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

Johnson. The photo had shown an ordinary toddler: hair in tight pigtails, one against each thin cheek. A dress with a narrow collar and tiny, dark polka dots. Janie had clung to that cardboard while her mind slipped and her brain turned to glass. She remembered that dress.
Janie had shouted Sarah-Charlotte's name, trying to tell her best friend that good had just changed to evil, but her lips had not moved. She ,had made no sound.
It seemed to Janie now that for months she had made no sound. But today the past was past. This was just school, full of friends and cheeks and jaws.
Janie heard herself laugh, and she recognized the laugh: pre-milk carton laughter. She could hardly wait to telephone Reeve: I'm here, I'm laughing!
After school, Sarah-Charlotte wanted to go show off their lip prints. The only real choice was the volleyball game. Janie had never cared for volleyball. She had never figured out how to serve without hurting her wrist, and although she was less afraid of a volleyball than of a baseball, still she hated a ball coming at her. She was awestruck by athletes who loved balls coming at them, who leaped forward and flung themselves into the path of the ball.
She and Sarah-Charlotte sat on bleachers in the midst of a crowd of printed cheeks.
Yearbook photographers converged on the pack. Tyler, who was in charge of candids, closed in on Janie.
Janie shook her head and turned her face away. "Come on, look at the camera, Janie, give me a full-face shot!" Tyler leaped up the bleachers, missing innocent people's hair and glasses by microns. He took three shots with Janie's hand in the way. Janie glared at him and he snapped that, too.
"Stop it! I'm not a senior."
"We need it for the yearbook, Janie. We're going to do a milk carton page."
"What are you talking about?"
"Come on, Janie. You're famous. The face on the milk carton. We lived through you. People have scrapbooks about you. We're going to have the whole thing in the yearbook."
This terrible part of her life she wanted forgotten? And they were going to make a separate section in the yearbook?
How could she touch a yearbook ruined like that? What if people signed her yearbook and nobody wrote I'll miss you, what great times we had, good luck! but instead they wrote Your kidnapping story was so exciting, I'll always remember the time network TV came to the school.
TV, which had tried to slice her up, ruin her family, chase them down, make her parents admit that this tragedy was their fault-this would get a yearbook page?
Janie wanted to rip the camera out of Tyler's hands. She wanted to yank out the film, tear it into pieces with her bare hands.
So she did.
She had had only Tyler's attention. Now she had the entire gym gaping at her. Parents and teachers
rushed to referee. Janie was freaked, and looked like a freak. Face coated with flaming lip prints, hands trying to kill a camera.
I've got to get out of here, thought Janie, and she started to plunge down the bleachers, to run for the girls' room, scrub the lipstick off her face, hide out. Janie had spent plenty of time hiding out: under the covers, in girls' rooms in New Jersey and Connecticut high schools, behind her hair, behind her silence.
"Don't run," said Sarah-Charlotte quietly, forcing her back down on the bleacher. "Just smile and wait. They'll go." Sarah-Charlotte handed the empty camera back to Tyler. "Beat it, Ty."
"I have to get out of here," whispered Janie, "they're staring at me."
"Stare back. But don't you run."
Janie felt as exposed and unraveled as the film hanging from her hand. But Sarah-Charlotte was right. In a minute or two, people had moved on, watching the game, leaving Janie alone.
"Primitive response," explained Sarah-Charlotte, "is fight or flight. But you can't do both. You~re always doing both at once, Janie. You're the one tearing yourself apart. Next time you start a fight, stay in the fight."
How come Sarah-Charlotte, who never had problems, was the one with wisdom? How come she, Janie, was the one who had not learned anything? This hardly seemed fair.
"I believe," said Sarah-Charlotte, "that last year, your response was flight, the whole flight, and nothing but the flight. And look where it got you. One nightmare after another." Sarah-Charlotte
made it sound as if there were no nightmare, merely Janie's failure to sit still. "This year, choose fight," instructed Sarah-Charlotte. "That way, it ends fast."
Ends.
Reeve's older sister, Lizzie, had been a lawyer for Janie. When will it end? When will it be over? Janie had asked Lizzie. When will I be an ordinary girl with an ordinary family?
It will never be over, Lizzie said.
Oh, Reeve! thought Janie. She didn't want her girlfriend. She wanted her boyfriend. Reeve, when you're here, it is over. I don't have to choose between fight or flight.
If only the chronology of being a teenager were not so rigid. After high school came college, period, and so Reeve had gone into a college world. Period.
She closed her eyes and brought him home in her heart.
. S Х
WSCK was 'rarely able to fill requests. Requests were for commercial radio stations. WSCK played bands that were formed and fell apart in a semester, bands that chose a new name every month, bands whose name stayed the same but whose singers came and went like traffic.'
Naturally no listener could remember the names of these bands, so requests' were "You know, those guys on the sixth floor of Cushing Hall? With the beards? Play their tape." How were you supposed to know from the tape whether people had beards?
"Play that band you did the other day, those guys that sang, remember them?"
Derek did not stay polite to stupid people, but Reeve continued to be nice, and struggled to figure out what they meant.
But on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, the callers called about Janie.
Every week the numbers climbed. Thirty-nine no longer seemed astronomical. "Any questions?" Reeve would say, halfway through his hour. "Call the station if you need a janie boost."
They called.
Reeve could not get over how, with the mike at his mouth, he could say out loud things he never would have said in actual conversation.
He would never have told his own parents about Janie's crying jags. He had not told his best friend a single detail of the suffering Janie had forced upon the Springs. He hadn't told Sarah-Charlotte when she tried to pump him.
It had taken no effort for Reeve to keep the secrets of his girlfriend's heart and soul. Janie wanted it private, so it was private. Reeve just sat with her while she spilled over, like a glass of water. To Reeve, Janie was clear and beautiful, like spring water, while the circumstances around her were muddy and infected.
He tended to stop listening to Janie's troubles, actually, wishing this could be happening in the summer, when she would have less clothing on and he could rub sunscreen lotion on her skin. All her skin. Skin he had not yet seen.
Then he would wake up from his reverie on the beauty and wonder of girls to find' that his own
personal beauty and wonder was still crying about parents. He wanted to say: They're only parents! Give it a rest! Look who's holding you up! A boy. A boy who wants you so much he cannot believe that you are still talking about parents. Or even talking. Don't you realize there's a time and a place for talk, and this isn't it?
No, Janie went on failing to realize that it was time for physical involvement, instead of mental or emotional.
Reeve's sister Lizzie, now, she loved to talk, so she picked a talking profession: law.