The Midnight Frequency

Dead Air

There are four hundred and ninety students at Carrow High, and on a good day I am none of them.

I have a system. You stand at your locker the way a coat hangs on a hook—present, useful, beneath notice. You keep your eyes on the little dial and you turn it, even when it's already open, because a girl spinning a combination is a girl with a destination, and a girl with a destination is furniture. You do not look up when the hall floods between bells. You become the part of the wall that has a vent in it. You practice being a hallway.

I am, if I say so myself, extremely good at this.

(I have a whole skill set nobody will ever see, which is the central tragedy of skill sets like mine. I can tell which of the overhead lights is about to die by the way it ticks. I can name every person who passes by their shoes without lifting my head, which sounds like a party trick until you understand it is a survival adaptation, like the moths that grew darker when the factories came. I can hold an entire conversation in my skull—witty, devastating, the kind that ends with the other person quietly reassessing their life—and deliver, out loud, exactly none of it. Zero words. A perfect score.)

The trick is you have to want it. You have to genuinely prefer the vent.

This was not always the arrangement. There was a June, two and a half years ago, in eighth grade, who got up on the cafetorium stage at the Spring Showcase with a folded piece of paper and a poem about her mother, and who opened her mouth, and—

We don't have to do this. It's a Thursday. The point is that some doors, once they shut, you stop testing the handle.

The bell pulls the hall taut and then snaps it. By the time the speaker in the ceiling crackles, I'm already a coat on a hook again.

"Good morning, Owls, and what a morning it is."

That's Theo Brandt. You'd know it even if they didn't say his name, which they do, every day, brought to you by your morning announcer Theo Brandt, like he's a cereal. His voice does a thing I have studied the way other people study for the SAT—it just arrives. No throat-clearing, no apology, no little hitch where a person checks whether they're allowed to be talking. He says good morning and you believe it's good and you believe it's morning.

"Picture day got moved to Tuesday, so for those of you planning a face, plan it then. The Owls take on Dunmore Friday under the lights—be loud, be kind, bring a jacket, it's getting cold up here. And the big one: one week from Saturday, they're cutting the ribbon on the new Voss Media Center, and I'm told there will be a gleaming studio, an actual broadcast booth, and free food, which historically is the only one of those three things any of you care about."

A laugh moves through homeroom. Around me people are doing the homeroom things—copying somebody's worksheet, sleeping with their eyes engineered open, a boy two desks up rebuilding a pen into a tiny weapon.

"Mr. Voss is going to say some words," Theo goes on, lighter now, the way you'd narrate a thing you weren't entirely sold on, "and there'll be a plaque, because it's not a building in this town until it has his name screwed to it." A beat. You can hear him decide not to push it. "Anyway. State-of-the-art. We're lucky. Go Owls."

In front of me, Cassidy Pike leans across the aisle to Mara Quill. They don't lower their voices, because girls like me don't have ears, that's the deal.

"My mom said they're putting the radio thing back," Cassidy says. "Like the station. The old one nobody used."

"Wasn't that the thing that Sandoval girl did?" Mara says. "The one who ran away?"

"Dahlia." Cassidy says the name the way you'd hand somebody a tissue you didn't want anymore. "Yeah. God. That was forever ago."

"My brother said she ran off with some guy from over in Halford."

"She was so weird, though." Cassidy isn't being cruel. That's the part that lands wrong, that gets under the nail. She's being kind, in the specific bored way of someone closing a file. "Like, no offense, but you don't just disappear if you've got, like, people. She probably wanted to."

"Anyway," Mara says, and that's the eulogy. Anyway. Dahlia Sandoval, sixteen, last seen sometime last winter, filed under things that happen to weird girls. The announcement ends. The day starts. Nobody scratches the name into anything; it just dissolves into the carpet-glue smell and the fluorescent hum and is gone.

I don't know Dahlia Sandoval. I want to be clear about that, because of everything that comes after. In September I know exactly two things about her: that she was quiet, the way I am quiet, the kind of quiet people mistake for an empty room. And that the word everyone uses for her—ran away—they say it the way you'd read a label off a jar. Confident. Done. Already moving on to lunch.

I file it where I file everything. I become the vent.

—

The shop smells like brass and 3-in-One oil and the specific cold of a place that's mostly a garage, and it is the only room in Carrow where I am the right size.

CASTELLANO & KEY, says the window, gold letters my dad repaints himself every couple of Augusts so they don't go gray. Below that, smaller: Locks, Safes, Auto — We Open What's Stuck. My father wrote that last part. It is the closest my father comes to poetry.

He's at the bench when I come in through the back, a deadbolt clamped in the vise and his glasses pushed up into hair that's going the color of pewter shavings. He doesn't say hi. We don't, really. He lifts his chin maybe a centimeter, which in the Castellano dialect is a paragraph.

"Sit," he says. "You're going to feel something."

I drop my bag and sit. On the bench between us he's set a practice cylinder, the kind with the cutaway so you can see the pins, except he's turned the cut side away from me.

"No looking," he says. "Cheating's for people who don't want to learn it twice." He puts a tension wrench in my left hand and a pick in my right and folds my fingers around them like he's done since I was nine, when the other dads were teaching their kids to throw. "Now. You're not muscling it. You're listening with your hands."

This is the thing about my father that I will spend years failing to explain to anyone: he is the most silent man I have ever met and he taught me everything I know about paying attention. He sets the tension—barely, a breath of pressure—and tells me to feel for the pin that fights back.

"There's always one that's carrying the weight," he says. "The binding pin. Find that one, set it, the rest go quiet and easy. People do the same thing. There's always one that's holding the whole door shut." He taps the cylinder. "Most folks lean on all of them at once and wonder why nothing gives."

I find it. The third pin, stubborn, a tiny resistance like a held breath. I ease it up until it ticks into the shear line, and the second pin softens, and the first, and then the plug turns under my hand smooth as a key was always meant to be there, and the bolt thunks back, and for one second the shop is the warmest place on earth.

My dad doesn't smile. But he sits back, and that's the same thing.

"Good," he says. "You've got the hands for it." He says it every time. It is, I am fairly sure, the nicest thing anyone says to me all week, and it's about lockpicking, and I'll take it.

Over the bench, on the pegboard, hangs the ring. The master keys. Schools, the rec center, half the storefronts on Main, the churches, the old municipal stuff nobody else can get into anymore. When a building in Carrow forgets how to open itself, it calls my father. He has, on a single split-ring, more of this town than the mayor does. He doesn't think about it that way. To him it's just the job, and a sacred one—you hold people's locked doors, you don't talk about whose they are. I have grown up understanding that the keys to nearly everything hang four feet from where we eat.

We eat in the back, at the little table, and there are three chairs.

One of them is just empty. It's been empty five years and it's still hers, the way a tooth you lost is still the tooth, your tongue going to it. Nobody sits there. Nobody's said don't. It's not a shrine—my dad would die before he made a shrine—it's just a chair that the table happens to have an extra of, the way a frequency keeps broadcasting after the station's gone dark, just nobody listening.

That's not me being poetic. My mother was, for a while, the most listened-to voice in Carrow. Vivian Castellano, The Night Shift, eleven to two on the AM band, the woman whose voice came out of every kitchen radio and dashboard in the county after midnight, low and warm and a little wicked, talking to the truckers and the insomniacs and the heartbroken like she'd met each of them personally. People still tell me. Your mom got me through my divorce. Your mom played a song for my boy when he shipped out. They tell me like it's a gift. They don't know they're describing the back of a head walking out a door.

She left to chase a bigger signal. A real market, a real station, somewhere the dial went further than the county line. She was going to send for us. The word send did a lot of heavy lifting in our house for about a year and then we retired it.

My phone buzzes against the table while my dad's rinsing plates. I know before I look. There's a rhythm to it—she goes quiet for weeks, months, and then some midnight feeling comes over her three states away and she calls, and because it's always near midnight, because of the kind of life she lives, I'm always asleep, and so it goes to voicemail, and the little red number sits on my phone like a coal.

Voicemail (1).

I don't play it. I've got two from August I haven't played either. I'm not being dramatic. It's just that her recorded voice and her real voice are the same voice—that's the whole horror of radio people—and I cannot always afford, on a Thursday, to have my mother in the room.

There's also the postcard. It came Tuesday. It's a picture of a city I've never been to, lit up at night, and on the back, in her handwriting that slants like it's leaning into wind, are four lines I've read maybe eleven times and not once out loud. My dad hasn't asked what it says. I've left it on the counter, face up, for two days, the way you leave a door cracked, and he walks past it and doesn't read it either, and we are, the two of us, world champions at the thing we are doing, which is not talking about her.

"Go to bed," he says, not unkindly. "You've got school."

I go up. I don't sleep.

—

Here is what nobody tells you about being invisible: it's loud in here.

The not-talking doesn't go anywhere. It just pools. All day I'm a vent in a wall and all night the things I didn't say come back wanting to be said to somebody, and there's nobody, so they pile up behind my teeth and hum. I lie in the dark and I have the cafeteria conversations I'll never have, the comeback to Cassidy, the thing I'd tell Theo Brandt if I were a person who told Theo Brandt things, the whole un-broadcast catalog of June.

By one in the morning the house is too small for it. I pull on a hoodie and my dad's old field jacket—he sleeps like the dead, the deepest-sleeping insomniac's husband in America—and I take the spare shop key and I go out into the cold, and I do not exactly plan where.

I do, though. My feet do.

Carrow at night is a town that's been turned down rather than off. Fog comes up off the river and pools in the low streets, and the one stoplight on Main blinks yellow at nobody, and up over the rooftops, on Signal Hill, the dead radio tower stands against the sky with its red light long burnt out, a needle that used to thread the whole county and now just holds up the dark. My mother's tower. Not really—it was the town's—but the AM signal went out from up there once, The Night Shift, eleven to two, and I have walked to the foot of that hill more nights than I would tell a doctor.

The high school sits below the tower like something it dropped. And the media wing—the old one, the dead one, the part they're about to make obsolete with Mr. Voss's gleaming booth—juts off the back of the building toward the slope, single-story, windows soaped over, a wing the school forgot it had.

I'm not going in. I want to be clear. I am a girl on a walk who has a key to a locksmith's shop and a complicated relationship with a tower. That's the whole crime.

But there's a service door at the dark end of the wing, steel, set back where the floodlight doesn't reach, and my feet take me to it the way they take me everywhere, without consulting me. And I put my hand flat against it just to feel the cold, just to have touched the building, the way you'd touch a horse.

And the door is wrong.

I know doors. It's the family business. A locked steel door has a particular silence to it, a settled, closed weight, the bolt seated deep where it belongs. This door doesn't have that. Under my palm there's a looseness, a fault—the strike plate's worked loose, or the bolt's worn its keeper, or somebody, once, did something to it on purpose and it never healed. The lock isn't holding. The lock is resting, the way a fist rests when it's only pretending to be closed.

My hands know it before my head agrees to it. The third pin. The one carrying the weight. I can feel, through six inches of air and steel, exactly how this one wants to give.

And there's something else. I go still—the way my dad taught me, you go quiet to hear the quiet thing—and I put my ear nearly to the metal, and under the wind and the river and my own stupid heart there's a sound coming from inside. Faint. Steady. A hum. Electrical. The low, patient hum of something that is still, against every reasonable expectation, powered on. Something in that black wing is awake.

Some doors, my dad says, in my head, the way he says it over the bench, open from the inside.

I breathe out, slow, the held breath of the binding pin.

And I reach for it.

The Booth

The lock clicks—a sound I feel in my teeth—and the door gives.

It shouldn't have. That's the first thing. This is a deadbolt, a real one, the squat brass kind Dad would call honest, and honest locks don't open for a girl with a bobby pin and the back half of a paperclip she straightened against the hallway tile. They open for keys, or for time, or for someone who learned the inside of a cylinder before she learned cursive. (Dad teaching me at the kitchen table, eight years old, both of us not talking, his big thumb guiding mine: feel for the one that's stubborn, Junebug. There's always one pin that's holding the weight. You set that first. The rest just want permission.) I set the stubborn one. I gave the rest permission. And now the door is swinging in on a darkness that smells like hot dust and old electricity and something faintly sweet gone stale, and I am standing in it like an idiot with my heart going off in my chest like a smoke alarm with a dying battery, that frantic stupid chirp, over and over, nobody coming to fix it.

I should leave. I rehearse leaving. I'm very good at the rehearsing part—I have whole imaginary lives in there, conversations where I'm funny, exits where I'm graceful—and very bad at the doing, which is the entire problem with me in one sentence, somebody should put it on a plaque.

I step inside.

There's a second door. Of course there's a second door, because this is a radio station, or it was, and you don't want the night air and the hallway and the janitor's mop bucket getting onto your sound. The inner door is heavier, padded, the foam cracked and weeping yellow crumbs, and it sighs shut behind me with a thunk that seals the world out so completely my ears ring with the new quiet. I can hear myself. That's how quiet it is. I can hear the blood in me.

And the room—

The room is alive.

Not alive alive. But there's a board, a long control board with a hundred sliders and a hundred knobs, and a green light glows along the bottom edge of it, low and steady, like coals you'd forgotten you banked. A meter needle floats at rest. A clock on the wall, the round industrial kind with the red sweep hand, keeps time at 11:51, and the second hand stutters forward, alive, alive, somebody's been paying this electric bill for years without knowing it, or the school forgot this corner exists, which—looking around—they did. They absolutely did.

WCRW, says a sign over the board, hand-lettered once in gold paint now the color of weak tea. 88.1 FM. And under it, smaller, a strip of label-maker tape, the letters punched out one clack at a time: CARROW'S OWN VOICE.

There's a chair.

I don't know why the chair is the thing that gets me. It's an ordinary office chair, the seat split at one corner and patched with packing tape gone amber, and it's been worn—not generally, not by everyone, but by one person, one shape, the foam compressed into the exact geography of a single body that sat here a thousand nights with their feet hooked on that low rung, leaning toward that mic. You can read a person in a chair like that the way you can read them in handwriting. Somebody lived here. Somebody small. Somebody who leaned in.

Headphones hang on a hook screwed crooked into the wall, the ear pads flaking black confetti. A coffee mug, dry, a brown tide line dropped down the inside. A space heater with a frayed cord, off. A row of binders furred grey with dust, their spines labeled in a careful slanted hand—LOGS, and a year, and another year, going back and back—except the dust isn't even. There's a clean stripe across the desk in front of the chair, a rectangle of not-dust, the size and shape of a notebook somebody took. Or set down a hundred times. Or both.

And the mic.

It hangs from a black arm bent toward the chair like a question somebody's been asking the dark for a long time. A round screen over the front of it, a foam ball, a switch on its base I do not touch. I do not touch it. I want it understood that for one whole minute, in the record of my life, I did the careful thing.

I tell myself I'm just looking. I tell myself a lot of things.

The desk is plywood under a laminate top, and the laminate is a galaxy of stickers and Sharpie and the rings of cups, the way every shared surface in a school becomes a wall everybody signs without meaning to. I trail my fingers across it (gross, I know, the dust comes up grey on my skin like I've touched the inside of a vacuum), and that's how I find it. Not with my eyes. With my fingertips. A roughness. Letters dug into the laminate, scratched deep, the way you'd carve a thing you needed to be sure outlasted you—with a compass point, maybe, or a key, pressed and pressed until the plastic gave.

I lean down into the green glow to read it.

DOT WAS HERE.

And under that, smaller, the letters crowding because the carver ran out of nerve or out of room:

—and then she wasn't.

The cold that goes through me has nothing to do with the temperature.

Because I know that name. Everyone knows that name the way you know the names of the gone—lightly, wrongly, the story already sanded down to a shape that's easy to hold. Dahlia Sandoval. Dot. The quiet girl, two grades' worth of quiet, here and then over one autumn weekend not, her locker cleaned out, a note her mother showed around with shaking hands, a town that exhaled and said runaway and moved its eyes to the next thing. Eight months ago. I remember because that was around when I stopped going to the cafeteria, which is its own kind of leaving, the kind nobody notices, the kind that doesn't get a note.

I straighten up too fast. The chair is in front of me. Her chair. I have been standing in a dead girl's room—except she isn't dead, nobody said dead, ran away is not dead—I have been standing in a vanished girl's room touching her dust like it's mine.

That's when I should run. Plaque number two.

Instead I find the cassette.

It's in a tape case on the corner of the desk, in the clean rectangle, dead center, the only object on the whole surface that's been set down on purpose. The clear plastic kind, the hinge cracked. Inside, a cassette—an actual cassette, the kind I've only seen in Dad's truck and in the shoebox in our hall closet I'm not supposed to open—and across the paper insert, in ballpoint pressed so hard it embossed the back, four words in a girl's careful slanted hand, the same hand as the binders:

FOR WHOEVER'S NEXT.

I stand there holding it like it might be warm.

(For whoever's next. Not for whoever finds this. Not goodbye. Not help. Next. Like a shift. Like a watch being kept. Like she didn't run from something so much as hand it off, and trusted, against all the available evidence of how people are, that somebody would come.)

The case is heavier than one cassette should make it. I tilt it and something shifts behind the paper liner, something small, and I work a fingernail under the insert and there's a second one tucked back there—tiny, a fraction the size, the kind that goes inside an answering machine or a little recorder, no label at all, just a thumbnail of black plastic and brown tape, hidden. Deliberately hidden. By the same person who left the big one out in plain sight where it couldn't be missed.

One to be found. One to be looked for.

I don't understand it. I won't understand it for a long time, and when I do it will cost me everything I'm not yet brave enough to spend. But my body understands something my brain hasn't caught up to, because I press the insert flat over the little cassette again, careful, and I put the case down exactly where it was, in the clean rectangle, like setting a thing back in a museum, and my hands are not steady.

11:58.

I should go. I have a window—Dad asleep over the shop, the back lot, the broken fence by the tennis courts I came through, the whole black walk home rehearsed. I have everything I need to leave.

I look at the switch on the base of the mic.

Here's the thing nobody knows about me, because I've never said it, because the saying is the exact thing I can't do: I am not quiet inside. Inside it never stops. Inside there is a girl who has the comeback, every time, three seconds too late and aimed at no one—the whole brilliant ungiven speech, the joke that would've landed, the true thing the moment needed and didn't get because my throat closed like a fist around it. There's a freeze in me that lives in my jaw. I felt it lock for good two years ago on a stage with a hot light in my eyes and four hundred faces below me waiting, and the silence I made up there was so total and so long that it stopped being a pause and became who I am. Castellano. The quiet one. Like Dot. Two grades' worth of quiet.

My mother talked to a whole town in the dark for a living. She put her voice into a thousand cars on Mill Road and the bypass and the lots behind the diner, into kitchens and bedrooms and the headphones of kids who couldn't sleep, and then one day she decided a thousand wasn't enough, and she went looking for a bigger dark to fill, and she has not, in five years, used that voice to say one word to me. So. There's that, too. There's the part where the sound of a person leaning into a microphone is the sound of being chosen by, and then over.

The ON AIR sign hangs above the board. A long red tube behind frosted glass. Dead.

I touch the switch.

I mean to just see. I mean to look at it the way you look over a railing at a long drop, to scare yourself a little and then step back to the safe part of the floor.

I flip it.

Somewhere under the board a relay closes with a soft heavy clack, and the meter needle jumps and swings and settles, trembling, into the green. The space heater of a hum I didn't know I'd been hearing climbs a half-step. And the red tube above me catches, flickers, and fills—not all at once, the gas walking the length of the glass—until it burns steady and whole.

ON AIR.

The light comes down over the chair, over the desk, over the four words and the carved name and my two grey hands, and it turns the dust in the air to floating embers, and I understand, the way you understand a held breath, that this is not pretend. There is an antenna somewhere over this building, on Signal Hill maybe, on the dead tower they put a chain-link fence around, and it does not know it's supposed to be dead, and right now, at this frequency, in this nothing hour, whatever I do into that foam ball goes out. Out past these two doors. Out into the fog. Eighty-eight point one, into the whole sleeping town, to every radio anybody left on, which is none, which is no one, which is the safest audience there has ever been: an audience of zero, in the dark, who cannot see my face.

I sit down in her chair.

It takes me. It fits me. That's the worst part and the best part—the foam was worn for someone small who leaned in, and I am small, and God help me, I lean in.

The mic is right there. The freeze is right there too, in my jaw, the old hot light flashing behind my eyes, four hundred faces, the silence that became me. I feel my throat start its fist.

But there's no one. That's the trick of it, the loophole, the open door at the back of the room I've been locked in for two years. There's no face. There's no waiting. There's nobody to go quiet at, nobody to disappoint, nobody to file me under quiet. There's just the soft enormous nothing pouring out of the headphones I haven't even put on, the hiss of a channel open and empty, dead air waiting for a voice the way the booth waited for a body.

And before the fist can close—before the careful, rehearsing, rehearsed-into-paralysis part of me can stop it—something true comes up and out of me, low, in a voice I don't recognize as mine because I have not heard it aloud in so long, a voice that doesn't shake:

"I've never told anybody this."

That's all. Four words and then the fifth. I don't even finish the thought, there's no confession after it, the sentence is the confession—that there is a this, that there's a whole hoard of this in me, years of it, and that here, finally, in a dead girl's chair under a red light to nobody, I have admitted it out loud.

And nothing happens. The town does not wake. No alarm. The clock ticks to midnight, 12:00, the red sweep hand going over the top like it does ten thousand times a day for everyone, and I am still here, and I have spoken, and the ceiling did not come down.

The relief is so big it's almost grief. I have to put my hand over my mouth. My eyes are doing something I will not name.

The ON AIR light glows over me like a small red moon. I lean in, and into all that waiting dark, into the open and the empty, to no one at all, I whisper, "Is anybody out there?"

The only answer is the soft, enormous hiss of dead air.

I run.