Chapter 15: The Show Goes On

Kirsten's POV

The email came at noon from a woman I had never met.

She ran a small internet station out of a back room above a record shop in Fremont.

She wrote: One of the news desks sent me your recording. I played it three times. I have a midnight slot and no host. Can you start tonight?

I read it standing in my friend's kitchen, and I did not wait to finish my coffee.

The station was two rooms and a hallway.

The booth had a window onto a mixing desk with half its sliders taped down, and a microphone older than I was.

The producer shook my hand at the door and gave me a headset.

"We have about four hundred listeners on a good night," she said. "Most of them are insomniacs and truck drivers."

"I'll take them."

"The board's a disaster. My tech quit in June."

"I have a tech," I said.

Calvin was already crouched behind the desk with a screwdriver, studying the cables.

He had driven me there in the truck without being asked, and he had put on his clean flannel shirt again.

"This channel's been wired backward," he said. "It's all right. I've fixed worse in a rain shed."

The producer looked at him, then at me, and decided not to ask.

By eleven fifty he had the board lit up green, every slider moving, and he had given me a thumbs-up through the glass without smiling.

At midnight the red light came on.

I put my hands flat on the desk, because they were not steady.

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