in ‘thinking tools’. But I couldn’t quite remember the last time I’d disliked someone as much as I did right then. If there’s one thing that makes me properly angry, it’s people patronising me.

  “No,” I said, because if I’d tried to say anything else, I would have either started shouting or started crying.

  “So why did you post it?”

  I was drunk.

  “I thought it was artistic,” I said.

  “Right.” She smirked. “Well then. That’s … well, I’ve got to say, that’s really very disappointing. I expected better.”

  Artistic was disappointing? I was zoning out of this conversation. I was trying really hard not to cry.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  She looked at me.

  “I’m going to have to remove you as head girl, Frances,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said, but I’d seen it coming, I’d seen it coming from a mile away.

  “You’re just not presenting an appropriate image for the school. We need a head boy and girl who really believe in the school and care about its success, which clearly you don’t.”

  And I’d had enough.

  “I think that’s a bit unfair,” I said. “The video was obviously a mistake, and I’m sorry, but to be fair, the only reason you even know I was in it is because someone else has told you, it wasn’t even from a YouTube account that belongs to me, and you’re just assuming that I had all the same views. Plus, what I do outside of school shouldn’t factor into me being head girl anyway.”

  Afolayan’s expression changed as soon as I started to speak. Now she looked angry.

  “If the things you do outside of school affect the school, then they affect your place as head girl,” she said. “This video has gone viral around many of our students.”

  “What, so I’m supposed to just base my whole life and everything I do around the fact that I’m head girl and someone might accidentally see what I’m doing?”

  “I think you’re being very immature.”

  I stopped speaking. There was no point trying to argue. There was no way she was going to even attempt to listen to me.

  They never do, do they? They never even try to listen to you.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Not a very good start to Year 13, eh?” She raised her eyebrows again and produced a slightly pitying smile that said ‘You should probably leave now before I have to ask you to.’

  “Thanks,” I said, but I didn’t know why because I had nothing to thank her for. I got up out of my chair and walked towards the doorway.

  “Oh, I’ll need your head girl badge back,” said Afolayan. I turned around and she was holding out her hand.

  “Oh God, Frances, what’s wrong? Are you all right?”

  Only one of my friends – Maya – was sitting at our ILC table when I got there. I was crying, which was embarrassing – not loudly or anything, but my eyes were wet and I had to keep wiping them so my mascara didn’t run.

  I explained to her what had happened. Maya seemed a bit uncomfortable about the fact that I was crying. None of them had seen me cry before.

  “It’s okay – it’s not gonna really affect anything, is it?” Maya laughed awkwardly. “I mean, at least you won’t have to do any of those speeches or events any more!”

  “It’s messed up my UCAS application … like, an entire paragraph of my personal statement was about me being head girl, it was literally the only reason I wanted to be head girl in the first place, something I could say that I did … I don’t have any other hobbies, or … Cambridge want to see you in some kind of … kind of leadership role …”

  Maya just listened and made a sympathetic face and rubbed my back and tried to be helpful, but I could tell she didn’t get it, so I just said I was going to the bathroom to sort out my makeup, but just ended up sitting in a cubicle and trying to calm down and hating myself for crying in front of other people and for letting other people make me cry in the first place.

  RAINE

  “So Frances,” said a girl I knew from my history class, Jess, leaning over her chair to talk to me from a different table, “if you’re Toulouse from Universe City, who’s the voice of Radio Silence? Is it your friend Aled?”

  It was the fourth week of September. A Wednesday. Aled was leaving for university in three days.

  Everyone in Year 13 had been forced into the ILC during Period One to work on our personal statements for our UCAS forms, not that anyone was actually doing much work. My personal statement was pretty good, and by pretty good I mean it was the most eloquent 500 words of bullshit I’ve ever written, but I was still trying to work out what to put in my ‘extra-curriculars’ paragraph, now that I couldn’t boast about being head girl any more.

  “Is that why you were hanging out all summer?”

  Apparently lots of people had heard about Aled and me hanging out in the summer. The only reason people found it interesting was because they thought I was some kind of schoolwork-obsessed hermit. Which was true a lot of the time, so fair enough.

  I considered lying to Jess, but I panic under pressure, so I just said:

  “Erm, I can’t— I’m not allowed to say.”

  “Don’t you live in the same village?” said another girl, who was sitting next to Jess.

  “Well, yeah,” I said.

  Suddenly everyone within a five-metre radius was looking at me.

  “Because, like, since you’re working on the show now, you must be pretty close to the actual creator.”

  “Er …” I felt my palms actually starting to sweat. “Well, that’s not necessarily true.”

  “That’s what everyone on Tumblr’s saying anyway.”

  I didn’t say anything to that, because she was right. Everyone on Tumblr seemed to think that me and the Creator were BFFs.

  Well, I guess they weren’t too far off the truth.

  “How come you’re not allowed to tell us?” said Jess, grinning like this was the most fun she’d ever had. I’d never been particularly close to Jess, and she was mostly known for always having the worst fake tan streaks imaginable. In Year 10 a teacher got put on probation for calling her ‘bacon legs’ during a lesson.

  “Because—” I caught myself before I said ‘he’ “—the person who it is doesn’t want anyone to know.” I laughed to try and ease the tension. “Like, it’s all part of the mystery.”

  “Is he your boyfriend?”

  “What— Who? Radio?”

  “Aled.”

  “Er, no.”

  Jess just kept on grinning. The people listening in had started to look away again, chatting among themselves.

  “Wait, are you talking about Aled Last?” someone chipped in from the opposite end of my table. I looked over and realised that it was Raine Sengupta, tipped back in her chair against the wall and tapping an unbreakable ruler against her table. “I don’t think it’d be him; he’s like the quietest person in the world.”

  She looked at me and raised her eyebrows and grinned slightly and I suddenly became aware that she was lying.

  “Also, Daniel Jun wouldn’t be into that shit,” she continued, “like, all that arty stuff. I don’t think he’d be best friends with a YouTuber.”

  “Mm, that’s true,” said Jess.

  Raine swung her legs, still dangerously tilted back on her chair. “It’s probs someone we don’t even kno
w.”

  “I just want to know.” Jess said this too loudly and our teacher finally realised no one was doing any work and stood up and told everyone off.

  Raine shot me a quick peace sign once Jess had turned round and I wasn’t sure whether it was the stupidest or the coolest thing I had ever seen, and I happened to glance at the paper in front of her, which should have been a printed-out draft of her personal statement but was instead totally blank. When I went to talk to her at the end of the lesson, she’d already left the room.

  I didn’t see her again until after school when she was walking down the road literally three steps in front of me. I was going that way in any case, towards the train station. Normally I’d avoid any possibilities of running into people I only vaguely know, but … I don’t know. Maybe I was imagining that look she’d given me in history.

  “Raine!”

  She turned round. I would have killed for her hair. My hair’s corkscrew-curly and would look crap with an undercut, even though I tie it up every day anyway.

  “Oh, hey!” she said. “You all right, mate?”

  “Yeah, I’m good, thanks,” I said. “You?”

  “Shattered, tbh.”

  She looked it as well. But most of us were like that.

  “So I was looking for you at lunch …”

  She laughed. Her smile seemed like she knew something she shouldn’t. “Oh, sorry, I have detention like every lunchtime.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Well, you know my results were a bit shit?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Basically they make me do work at lunch and during free periods to make up for it.”

  “What, even at lunchtime?”

  “Yeah, I get ten minutes to eat and then I have to sit outside Dr Afolayan’s office for forty minutes and do homework and stuff.”

  “That’s … morally wrong.”

  “I know, right!? Lunchtime is a basic human right.”

  We turned a corner and it started to rain, the grey of the sky bleeding into the grey of the pavement. I put up my umbrella and made sure it was covering us both.

  “Yeah, so, do you know Aled Last or something? It kind of looked like you were lying to Jess’s face, which was hilarious, by the way.”