Lucky Caller

by Emma Mills

  “Way to go, Waldo,” Joydeep said. He took out some headphones and plugged them in, and then swiped at his phone for a moment before holding it out to Sasha. “Take my picture?”

  “Sorry?”

  “The public needs to see how cool I look,” he said, putting on the headphones and pulling the mic on its holder toward himself. He posed with several approximations of a smolder and then spent the next few minutes on his phone, selecting, filtering, and posting the best one.

  (I would later follow him—username deepz715—and discover the caption for that very first studio pic: First time catching those waaaaves.

  “What waves?” I would ask, and he’d look at me like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  “Airwaves. For real?” A scoff. “What kind of waves.”)

  At five o’clock on the dot, I faded out the music and cued Joydeep.

  He took a deep breath and then leaned into the mic.

  What happened next was … unexpected.

  “I am Joydeep,” he said, and for some reason, it came out … incredibly weird. “You’re listening to … the radio. This station, on the radio.” His voice spiked by turns an octave lower or higher than usual, like a scrambled audio file. “You know the one, because … you chose to listen to it. Anyway. This is us. The Sounds of the Nineties. You’re about to hear a song, and … this is that song.”

  He pointed at me, and I hurried to switch off his mic and switch on the music.

  Joydeep pulled his headphones off and flashed a thumbs-up.

  I blinked. “What was that?”

  “Link number one! We did it!”

  We all stared.

  “Why was your voice like that?” Sasha asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Like you were … slowly melting,” Jamie said.

  “What?” Joydeep looked genuinely confused.

  “Also, did you forget the name of the radio station?” Sasha said.

  He threw his hands up in the air. “I’m doing my best! It’s not like it’s real radio anyway. Nobody’s even listening!”

  “It’s definitely real, though,” Jamie said.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “There are three people listening right now,” I supplied.

  “What? You can tell?”

  “There’s a counter, remember?” I pointed to one of the monitors. Mr. Tucker had highlighted it in our “radio operations crash course” lecture—You can track your audience in real time!

  Sasha and Jamie gathered behind me and Joydeep rolled closer in his chair and we all peered at the little box in the corner of the screen that contained a numeral 3. As we watched, 3 changed to 4 momentarily and then dropped back to 3.

  “Someone just noped out of this song,” Sasha said.

  “We should write that down,” Joydeep said. “They hate whatever band this is. We shouldn’t play them anymore.”

  “We can’t be a nineties station that doesn’t play Green Day,” Jamie said.

  “We could be if we wanted,” Sasha murmured, and I grinned up at her.

  Joydeep leaned back in his seat. “So what am I supposed to do different? I was just talking.”

  “No, you’re just talking now. That was more like … awkwardly giving a presentation that you didn’t prepare for,” Sasha said.

  “Being more specific might help,” I added. “Also, yeah, maybe try talking in a more … conventional sort of way.”

  “I was!”

  “No,” I replied.

  He looked exasperated.

  “Just talk like you’re talking now,” Jamie said. “Like, conversationally. ‘Hey, this is Joydeep. You’re listening to 98.9 The Jam.’ Like that.”

  “Be punchier,” Sasha said.

  “Punchier?”

  “More excited. Radio deejays are always, like, hyped about shit.”

  “Normal or punchy? Which one am I going for?”

  “Normal,” I said, at the same time Sasha said, “Punchy.”

  “Tiebreaker?” Joydeep looked Jamie’s way.

  “Normal,” Jamie said.

  “I’ll thread the needle.”

  “It’s two to one!” I replied.

  “Hey, you guys decided this isn’t a democracy when you vetoed Grab Your Joystick without the slightest consideration.”

  “Okay, we actually did vote on that, in a very democratic manner, and anyway, why ask for a tiebreaker if you’re just going to ignore it?”

  Joydeep gestured to his throat. “I’m sorry. I think I should be saving my voice.” We sank into silence until the next air break.

  “Hey, this is Joydeep, and you’re listening to … the radio.”

  He looked my way, and I waved my hand to indicate more.

  “That song was … something, right?” He paused as if someone was going to answer. “This is our show, and you’re listening to it. Which is cool, so. Thank you. Here is another song, and … hope you’re having a great day. Okay, bye.”

  “You’re not ending a phone call!” Jamie squawked as I started the next song.

  “And why are you talking like that?” Sasha said.

  “Like what?”

  She made a face. “I’m JoyDEEP, and this is the RADIO. Here is A SONG.”

  “I was threading the needle!” he cried.

  “You have to give like actual information, though,” I said. “You have to be, like, specific about stuff.”

  “I was!”

  Sasha raised her eyebrows. “That was specific? God, I hope you never witness a crime.”

  Joydeep folded his arms. “Tell me, why is it ‘gang up on Joydeep’ day? Why is that what we’ve all decided to do today instead of having a very nice and fun time doing radio?”

  “You were the one who said you wanted to host!” I said. “And that it was the easiest part of this whole thing!”

  “Well, I’m doing my best,” he replied.

  “It’s not personal,” Jamie said, in his reasonable Jamie tone of voice. “We all just want to do well. Plus Nina has, like, a legacy to uphold.”

  Sasha frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” I replied quickly, shooting Jamie a look. “It means nothing.”

  * * *

  We parted ways in the hall after our show wrapped up for the night: (“This has been Joydeep and Sounds from the Nineties—uh, of the Nineties. Thanks for listening, and uh … yeah. Bye!”). Joydeep and Sasha headed toward the west entrance, but I followed Jamie in the opposite direction.

  “Hey.”

  He turned and looked mildly surprised, like we hadn’t just been sitting in a small room together for the last two hours. “Hey.”

  “So. About … all that.” He didn’t jump in—though I don’t know why he would’ve—so there was an awkward beat before I continued. “Maybe, like … lay off the radio stuff?”

  Jamie frowned. “The stuff that we were just doing? Where we do radio?”

  I squeezed my eyes shut briefly. “I mean, like … the stuff about my dad.”

  “Oh.”

  “The whole … legacy … thing,” I continued. “I just … I kind of just want to leave him and everything out of it. I don’t want it to be about that. I just want to take this class and be done with it.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, sorry.” He scratched the back of his head. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I just think it’s cool.”

  “It’s really not.”

  He nodded again, and it was quiet.

  “Are you taking the bus?” he said after a moment.

  “Rose is picking me up.” I paused. I couldn’t not ask. We were going to the same place, after all. “Do you … want a ride?”

  Surprise flashed across his face again. “Uh … sure. Yeah, that would be great.”

  * * *

  Rose pulled up to the front of the school in Mom’s car, exhaust billowing out the back tailpipe, plumes of white in the cold January air.

  Jamie and I piled in.


  “Well, what a surprise,” Rose said, glancing back at him. “I charge by the quarter mile, you know.”

  Jamie looked like he wasn’t sure if this was a joke.

  “I’m kidding,” she said after a moment, and Jamie huffed a laugh.

  Rose had some kind of indie band playing, soft bleating with acoustic backing. It was a far cry from the “Best of 1990”—or at least the “Best of 1990” according to Jamie—playlist we had just broadcast.

  “What were you still doing at school this late, James?” she said as we pulled through the parking lot.

  “Our radio show,” Jamie said.

  “Oh.” Rose cut a glance at me. “That’s right. You guys are in the same group.”

  I hadn’t mentioned it to her.

  “How was work?” I said. A very subtle and nuanced change of subject.

  “It was fine,” Rose replied. She worked at the fancy mall on Eighty-Sixth Street, at a store that specialized in weird, boho kind of clothes. That macramé stuff, my mom always joked. Rose was dressed in some of it now, thick fringe spilling out the bottom of her winter coat. I figure I’d better just lean into the whole art student thing, she had said when she first started working there. Just fully embrace it.

  Rose was now in her second semester at IUPUI, at the Herron School of Art + Design. (The “+” was a very deliberate stylistic choice: “Did they workshop that plus?” Dad had asked. “I’ve been in meetings like that, and lemme tell you, they make you want to off yourself. Should we put an exclamation mark after ‘Summer Slam’? Let’s talk about it for forty-five minutes. Make sure we consider every conceivable consequence of the exclamation mark.”) She was studying visual communication design—something I wasn’t entirely sure I understood.

  The secret was: She wasn’t entirely sure she understood it either.

  I was the only one who knew it, but Rose had been struggling in her classes in the fall. She had almost failed a couple of them but just managed to squeak by with grades high enough to keep her scholarship. She played it off to Mom and said it was because she had been doing too much—working and all that. Mom tried to get her to cut back on her hours, and she had a bit, but I knew that wasn’t the real reason.

  We never talked about it, though. It was kind of our thing, Rose and me. We could pretend with each other, and that was okay.

  At least most of the time. “So how did the show go?” she said, not quite as accepting of my subject change as I would have hoped.

  Unconsciously, my eyes flicked up to the mirror. I could see Jamie looking out of the window in the back.

  “It was … something,” I replied.

  Rose snorted. “Enthusiastic.”

  Alexis had texted me partway through the show: Listening right now and I need to know if you’re holding your host at gunpoint or like what the situation is in-studio that’s making him sound like that

  No offense lolol

  But seriously though

  “Nah, we just need a little … practice,” Jamie said. “Just gotta iron out a couple wrinkles.”

  That was being generous, but that was Jamie in general. I flashed suddenly on him in second grade, when we were in the same class at Garfield Elementary. We were growing seeds once as a class project—everyone got a little Styrofoam cup full of dirt, got to press their fingers in to create divots and plant the seeds. We left them along the window ledge, everyone’s cups printed with their names. It’s wild looking back how something that sounds so boring now can be so exciting to you as a little kid, but it was. I guess when you haven’t experienced very many things, lots of mundane stuff becomes exciting simply because you’ve never done it before.

  One boy in our class, Ethan Lowe, was really sad because everyone’s seeds had sprouted but his. One day, when the teacher was occupied on the other side of the classroom with Ethan and some other kids, I caught Jamie hunched over two of the Styrofoam cups, quickly but carefully digging several of the thin green shoots out of the one labeled JAMIE and transferring them to the one labeled ETHAN.

  “You’re gonna get in trouble,” I hissed.

  Jamie didn’t reply, just continued his covert transplant. Ethan was ecstatic when he later noticed that his plants had finally grown.

  That was something I liked about Jamie—he was an optimist, but the kind who knew that optimism alone wasn’t enough to make Ethan Lowe’s radish seeds sprout. He was willing to take matters into his own hands.

  “No, the show’ll be great,” Jamie continued now as we waited at a traffic light. “We’ll get there,” he said in a way that, despite all evidence to the contrary, made you think we just might.

  6.

  JAMIE PARTED WAYS WITH US in the elevator at the Eastman, thanking Rose for the ride and ducking off when the doors opened at the seventh floor.

  Rose turned to me when the doors had shut once more.

  “You never said Jamie was part of your radio group.”

  “Didn’t seem relevant.” I fixed my eyes on the floor numbers, watching the light switch from seven to eight.

  Rose looked unimpressed. “Really?”

  I gave her a look that said I wanted to pretend right now, and she didn’t press further.

  We reached the ninth floor and trekked to our apartment. Sidney jumped up from the couch when we got in.

  “Guess what?” She was bouncing up and down.

  Rose looked her over. “Haircut?”

  “New shoes,” I said, even though she wasn’t wearing shoes.

  “You’ve mastered the power of flight,” Rose said.

  “Your organs have been swapped out with someone else’s organs. It was the first-ever total organ transplant, and they did it in less than eight hours. It was truly a feat of modern medicine.”

  Sidney looked exasperated, nearly vibrating with the power of her news. “No! Stop it!”

  “You said guess what, though,” Rose pointed out. “We’re guessing what.”

  I gasped. “You were adopted! Actually we’re all adopted! We’re all in the royal family! We’re all in different royal families!”

  “I GOT IN THE MUSICAL!” Sidney burst out.

  Sidney loved theater the way other people loved sports or boy bands or video games. She followed the careers of Broadway actors like they were Hollywood celebrities. She memorized both parts of elaborate duets. Her friends got together to dream cast their favorite shows.

  She had practiced her audition relentlessly over Christmas break—although not required, she had memorized the monologue and the brief song, and then rehearsed them to the point that they would probably be fixed in all of our memories for the rest of our lives. If any of us ever had grandchildren, they would likely remember Sidney’s audition pieces too, such was the extent that they were seared into our collective consciousness.

  But now, apparently, all of her hard work had paid off.

  “I’m Miranda!” she said, jumping up and down, and we jumped up and down too.

  “Is this good? Is Miranda good?”

  “She’s in like at least half the scenes! And she gets her own ballad! I get a ballad!”

  “Who is this that gets a ballad?” Mom said, appearing from the hallway.

  “It’s me!” Sidney screeched. We were still jumping.

  “She didn’t tell you?” Rose said.

  “She did—I just like hearing it again.” Mom flung her arms in the air, started jumping too. “My daughter gets a ballad!”

  “I am the most talented sister!” Sidney bellowed.

  “Do we have to endorse that?” I asked.

  “Today is Sidney’s day,” Mom replied with a grin.

  “Today, you are the most talented sister!” Rose chanted, and we all chanted it back.

  7.

  Conrad: 100.2 The Heat. Got some news this morning of a personal nature.

  Will: Oh my god, Conrad … are you dying?

  Conrad: It’s about my family. Geez.

  Will: Ah. Got it. Boring, but let’s hear it
.

  Conrad: My little girl is gonna be a star. Or, star of the junior high musical, at least.

  Nikki: Awww, that’s awesome! What show are they doing?

  Conrad: Some millennial thing that one of the teachers wrote. It’s about bullying, or the environment, or something like that. They basically, like, Weird Al’ed a bunch of fair use songs for some theme … Don’t do drugs. Stop at stoplights. That kind of thing. Anyway, bottom line: Sid is starring in it. She will be singing her own ballad—

  All: Ooooooh.

  Conrad: Appropriate group reaction—thank you. Yeah, so she’s got the ballad, she’ll be doing her thing, and I’m just, uh, so psyched. I’m gonna be there in the front row.

  Nikki: Are you?

  Conrad: Absolutely. Just booked the time off. So if you’re just tuning in and you hate my guts, you can look forward to at least one Conrad-free show in April. You’re welcome.

  Will: Conrad’s gonna be that dad standing in the aisle with the video camera.

  Conrad: You bet I am. I’m totally going to be that guy, like, shushing everyone and taking a thousand pictures. Huge bouquet of roses—like so big you can’t see over it. Just so obnoxious.

  Tina: Sounds about right.

  Conrad: Heyyy!

  Nikki: Did you guys ever do school plays?

  Tina: No, I was way too self-conscious for that.

  Nikki: Will?

  Will: Nah. That stuff’s for the geeks, right?

  Conrad: And my daughter?

  Will: Oh yeah. Forgot that part. [laughter]

  8.

  NEXT WEEK BROUGHT OUR 1991 episode. Joydeep’s hosting hadn’t altered much from our first show—it was still wooden and awkward.

  “You know, you could try actually talking about stuff when you get on there,” I suggested after our second You are listening to the Sounds of the Nineties, and here is a song type of break.

  “Like what?”