Polly

by Amy Bryant

  He produced a clipboard from on top of a file cabinet and placed it in front of a pasty kid with frizzy hair, who set upon it as if he were being timed. The next unfriendly radio station guy stepped forward, and Ian leaned back against the desk, focusing his eyes somewhere over our heads. When the clipboard reached Julie she made a show of not signing it, letting the pen that dangled from a string drag noisily across her desk as she handed it to me. As I wrote down my name I wondered what a cute boy with an English accent was doing in rural Virginia.

  The radio station was housed in a run-down, three-story building a few blocks from campus. Even though the new volunteers had been told to report there Thursday at three, climbing the dingy stairs to the station I felt like I was showing up at a party I hadn’t been invited to. I pushed open the door and inhaled stale, smoky air, which gradually gave way to another smell, what I later identified as the oily scent of records.

  Sitting on a battered couch was a guy in Creepers with reddish hair that stuck straight up. I couldn’t tell if the color was natural or a dye job. Next to him was a voluptuous girl dressed all in black, smoking a cigarette.

  “I can’t make up my mind about Peter Murphy and Love and Rockets,” the voluptuous girl was saying. “I mean, are these just side projects until Bauhaus gets back together? And what about the Bubblemen? What the fuck was that all about?”

  The guy with red hair shrugged.

  Ian appeared beside me in the doorway. “Bauhaus is over,” he said, like he’d heard it straight from Peter Murphy himself.

  I moved farther into the office to let Ian by. He was wearing an olive green T-shirt with the words WOLFGANG PRESS printed across the front in black. I guessed Wolfgang Press must be a band.

  “We were wondering when you were going to get here,” the voluptuous girl said, even though it was only five after three. She was wearing red lipstick that left a bright smear on her cigarette, and she had perfect white skin and straight blunt bangs. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.

  “Is it just the three of you then?” Ian sighed. “Fucking freshmen. It was like this last year, too. A big crowd shows up at the first meeting, all of them anxious to become DJs, and as soon as I use the word work, they disappear.”

  The most beautiful girl I had ever seen gave Ian a pointed look. “I’m not intimidated.”

  “All right. Let’s get started, then.”

  Without bothering to make introductions, Ian showed us how to unpack the records that came in from the record companies and write the station’s call letters in permanent marker on both sides of the record and on the jacket. There were records everywhere. They were stacked up on the couple of desks and the few chairs that were the only additional furniture in the room, and piles of records were lining the walls. There were more records still in their shrink-wrap in the front hallway, waiting to be opened.

  Once he was satisfied we were equal to the task of cataloging records, Ian pointed at a turntable that rested on top of an upside-down wooden crate. Two oversized speakers sat nearby.

  “You’re welcome to play anything you’re curious about,” he said. “I just don’t want to hear any REM or U2. This is a college radio station, not a commercial conglomerate.”

  He disappeared down a hallway to what I presumed must be the DJ booth. I helped the redheaded boy, who identified himself as Andrew, lug a box of records upstairs from the lobby. The girl, who was named Cynthia, seated herself behind one of the desks and began examining a stack of records.

  “Jesus Christ. This band’s called ‘Assume the Position,’” Cynthia said, holding up a record and throwing it down again. “Can’t we just toss some of these straight in the garbage?”

  “We should stage a record-burning bonfire out back later,” I said.

  Cynthia smirked and shook a cigarette out of her pack. “Anyone want one?”

  I jogged over to her. “Thanks. I didn’t think you’d be able to smoke here, so I left mine at home.” My words came out in a nervous jumble, and I noted that I had referred to my dorm room as home.

  “Oh, I keep mine with me at all times,” Cynthia said. “I’m at two packs a day.”

  “Wow.”

  Cynthia waved at Andrew. “Want one?”

  “No thank you. All four of my grandparents died of lung cancer.”

  “I’ve got cancer all over my family,” Cynthia said. “I figure I might as well smoke, you know? I mean, I’m gonna get it anyway, so.”

  “So, do you guys want to listen to something?” Andrew asked. “We have to be careful. I don’t want to offend Mr. Pretentious.”

  “He might be pretentious, but he’s hot,” Cynthia said.

  I pulled a record out of its jacket without pausing to examine it and scrawled the station’s call letters across it. I’d been hoping Cynthia wouldn’t notice that Ian was hot, though I admired her for saying it out loud, like she didn’t care who might overhear. She struck me as the sort of girl who hadn’t experienced a lot of rejection in her life.

  After about an hour, Ian came back and led us down the hall to the library. We each carried an armful of records that we had labeled. As we passed the DJ booth I peered through a glass partition. A chubby girl with horn-rim glasses and blue-black hair was placing a record on one of two turntables. A pair of headphones rested around her neck.

  “That’s Sarah,” Ian said. She raised a hand in greeting without looking up.

  Ian led us further down the hall into a large room that held nothing but shelves of records. The shelves were so jammed I couldn’t imagine how we were going to squeeze in any new records. They were separated into classical, country, bluegrass, blues, and jazz, but the majority of the shelves were devoted to rock.

  “As you might imagine, when you become a DJ you’ll want to pull your play list before you start your show,” Ian said. “You want to minimize the running back and forth.”

  Andrew cleared his throat. “Um, exactly how long will it be before we can, you know, go on the air?”

  “Ask me again in a month.”

  When I saw Polly Hessler on the address label in William’s handwriting I sat down and opened the package on the floor of the mailroom. He’d sent me a brochure about registering to vote and a schedule book for keeping track of my assignments. Unlike Mom, he included a note on an index card. I thought these things might come in handy, he wrote. I turned over the index card to see if he’d written anything on the back. It was blank. Tucked inside the schedule book was a check for fifty dollars. I couldn’t stop smiling the whole way back to my room.

  I went to the radio station most days after class. I’d spend a couple of hours logging and filing records before meeting Julie at the dining hall for dinner. It was just Julie and me eating together now; the rest of the Notable Exceptions had moved on.

  Andrew and Cynthia were at the station most afternoons, too. Instead of listening to records we tuned the stereo to WUVT. The three of us became acquainted with the various DJs who had afternoon shows. Mostly the DJs kept to themselves, pausing only to check if a particular record had come in or to ask for a cigarette. But I felt like I knew them from listening to their shows.

  Marcus had shoulder-length hair and played punk from the late seventies and early eighties. I loved Marcus’s show. Sarah played bands like the Church and Joy Division, and sometimes she read her friends’ poetry over the air. Andrew groaned whenever she did this.

  Karen played everything from speed metal to classic rock, depending on her mood. “People want to know what fucking genre they’re fucking listening to,” Ian would shout at her when she arrived at the station. As music director Ian’s job was to oversee the play lists, so part of his job was to yell at the DJs.

  Gary had a crew cut and was a few years older. He played hardcore. I wanted to talk about bands with Gary, but I couldn’t get up the nerve. Gary usually didn’t talk on the air, and when he did speak his voice was a monotone.

  Cynthia stayed in the front office with Ian, wri
ting down the names of the records that came in on a master list. Andrew and I were stuck lugging stacks of records down the hall to the library for filing. I found out—mostly through eavesdropping on Cynthia’s constant questioning—that Ian’s family was from a suburb of London, that he had moved to Blacksburg when he was twelve, and that his father was a professor in the architecture department. He was supposed to be a junior, but he was taking the semester off to concentrate more on the radio station and think about what he really wanted to do.

  My conversations with Ian were limited to perfunctory comments about which bands I had and hadn’t heard of, and whether I liked them. Hanging out with him made me feel like a game-show contestant. He would name band after band, and we would shout out whether we’d heard of the band and, if so, whether we’d seen them live.

  “You’re one of those DC hardcore girls,” he said once, winking at me.

  “Not really. I mean sort of,” I said. “I mean, that’s where I grew up and all.” I went back to marking up the record I was cataloging, letting my hair fall into my face.

  “Ian’s amazing,” I told Julie at dinner. Amazing was a word that Ian used a lot. He thought the Pixies were amazing. Dead Can Dance were amazing. Sonic Youth were amazing. London and New York City were amazing.

  “Shoes?” Julie asked.

  “Black.”

  “Well, be careful,” Julie said. “He might just seem cooler because of the accent.”

  I considered this.

  “No. He’s different from other guys I’ve known. He’s smart.”

  “Smart how? Like he has a big vocabulary?”

  “I don’t know. Not like that. Like mature smart.”

  Julie twirled spaghetti around her fork. “So what are you going to do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Aren’t you going to do something? We should make a plan.”

  I liked that Julie said we, like the two of us were in on it together. She made it sound like all it would take to get Ian’s attention was the right strategy. Like if we put our heads together we could trick him into going out with me. I wasn’t ready to plan, though.

  “I guess I need to hang out with him more first,” I said.

  Julie came by the radio station to see Ian. When I introduced her to him she pretended not to know who he was. She lit a cigarette and picked up an INXS record that was lying on top of a stack by the door.

  “I kind of love this band,” she said. “I have to admit it.”

  Ian gave her a sharp look. “That’s in the trash pile for a reason,” he said.

  “So can I have it then?” Julie asked.

  Ian shrugged and walked out of the room. Andrew made a face at his back.

  When Cynthia invited Andrew and me to a keg party, I accepted without giving it much thought. Julie and I had been to a few keg parties already. We spent our time in out-of-the-way corners, getting drunk and making fun of people’s outfits. Sometimes Julie threatened to pick up a guy, but every time anyone approached us (especially if he was wearing white tennis shoes and a baseball hat, which he usually was), we gave out fake names and made sarcastic comments until the guy got the hint and moved on. Julie liked to go by Beverly. I was Chloe.

  This party was different. We didn’t have to be Beverly and Chloe here. Nobody was wearing a baseball hat or a Greek sweatshirt, and a punk band was playing in the living room. And it was crowded. Until now I had assumed that the only cool people in Blacksburg were the twenty people who worked at the radio station.

  As we wound our way through the house in search of the keg, I caught sight of Ian in the bathroom line talking to Cynthia. He had his arms crossed in front of his chest and he was smiling at something Cynthia was saying. He had little teeth. Or maybe he just had big gums.

  I kept my head down and went around a corner into what turned out to be the kitchen. A crowd was slowly moving toward the keg in the center of the room. We grabbed two blue plastic cups from a stack on the kitchen counter.

  “Ian’s here,” I said.

  “For someone who supposedly likes Ian, you sure have a funny way of showing it,” Julie said in a low voice. “I mean, it’s not like you don’t know him. Just go up and say hi.”

  We moved closer to the keg. The soles of our shoes stuck to the beer-sodden wooden floorboards as we walked. “I don’t know. I think he’s here with Cynthia,” I said.

  Once we had our beers we went back out to the living room to check out the band. When we passed by the bathroom line Ian and Cynthia were gone.

  The living room was packed. We drank quickly from our beers so they wouldn’t spill when people knocked into us. There wasn’t a stage, and it was too crowded to see what the band was doing. We crossed over to the far side of the living room, near the front door, where there was slightly more space. I looked out the one window and spotted Andrew’s stuck-up red hair.

  I brought Julie outside to say hi. Andrew was on the front porch with a couple of other boys. They were all holding blue plastic cups. A tall guy with a mop of wavy hair was talking.

  “So I covered my hand with the chocolate sauce, went into the stall next to somebody, and after a minute said, ‘Hey man, you got any toilet paper?’ Then I stuck my hand under, and the guy totally screamed.”

  Everybody laughed.

  “Hey, Andrew,” I said.

  “Hey.” He pointed at the guy who’d been talking. “This is Mark. And this is Sam.”

  “I’ve seen you two in the dining hall,” said Sam. He was wearing a patterned, button-up shirt and round wire-rimmed glasses.

  Julie pointed at the window. “How come you guys aren’t in there moshing?”

  “We don’t have to mosh in there,” Mark said. “You can mosh anywhere, really.” He swung a hip into her, and beer sailed out of her cup. “Like, if you’re in a crowded elevator, why not get a pit going?”

  “Or you can mosh in line at the dining hall,” I said.

  “Andrew likes to mosh in the dorm showers,” Sam said. We laughed.

  “Shut up,” Andrew said.

  “Seriously, that band in there kinda sucks,” Mark said. “I mean, they’re okay, but I’ve seen way better.”

  “Hey, what’s the first band you guys ever saw?” Sam asked, “Like I saw REO Speedwagon with my older sister when I was in elementary school.”

  “That’s a good one,” Julie said. “My first concert was Shawn Cassidy. I was eight, and I wallpapered my entire bedroom with posters of him.

  “I saw Cheap Trick when I was ten,” Andrew said.

  “I saw the Go-Go’s with A Flock of Seagulls,” I said. “I was thirteen, and I wore a red miniskirt and black-and-white striped tights. I wanted to be Gina Schock.”

  Ian’s voice floated up behind me. “A Flock of Seagulls were nothing but a creation of a corporation,” he said.

  I swallowed. “Yeah, well, I was more of a Go-Go’s fan anyway,” I said.

  “‘I Ran’ is a great song,” Sam said.

  Andrew introduced Ian around. Mark told another story. This one was about pulling leftover pizza out of the trash and giving it to a frat guy on his hall. “When I offered it to him, he was like, ‘Sweet!’” Mark said. Julie laughed so hard she spit her beer out.

  Ian turned to look at me. “You need another beer?” he said.

  I forced my face into a noncommittal expression and followed him into the house. I wondered if he was thinking about how dumb I was for going to see A Flock of Seagulls and the Go-Go’s. I was never going to be a DJ.

  “I thought you might be here,” Ian said when we got inside. The band had stopped, and three boys were in front of a stereo picking out records from a red plastic crate. I guessed it was their party.

  “Yeah. Cynthia told me about it.” We were strolling toward the kitchen. I took a long drink of the remainder of my beer.

  “I figured you’d be here, what with the punk rock band playing and all,” he said.

  “Are you making fun of me, Ian?” I sai
d this in my best imitation of an English accent.

  He smiled. “Of course not. I’m not the sort that makes fun of people.”

  “‘I’m not the sort.’ That’s an English thing.”

  “What?”

  “Your accent makes you sound English, but not just that. The way you say everything makes you sound English.”

  “Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “I’m English.”

  We had reached the kitchen. The party had emptied out somewhat since the band had finished so we were able to walk right up to the keg. I wondered where Cynthia was.

  Ian filled up my cup and then his own. Then he fished his cigarette pack out of the pocket of his windbreaker and pointed it at me. Even though I had my own pack I took two out and put the pack back in his pocket.

  Ian looked down at his pocket where my hand had been. “When’s the last time you ate anything homemade?” he asked. “My mother dropped off some soup for me this morning.”

  Ian’s apartment was on the first floor of a drab brick building a few blocks from the radio station. It smelled like stale coffee and cigarettes and faintly of something else—something like oranges and vinegar that was the smell of Ian himself. There wasn’t much in the way of furniture, but records were everywhere, stuffed into bookshelves and filling up milk crates that lined the perimeter of his living room.

  “Shit,” I said, following him into the kitchen. “Why do you even bother with the radio station when you have this much music in your apartment?”

  Ian laughed. I sat at a large wooden table with mismatched chairs while he peeled off the top of a Tupperware container and dumped soup into two bowls. I couldn’t see what kind of soup it was. He shoved the bowls into the microwave and pushed the door shut. Together, we watched the bowls rotate.