The Radio

A janitor observes the interactions between three teenagers who refuse to go home. This story explores the inability to communicate and the burden of monotony.

Those goddamn kids just wouldn’t go home.  

My old ipod had been broken for a year or so, but I kept my headphones planted over my ears so that nobody asked me questions. There were no customers this time of night, true, but I still had to account for those three goddamn kids.

“Go home,” I pushed the mop back and forth across the floor. “This is a supermarket, not a teen center.” I stopped mopping for a moment and looked around the room. I couldn’t tell which parts I’d cleaned already.

I dropped the mop in the bucket. Checked to make sure my headphones were still on. They were. I hoisted the bucket over my shoulder and started the trek up to the break room. Their voices got louder as I approached.

It was the same three. The boys were playing with a tennis ball�"that could probably account for all the noise. I couldn’t tell which game they were playing but I could certainly tell who was losing. The taller boy laughed each time the ball flew past the smaller one’s shoulder, casting sidelong glances at the girl as he did so. The girl hid her face behind a book and feigned inattention. I could not, for the life of me, remember their names.

I pushed my mop bucket to the corner and lifted the mop, listening to the thud, thud, thud of the tennis ball against the floor. I looked up. The taller boy was bouncing the ball off the ground. “Jake,” the other one called, trying to get his attention. “Jake, are we still playing?”

Jake tossed the ball over his shoulder without looking, an attempt at nonchalance that was ruined when the ball hit a chair and rolled underneath the table. The girl turned a page in her book. Jake ignored the ball and stared at her outright. She didn’t look up.

The smaller boy ducked under the table. “I’ve got it,” he told Jake, emerging several moments later and holding the tennis ball aloft. Jake continued to stare at the girl. The smaller boy began to bounce the ball off the ground, as Jake had been doing moments ago. It hit his foot and rolled across the room, coming to a stop beside my bucket.

He glanced first at Jake, then back at me, then back at Jake once again. He crossed the room quickly, agitatedly, and bent down to pick up the ball. Of the three, he was the only one still wearing his uniform�"I glanced at his nametag out of habit and boredom. HELLO, it read, MY NAME IS FINLEY. I smiled privately to myself. Finley picked up the tennis ball and hurried away without once making eye contact. I stared after him for a moment, then continued mopping.

“Jake,” Finley repeated. He approached Jake and stood directly behind him, with less than an inch separating his nose from Jake’s shoulder. “Jake, are we still playing?” Jake didn’t answer.

“You shouldn’t ignore people, Jake,” the girl said, without looking up from her book. “It’s rude.”

Jake turned towards Finley, slightly flustered, and said, “What’s the big deal? You were losing anyways.”

Finley frowned. “I thought we weren’t keeping score.”

“We weren’t. That’s how bad you were losing,” Jake glanced at the girl for a split-second�"when she failed to look up, he walked around the table to stand behind her. “Watcha reading?”

“As I Lay Dying,” Finley observed helpfully, reading the title from where he was standing.

“Sounds pretty dumb to me,” Jake remarked, shooting Finley a glare. The girl said nothing and turned another page. There was a silence.

“I haven’t even started my homework yet,” Finley announced suddenly, shoving his hands into the large pockets of his uniform and grinning at Jake knowingly.

“Well you’re a f*****g rebel, is what you are,” Jake replied viciously. Finley’s face fell. There was another moment of silence�"then, suddenly, as if on impulse, Jake reached forward and snatched the book from the girl’s hands.

“Hey!” She leapt to her feet. “I have to finish that for tomorrow!”

“You don’t have to do anything,” Jake replied cheekily, holding it high above her head. She made several half-hearted attempts to retrieve it before Jake turned, sprinted across the room, and leapt on top of the coffee table. “I have an idea!” he shouted. “Let’s start a book-club!”

“You’re going to break that,” she told him. She cast a quick glance at me�"I turned my eyes to the floor, feigning deafness. I checked to make sure my headphones were still on. They were.

“I’m not going to break it,” Jake muttered. Moments later, the ground shook with the force of his feet landing on the floor. There was another silence. I glanced briefly at the clock�"ten thirty. If they stuck to their usual schedule, it could be an hour before they left. I realized I had been cleaning the same spot for the past ten minutes and pushed my bucket over to the other side of the room.

“You could always go home and read,” Finley suggested helpfully. “It’d get you away from Jake, at the very least.”

The girl folded her arms. “I don’t want to go home,” she said. “I want to read here.”

“Why not?” Jake asked. “Hate your family?” He smirked, and tossed the book up in the air. It spun around three times and he caught it. “They hate you?” He tossed the book again and dropped it onto the floor.

The girl stared at the book, making no effort to retrieve it. “It is possible, you know,” she said eventually, “To have a family of perfectly wonderful people who don’t like each other very much.”

There was a pause. “Sure,” Jake said eventually. “Plenty things are possible.” No one spoke for some time. Finley started tossing the ball up and down, humming a tune that I couldn’t identify.

“I wish that old radio worked,” the girl announced suddenly, her desire to read apparently forgotten. “I want to listen to music.”          

“Which radio?” Jake asked. Finley dropped the tennis ball and it rolled under the radiator. He ran after it.

“That old one. Over there on the table,” she said. She pointed.

“Who says it doesn’t work?”

The girl shrugged. “I don’t know. Nobody ever uses it.”

“I saw someone using it the other day,” Finley interrupted, as he lay on his stomach and reached for the ball. “Or last week or last month or something. Colin was listening to the news about that court decision. I remember. He was hearing about the court decision and saying how outrageous it was.”

“Which court decision?” the girl asked.

Finley stood up. “Well…” he trailed off. “The court decision. You know,” there was a pause. “I don’t know.”

“If Colin can get it to work, so can I,” Jake said. I heard confident footsteps crossing the room. I looked up again. The three of them had gathered around the decrepit radio that lay atop the similarly untouched chemical safety manual, several feet away. Jake turned the knob back and forth experimentally. “Huh,” he muttered. “Guess it really is broken.”

The girl pushed him aside. “You forgot to turn it on,” she informed him. Finley smirked. Jake turned red and took a small step backwards.

She pressed a button�"after several moments of inactivity, the red light began to glow dimly. She raised the volume slowly, and a chorus of static echoed from the speakers.

“Do you ever feel,” Finley said, “As if the whole world is tuned into one station, and you’re listening to the other? Like�"they’re listening to rock n’ roll, and you’re listening to country�"or they’ve turned on a sports station, and you’re stuck on NPR�"like everyone else is hearing a different set of instructions�"or maybe just dancing to different music…”

“Well aren’t you a poetic little f****t,” Jake sneered, elbowing Finley in the stomach. Finley hurled the ball at his head in retaliation, but Jake caught it before it could hit him. He glanced hopefully at the girl�"but she hadn’t been watching. She was busy fiddling with the radio.

“Turn it off,” Finley grumbled, still clutching his stomach in pain. “It’s obviously broken.”

“I think I’ve almost got it.”

Finley gritted his teeth. “I hate the noise of that static.”

“Just be patient, alright?”

Finley covered his ears irritably and wandered away from them. He lifted the girl’s book off the floor and stared at it for several moments. “Got your book back!” he shouted, with such a volume that both Jake and the girl jumped slightly.

“I can see that,” the girl said, after a pause.

“You should really get going on this,” Finley continued, opening the book and flipping through. “You’re only on page twelve.”

“It’ll be fine,” the girl muttered. She turned the volume of the radio up higher. The sound of static filled the room.

“Hey!” Finley shouted. He dropped the book and covered both ears again. “Cut it out!”

“What’s your problem, man?” Jake snarled, positioning himself to stand in front of Sarah. “If you don’t like it, go home.”

“Why should I go home?” Finley demanded.

“You’ve got no reason to be here,” Jake snapped. “Sarah and I do.” 

So that was her name�"Sarah. I felt, somehow, as if I had already known this�"but there were so many Sarahs that worked here, and so many others I’d encountered at various points in my life, that it was impossible to differentiate between any of them. I stared down at my mop and couldn’t remember if I’d already cleaned the corner opposite. It felt like I had, but I crossed the room and started cleaning again anyways. Just to be sure.

“Is that so?” Finley retorted. “What reasons have you got to be here?”

Jake stood speechless for a moment�"Sarah continued to twirl the knob on the radio, with no discernible results. I looked around the room to see which places I had cleaned and which places I had not. It all looked the same.

“Well,” Jake said eventually, “You’re only here because you’ve got nowhere better to be.”

Finley folded his arms. “Isn’t that the only reason anyone goes anywhere?”

Jake glared at him.

“Besides,” Finley continued, “You didn’t answer my question.”

Jake studied the tennis ball in his hands for some time. “I could be somewhere else,” he muttered, “If I wanted to.”

“Well, obviously,” Finley said. “But you’re here. So you have to be here, just as much as I do.”

Jake rolled his eyes. “Sure I do.”

“We all have to end up wherever we are,” Finley explained, tucking the book under his arms and covering his ears once again. “A series of events occurred that led you to be here, instead of dead or at home or in jail or anywhere else. Even if you think you’re better than me because I don’t have anywhere else to be, and you say that you could have been somewhere else because you, supposedly, do, we’re both here right now and we were here ten seconds ago and we couldn’t have done anything about it. Being here isn’t something we decided. It’s something that happened to us.”

The sound of the static steadily increased as Sarah adjusted the volume of the radio. “You think you’re clever,” Jake said eventually, raising his voice to be heard over the noise, “But you really just sound like a pedantic a*s.”

 “Would you two shut up, already?” Sarah snapped, pressing her ear against the speaker. “I thought I heard something.”

“No,” Finley said, “That was just the sound of my eardrums exploding.”

“Really, Sarah,” Jake muttered, “It is getting a bit loud.”

Sarah backed away from the radio and examined it closely. After several moments of contemplation, she stepped forward, grabbed the sides of the radio, and lifted it off the counter.

“Whoa! Careful!” Jake shouted. He lunged towards her, arms outstretched�"but Sarah pushed him aside, marching determinedly to set the radio down on the table at the center of the room.

“What are you doing?” Jake asked.

“Trying to get a connection,” she muttered. She twisted the knob back and forth. “I might get better service over here.”

Even Jake had begun to look irritated by this point. “Seriously, Sarah, turn it off,” he grumbled. “It’s not working.”

“It’ll work!” she hissed. Jake fell silent. After less than a minute, however, Sarah ceased working, stepped back, and sat down at the table. She put her chin in her hands and stared at the radio.        

There was a pause.

“You alright?” Jake asked her.

“Sure.” The crackling noise of static filled the room.

Finley approached her hesitantly. “You want your book back?”

Sarah said nothing. Slowly, Finley placed the book on the table in front of her. For a brief moment, she turned her gaze to the book�"then, without warning, she got to her feet, snatched it up, and threw it at the wall as hard as she could. It fell to the ground like a dead bird and sat there unmoving.

Finley turned to Jake for help. “Was it something I said?”

Jake shrugged. “Probably.”

“I hate that book!” she screamed, her hands clenched in fists at her sides. “It’s completely incomprehensible!” She stared at the wall for a second longer�"then she sat down at the table and covered her face in her hands.

“Whoa!” Jake shouted, for the second time that night. “You don’t have to cry about it, Sarah�"it’s okay if you don’t like the book�"I don’t like practically any books!”

“Me, neither!” Finley insisted hysterically. “I hate literature!”

Sarah pushed herself to her feet. “It’s not that,” she said. She wiped the tears from her eyes forcefully, angrily. “I just wanted the stupid radio to work.” Then she grabbed her jacket and her backpack, pushed herself to her feet, and rushed out of the room, leaving the door open behind her. The two boys just stared after her in amazed confusion. The static of the radio filled the room.

I realized that I had abandoned mopping completely and had been standing, watching, for the past several minutes. Jake suddenly turned his gaze to me as if he had only just realized my presence. He cracked an uneasy grin, jabbed a finger at the open door, and said, “Women. Am I right?” I shrugged and continued mopping.

“She left her book behind,” Finley noted, after they’d stood in silence for some time.“Should I go give it to her?”

There was a beat of silence. “You really are an idiot, aren’t you?” Jake asked.

“We can at least turn the goddamn radio off,” Finley snapped.

“What if she comes back?”  Jake asked, his eyes lingering on the door. “She might be upset.”

“She’s not coming back,” Finley scoffed. “Besides, she’ll be upset no matter what we do.”

Jake sighed. “Fine. Turn it off, then.” 

Finley approached the radio and frowned at it. “How?”

Jake peered over his shoulder. “I don’t know,” he said. “Sarah turned it on.”

They both examined the radio for some time. Finally, Finley reached forward experimentally and pressed a button.

The resulting noise was deafening. I dropped my mop and clenched my hands over my headphones, unsuccessfully trying to block out the horrific sound. A human voice was audible, certainly�"but the voice was so disfigured it sounded much less like speech or lyrics and much more like a disembodied scream.

“Hey, it’s working!” Jake shouted over the cacophony, covering his hands with his ears. “We should tell Sarah!”

“It is not working!” Finley shrieked, pressing the same button frantically in a futile attempt to stop the noise.           

“Turn down the volume!” Jake cried, taking a step back.

“I am!”

It was true. Finley was twisting the knob but nothing was happening. The noise continued, if anything growing louder with each passing second. The walls seemed to vibrate under the sheer force of the terrible frequency. I clenched my headphones tighter over my ears, but they did nothing to block out the noise.

“Turn it off, then!” Jake cried, backing further and further away from the radio.

“I don’t know how!”

“Well figure it out!”

Finley was down on his knees in front of the radio, hitting buttons and turning knobs and flicking switches, but nothing seemed to work.

“Go ask Sarah!” Finley shouted.

“What?”

“She turned it on! She’ll know how to turn it off!”

“What?” Jake was sitting in the corner with his hands clasped over his ears. The noise continued to grow louder. It wasn’t so much the volume that was unbearable, but the frequency and timbre of the voice. I gritted my teeth and squeezed my eyes shut and turned towards the corner, the urge to flee also coupled with a strange sort of paralysis�"it was as if the sound was not just in the room, but everywhere�"emanating not from the radio itself, but from the very air which separated us�"and all I could hear was the horrible shrieking and Jake’s voice, crying over and over, “Turn it off! Turn it off!”

It all was punctuated suddenly by a loud, resounding crash. The noise stopped�"I opened my eyes. Finley stood in the center of the room, gasping for breath, staring at the fragmented pieces of the awful machine scattered on the floor in front him. We stood there without speaking, our ears still ringing, the sound of the crash still echoing off the walls of the room. Finally, after more than a minute of silence, Finley spoke.

“That radio,” he panted, clutching the table for support, “Was f*****g possessed.”

Jake pushed himself to his feet and walked forward slowly, unsteadily. His face was slightly red. “Well Christ, Finley,” he said, “You didn’t have to kill it.”

Finley glared at him. “What was I supposed to do?”

“You could’ve….I don’t know. Taken out the batteries, or something.”

There was a pause.

“Well you didn’t have such great ideas cowering over there in the corner,” Finley snapped. “And I never wanted to use the goddamn radio in the first place.

“Well, yeah,” Jake mumbled. “But now he has to clean it up.”

It took me a moment to realize they were talking about me. Slowly, I reached up�"brought my headphones down to my neck�"and examined the broken radio on the floor for some time. “I’m not cleaning that up,” I said. Then I put my headphones back over my ears.

Finley turned his head to Jake. Jake blinked once, absorbing this information. “Oh,” he said, finally. “Right.”

They hauled a broom and dustpan out of the closet and set to work. “I hope you realize,” Jake said, as they were working, “That this is completely your fault.”

“My fault?” Finley stopped working and glared at him indignantly.

“You’re the one who broke it. Besides, you’re the reason Sarah left.”

“How am I the reason Sarah left?”

“I don’t know,” Jake said. “You criticized her reading abilities, or…” he trailed off. “Something.” He tried to toss one of the fragmented speakers into the trash, but the oddly shaped piece fell short and landed on the table.

“She wasn’t upset about the book,” Finley snapped, as Jack ambled across the room to collect the broken speaker. “She was upset that the radio didn’t work, and you’re the one who told her you could fix it.”

“Well it certainly isn’t fixed now,” Jake muttered, staring at the broken speaker in his hand. “You’ve taken care of that.”

“Besides,” Finley continued, ignoring Jake’s last remark, “You’re the one who stole her book in the first place. If it weren’t for you she would still be sitting here reading and we would be tossing around the tennis ball like usual, and we never would’ve had to interact with the goddamn radio in the first place.”

There was a pause. Jake threw the speaker in the trash and returned to the center of the room.

“So what you’re saying,” he said thoughtfully, “Is that this is really Sarah’s fault.”

“No.” Finley sighed. “That’s not what I was saying at all.”

There was a long silence. Pieces of the broken radio fell softly into the trash can.

“Although,” Finley said suddenly, “I suppose it is mostly her fault.”

“Yeah,” Jake replied quickly. “It really is.”

In all the commotion, I realized that I had completely forgotten which parts of the floor I had mopped already. I pushed my mop across the room and tried to remember whether or not I’d cleaned the room downstairs. I was pretty sure I had, but I couldn’t be certain. Finley and Jake eventually finished cleaning up the radio, and they set about playing with the tennis ball again.

“Do you think Sarah’s coming back?” Finley asked, after several minutes of silence.

Jake threw the ball. “No.”

Finley caught it in both hands and stared at proudly it for a moment. “Why not?”

Jake didn’t answer.

“I wonder what was wrong with that radio,” Finley mused. He threw the ball and it bounced back and hit him in the stomach.

Jake shrugged. “It was old.”

“Yeah,” Finley consented. He threw the ball again. “It was old.”

I moved to the outer left corner of the room and started mopping. I thought I might have cleaned it already, but I couldn’t be entirely sure.

“I was surprised,” Finley remarked suddenly.

“Huh?” Jake asked. “Why?”

“You didn’t follow Sarah when she left.” There was a pause. The ball bounced towards Jake. “I always thought you were here because of Sarah.”

Jake caught it in one hand. “I thought you were here because of Sarah.”

Finley laughed. “No,” he said. “I’ve got nowhere better to be. Remember?”

Jake didn’t answer. The thud, thud, thud of the tennis ball echoed throughout the room.

“Yeah,” Jake said eventually. “Me too.” He threw the ball again, harder this time�"it ricocheted off the wall, flew over Finley’s head, and rolled across the floor. It came to a stop at my feet.

We stared at each other for a moment.

Letting out a long, tired sigh, I bent down, picked up the ball, and tossed it back to Finley.   

This was a poor choice. He extended his arm and made contact with the ball, but it bounced sideways off his hand�"it then rolled across the room, through the open door, and bounced down the stairs, out of sight.

There was a long silence. We all stared after it.

“Well, s**t,” Jake said eventually. “I guess we’d better go home.”