Radio Silence. Alice Oseman
Oseman
School sucks.
Why oh why is there work? I don’t— I don’t get it.
Mm.
Look at me. Look at my face.
Does it look like I care about school?
No.
‘lonely boy goes to a rave’, Teen Suicide
UNIVERSE CITY: Ep. 1 – dark blue
UniverseCity 109,982 views
In Distress. Stuck in Universe City. Send Help.
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Hello.
I hope somebody is listening.
I’m sending out this call via radio signal – long out-dated, I know, but perhaps one of the few methods of communication the City has forgotten to monitor – in a dark and desperate cry for help.
Things in Universe City are not what they seem.
I cannot tell you who I am. Please call me … please just call me Radio. Radio Silence. I am, after all, only a voice on a radio, and there may not be anyone listening.
I wonder – if nobody is listening to my voice, am I making any sound at all?
[…]
“Can you hear that?” said Carys Last, halting in front of me so suddenly that I almost crashed into her. We both stood on the train platform. We were fifteen and we were friends.
“What?” I said, because I couldn’t hear anything except the music I was listening to through one earphone. I think it might have been Animal Collective.
Carys laughed, which didn’t happen very often. “You’re playing your music too loud,” she said, hooking a finger around the earphone’s wire and pulling it away from me. “Listen.”
We stood still and listened and I remember every single thing I heard in that moment. I heard the rumbling of the train we’d just got off leaving the station, heading farther into town. I heard the ticket gate guard explaining to an old man that the high-speed train to St Pancras was cancelled today due to the snow. I heard the distant screech of traffic, the wind above our heads, the flush of the station toilet and “The train now arriving at – Platform One – is the – 8.02 – to – Ramsgate,” snow being shovelled and a fire engine and Carys’s voice and …
Burning.
We turned round and stared at the town beyond, snowy and dead. We could normally see our school from here, but today there was a cloud of smoke in the way.
“How did we not see the smoke while we were on the train?” Carys asked.
“I was asleep,” I said.
“I wasn’t.”
“You weren’t paying attention.”
“Well, I guess the school burned down,” she said, and walked away to sit on the station bench. “Seven-year-old Carys’s wish came true.”
I stared for a moment more, and then went to join her.
“D’you think it was those pranksters?” I said, referring to the anonymous bloggers who had been pranking our school for the past month with increasing ferocity.
Carys shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter, does it? The end result is the same.”
“It does matter.” It was at that moment that it all started to sink in. “It’s— it looks really serious. We’re going to have to change schools. It looks like the whole of C block and D block are … just … gone.” I crumpled my skirt in my hands. “My locker was in D block. My GCSE sketchbook was in there. I spent days on some of that stuff.”
“Oh, shit.”
I shivered. “Why would they do this? They’ve destroyed so much hard work. They’ve messed up so many people’s GCSEs and A levels, things that seriously affect people’s futures. They’ve literally ruined people’s lives.”
Carys seemed to think about it, and then opened her mouth to reply, but ended up closing it again, and not saying anything.
“We care about our students’ happiness and we care about their success,” said our head teacher, Dr Afolayan, in front of 400 parents and sixth formers on my Year 12 summer term parents evening. I was seventeen and head girl, and I was sitting backstage because it was my turn to speak on stage in two minutes. I hadn’t planned a speech and I wasn’t nervous. I was very pleased with myself.
“We consider it our duty to give our young people access to the greatest opportunities on offer in the world today.”
I’d managed to become head girl last year because my campaign poster was a picture of me with a double chin. Also, I’d used the word ‘meme’ in my election speech. This expressed the idea that I didn’t give a shit about the election, even though the opposite was true, and it made people want to vote for me. You can’t say I don’t know my audience.
Despite this, I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to talk about in my parents evening speech. Afolayan was saying everything I’d scribbled down on the club-night flyer I found in my blazer pocket five minutes ago.
“Our Oxbridge programme has been particularly successful this year—”
I crumpled up the flyer and dropped it on the floor. Improvisation it was.
I’d improvised speeches before so it wasn’t a big deal, and nobody could ever tell they were improvised anyway; nobody ever even wondered whether they were. I had a reputation for being organised, always doing homework, having consistently high grades and having Cambridge University ambitions. My teachers loved me and my peers envied me.
I was clever.
I was the top student in my year.
I was going to Cambridge, and I was going to get a good job and earn lots of money, and I was going to be happy.
“And I think,” said Dr Afolayan, “that the teaching staff deserve a round of applause as well for all the hard work they’ve put in this year.”
The audience clapped, but I saw a few students roll their eyes.
“And now I’d like to introduce our head girl, Frances Janvier.”
She pronounced my surname wrong. I could see Daniel Jun, the head boy, watching me from the opposite side of the stage. Daniel hated me because we were both ruthless study machines.
“Frances has been a consistent high achiever since she joined us a few years ago, and it’s my absolute honour to have her representing everything we stand for here at the Academy. She’ll be talking to you today about her experience as an Academy sixth former this year, and her own plans for the future.”
I stood up and walked on stage and I smiled and I felt fine because I was born for this.