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

But Jodie was the only daughter-Janie having quit-and Mom and Dad were frightened when she looked through college catalogs from California or Texas or Michigan. There weren't many schools in New Jersey and if the college experience was going to count, Jodie at least needed to get out of state. So she was looking in New York and Pennsylvania. Connecticut she would skip, because Connecticut was the Spring family word for kidnap and loss and rage. That brought her eyes up the map to Rhode Island and Massachusetts. If she went to school in Providence or Boston, she'd be on the railroad line and could get home easily. Nobody would have to rearrange a life to come get her in the car.
It was autumn.
The time, for high school seniors, of looking at college campuses. Jodie Spring looked at the catalog for Hills College, and she thought, Janie's boyfriend goes there. He'd show me around the campus. It would be cool to see Boston with Reeve.
S S S
Were Derek Himself, Vinnie and Cal into his story? Had he pulled it off? Reeve didn't risk looking at them. If they were laughing at him . .
Reeve had found a beat. He felt instinctively that
Janie's story must be told slowly, in a rhythm of confusing omissions, so that people wanted more. It had to be the same puzzling nightmare that it had been for Janie.
"So it's you on that milk carton. You are a missing person,". breathed Reeve.
The mike ate his words, hungered for more.
"Around you, everything is ordinary. People are still having Jell-O and sitting two to a chair. But your life just switched channels."
Now Reeve's mind was crammed with a whole library of radio time. Janie Johnson was a story to tell forever.
"What does missing mean?" asked Reeve. His eyes were fixed on the fat, gray mike. His fingers teased the adjustable arm, making friends with it, getting safe. "Does missing mean lost? Does it mean run away? Or does it. mean . . . kidnapped?"
Janie and her two families had never given interviews.
Not once.
Not to anybody.
Reeve, and Reeve alone, knew both sides completely; knew more than Janie, really, because his parents had talked to Janie's parents and to the police, back when Janie was still too horrified to hear or see or listen.
"Of course," said Reeve, dragging his voice like a net to catch listeners, "the question is-now what? Because you love your parents. If you tell anybody you think you were kidnapped, well-think about it. Think about the media. The police. Your family would be destroyed. If these grown-ups you call
Mommy and Daddy are really your kidnappers, and if you turn them in, you'll send your own parents to prison."
Two beats of silence. Then a lowering of the voice. "But if you don't tell . . . what about that other family? Still out there? Still worrying, after all these years?"
Derek was staring, a pencil dangling in his hand. Vinnie's mouth was half open, like a little kid at story hour. Cal was tilting back apprehensively, to get away from the idea that the family you love must have kidnapped you.
I have an audience, thought Reeve.
It was a hot, winning feel: like hitting the ball out of the stadium when thebases were loaded.
I can do this, thought Reeve. I'm good at it.
To the audience he could not see-might not even have-he repeated, "Now what?"
CHAPTER
TWO.
Sarah-Charlotte needed to know exactly what wardrobe Janie was taking for her next visit back to New Jersey.
"It doesn't matter," Janie pointed out. She didn't feel like discussing the impending visit, especially because she wasn't going down there; they were coming here. With Sarah-Charlotte, Janie would find herself creating and keeping secrets there was no point in having. "I've gone back before," she told Sarah-Charlotte carelessly, "they're used to me, and anyway, they know my whole wardrobe from when I lived there, so it's no big deal."
"Clothing is always a big deal," said Sarah-Charlotte crossly. "Don't tell me you're becoming one of these annoying people who pretends fashion doesn't matter."
Janie giggled. It was an all-purpose, change-the-subject giggle. "You know what? I care so much about fashion I just bought a new Barbie I didn't have."
Janie flung herself over the edge of the bed, and Sarah-Charlotte held her ankles while Janie groped around under the starched lace skirt. She yanked on the handle of her Barbie suitcase. They
sprung the locks and took out the new purchase. Barbie on a High Stepper Horse. A palomino with even better hair than Barbie. Janie began to braid the horse's hair.
'When I was eight, I would have killed for this," said Sarah-Charlotte. She picked out the flexible gymnastics Barbie and began to dress her as a Pizza Hut waitress. "Why don't you go visit Reeve?" she said. "Wouldn't it be fun to stay in his dorm?"
Janie was feeling flimsy. She did not want to talk about Reeve. Boston seemed as distant as Tibet, and the college life that Reeve led as strange and unknown as the Himalayas. "My parents? Allow me to travel to Boston and stay in a boys' dorm? Get a grip on yourself, Sarah-Charlotte."
They both laughed. Janie's parents, and of course "them," in New Jersey, didn't let anybody do anything. Not with their history.
"Get Reeve to drive down," said Sarah-Charlotte. "Just for an afternoon, anyway."
She knows how much I miss him, thought Janie. I've kept it from her, but she knows that even when Reeve couldn't find the right words to solve things, he always had the right arms and the right shoulders. "He doesn't have a car," she said. "It's Boston. What would he do with a car? He'd have to park it, which is impossible, and repair it when it gets broken into."
Sarah-Charlotte nodded, letting Janie escape the subject of Reeve. "I had higher hopes for Barbie than being a waitress. I expected her to be an airline pilot. Barbie," said Sarah-Charlotte sadly, "how did you slip to this?"
She really is my best friend, thought Janie.
Friend. The word seemed like Barbie: warm and tan and always the same. I wonder, thought Janie, if it's too late to be friends with my sister, Jodie.
S S S
WSCK was a music station, but it didn't try to compete with commercial Boston stations. There was no point in featuring somebody from the eighties, like John Cougar Mellencamp, or somebody who would last forever, like Aerosmith. They didn't wrestle with how close to Pearl Jam they should play Stone Temple Pilots (since those bands sounded exactly the same except different). They didn't worry about whether to have a jazz hour, or whether to expand their reggae and rap.
WSCK did garage bands. Local bands. Hopefuls trying desperately to climb past unadvertised evenings in unknown clubs. Mostly, they did college dorm bands.
Boston was full of colleges. Northeastern, Simmons, Boston College, Boston University, New England Conservatory, Wentworth, and Reeve's college, Hills. Just across the bridge were Harvard and MIT. Two hundred and fifty thousand college kids in Boston, and on every floor of every dorm were kids who wanted to make it as musicians.
All of them needed airtime. Bands walked constantly through the doors of WSCK, holding out their homemade tapes or CDs or even records; amazingly enough, people were still cutting records. Reeve loved the smell of vinyl. He loved the musicians, whether they were garage bands or
Janie didn't tell. She kept it a secret between herself and the milk carton.
just garbage. They tried so hard. They were so brave and willing to be humiliated, as long as they got heard.
The playlist at WSCK was not a computer-generated work of art. No research team was finding out if the listening audience on Huntington Avenue wanted more or less Melissa Etheridge. Nobody cared about Melissa Etheridge. They cared about themselves.
Only at ten P.M. did the format change.
From ten to eleven, the station featured talk. Sometimes it was right-wing, sometimes left-wing. Sometimes it was hate, sometimes it was New Age love. It was opinion on legalizing marijuana. Or opinion on retiring all current professors at all currently existing universities. (People were in favor.)