Lucky Caller

by Emma Mills

  “What about them?”

  “That’s our theme.”

  “But why?”

  “The station’s catalog is full of nineties music. The school doesn’t have access to a lot of the current stuff, but they do have permission for a shit-ton of stuff from the nineties. So if you pick the nineties as the theme for your show, you have a ton of music to choose from. All you gotta do is queue it up and do a few breaks where you say what the songs are, and that’s it. Coast on by for the rest of the semester.”

  Jamie was frowning. “What do you mean by nineties though?”

  Joydeep frowned back. “Music that was released between the years 1990 and 1999?”

  “No, I just mean—that could be anything. Gin Blossoms or Boyz II Men or Chumbawamba or Nirvana or Biggie—”

  “That’s a lot of dudes on your list,” Sasha said.

  “Britney Spears or Aaliyah or Celine Dion or Lauryn Hill,” Jamie amended.

  Joydeep frowned. “What the fuck, did you study nineties artists?”

  “I just like music,” Jamie mumbled. “All I’m saying is, I think nineties is too broad.”

  “So you want us to narrow it down to, like, hip-hop recorded in a basement in February of ’92?”

  “That’s kind of an extreme way to put it, but we could at least … pick a genre or something.”

  Joydeep shook his head. “No. Come on. The point is that there’s a bunch of stuff to pick from. If we limit ourselves too much, we’ll have to do actual work. If we say we’re only doing hip-hop or whatever, we’ll have to actively search out hip-hop in the catalog. Too much work. I’m telling you, all we need to do is search the year and queue up songs at random.”

  Jamie didn’t look convinced.

  “How about this: If you want, you can be music guy. Do you want to be music guy? Do our programming?”

  Jamie looked to me and Sasha. “What roles do you want?”

  “I don’t care about being music guy,” I said.

  “Me neither,” Sasha said. “And I don’t want to be the host.”

  “Me neither,” I echoed.

  “I’ll do that part,” Joydeep offered.

  “For real?” Jamie said.

  Joydeep shrugged. “Sure. That’s like the easiest part. All you have to do is talk.”

  “I mean, I don’t think it’s as easy as that,” I said.

  “Why not? I’m talking right now. Putting words together one after another. Still at it. Little to no effort involved on my part.”

  “Great audition,” Sasha muttered.

  “So we’re decided?”

  “Wait, no.” I peered at the syllabus. “Someone has to be the producer. And someone needs to…” I scanned the requirements. “Do publicity and prepare on-air features.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Like weather, or news and stuff.”

  “That’s fine for me,” Sasha said. “Running the equipment would freak me out.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I said. “I’ll produce.” It mainly involved pressing buttons. Sometimes modulating volume. I could do that.

  “So in summary,” Joydeep said, “I’m the host. Wonder Woman’s gonna do publicity and shit. Where’s Waldo over here will do music.” Jamie looked down at his sweater, frowned. “And, uh…” Joydeep waved in my direction. “You … are the producer.”

  “I don’t get a nickname?”

  “Let me chill on it,” he said with a grin. Then he slapped his hands on his thighs. “Great. It’s decided. Nineties it is.”

  “Shouldn’t we … vote or something?” Jamie said.

  “Anybody else got any great ideas?”

  We shared a look. The truth was, no. Like every other class I was taking this semester, I just wanted to get this done as painlessly as possible. I was willing to be a nineties power hour (or two hours, as the case may be). Maybe Dad will have some recommendations, I thought absently, before shaking that thought away.

  I glanced over at Jamie. He met my eyes but just as quickly looked away.

  “Excellent,” Joydeep declared. “Get ready to party like it’s—”

  “Please don’t,” Sasha said.

  3.

  IN NO WAY DID I want to be in charge of our radio show. But technically, I was the producer, and technically, we needed to submit the show proposal by Friday. So we had to meet up outside of class to discuss more details.

  It was Joydeep who suggested we meet in the student art gallery. We couldn’t talk in the library, and he claimed the cafeteria was too “exposed.”

  We don’t want anyone taking our idea, he texted in the chat we had started for our group.

  We already talked about it in class, Jamie replied. Any other group could’ve heard us.

  I know. Wasn’t thinking. Won’t make that mistake again.

  The student art gallery was off the main hall, next to the lobby outside the auditorium. It was smaller than the average classroom, with gray carpet and white walls lit by fluorescents, and tracks of gallery lighting throwing additional light on the art. There were two doors facing the hall, I guess to facilitate traffic flow should there be an incredible stream of people coming through.

  The truth was, though, no one really went in there except during parents’ nights and stuff. The wall facing the hallway was made of windows, so it wasn’t really a place where students could get up to any kind of shenanigans since you were visible to everyone in the hall. A bench inside ran along that glass wall, a round table was pushed up to it, and a couple of chairs sat around the other side. There were signs on both doors that read: WHEN THE DOORS ARE OPEN AND LIGHTS ARE ON, PLEASE COME IN AND ENJOY THE ART.

  I had been in the gallery more often than most, probably, since Rose had always had something up in there, and her group of friends—my friends too—liked to hang out there at free period sometimes.

  Paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and paper cuttings lined the walls. A long glass case held items made by the Intro to Jewelry Making class (an actual course offered in Meridian North’s extensive catalog), and there were a few big rectangular stands with pottery pieces on top of them. Rose had taken all of these classes and aced them. She was Visual Arts Student of the Month half a dozen times.

  When we were all gathered there after school on Tuesday, I flipped open my notebook and pulled out the handout with the requirements for the proposal.

  “So we need a name for the show.”

  “Okay, well, Joydeep is hosting,” Sasha said, “so how about … Into the Deep?”

  Joydeep made a face. “No, god, why are we going into me?”

  “It’s wordplay.”

  “I hate it.”

  There was a pause. “Nice to Mitra,” Jamie suggested.

  “No! Veto. Veto times a thousand,” Joydeep replied.

  It was quiet again. Sasha tapped her fingers against the table. Jamie had a bottle of water out on the table, and he ran one finger under the seam of the label, slowly tearing it up.

  I absolutely did not want to take the lead on this. I was definitely not putting myself in charge. But “How about something to do with the theme?” came out of my mouth, seemingly of its own volition. “Nineties Jam? Sounds of the Nineties?”

  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 repl
ied.

  “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:

  “What if we move in with the Dantist?”

  I had been staring at one of the many completed paint-by-numbers paintings that hung in Dan’s house. This one hung by the fridge—it depicted a small cabin nestled among some thick-trunked trees.

  “You’ll have to go to Carmel High School instead of Meridian North,” I continued.

  “So?”

  “Sooo … doesn’t that suck?”

  Sidney shrugged. “School is school. Doesn’t really matter to me.”

  How could she be so chill about this?

  “What about all your friends?” I said.

  She took her phone from her back pocket and held it to her chest. “They’re right here.”

  “Broadway soundtracks are not your friends, Sidney.”

  “Okay, number one, you’re wrong. Two, I meant I can reach them through here. We don’t have to be in the same place all the time to be friends. We transcend just, like, being in the same class together.”

  She said this with the implication that I couldn’t possibly understand, and maybe she was right. Alexis was probably my closest friend at school now that Rose had graduated, but it was a casual kind of friendship. We’d text, grab lunch together, hang out occasionally on the weekends, but I wouldn’t necessarily say we transcended anything.

  I scraped a plate vigorously into the trash. Too much wisdom coming from Sidney made me feel untethered. I was older. I was supposed to be wiser. I was supposed to be the one transcending. Then again, I was the one who went along with the frozen pizza plan way back when.

  “I just feel like everyone’s being really okay with everything,” I said eventually.

  “That’s bad?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She gave me a skeptical look.

  “I mean obviously it’s not bad, it’s just…” Unsettling.

  I didn’t finish. Just shrugged and kept on scraping.

  5.

  BASED ON EVERYONE’S AVAILABILITY, OUR radio time slot was to be Thursdays from 5–7 p.m. Sasha volunteered as a tutor a couple of days a week, and her Thursday session knocked us out of a 3–5 block. Jamie initially floated the idea of going for a morning time slot, but it was resoundingly vetoed by the rest of us.

  “I’m not getting up earlier than I have to,” Joydeep said. “And anyway, we can’t stomp on Maddie in the Morning’s turf. She’s a certified legend.”

  The student radio station was populated with not only shows from the radio broadcasting class, but also from student volunteers who were just, as Joydeep put it during our first class, “so fucking psyched about radio.” Maddie, of Maddie in the Morning, was one such volunteer. She was Meridian North’s equivalent of a breakfast show host: On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Maddie was on-air from 6–8 a.m. Evidently, she was the only person who wanted that time slot, which is how she somehow acquired three of them.

  Maddie had a remarkable ability to talk about nothing—it was almost hypnotic. Even though it was terrible, you couldn’t stop listening. A typical link or break, as Mr. Tucker told us the on-air bits were called, was something like:

  Homecoming. Everyone’s got an opinion on it. E-ver-y-one. My opinion? I’m okay with it. I didn’t always feel that way. But I think I feel that way now. [long pause] But if you think about it … it’s not that great. Actually. Now that I think about it. Anyway, here’s Wham!

  One rumor was that for music programming, she just put the catalog on shuffle and let it ride. She played the most random things: Nor
wegian rap followed by The Beatles followed by Shania Twain, followed by Maddie’s opinions on electric vs. manual toothbrushes. (Should we call it a manual toothbrush? You call it a manual car, and there are electric cars too, but also automatic cars. So should we call it an automatic toothbrush? Let me know what you think. Anyway, here’s the third movement from Beethoven’s fifth symphony.)

  A 5–7 p.m. time slot meant that I had two hours to hang around and do nothing after school since it didn’t make sense to get the bus home, turn around, and take it right back. So I hung out in the library watching videos online, wasting perfectly good time I could’ve used doing homework in favor of doing it later and complaining about not having enough time to finish it.

  The evening of our first show, we met in the studio. We were given a code from Mr. Tucker to get in since it was an after-hours show.

  He had taken us all on a tour of the station during class, showed everyone the booth where we would do our shows and the editing bays where we would work on promos and stuff. Everything was carpeted and a little run-down looking. Shelves of CDs lined the walls of the sound booth, and there were even racks that must have held tapes at one point, but now sat empty. An L-shaped table was set up with the soundboard, three computer monitors, and a few mics. There were also several rolling chairs, and a beat-up looking black leather loveseat shoved in one corner.

  When I arrived, Jamie was already there, browsing one of the CD racks.

  “What do you think the point of the CDs are?” I said. Jamie looked up, startled. “I mean, it’s all digital anyway, right?”

  “Oh. Yeah. I guess it’s just like … set dressing.”

  “To really nail down the authentic radio feel?”

  He smiled a little. “Exactly.” He nodded toward the loveseat. “I was more trying to figure out why this was here. Kind of unexpectedly chilled out.”

  “I guess that’s the vibe we’re going for?”

  Sasha arrived then, Joydeep just behind her.

  “I already got the playlist queued up,” Jamie told us as we all got into position: Joydeep and I sat in rolling chairs, side-by-side at the soundboard so that I could operate the controls and he could see which songs were coming up on the monitor. Sasha sat across from us, on the other side of the bend in the table near one of the guest mics, with her laptop open. Jamie settled in on the couch.