Authors: Caroline B. Cooney

Whatever Happened to Janie? (22 page)

“Ooooh, here’s a great maid-of-honor gown!” squealed Sarah-Charlotte. “Dark wine-red velvet. Perfect for a winter wedding. Just my color.”

“It’s a beautiful gown,” Janie agreed. Sarah-Charlotte’s white-blond hair would look like its own veil against that deep wine red.

But I have a sister now, thought Janie. A sister with auburn-red hair like mine. Isn’t your sister supposed to be your maid of honor? And Jodie would look better in green. How do I tell Sarah-Charlotte she can’t be my maid of honor? How do I sort out the fathers of the bride?

It’s just as well that Reeve doesn’t know about the wedding, she thought. I’m not quite ready myself.

She ached for Reeve. It was physical, that ache, located inside her arms. She needed to curve around him.

• • •

Think of a topic! Reeve yelled at himself.

His mind was a clear space.

Politics? He didn’t know anything.

The world? Nobody on campus cared.

Music? He couldn’t think of the name of a single band on the face of the earth.

Nature? Women’s rights? Traffic jams?

What do people talk about on the air? thought Reeve.

His mind was as smooth as the polish on a new car. His brain was buffed. The microphone was waiting; Derek was laughing silently and gladly.

Reeve had been a deejay for the first time from three
A.M
. to four
A.M
.—an hour when even college kids slept and the number of listeners probably hovered around two. It came easily: no clenching up, no fumbling for words, no mispronunciations. After two weeks at three
A.M
., Reeve had talked his way into prime time.

Derek’s advice had been against Reeve, and Derek was about to be proved correct.

Reeve had told everybody. Two of his classes were lectures with five hundred strangers. When the prof asked for questions at the end of class, Reeve stood up and announced his broadcast hour. His other two classes had twenty-five kids, and he’d told them, and of course he’d told the guys on his dorm floor and the girls on the floor below—people he had to live with.

Why, oh why, hadn’t he chickened out? Every single person he would ever know at Hills College was going to hear him being a jerk and a loser.

Of course, they might not be listening.

It was just a college station. They were probably listening to real stations.

If I fail, it’s okay, he told himself. Nobody but me cares, and it’s no big deal, and—

If he failed, he would transfer to another college.

It would be fun asking his parents for another ten or twenty thousand dollars in order for their son not to be humiliated on the air.

It’s nothing but a microphone, he said to himself. Say something. Say anything. “Once upon a time,” said Reeve.

Derek Himself stared incredulously. Cal, a deejay, and Vinnie, the station manager, who were the other two guys at the station tonight, looked up from their paperwork. All three began to snicker, and then actually to snort, with laughter, although background noise was forbidden when the mike was on; it would be picked up and broadcast.
Once upon a time?
A beginning for kindergartners. A beginning for fairy tales and picture books.

Reeve would never live it down. He really would have to transfer.

He pictured Cordell laughing at him. Laughed at by a roommate stupider and smellier than anybody on campus? He imagined the guys in the dorm yelling
Loser! Loser!
Guys he wanted to be friends with but hadn’t pulled it off yet. Guys who would not be polite about how worthless Reeve was.

“Once upon a time,” he repeated helplessly, stuck in horrible repetition of that stupid phrase.

And then talk arrived, like a tape that had come in the mail. For Reeve Shields really did know a story that began with “Once upon a time.”

“I dated a dizzy redhead. Dizzy is a compliment. Janie was light and airy. Like hope and joy.
My girlfriend,” he said softly, into the microphone. Into the world.

“You know the type. Really cute, fabulous red hair, lived next door. Good in school, of course, girls like that always are. Janie had lots of friends and she was crazy about her mom and dad, because that’s the kind of family people like that have.”

Never had Reeve’s voice sounded so rich and appealing.

“Except,” said Reeve, “except one day in the school cafeteria, a perfectly ordinary day, when kids were stealing each other’s desserts and spilling each other’s milk, Janie just happened to glance down at the picture of that missing child printed on the milk carton.”

His slow voice seemed to draw a half-pint of milk, with its little black-and-white picture of a missing child. It was almost visible, that little milk carton, that dim and wax-covered photograph.

“And the face on the milk carton,” said Reeve, “was Janie herself.”

Published by Laurel-Leaf
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books
a division of Random House, Inc.
New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Laurel-Leaf and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on request.

RL: 5.3
eISBN: 978-0-307-42520-1
October 2008

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