The Voice on the Radio by Caroline B. Cooney

that poor family to suffer. To worry, year after year: Is our little girl in pain? Is she cold? Is she scared? Is she bleeding
? Is she alive?
    Hannah took that little girl home to her own mom and dad, and she said, This is my baby. Your grandchild. You’ll be better parents than I am, so bye! Enjoy her! And Hannah left
.
    She went back to her cult. Maybe. Nobody knows. Anyway, she disappeared forever, leaving only one instruction. “Enjoy her.” And they did. Oh, how they enjoyed her! Their little girl—they thought her name was Janie, not Jennie—was the light of their lives. When they were parents to Hannah, they must have made some really, really big mistake, though they never figured out what the mistake was, or when they made it. But you’ve got to admit, good parents don’t have daughters who join cults and abandon their babies. But now they could get it right. This time around, they’d be perfect parents. And Janie: It was her job to be the perfect daughter
.

----

    Janie took out her Barbies.
    She no longer had the large accessories: cars, beauty parlor, furniture, condo—these were long gone to fund-raiser tag sales.
    She still had the clothing.
    She sat on her bed and sorted wardrobes by career. Barbies liked to be onstage, so there were lots of choices: singer, ballerina or model. Barbies liked the professions, so they could be doctor, astronaut or soldier. And they loved sports, so they were always ready to go horseback riding, or teach swimming, or just get a tan.
    The Barbies had had more careers in that suitcase than Janie had ever daydreamed of for herself.
    In fact, trapped in yearbook visions, forced to think of graduation and college, Janie realized that she had never had any plans except to stay sane and keep the number of parents in her life as low as possible.
    And marriage.
    She wanted to be married the way both her Johnson and her Spring parents were married: for better or for worse, so that when the worst came, you held on to each other, until better returned.
    Just because Reeve hasn’t checked his e-mail, hasn’t called, hasn’t written, doesn’t mean the world is over, she told herself.
    Two years.
    Two
years
before she could join Reeve at college.

    Once again Reeve had been at WSCK so many hours that the cafeteria was closed by the time he remembered dinner. He was forced to eat from a row of vending machines that lined the student center.
    “Hey, aren’t you the guy on Sick?” said a girl getting Fritos.
    Reeve grinned and nodded. He loved being noticed.
    “I’m Kerry.” She offered him some of her Fritos. “You do the janie thing! I haven’t missed a single janie,” said Kerry, like a collector.
    What a trip! Back home, recognition and admiration had gone to his older brother and sisters. No wonder they enjoyed life so much.
    “I liked that part where Janie had such bad nightmares she had to barricade herself in with pillows to keep the demons from attacking her spine or her toes while she slept,” said Kerry. “I had to do that when I was little.”
    Reeve felt a funny dryness in his mouth, as if he had seen a bear on the path. I told about that? Her parents don’t know about that. Now Boston knows.
    “My boyfriend Matthew is in love with Janie. He says he’d know her the minute he saw her, with that red hair swirled around her head.”
    It had not occurred to Reeve that he had described Janie so well that strangers could recognize her. He wanted an audience, but at the same time, he didn’t want the audience to be real.
    It doesn’t matter, Reeve said to himself. Janie’ll never hear my broadcasts. Nobody outside of Hills College listens to WSCK. I bet there are fifty stations around Boston and everybody is listening to them.
    Statistics of probability always made Reeve feel better.
    He walked down the street to his dorm. Hills College had no grass, no quadrangles; it simply filled several Boston blocks. Reeve had not explored Boston the way the other freshmen