Radio Silence

by Alice Oseman

  When the train started to roll away again, I thought about jumping up from the bench and running along and waving at him through the window like people do in movies. Then I thought about how stupid that would look, and how pointless that would be, so instead I just sat there on the bench and waited until the train had gone, and then it was just me and the countryside again, me and the fields and the grey.

  MY FRIEND

  I’d kissed Carys Last the day before she ran away and she’d hated it and hated me and then she’d left and it was my fault.

  It happened on GCSE results day – my Year 10 one, her Year 11 one. She came round my house that evening to celebrate, or in her case, commiserate, because she had failed everything.

  She had failed every single exam she’d taken.

  I sat on one sofa with bags of unopened crisps and bottles of fizzy drinks – unused celebratory food and drink – and watched her rant about it on the other sofa.

  “You know what? I don’t even care any more. I literally do not care. So what, what’s gonna happen? I’ll just have to repeat Year 11. No one can do anything about it. And if I fail again – then so what! I’ll get a job. Somewhere that doesn’t care about grades. I might be stupid, but there are loads of things I can do. My mum’s such a bitch, I just— I mean, what does she expect? Like, I’m not my brother! I’m not the fucking golden child! What did she expect!?”

  She went on like this for a while. When she started crying I moved over to the sofa where she was sat and put my arm round her.

  “I’m not useless, I can do stuff! Grades – they’re just letters. So what if I can’t remember trigonometry and stuff about Hitler and photosynthesis and shit.” She looked at me, her mascara just black smears under her eyes. “I’m not useless, am I!?”

  “No,” I said, barely more than a whisper.

  Then I leaned in and kissed her.

  To be honest, I don’t really want to talk about it.

  I cringe just thinking about it.

  She stood up almost immediately.

  There was a moment of unbearable silence, like neither of us could quite believe it had happened.

  And then she started screaming at me.

  “I thought you were my friend,” came up several times. “Nobody cares about me,” too. “You were just pretending this whole time,” was probably the thing that hurt the most.

  I hadn’t been pretending. She was my friend and I cared about her and I hadn’t been pretending about any of that.

  She ran away from home the next day. Within a day, she’d blocked me on Facebook and deleted her Twitter. Within a week, she changed her phone number. Within a month, I thought I might be over it, but in reality, I’ve never been over it. I might not have a crush on her any more, but that doesn’t mean it never happened, and it will always be my fault that Carys Last ran away.

  SKULL

  “Do you want me to leave the room?” asked Mum. “I can leave. If that’d make you feel better.”

  “Nothing is going to make me feel better,” I said.

  It was January. It was The Day. We were standing on opposite sides of our kitchen counter and I had an envelope in my hands and inside the envelope was a letter that would inform me whether I’d got into the University of Cambridge.

  “Okay, I’m going in the other room,” I said, changing my mind.

  I walked into the living room with the letter and sat down on the sofa.

  My heart was pounding and my hands were shaking and I was sweating everywhere.

  I was trying not to think about the fact that if I hadn’t got in, I had wasted a strong percentage of my life. Almost everything that I’d done at school had been done with Oxbridge in mind. I’d chosen my A level subjects for Oxbridge. I’d become head girl for Oxbridge. I’d continuously got amazing grades for Oxbridge.

  I opened the envelope and read the first paragraph.

  It took one sentence for me to start crying.

  It took two for me to make a sort of screeching sound in the back of my throat.

  I didn’t read any more than that. I didn’t need to.

  I hadn’t got in.

  Mum came and held me while I cried. I wanted to punch myself. I wanted to punch myself until my skull cracked.

  “It’s okay, sh, you’ll be okay,” Mum kept saying, rocking me slightly like I was a baby again, but it wasn’t going to be okay, I wasn’t going to be okay.

  When I told her this, or sobbed it, she said, “Okay, well, you’re allowed to be upset about it. You’re allowed to cry about it today.”

  Which I did.

  “They don’t know what they’re doing,” Mum muttered after a little while, stroking my hair. “You’re the cleverest person in the school. You’re the best person in the world.”

  FUCK YOU ALL

  To say that I was extremely upset about it is a major understatement. I’d known that my interviews were awful, but some small part of me had still hoped that I’d get in. This was the first lot of shock and disappointment, and then by the time Mum and I had ordered pizza and watched Back To The Future, I was angry at myself for expecting to get in, which was the second. By the time I was lying awake at 3am, I hated myself for being a privileged twat. Who cried because they didn’t get into one university out of the five they applied to? Some people cried from happiness because they got into one university.

  The numerous “Omg I got a place at Cambridge/Oxford University!!! :D” Facebook statuses that popped up throughout the day were not helping, particularly when they were from people who always did worse than me in exams.

  Though when I saw that Daniel Jun had posted one, I did feel a slight bit of joy that he’d got in. He deserved it.

  Daniel Jun

  4 hrs

  Accepted into the University of Cambridge to study Natural Sciences! Couldn’t be happier x

  106 people liked this

  He’d worked himself to death. It wasn’t like he had anyone cheering him on. He honestly deserved this. And I liked him, I guess. I really did like him now.

  But would you let me have a really selfish moment?

  I just …

  I’d done literally everything. I’d read an outrageous amount of books. I’d been preparing for this for an entire year. I was the cleverest girl in the class, I had been since I knew what it meant to be clever, and Cambridge was where clever people went.

  And I still hadn’t got in.

  Everything had been for nothing.

  I’m sure you think I was complaining about nothing. You probably think I’m a whiny teenager. And yeah, it was all in my head, probably. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t real. So fuck you all.

  5. SPRING TERM (a)

  WHITE NOISE

  Throughout the rest of January I tried not to think too much about anything. I did my schoolwork without thinking about it. I didn’t talk to anyone about Cambridge, but everyone knew that I hadn’t got in. I’d texted Aled several times to check how he was, but he hadn’t replied.

  I had a lot of coursework due at the end of the month. I had to stay up very late to finish it every night. I actually didn’t go to sleep at all the night before it was due, I just stayed up the whole night and went to school in the morning without any sleep. I had to call Mum and ask her to pick me up at break because I thought I was going to pass out.

  And alongside all of this, I continued listening to Universe City. The episodes in December and January were pretty bland. Aled didn’t seem to know what he was doing. He forgot almost entirely about several ongoing subplots. The new characters were uninteresting and didn’t appear in the story very often.

  And on the final Friday of January, Aled posted the episode that would destroy the Universe City fandom.

  The episode was titled ‘Goodbye’ and it was twenty minutes of white noise.

  YOU MUST HAVE COME FROM A STAR

  The fandom pretty much collapsed in collective despair. The Tumblr tag was overflowing with lengthy obituaries, miserable text
posts and emotional fan art. It was all very sad so I didn’t look at it for too long.

  Aled tweeted his final tweet on the same day:

  RADIO @UniverseCity

  i’m sorry. i need some time. you may be very small but you are all very important in the universe. goodbye <3

  31 Jan 14

  And people flooded my inbox with questions, even though I was nothing to do with Universe City any more.

  Anonymous asked:

  You haven’t been consistently active on Tumblr for a few months now. You are the only person apart from the Creator who has ever had any involvement in the show. You recently turned your ask box back on so I hope you won’t mind me sending this message. Do you have any insight into Universe City’s ‘Goodbye’ episode that was posted two weeks ago (assuming you’ve listened to it)?

  touloser answered:

  i don’t really know what to say except i’m as sad as you are that the creator decided to do this but they’re obviously going through some personal things right now. nobody except the creator knows whether universe city will ever return so i suggest everyone starts trying to move on. things like this happen. it’s just unfortunate that it’s happened to something that’s so important to so many people.

  i knew the creator. universe city was very very important to them. in fact, that’s an understatement. universe city really was the only thing they had. universe city was the only thing i had for a long time too. i don’t really know what to do with myself any more. i don’t know what the creator is going to do either. i don’t know what to say.

  I didn’t know why he’d decided to end it. Maybe his mum had made him. Maybe he hadn’t had enough time to make it. Or maybe he just didn’t want to make it any more.

  It still confused me, because it was clearly important to him. He cared about it more than anything.

  He hadn’t even revealed who February Friday was yet.

  On the night of the white noise episode, I sat in the lounge with my laptop and thought, for the first time in at least a month, about who February Friday might be.

  It came to me almost instantly.

  What Aled had said about Carys the night he’d come back to the village had been rattling around my mind for weeks, and then suddenly I realised why.

  Fire.

  The bonfire of clothes.

  She’d burned her hands in the fire.

  It was such a random story for him to tell us. Of everything he could have said about Carys’s relationship with their mum, he chose that particular event.

  I loaded up Aled’s Universe City transcription blog and ran a CTRL-F Find for the word ‘fire’ in each of the first twenty episodes. I then copied and pasted relevant quotes into a Word document.

  • And after the fire, that was it, you were gone

  • I see you in every fire that lights

  • In the end I wish it had been me who’d fallen into the Fire, though maybe that’s a selfish thing to say

  • The Fire that touched you must have come from a star

  • You were always brave enough to get burned in the Fire

  There wasn’t any doubt in my mind after that.

  Carys Last was February Friday.

  FAILURE

  It had all been a cry for help.

  Universe City. The entire thing.

  It had been a cry for help from a brother to a sister.

  It took me that weekend to work out what I needed to do.

  I needed to get Carys to help Aled.

  At this point, she was the only person who could help him.

  The Letters to February had been there since the beginning. Aled had been writing about Carys for years. He missed her. He wanted to talk to her. And he had no idea where she was.

  If she was anywhere at all.

  It was Aled’s mum who was keeping Carys’s location from him – I didn’t know how and I didn’t know why. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it and worrying. I’d had my chance to help Carys and I’d missed it by 10,000 miles.

  Well, that was exactly it, wasn’t it?

  I’d had my chance to help before and I failed.

  And I’ve never liked failure.

  SILVER-HAIRED GIRL

  “Yo, small blonde person, swap seats with me.”

  I looked up from my history worksheet on the Monday after to see a silver-haired girl jostling the boy in the seat next to me out of his seat and then sitting in it herself. She made herself comfortable, put her elbow on the table and her chin in her hand, and gazed at me. The silver-haired girl was Raine Sengupta.

  She’d recently dyed her previously black hair bright silver and her side-undercut was so extreme that she’d basically just shaved the right side bare. Hair is a window to the soul.

  “Frances, my pal, you are not doing so great, are you?” she said with a solemn nod.

  I still hung out at school with Raine and Maya and all of that lot and I still spoke to Raine fairly often, but they didn’t know anything about what had gone down with Aled or Universe City.

  I laughed. “What d’you mean?”

  “I mean you’ve been moping around like a damp biscuit, mate.” She sighed. “Are you still in mourning for Cambridge?”

  I felt like I was about to explode with how much I was panicking about Aled, about Carys, about helping them, about doing something good for once in my absolute failure of a life, but instead I said:

  “No, no, I’m fine. I promise.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “Yes.”

  She continued to stare at me. Then she looked down at what I was doing, which was doodling on a worksheet instead of filling in the answers.

  “Hey, these are good! These are like your drawings for Universe City.”

  I nodded. “Thanks …”

  “You should screw uni and just go to art college or something,” she said. “Miss García would love you.” She’d meant it as a joke, but for a very brief second I took the idea completely seriously, and it startled me, and I tried not to think about it after that.

  “So what’s been going on?” she continued.

  I wanted to tell her and I didn’t. I wanted to tell someone, but I wasn’t sure if Raine was the right person. Was there a right person to vent to about all the stuff that’s been happening?

  I did it anyway.

  From my involvement with Universe City to what Aled did to Daniel to what I did to Aled to what his mum did to Aled to Carys being February Friday and the ‘Goodbye’ episode. All of it.

  All of it, except the one thing I still couldn’t admit to anyone except Aled – about me and Carys. I still couldn’t quite find the words to tell that bit.

  “That’s a lot of stuff,” she said. “What’s your plan?”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “You’re just going to let everything end like this?” She folded her arms. “Aled’s all alone and trapped at university. Carys is out there in the world and has no idea what’s going on with her brother. Universe City ended with absolutely no explanation. And nobody’s going to do anything about any of this. Except maybe you.”

  I stared down at my worksheet. “Well … I want to find Carys so she can help Aled, but … it’s probably impossible.”

  “Aren’t you Aled’s friend?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “So don’t you want to help?”

  “Well …” Of course I wanted to help. Why was I still hesitating about this? “I don’t know.”

  Raine tucked the longer side of her hair behind her ear. “It’s like – okay, this is going to sound really silly, but, my mum, she always says this thing about – when you’ve got a lot going on, you have to look at the bigger picture. Just take a step back and look at the big picture and think about what’s really important at this moment in time.”

  I sat up straight. “My mum says literally the exact same thing.”

  “What? No way!”

  “Yeah, she calls it The Big Scheme of Things
!”

  “Mate! That’s literally what I’m talking about!”

  We both grinned.

  Raine really was trying to help me.

  “You know what I think would help in The Big Scheme of Things?” said Raine. She crossed one leg over the other and looked me in the eye. “Finding Carys Last.”

  FILOFAX

  The reasons why I was scared about finding Carys Last were as follows:

  • The last time I had seen and spoken to Carys Last had been eighteen months ago.

  • The last time I had seen and spoken to Carys Last, I had kissed her without asking, and she had not been happy about it, and it had made her run away from home, and I had been embarrassed and guilty about it every day since.

  • The effort it would take to locate Carys Last when the only person who knew her location was a terrifying dog-murderer would probably make me even more stressed than I already was (if that was possible).

  Despite all of this, the idea of doing something helpful for once in my absolutely useless life was what kept me going.

  That was the thing, I guess.

  I’d been rejected from Cambridge and I felt like my entire life had been a waste.

  Which is silly and pathetic, I know. Believe me, I understand.

  Raine came round my house after school the next day to discuss her ‘Find Carys’ plan.

  Because Raine was still severely underachieving in all three of her A levels, she was still being forced to sit outside Dr Afolayan’s office every lunchtime and free period to do homework.

  This also meant that Raine saw a lot of people pass in and out of the office, which, by the way, was more of a large conference room – air-conditioned, plasma TV on the wall, several potted plants and comfy armchairs.

  One of these people was parent governor Carol Last.