Lucky Caller Read online

  “Was green ever, like, especially cool?”

  “Is it uncool?”

  “I mean, I don’t have strong feelings about it either way?”

  “We’ll ask Rose, she’s the artist,” he said, and Rose later said it depended on the hue, and intensity, and saturation. There were too many parameters to make a definitive call.

  This year, the Dantist had given us each a piece of jewelry—his mother’s jewelry, specifically. She had passed several years ago, and Dan told us he couldn’t bear to sell it.

  It was the real deal. Rose got a necklace with a diamond pendant on it. Sidney got pearl earrings. I got a ring—a thin gold band with five small opals set into it in a row.

  “I know it’s all a little old-fashioned looking,” Dan had said tentatively. “Not the most … current thing. But I thought maybe … well, I thought you might like it.”

  “It’s really nice,” Rose had replied. “Thank you.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and Sidney chimed in too, throwing her hair back and gesturing to one ear.

  “Do I look glaaaamorous?”

  “Very glamorous,” Dan replied with a smile.

  I was still wearing my ring that night, and I rubbed at the stones absently as I lay in bed. The light filtering through the curtains from the street below caught the gold a little, glinted.

  Sidney must have been watching me through the dimness, because she spoke:

  “The Dantist’s presents were like something from Kingdom. Like he gave us magical relics. Gems with special properties. Mine would be for invisibility.”

  Kingdom was a make-believe game we invented when we were younger. Rose and I were ten and eleven, and Sidney was just six. Only Sidney still mentioned it from time to time—I think she had the fondest memories of it, being the youngest. It was very involved and deeply embarrassing, as childhood make-believe games often are.

  “Mine would be for making people quiet when other people are trying to sleep,” Rose said from her side of the room.

  “The pendant of tranquility,” Sidney replied, and after a beat: “Say what yours is, Nina.”

  “The ring of silence.”

  “We can’t have overlap in our powers.”

  “You can’t have earrings of invisibility.”

  “Why not?”

  “How would that even work? You have two earrings and two earring backs. Does it only work if you have both earrings? What if you only have one earring in? Are you half invisible? Which half? Top to bottom, or like, left side, right side? And it’s not even efficient anyway, like, what if you needed to go invisible really quickly? Like, gee, wait while I get both of these attached. Let me just fumble around with the earrings and the backs and like try to punch one through the closed-over skin if I haven’t worn earrings in a while—”

  “Okay, fine, they’re not earrings of invisibility, they’re logic shields. They’re immune to your dumb logic. Invisibility is just a bonus side effect.”

  “That doesn’t even make—”

  “Rose!” Sidney squawked.

  “Pendant of tranquility,” Rose said.

  “You’re not even wearing it,” Sidney muttered. It was quiet for a little while, and I thought maybe Sidney had fallen asleep until she spoke again. “Why did we stop hanging out with Jamie?”

  “Yeah, Nina, why is that?” Rose asked.

  “Ring of silence,” I replied.

  “No overlap!”

  “Ohhhhhh my god.”

  It was quiet for a moment. Maybe the ring actually worked.

  “Do you guys feel weird?” Sidney said eventually. “About the whole … engagement thing?”

  “Define weird,” I said, just as Rose replied:

  “It’s okay to feel…” She didn’t finish. “It’s okay to feel. Whatever you want to feel.”

  “I know that. But what do you feel?”

  I swallowed. Rose didn’t answer, so I did.

  “When there was that knock at the door … did you have like a split second, like, totally stupid moment where you thought that maybe it was Dad?”

  “What, like busting in to stop it from happening?” Rose said.

  “I don’t know.” A pause. “I said it was stupid.”

  Neither of them replied.

  “I’m happy for Mom,” Rose said eventually. “But also, yeah, it’s a little weird. Things are going to be different.”

  “How?”

  “I mean, we’ll definitely have to move.”

  I sat up in bed. “Wait, what?”

  2.

  Conrad: This is Pete Conrad. You’re listening to 100.2 The Heat, and we’re about to, uh, do the resolution thing.

  Will: Yeah?

  Conrad: Yeah, yeah, yeah. New year, new you, all that crap. Nikki, what’s your resolution?

  Nikki: I mean, it’s always the same, isn’t it? Go to the gym more, eat better, blah blah blah.

  Conrad: How’d that go last year?

  Nikki: How do you think?

  Conrad: Well, I think you look great. You look great all year long.

  Will: Awwww.Nikki: No, I don’t like when you’re nice. It makes me suspicious.

  Conrad: What? Why? I’m always nice.

  Tina: Uh-huh. Yeah, right.

  Conrad: I am! Tina, don’t pile on with them. You guys always gang up on me. It’s always three against one.

  Nikki: You’re a lot of things, Conrad, but nice isn’t one of them.

  Conrad: I am … offended. That’s what I am. Truly. I think we’ll find a lot of support out there for me, lotta people on my side. Call in if you think that I’m nice and these other three are full of—

  Tina: Probably not helping your case.

  Conrad: We’re gonna put it to the listeners. You guys’ll see. And call in if you’ve already given up on your resolutions. God knows I have.

  Will: It’s January third.

  Conrad: I know—it’s my longest record yet. 555-1002, give us a shout.

  TOP 40 MUSIC TOOK OVER, and I paused the show.

  I was always a day behind on my dad’s show—with the time difference between Indianapolis and San Diego, I rarely ever caught it when it actually aired. Luckily, they archived them online.

  It was the first day back to school after break. Everything had gone by quickly after Christmas. Rose still had another week off, but it was back to business for me and Sidney. No more sleeping in, lying around, eating cereal for lunch, and listening to Mom and Dan doing the crossword puzzle.

  I had asked my mom the day after Christmas if the engagement meant we were going to move. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought about it before except that I never really thought too deeply about much of anything if I didn’t have to.

  Mom answered in the affirmative.

  “Sidney’s finishing up middle school this year, so she can transition into high school anywhere. Rose has graduated, and you’re almost done. Our lease is up in the summer. It just makes sense. The timing is right.”

  “So that’s why you guys decided to get married now? For, like, the sake of convenient timing?”

  “It was a factor,” she said, “but obviously a marriage isn’t founded purely on timing alone.”

  “Are we gonna move into Dan’s house?”

  She shrugged. “We might find a new place. Some place between Dan’s job and mine. We’ve also been talking about…” She paused, considering. “Well, I’m thinking about going back to school.”

  My mom worked in a core facility at the School of Medicine downtown. A core was a place with shared machines that a bunch of research labs used since the machines were too expensive to buy individually. Mom’s core did flow cytometry, which was a technique used to separate cells into different populations. I remember her explaining it once with M&M’s when we were kids—pouring a bag out on the tabletop, all the different colors mixed together, and then separating them out into yellows and reds and blues. Flow cytometry used lasers to separate the cells out by different properties, just
like you could separate M&M’s by color.

  She had mentioned going back to school to get her PhD before, but I didn’t know it was an actual thing that was actually becoming real, like the marriage and the apparent move.

  “So I’d still be working downtown,” she continued. “If that were to happen. But we can find a place that will fit all of us if we want. If you want to keep staying with us for college, like Rose is.”

  “Staying with us?” I said to Rose later. “Can you believe she said it like that? Like it won’t even be our home. Like we’ll be strangers or something. Seriously?”

  Rose just shrugged and said, “I mean…” and then she turned back to her sketchbook like she had expressed a complete thought.

  I thought of her response to Mom at Lincoln Square: We feel … Okay. Right? We feel okay?

  I felt okay with it only so long as nothing changed. That’s what I should have said, but stuff like that never came in the moment. The perfect comeback only comes to you way after the offending incident, most especially when you’re alone in the shower with no one but the shampoo bottle to tell it to.

  When I reached my locker the first day back at school, Alexis Larsson was already there. She was someone who had probably never shared searing rejoinders with her shower products. Truthfully, she was the kind of person who probably warranted those comebacks herself, but she was something like my closest friend at school now that Rose had graduated.

  Alexis had appeared in seventh grade, a transfer from some fancy junior high on the north side. None of those new-kid-is-an-outsider tropes applied. No, Alexis instantly became the coolest person in our grade. It was like on a reality show when they introduce someone new and controversial midseason for ratings.

  The mystique and hype surrounding Alexis had mellowed out by now—there were so many more people at Meridian North High School to dilute it—but I still had that feeling every now and then of being twelve and completely awed by her. Hoping she would like me despite the fact that she must have, or we wouldn’t still be friends.

  “One more semester,” she said by way of a greeting, holding one hand up for a high five and adding in an ominous voice: “The beginning of the end.”

  “Hooray.” I slapped her palm and then set about getting into my locker.

  “How was your break?” We had texted a little, but she was gone for the bulk of it on a family ski trip to Colorado. All the Larssons got together at Grandpa Larsson’s cabin in Breckenridge—it was an annual tradition. I caught the pictures and videos Alexis posted throughout, seated on a ski lift or posing in front of a massive fireplace or holding up a snowball with a devilish grin. Alexis didn’t know I knew this, but one time she handed me her phone to look something up, and there was already a page open on the browser titled “Become Instagram Famous in Eight Easy Steps!” I couldn’t say what step she was on currently, but she had a couple thousand followers, so she must have been doing something right.

  I shrugged. “Pretty good.” I didn’t feel like going into it. “How was skiing?”

  “I snowboarded, mainly,” she replied. “But it was everything.”

  One of Alexis’s favorite phrases—things were often everything or nothing. She left very little room for the in between.

  “What do you have this afternoon?” she said.

  “Radio broadcasting.”

  “Ah.” She grinned. “Ready for your big debut?”

  I made a face. “No?”

  “You’ll do great. Shit, I’m gonna be late. Text me after,” she said, and then quickly strode away.

  * * *

  I didn’t care what Jamie said—the fact that my dad worked in radio didn’t give me much of an advantage in radio broadcasting class. It didn’t mean I automatically knew everything there was to know any more than Josh Epson’s mom being our sophomore English teacher meant he inherently understood symbolism in The Scarlet Letter better than the rest of us.

  Although since my mom worked in science, we always did have pretty great science fair projects growing up. So maybe we did have a bit of a leg up on that one.

  The radio broadcasting course had a lot of components—learning about the history of radio, learning how to work with editing software, producing promos and stuff, and most importantly, creating and producing a weekly radio show for the student station.

  “And keep in mind, a lot of these skills will be transferrable to podcasting,” the teacher, Mr. Tucker, told us that first afternoon of class. He was a youngish guy with a beard and thick locks that he pulled back with a headband. “If you happen to be, uh, somewhat more interested in that medium.” He went through the syllabus with us and gave a brief intro presentation. In the last part of class, we would need to divide up into groups of four for our radio shows.

  “I’m good with however you guys want to do it, but you’re going to spend a lot of time with your group over the course of the semester, so choose … mindfully, that’s how I’ll put it. Maybe your friend is here, but maybe working closely with them is going to drive you up the wall or get in the way of your productivity. Definitely keep that in mind.”

  The thing about Meridian North was that it was so massive, you could definitely get put in a class without any of your friends whatsoever. I knew some of the people here for sure. There was this girl Sammy—we had French together sophomore year—and her boyfriend who played on the soccer (baseball?) team. A kid named Fletcher who I knew from when I disastrously tried debate club in ninth grade (Prompt: “Does technology make us more alone?” Me: “Uhhh … I mean, yeah? But if you think about it … no?”). But there was no one I was an instant lock with, unlike the group of girls turning to each other at the front of the room or Sammy immediately grabbing her boyfriend’s arm.

  The girl sitting in front of me turned around. She had deep brown skin, tight curls cut short, and extra long legs stretched out into the aisle. I realized that I knew her—she was in the team sports class I took junior year. Her name was Sasha, and she played on the volleyball team. She had picked me for one of our class matches once even though my volleyball skills were about on par with my debate skills.

  So maybe we weren’t exactly friends, but we were friendly at least. “Want to be in a group?” she asked.

  I shrugged like I wasn’t supremely grateful to her for initiating, like I wasn’t just sitting there hoping someone would. “Sure.”

  “We need two more.”

  We scanned the room, but groups of four were rapidly materializing.

  “Uh, maybe…” Sasha began, but then a guy sidled up to us from the back. He was wearing a T-shirt with giant neon letters that said “GREATEST OF ALL TIME” on it, but in weird typography, stacked up into a column in chunks like GREA/TEST/OF/ALL/TIME.

  “Grea test of all time?” Sasha read as the guy opened his mouth to address us.

  He looked caught off guard. “No, it says—”

  “What kind of test is that?” I asked, because I couldn’t help it. “Like a diagnostic kind of thing?”

  “All right, how are we doing?” Mr. Tucker called. “All grouped up?”

  GREA/TEST/OF/ALL/TIME looked back at us, hesitating like maybe he had changed his mind, but then he plowed ahead. “Group? Us three?”

  “Sure,” Sasha replied, glancing at me. I nodded.

  “Cool,” the guy said, but a bit flat like it really wasn’t cool, like maybe he didn’t want to partner with people who pretended not to understand his T-shirt. “He’s with us too.” He gestured toward the back of the room, and a few rows behind us, Jamie Russell—wearing the same red-and-white-striped sweater he had worn on Christmas—gave us a little wave.

  There seemed to be no way out of it.

  “Works for me,” Sasha said, and I echoed it weakly:

  “Yeah. Great.”

  The Greatest of All Time was named Joydeep Mitra. He gestured Sasha and me to where Jamie was sitting in the back. As we followed him, he looked up at Sasha appraisingly.

  “You’re
really tall.”

  “Thanks, I hadn’t noticed.”

  “No, but for real. Is the atmosphere, like, different up there?”

  Sasha’s expression was unwaveringly placid. “I don’t know, what’s the gravity like down there?”

  A smile flickered across his face, but he didn’t respond, just plopped down at the desk next to Jamie’s.

  “You guys know Jamie?” Joydeep said, and I nodded. Jamie nodded back, but not without a flash of that same kind of embarrassment he had worn on Christmas. I told Gram we shouldn’t bother you guys …

  Sasha greeted Jamie too, and then we were a group, I guess, officially. Mr. Tucker told us we needed to brainstorm the concept for our show—we would have a proposal due at the end of the week, and then we’d get our time slot. Once we officially started broadcasting, we would be on the hook for one show a week for most of the semester.

  “The live broadcasts are a large portion of your final grade,” Mr. Tucker told us after everyone had rearranged into their groups. “Since I obviously can’t listen live to every single time slot, you’ll be responsible for archiving each show as an audio file. Think of these audio files as assignments—failing to archive means a zero for that assignment for the whole group. No exceptions.” He leaned on his desk, his pants riding up on one leg to reveal socks that were a shock of neon stripes. “I want you to be creative with your concepts. And I want you to have fun. And”—he smiled—“to make it a little more interesting, we’re going to have bonus points for the group that has the highest average listenership at the end of the semester.”

  When we were turned loose for brainstorming, Joydeep said with no preamble, “Who here is just so fucking psyched about radio? Anyone? No one? Good. Because my brother Vikrant took this class three years ago, and he told me the secret.”

  “There’s a secret?” Jamie said.

  “Of course there is. There’s a secret to everything.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What is it?”

  “Are you ready?”

  I looked at Sasha, who just raised an eyebrow skeptically. “Pretty ready?”

  Joydeep held his hands up like he was framing it in the air: “The nineties.”