"Cooney, Caroline B - Janie Johnson 03 - Voice on the Radio" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cooney Caroline B)

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Boston popped out of the ground. They'd been on a boring highway, with boring buildings, they entered a tunnel, and wham! There was Boston, skyscrapers and hotels, neon lights and streetlights and office-at-night lights.
Jodie concentrated on being in the correct lane at the correct time, but she never once picked the correct lane, and had to whip between cars and risk fender benders, and listen to angry honks.
They hit the Marriott at 10:14.
The place was so efficient that they were in the room at 10:21.
"Reeve broadcasts Thursday nights from ten to eleven," said Janie. "Let's listen to his station."
Brian took over the radio. It was a cheap little thing, brown and black plastic with a sleep alarm, and Brian had trouble finding WSCK. "They're just down the block," said Janie. She tried tuning and got nowhere. Jodie finally managed to get the station, and there was Reeve's voice, big and sexy and deep, announcing Visionary Assassins.
Brian cracked up. "I'd sing in a group with that name."
"Or maybe you wouldn't," said Jodie after listening for a minute. "Visionary Assassins ought to be assassinated for pretending to be a band."
They lay back on their beds, giggling at the ceiling, punchy from having accomplished the trip and being on their own in a wonderful city, with freedom in front of them.
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"Okay, the pressure's on!" cried Derek Himself into the mike. "The interest is up, the calls are in, you guys want another janie tonight. Well, we got a special coming up. A twofer. Along with a couple of janies, Reeve's promised us a hannah."
Reeve flexed his arms, took the mike, felt the
sweep of pleasure rushing from mike to heart. He prepared his best speaking voice, his best timing, his most dramatic pauses.
Janie didn't go politely into being Jennie.
She went fighting and spitting.
The courts said Janie had to be returned to her biological family. To New Jersey. Lawyers took her down the same interstate we took the day we skipped school. But this time, it wasn't a road. It was a tunnel of fear. Janie was being poured down some evil tube, where she could land in any kind of nightmare, because she no longer had parents. She was mad at Hannah, she was mad at the world, but mostly she was mad at her birth parents. How dare they want her back, when she liked her old life better?
Janie found out something while she was living in New Jersey. She didn't have enough love to go around. Janie turned out to have a limited supply of love. Not enough to fit in her real mother and father. Who needed them? Janie had a great life. They were clutter.
Reeve felt strangely less cluttered himself. It dawned on him that one reason he was so good at this was because he, too, had ended Janie's terrible year with a heart full of confusion and pain. He, too, needed the release of confession.
Janie lay inside her body and turned into plastic. A Barbie doll.
Reeve.
She couldn't pull her lips together to say his name, or any other name, or any other word.
Reeve.
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Jodie thought it was a good thing she was not armed. If she'd had a shotgun, or a machete, she would have used it on Reeve Shields.
On the air, that Janie never wanted to be one of us, Jodie thought.
On the air, that Janie went back to her other family because she loved them more.
It would kill my parents.
Jodie felt like a gun going off, friction, powder, explosives, hot as a cannon. She felt white-hot and violent. I'll kill Reeve.
Was this how her brother Stephen had felt all those years? Had Stephen been filled with this rage and had to control it? Who could live with this much fury? It was burning up her thinking.
I hate Reeve's filthy guts.
She had to find some degree of control before she attempted speech. Otherwise nothing but swear words and meaningless shrieks would come out of her throat. I'm the oldest, thought Jodie, I have to set an example.
I'll kill him.
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Derek introduced the hannah.
Reeve could feel his listeners. It was an incredible hot sensation. He knew they were there. Glued, hungry, thirsty.
He was just as glued. He was hungry and thirsty to hear himself.
Who, really, is Hannah? Of course everybody was being kind to her parents, and pretending she was a misguided lost soul .
but she wasn't. She snatched a baby girl and left that family to worry forever. And that's evil. Hannah was evil.
The families, even the Springs, did not consider Hannah evil. Pathetic. Wrong. Lost. But not evil.
Reeve had learned, however, as all shock jocks before him had learned, that the best topiш is always evil.
If you don't have evil, invent it.
If it isn't exciting enough, embellish.
And where is Hannah now?
She's out there.
Somewhere. . . the sweet dishrag daughter the thief of two families . . . is out
there.
All grown up.
All evil.
The word evil was heavy and coppery in Reeve's mouth. He lingered on the word, so that his audience would taste it.