Maddie had a remarkable ability to talk about nothing—it was almost hypnotic. Even though it was terrible, you couldn’t stop listening. A typical link or break, as Mr. Tucker told us the on-air bits were called, was something like:
Homecoming. Everyone’s got an opinion on it. E-ver-y-one. My opinion? I’m okay with it. I didn’t always feel that way. But I think I feel that way now. [long pause] But if you think about it … it’s not that great. Actually. Now that I think about it. Anyway, here’s Wham!
One rumor was that for music programming, she just put the catalog on shuffle and let it ride. She played the most random things: Norwegian rap followed by The Beatles followed by Shania Twain, followed by Maddie’s opinions on electric vs. manual toothbrushes. (Should we call it a manual toothbrush? You call it a manual car, and there are electric cars too, but also automatic cars. So should we call it an automatic toothbrush? Let me know what you think. Anyway, here’s the third movement from Beethoven’s fifth symphony.)
A 5–7 p.m. time slot meant that I had two hours to hang around and do nothing after school since it didn’t make sense to get the bus home, turn around, and take it right back. So I hung out in the library watching videos online, wasting perfectly good time I could’ve used doing homework in favor of doing it later and complaining about not having enough time to finish it.
The evening of our first show, we met in the studio. We were given a code from Mr. Tucker to get in since it was an after-hours show.
He had taken us all on a tour of the station during class, showed everyone the booth where we would do our shows and the editing bays where we would work on promos and stuff. Everything was carpeted and a little run-down looking. Shelves of CDs lined the walls of the sound booth, and there were even racks that must have held tapes at one point, but now sat empty. An L-shaped table was set up with the soundboard, three computer monitors, and a few mics. There were also several rolling chairs, and a beat-up looking black leather loveseat shoved in one corner.
When I arrived, Jamie was already there, browsing one of the CD racks.
“What do you think the point of the CDs are?” I said. Jamie looked up, startled. “I mean, it’s all digital anyway, right?”
“Oh. Yeah. I guess it’s just like … set dressing.”
“To really nail down the authentic radio feel?”
He smiled a little. “Exactly.” He nodded toward the loveseat. “I was more trying to figure out why this was here. Kind of unexpectedly chilled out.”
“I guess that’s the vibe we’re going for?”
Sasha arrived then, Joydeep just behind her.
“I already got the playlist queued up,” Jamie told us as we all got into position: Joydeep and I sat in rolling chairs, side-by-side at the soundboard so that I could operate the controls and he could see which songs were coming up on the monitor. Sasha sat across from us, on the other side of the bend in the table near one of the guest mics, with her laptop open. Jamie settled in on the couch.
“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.”