Radio Silence

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2016

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

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London SE1 9GF

The HarperCollins website address is: www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Alice Oseman 2016

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Lyrics from ‘lonely boy goes to a rave’ courtesy of Teen Suicide © 2013. All rights reserved.

Alice Oseman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007559244

Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780007559251

Version: 2018-03-16

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Futures

1. Summer Term (a)

I Was Clever

The Narrator

Dying, But In a Good Way

Do What You Want

I Always Wished I Had a Hobby

A Normal Teenage Girl

Different Carriages

Somebody Is Listening

Made It

1. Summer Term (b)

Aled Last In My Bed

I Know, Right

Weird

We’d Make Millions

Power

Online

Stop-Motion

#Specialsnowflake

Awkward

Logarithms

Something Before We Continue

We Are Out There

Daniel Jun

Boring

Babar

2. Summer Holiday (a)

Your Art Is So Beautiful

Angel

Really Dumb

A True Fact

Laugh and Run

Radio

February Friday

The Big Scheme of Things

The Circle of Evils

Power Station

Kanye Wouldn’t Have Liked It

Blanket Bundle

Dark Blue

2. Summer Holiday (b)

The Worst Episode

5 Weird Things I’m Obsessed With

Sleep Now

3. Autumn Term (a)

Confused Kids In Office Suits

Touloser

Artistic Was Disappointing?

Raine

Like This

In the Dark

Youtube Famous

Lying Is Easier on the Internet

Time Vortex

Sorry

3. Autumn Term (b)

Bullet

School Frances

Winter Olympian

Space

Hate

Guy Denning

Press Play

What Else Were You Supposed to Do

Unhelpful Things

Old White Men

The Only Special Thing

Childish Kisses

Extremely Tired

Hours and Hours

4. Christmas Holiday

An Internet Mystery

Galaxy Ceiling

3.54AM

Burning

Rusty Northern Hands

My Friend

Skull

Fuck You All

5. Spring Term (a)

White Noise

You Must Have Come From a Star

Failure

Silver-Haired Girl

Filofax

London’s Burning

Golden Child

Family

The ‘Incident’

5. Spring Term (b)

Art Reflects Life

A Computer With a Sad Face

Listen

No One

We Hoped

On Your Own

University

5. Spring Term (c)

Universe City

Summer

A New Voice

Acknowledgements

Also by Alice Oseman

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Books by Alice Oseman

About the Publisher

School sucks.

Why oh why is there work? I don’t— I don’t get it.

Mm.

Look at me. Look at my face.

Does it look like I care about school?

No.

‘lonely boy goes to a rave’, Teen Suicide

UNIVERSE CITY: Ep. 1 – dark blue

UniverseCity 109,982 views

In Distress. Stuck in Universe City. Send Help.

Scroll down for transcript >>>

Hello.

I hope somebody is listening.

I’m sending out this call via radio signal – long out-dated, I know, but perhaps one of the few methods of communication the City has forgotten to monitor – in a dark and desperate cry for help.

Things in Universe City are not what they seem.

I cannot tell you who I am. Please call me … please just call me Radio. Radio Silence. I am, after all, only a voice on a radio, and there may not be anyone listening.

I wonder – if nobody is listening to my voice, am I making any sound at all?

[…]

FUTURES

“Can you hear that?” said Carys Last, halting in front of me so suddenly that I almost crashed into her. We both stood on the train platform. We were fifteen and we were friends.

“What?” I said, because I couldn’t hear anything except the music I was listening to through one earphone. I think it might have been Animal Collective.

Carys laughed, which didn’t happen very often. “You’re playing your music too loud,” she said, hooking a finger around the earphone’s wire and pulling it away from me. “Listen.”

We stood still and listened and I remember every single thing I heard in that moment. I heard the rumbling of the train we’d just got off leaving the station, heading farther into town. I heard the ticket gate guard explaining to an old man that the high-speed train to St Pancras was cancelled today due to the snow. I heard the distant screech of traffic, the wind above our heads, the flush of the station toilet and “The train now arriving at – Platform One – is the – 8.02 – to – Ramsgate,” snow being shovelled and a fire engine and Carys’s voice and …

Burning.

We turned round and stared at the town beyond, snowy and dead. We could normally see our school from here, but today there was a cloud of smoke in the way.

“How did we not see the smoke while we were on the train?” Carys asked.

“I was asleep,” I said.

“I wasn’t.”

“You weren’t paying attention.”

“Well, I guess the school burned down,” she said, and walked away to sit on the station bench. “Seven-year-old Carys’s wish came true.”

I stared for a moment more, and then went to join her.

“D’you think it was those pranksters?” I said, referring to the anonymous bloggers who had been pranking our school for the past month with increasing ferocity.

Carys shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter, does it? The end result is the same.”

“It does matter.” It was at that moment that it all started to sink in. “It’s— it looks really serious. We’re going to have to change schools. It looks like the whole of C block and D block are … just … gone.” I crumpled my skirt in my hands. “My locker was in D block. My GCSE sketchbook was in there. I spent days on some of that stuff.”

“Oh, shit.”

I shivered. “Why would they do this? They’ve destroyed so much hard work. They’ve messed up so many people’s GCSEs and A levels, things that seriously affect people’s futures. They’ve literally ruined people’s lives.”

Carys seemed to think about it, and then opened her mouth to reply, but ended up closing it again, and not saying anything.

1. SUMMER TERM (a)

I WAS CLEVER

“We care about our students’ happiness and we care about their success,” said our head teacher, Dr Afolayan, in front of 400 parents and sixth formers on my Year 12 summer term parents evening. I was seventeen and head girl, and I was sitting backstage because it was my turn to speak on stage in two minutes. I hadn’t planned a speech and I wasn’t nervous. I was very pleased with myself.

“We consider it our duty to give our young people access to the greatest opportunities on offer in the world today.”

I’d managed to become head girl last year because my campaign poster was a picture of me with a double chin. Also, I’d used the word ‘meme’ in my election speech. This expressed the idea that I didn’t give a shit about the election, even though the opposite was true, and it made people want to vote for me. You can’t say I don’t know my audience.

Despite this, I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to talk about in my parents evening speech. Afolayan was saying everything I’d scribbled down on the club-night flyer I found in my blazer pocket five minutes ago.

“Our Oxbridge programme has been particularly successful this year—”

I crumpled up the flyer and dropped it on the floor. Improvisation it was.

I’d improvised speeches before so it wasn’t a big deal, and nobody could ever tell they were improvised anyway; nobody ever even wondered whether they were. I had a reputation for being organised, always doing homework, having consistently high grades and having Cambridge University ambitions. My teachers loved me and my peers envied me.

I was clever.

I was the top student in my year.

I was going to Cambridge, and I was going to get a good job and earn lots of money, and I was going to be happy.

“And I think,” said Dr Afolayan, “that the teaching staff deserve a round of applause as well for all the hard work they’ve put in this year.”

The audience clapped, but I saw a few students roll their eyes.

“And now I’d like to introduce our head girl, Frances Janvier.”

She pronounced my surname wrong. I could see Daniel Jun, the head boy, watching me from the opposite side of the stage. Daniel hated me because we were both ruthless study machines.

“Frances has been a consistent high achiever since she joined us a few years ago, and it’s my absolute honour to have her representing everything we stand for here at the Academy. She’ll be talking to you today about her experience as an Academy sixth former this year, and her own plans for the future.”

I stood up and walked on stage and I smiled and I felt fine because I was born for this.

THE NARRATOR

“You’re not going to improvise again, are you, Frances?” asked Mum, fifteen minutes previously. “Last time you ended your speech by giving everyone a thumbs-up.”

She’d been standing with me in the corridor outside the stage entrance.

My mum always loved parents evening, mostly because she loves the brief, confused stares people make when she introduces herself as my mother. These occur because I’m mixed-race and she’s white, and for some reason most people think I’m Spanish because I did Spanish GCSE last year with a private tutor.

She also loved listening to teachers telling her over and over again what an excellent person I was.

I waved the club flyer at her. “Excuse me. I’m extremely prepared.”

Mum plucked it out of my hand and scanned it. “There are literally three bullet points on this. One of them says ‘mention the Internet’.”

“That’s all I need. I’m well-practised in the art of bullshitting.”

“Oh, I know you are.” Mum handed me back the flyer and leaned against the wall. “We could just do without another incident where you spend three minutes talking about Game of Thrones.”

“You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?”

“No.”

I shrugged. “I’ve got all the main points covered. I’m clever, I’m going to university, blah blah blah grades success happiness. I’m fine.”

Sometimes I felt like that was all I ever talked about. Being clever was, after all, my primary source of self-esteem. I’m a very sad person, in all senses of the word, but at least I was going to get into university.

Mum raised an eyebrow at me. “You’re making me nervous.”

I tried to stop thinking about it and instead thought about my evening plans.

That evening I was going to get home and I was going to make a coffee and have a slice of cake and then I was going to go upstairs and sit on my bed and listen to the latest episode of Universe City. Universe City was a YouTube podcast show about a suit-wearing student detective looking for a way to escape a sci-fi, monster-infested university. Nobody knew who made the podcast, but it was the voice of the narrator that got me addicted to the show – it has a kind of softness. It makes you want to fall asleep. In the least weird way possible, it’s a bit like someone stroking your hair.

That was what I was going to do when I got home.

“You sure you’re going to be okay?” Mum asked, looking down at me. She always asked me that before I had to do public speaking, which was frequently.

“I’m going to be okay.”

She untwisted my blazer collar and tapped my silver head girl badge with one finger.

She asked me, “Remind me why you wanted to be head girl?”

And I said, “Because I’m great at it,” but I was thinking, because universities love it.

DYING, BUT IN A GOOD WAY

I said my piece and got off stage and checked my phone, because I hadn’t checked it all afternoon. And that’s when I saw it. I saw the Twitter message that was about to change my life, possibly forever.

I made a startled coughing noise, sank into a plastic chair, and grabbed Head Boy Daniel Jun’s arm so hard that he hissed, “Ow! What?”

“Something monumental has happened to me on Twitter.”

Daniel, who had seemed vaguely interested until I said the word ‘Twitter’, frowned and wrenched his arm back. He wrinkled his nose and looked away like I’d done something extremely embarrassing.

The main thing that you need to know about Daniel Jun is that he probably would have killed himself if he thought it’d get him better grades. To most people, we were exactly the same person. We were both smart and we were both going for Cambridge and that was all anybody saw: two shining gods of academia flying high above the school building.

The difference between us was that I found our ‘rivalry’ absolutely hilarious, whereas Daniel acted as if we were engaged in a war of who could be the biggest nerd.

Anyway.

Two monumental things had happened, actually. The first was this:

@UniverseCity is now following you

And the second was a direct message addressed to ‘Toulouse’, my online alias:

Direct Messages > with Radio

hi toulouse! this might sound really weird but i’ve seen some of the Universe City fan art you’ve posted and i love them so much

i wondered whether you’d be interested in working with the show to create visuals for the Universe City episodes?

i’ve been trying to find someone with the right style for the show and i really love yours.

Universe City is non-profit so i can’t exactly pay you so i totally understand if you want to say no, but you seem like you really love

the show and i wondered if you’d be interested. you’d get full credit obviously. i honestly wish i could pay you but i don’t have any money

(i’m a student). yeah. let me know if you’re interested at all. if not, i still love your drawings. like, a lot. ok.

radio x

“Go on then,” said Daniel, with an eye-roll. “What’s happened?”

“Something monumental,” I whispered.

“Yes, I got that.”

It struck me suddenly that there was absolutely no way I could tell anybody about this. They probably didn’t even know what Universe City was and fan art was a weird hobby anyway and they might think that I was secretly drawing porn or something and they’d all hunt down my Tumblr and read all my personal posts on there and everything would be awful. School Brainiac and Head Girl Frances Janvier Exposed as Fandom Freak.

I cleared my throat. “Erm … you wouldn’t be interested. Don’t worry.”

“Fine then.” Daniel shook his head and turned away.

Universe City. Had chosen. Me. To be. Their artist.

I felt like dying, but in a good way.

“Frances?” said a very quiet voice. “Are you okay?”

I looked up to find myself face to face with Aled Last, Daniel’s best friend.

Aled Last always looked a little like a child who’d lost their mum in a supermarket. This was possibly something to do with how young he looked, how round his eyes were, and how his hair was soft like baby hair. He never seemed to be comfortable in any of the clothes that he wore.

He didn’t go to our school – he went to an all-boys’ grammar school on the other side of town, and though he was only three months older than me, he was in the school year above. Most people knew who he was because of Daniel. I knew who he was because he lived opposite me and I used to be friends with his twin sister and we took the same train to school, even though we sat in different carriages and didn’t talk to each other.

Aled Last was standing next to Daniel, gazing down at where I was still sitting, hyperventilating, in the chair. He cringed a little and followed up with, “Er, sorry, erm, I mean, you just looked like you were about to be sick or something.”

I attempted to say a sentence without bursting into hysterical laughter.

“I am fine,” I said, but I was grinning and probably looked like I was about to murder someone. “Why are you here? Daniel Support?”

According to rumour, Aled and Daniel had been inseparable their whole lives, despite the fact that Daniel was an uppity, opinionated dickhead and Aled spoke maybe fifty words per day.

“Er, no,” he said, his voice almost too quiet to hear, as usual. He looked terrified. “Dr Afolayan wanted me to give a speech. About university.”

I stared at him. “But you don’t even go to our school.”

“Er, no.”

“So what’s up with that?”

“It was Mr Shannon’s idea.” Mr Shannon was the head teacher of Aled’s school. “Something about camaraderie between our schools. One of my friends was supposed to be doing this actually … he was head boy last year … but he’s busy so … he asked if I’d do it … yeah.”

Aled’s voice got gradually quieter as he was speaking, almost like he didn’t think I was listening to him, despite the fact that I was looking right at him.

“And you said yes?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Aled just laughed.

He was visibly quaking.

“Because he’s a turnip,” said Daniel, folding his arms.

“Yes,” Aled murmured, but he was smiling.

“You don’t have to do it,” I said. “I could just tell them you’re sick and everything will be fine.”

“I sort of have to do it,” he said.

“You don’t really have to do anything you don’t want to,” I said, but I knew that wasn’t true, and so did Aled, because he just laughed at me and shook his head.

We didn’t say anything else.

Afolayan was on stage again. “And now I’d like to welcome Aled Last, one of the boys’ school’s wonderful Year 13s, who will be setting off to one of the UK’s most prestigious universities in September. Well, if his A levels go to plan, anyway!”

All the parents laughed at this. Daniel and Aled and I did not.

Afolayan and the parents started to clap as Aled walked on to the stage. He approached the microphone. I’d done it a thousand times and I always got that little stomach flip beforehand, but watching Aled do it then was somehow three billion times worse.

I hadn’t really spoken to Aled properly before. He caught the same train to school as me, but he sat in a different carriage. I knew next to nothing about him.

“Er, hi, yeah,” he said. His voice sounded like he’d just stopped crying.

“I didn’t realise he was this shy,” I whispered at Daniel, but Daniel didn’t say anything.

“So, last year I, er, had an interview …”

Daniel and I watched him struggle through his speech. Daniel, a practised public speaker like myself, occasionally shook his head. At one point he said, “He should have said no, for fuck’s sake.” I didn’t really like watching so I sat back in the chair for the second half of it and read the Twitter message fifty times over. I tried to switch my mind off and focus on Universe City and the messages. Radio had liked my art. Stupid little sketches of the characters, weird line drawings, 3am doodles in my 99p sketchbook instead of finishing my history essay. Nothing like this had happened to me, ever.

When Aled walked off stage and joined us again I said, “Well done, that was really good!” even though we both knew I was lying again.

He met my eyes. His had dark blue circles under them. Maybe he was a night owl like me.

“Thanks,” he said, and then he walked away, and I thought that’d probably be the last time I ever saw him.