Two Bridges High School has a radio club. The club is so unknown that the members don’t even have a tri-board set up for the club fair. But I am aware that it exists because Mikael is one of the club members.
I’ve gotten to know him more in the past few weeks. Studying him has been easy ever since he accepted my presence at his side. Not that it had been difficult to be close to him in the first place. He didn’t have an aversion to me, but I kept my distance because of Natalie’s threat.
But I wasn’t afraid of what she’d say about me anymore. Between the stress of assignments and building resumes for college applications, I don’t think any student would lift their head from their textbooks to listen to her about someone like me.
I am unpopular. Unnoticeable, really. My charade as a rich kid has worked so well because I can blend in even in a small school like Two Bridges, where elite students are too busy caring about themselves to notice an imposter among their ranks. People cared about Natalie because she was a pretty girl in the wealthy circle for years. She used to tell me that the main reason she didn’t have friends was that everyone was jealous of her. I believed her two years ago when we first met, but now I see that there was a more compelling reason she didn’t have anyone by her side.
Natalie does not understand what it is that connects people to each other. Kindness and empathy escape her. She doesn’t know how to love people, whether platonically or romantically. Any friend that she has eventually leaves her because she doesn’t know how to care for them. In a twisted way, I was lucky that she left me.
It is no wonder that she tries to fill the hole in her chest with male validation. If no one loves her, attention from a boy is the only thing that can fill the void.
But maybe I’m reading too much into it. She has new friends, a fact that would have made me choke with jealousy one year ago, but now only leaves a dull ache in my chest. They’re the kind of people that my parents tell me to avoid, heavy drug users who constantly skip class because their family’s money will pay their way out of trouble. I watch from afar as she laughs at their mean jokes and disappears from school after lunch. I’ve heard rumors that she’s already tried to steal a boy from one of the girls. I wouldn’t be surprised if that piece of gossip were true.
“Her ranking is going to drop,” Ainsley hisses to me in class. “I’m definitely going to take her place.”
I roll my eyes discreetly. Leave it to her to spot opportunities where I see dysfunction. But I had done the same thing by choosing to become closer with Mikael.
We share the same anxiety about our college applications and the same irritating habit of hiding those negative feelings. We didn’t like being emotional people. In my culture and especially within my family, those feelings were a sign of weakness. If I couldn’t hold it in, I would have no one’s respect.
I don’t know why Mikael acted like that or if it was for the same reason. It’s different for him because he’s Swedish and a boy.
“That just means he’s twice as likely to be a blond icicle,” Yuey says, when I ask her if she knows anything about Scandinavian people. “At least he’s smart. I think it’s good that you guys are friends.”
Is that what we are? I think about the small ways he’s looked out for me. Recently, he was the one who told me to get involved in something to make myself stand out from the other overachievers. It was he who invited me to the Radio Club and said that it would be a unique extracurricular on my resume. Would a boy who was my competition do that for me?
I step into the basement recreation room with a heaping spoonful of doubt. Maybe Mikael was nice because he didn’t see me as a threat.
I am one of two girls in the room when I enter. Mikael pulls out a seat that he saved for me. The other students in the room eat snacks and scroll through their phones. I give the other girl in the room a smile, but she doesn’t return it. None of the others seem particularly social either so I don’t fault her for it.
Still, the silent rejection hurts. I wish Maia or Ainsley could be here with me. They would have something to say, whether it was the latest gossip or about the hottest fashion. I miss their idle pratter in the awkward silence of the room.
Mikael is my sole social life line. I ask him if the club runs its own radio channel, wondering if these students were the ones behind the music in the study hall. He explains that another club was in charge of that, a subdivision of the student government. They did something different.
The largest boy of the group brings out a big cardboard box that nearly covers his entire torso. He sets it down on the table gently and the rest of the club members surge forth eagerly, pulling out metal parts. The girl unzips her backpack, pulling out a contraption. The others follow suit, pulling out hunks of metal with wires sticking out.
“You build radios,” I whisper to him, putting the pieces together.
“Yes, but we do more than that. We teach children how to use them and participate in training with first responders like firefighters and policemen. When everything shuts down, radios will still work.”
I think about the snow day we had one month ago. The electricity in the apartment went out and my family got their news from the radio for the rest of the day. We survived using batteries and candles, waiting for the heat and light to come back. Maybe joining this club will teach me something.
Mikael does not have me build my own radio. He says it’s because it’s my first day, so I help him find parts that he needs based on vague descriptions. I pick through metal bits while the other students deftly arrange the parts.
The activity is soothing, but not all that interesting. I enjoy my closeness with Mikael. I’m meant to sit and work next to him as we lapse into a comfortable silence. But I don’t know if I belong in the club, among the gadget enthusiasts.
Nonetheless, I go with him every Thursday afternoon, bringing old radios from my apartment to repair in the club room. Some of the students think that the devices I bring are too old, vintage beyond repair. Mikael welcomes the challenge and makes an adventure out of it.
We visit old scrap shops across Manhattan, dipping into downtown Brooklyn for rarer parts. We go to the library and search for old manuals gathering dust in forgotten archives. I’m astonished by the amount of effort we’ve put into repairing two old broken radios. We weren’t getting graded for any of it. No adult, except for the club advisor, was going to notice this.
But I don’t point this out to him. I’m afraid that I’ll ruin his fun. I rarely see him like this, doing something for the sheer love of it rather than a calculated move to impress teachers and college admissions officers. I feel like I’m seeing his true self as he flips through the manuals and haggles with store owners.
It takes one month for the radios to work again. I spend an extra week after polishing them and giving them a new paint job. When my family asks what I’m doing hunched over the dining table covered in newspapers, I say that it’s for a school project. I don’t tell them that I like making things or that I feel compelled to transform piles of material into something beautiful. It’s the same feeling that I get sewing my dresses or baking cookies. It’s the very thing that drives me to lie about my life, glamorize growing up poor, and pretend I’m something more until I become it.
Mikael practically glows when I show him the radios. He spouts random facts as we fiddle with the dials, entering new channels. Various genres of music, snippets of the news, and foreign languages mash together to form an auditory world at our fingertips. It’s more magical than an iPhone and older than time.
“You should keep them,” I tell him.
He shakes his head. “We worked on them together. You should at least take one of them.”
“I don’t have space for them.” My family’s cluttered apartment comes to mind, heaped with junk my mother insists we need.
“Are you sure?” There’s a light in his eyes that reminds me of a kid who woke up on Christmas and discovered Santa was real.
“Yes.” I didn’t care about radios, but I was starting to realize that I cared about him.
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